TimesUP Archives - Wear Your Voice

Lena Waithe Is Proof That Representation By Itself Is Not Radical

Lena Waithe can claim all she wants that she gives a real fuck about Blackness and Black people, but her actions and her work continue to reflect otherwise. Two years ago, when I was still a columnist for Into (RIP),

Feb 25, 2020

Culture and Entertainment

In the Fight to Diversify Hollywood, We Need to Stop Ignoring Assistants

The entertainment industry thrives on unpaid and underpaid workers using the law of supply and demand to justify unfair compensation. By Adriana Gomez-Weston David Rensin’s “The Mailroom: Hollywood History From the Bottom Up” is considered the Bible of entry-level Hollywood, its

Jun 10, 2019

Culture and Entertainment

Lena Waithe and the Obligations of Leadership

This has been a teachable moment for Waithe but I regret greatly that Tiffany Boone and Ayanna Floyd’s bodies, minds and safety were the sites for her lessons. This article has been re-published with permission from DanielleDash.com and the original can

Jun 3, 2019

Culture and Entertainment

A Call-In: What Terry Crews Got Wrong And How He Can Fix It

Those who consider themselves allies and male feminists need to learn how to listen to the communities they claim to support. By Sherronda J. Brown and Lara Witt It's been more than a week since Terry Crews apologized for tweeting that children

Mar 14, 2019

#MeToo

The #MeToo Backlash and United States’ Disintegration of Rule of Law

What’s becoming clear as crystal is people are realizing just how many men would be behind bars if sexual assault and coercion were treated as the serious crimes they are.

One of the most disturbing things that emerged from the debate around “Grace” and Aziz Ansari’s date was how normalized coercive sexual encounters have been, especially with regard to women’s pleasure and safety. After a year of Trump’s regime, my capacity for shock has been whittled down, but during the Ansari brouhaha I found myself at peak stunned by all the people—and women in particular—who have accepted men’s sexually predatory behavior as a matter of course. Worse, they go to great lengths to defend this misogynistic paradigm. You know you live in a patriarchy when feminism is akin to a swear word. The case is made further when a simple fact like “coercion is not consent” becomes a divisive and controversial statement to both men and women. Color me flabbergasted. That is, until I took a couple steps back to analyze everything that the Ansari situation brought up. For me personally, I had to come to terms with the fact that more than half of my limited sexual encounters had in fact been non-consensual due to coercion or lies. It’s a horrible feeling to look back and realize that things were not what I thought they were. At all. And that I had considered those terrible encounters "simple" bad sex when they were far worse and even criminal encounters. It felt like being violated all over again, and I spent more than a few days sitting with my pain, grieving and acknowledging it, and trying to figure out how to put it all into place. Lili Loofbourow recently wrote in “The female price of male pleasure”: “Research shows that 30 percent of women report pain during vaginal sex, 72 percent report pain during anal sex, and 'large proportions' don't tell their partners when sex hurts. … The studies on this are few. A casual survey of forums where people discuss 'bad sex' suggests that men tend to use the term to describe a passive partner or a boring experience. ... But when most women talk about 'bad sex,' they tend to mean coercion, or emotional discomfort or, even more commonly, physical pain. Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health, and one of the forces behind the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, confirmed this. 'When it comes to 'good sex,'' she told me, 'women often mean without pain, men often mean they had orgasms.'” Loofbourow’s conclusions about how male sexual pleasure comes at the price of women’s pain would be chilling, except that every woman on this planet has been there at some point or another. Despite the frequency of these systemically entrenched behaviors and experiences, this isn’t something any of us openly talk about. At least until the Aziz Ansari situation.