Almost immediately, I was the person doing most of the social media-related creation, marketing, connecting, and interacting, so, when we split, it made sense for me to take the socials.

We split because they were an emotionally abusive, manipulative liar. I knew that Liar would not let me go peacefully due to past evidence of obsessive behavior, so I got an order of protection, purchased my own home, and cut them out entirely.

Liar and I had been together six years at that point, and we were engaged. We had a home together. My child considered them to be a full parent. It was one of the most difficult periods of my life, and I hope that lying bitch stubs their toe today.

That said- sometimes, when I reflect on that relationship, I am (and several of the people closest to me) shocked by the sheer amount of effort that Liar put into manipulating me.

When our relationship started, we were long-distance. Eventually, we closed that distance, but Liar would visit frequently. And then, once, they visited and left their journal behind. My kid, who was like 5 at the time, was paging through it and accidentally tore out a page.

On that page was one of the most disgusting lies that I had ever seen.

You see, my ex had another relationship before me. One that they claimed was abusive (although knowing what I know now, I’m sure they were lying and it was typical DARVO). Once, we were on video chat together on their laptop, and this ex allegedly called them. Liar made a big show of telling this ex off and setting a firm boundary about contact. As someone who believed that this was an abusive person standing up to their abuser, I felt genuinely proud in this moment.

Except that shit did not fucking happen, actually.

According to the journal, the ex did call (because Liar called first and they were responding), but the call did not actually connect. It was dropped. That means that the conversation that followed never took place. Liar was talking to themselves and literally performing this fantasy conversation for me.

I had no reason to doubt Liar, and now I am forced to question everything I ever knew about this person and our relationship.

Immediately, I called and confronted them. They admitted they lied and claimed it was because of mental health issues that they were dealing with. I broke off our relationship and encouraged them to get mental health support.

And they did. Liar went and started therapy, worked through what they felt was an issue with lying to avoid confrontation, and several months later, I decided to give them another chance after what seemed like genuine personal growth.

Except that was a farce too. It just made them better at hiding the tracks of their lies.

After five years, I caught Liar in a massive web of lies throughout our relationship after this point, including lies about them going to therapy, because they stopped long before they ever told me they did.

Maybe ‘tis the ‘tism, but I don’t understand this type of liar.

Inventing a whole version of yourself to be close to me when leaving me alone was an option at any and all points.

Anyway, here’s one of those angry poems.

Anyway, I hope that bitch is having a terrible day and that all liars stay the fuck away from me.

At face value, the plot of this movie is simple. Torrance Shipman, portrayed by Kristen Dunst, becomes the captain of the Rancho Carne Toros, a wealthy, overwhelmingly white cheerleading squad with a national championship pedigree.

Then she learns, almost immediately, that the legacy she inherited is stolen bullshit. Their team had stolen routines from the East Compton Clovers, captained by Isis (portrayed by Gabrielle Union). They are a predominantly Black team. The Toros then passed off the Clovers’ original works as their own and won national championships.

When discussing this movie, many, even Gabrielle Union herself, have described this as “cultural appropriation”. That’s not inaccurate. The Toros stole choreography from Black girls, received credit and compensation, and offered none to the original creators.

I would argue that what the Toros did was even deeper than appropriation.

The Toros created an entire championship tradition through theft. They took a resource (creativity) from another community, erased the people who produced it, claimed it as their own, and accumulated status and access, while access and benefit to those same spaces remained denied to the originators.

Beloved? That’s colonization.

Obviously, this is a fictional movie, and it has no historical relevance to colonial conquest, slavery, or the theft of land, but the logic beneath it is certainly colonial extraction and colonial legacy.

Colonialization isn’t just liking someone else’s creations or property; it is deciding that your relationship to other people’s resources or things that they produce is solely extraction, and that the ability to extract from this group is more important than the right of the actual originators to control, benefit from, and be recognized for their creation or property.

It is also an acceptance of harm (physical and/or economic) to the creators at the benefit of the extractors.

Somehow, this teen movie from 2000 not only gives a remarkably good demonstration of how that relationship works, it also does a damn good job of modeling what dismantling that dynamic, or decolonization, can look like.

Most importantly, I think that Bring It On gives something that a lot of conversations on “cultural appropriation” and racism don’t give—it gives white people an example of something to do beyond experiencing guilt and models something actionable to do with their feelings besides making those feelings the responsibility of the party harmed.

Here are some of the lessons that I think can be learned from Bring It On.

Lesson 1: You can inherit the benefits of something you didn’t personally steal.

Torrance didn’t personally go to East Compton, record, and then steal the Clover’s routines.

I think that’s important to point out here, especially within the context of colonial legacy and appropriation. If Torrance were the thief, Bring It On would arguably be a less complex movie. Big Red did it. Torrance knows this; so do Isis and the Clovers. Torrance inherited the benefits, but also the consequences of someone else’s crime.

Prior to this, Torrance believes that everything that she had inherited is the product of hard work and being exceptional. She has no reason to doubt that, there is a cabinet full of trophies to confirm.

Everyone believes that the Toros are amazing, innovative, creative champions.

… Then Missy takes Torrance on a drive that opens her eyes and makes her confront the fact that those trophies are built on a lie.

This is the first important lesson that this movie offers to whiteness: you do not have to personally create an injustice to benefit from it.

Torrance not being the direct thief does not change who benefited from the routines, nor does it change who they were stolen from.

This point gets lost in a lot of conversations on racial justice. “You benefit from this” is not the same as “You personally did this”. You can inherit an advantage and not have direct fault in what produced it. In fact, one of the reasons that inequity survives is because if it was produced effectively enough, the theft becomes invisible. The originators die, and their stories are hidden. All that remains is the mythos of exceptionism.

A trophy in a case, and everyone who knows it’s a lie is long gone.

Lesson Two: Finding out where something came from isn’t an attack

Torrance is humiliated and upset when she learns the truth. In this context, I understand why. Torrance has built her whole identity around being part of an exceptional, creative group, and then she learned that wasn’t true.

But Torrance’s feelings aren’t the real injustice. The fact that Big Red stole from the Clovers is.

I feel that white people forget this. In real life, and even daily on my social media pages, when people point out that content was sourced from me, it receives strong, negative reactions—mostly from white people. Many content creators who have stolen or appropriated my content get upset, defensive, or even harassing when people point it out and suggest that I should be credited.

When people point out that something being lauded as innovative, new, edgy, or exciting was sourced from Black communities or Black creativity or intellectualism, the conversation seems to shift to whether ownership is more important than mass consumption. Now someone feels attacked. Someone feels accused. Now someone needs reassurance.

And now the person has another job- comforting feelings around the theft, plagiarism, infringement, or appropriation.

Torrance’s embarrassment is valid. It is not Isis’s job to fix or understand.

Learning you were wrong about something is an opportunity for growth. Discomfort is a call to action.

You’ll be alright.

Lesson Three: Some things only seem original because they exist in spaces the originators can’t access

One of the best scenes in the movie is the football game scene. The Toros are cheering at a home game and the Clovers show up and perform the routine, and do so (in my opinion) with more flavor and finesse.

Until the moment that the Clovers show up, it is pretty apparent that the crowd is there to see the cheerleaders, not the football team.

Then the clovers walk into the stands and perform the material and perform it better.

Then everyone sees it— this is actually the Clover’s. It is undeniable who the source of the material is.

This is the part of cultural extraction that I hate the most. Appropriation is most profitable when there is considerable distance between the originator and the new audience. A thing can be Black as fuck in one room and “a revolutionary new trend” in another. Cornrows in one room and “boxer braids” in another.

We have watched this happen with music, fashion, dance, language, beauty standards, and entire models of communication. I could go on and on about this all day, but I’ll keep the list there for now.

Due to this distance, sometimes the white person receiving credit and compensation genuinely doesn’t always know how much history preceded them, and neither does their audience. Ignorance does not make the history disappear.

Sometimes, all it takes for that to become clear is that the originators be present in the room.

Lesson Four: Your attachment to something does not make it yours either

Once Torrance and the Toros learn about the theft, they do not immediately abandon the routine. Of course they don’t. They worked heard to learn it. They’ve practiced it. Their season is already underway, starting over now would be, like, really fucking hard.

This is another place where Bring It On may have accidentally, on purpose, made the movie more complex.

People become attached to things, even when those things are not theirs or ethically sourced. However, attachment is not entitlement.

“I’ve been doing this forever” does not erase “I should never have been doing this at all.”

The question isn’t whether you have feelings about the thing, it is whether your feelings give you a greater or equal claim to the people who’s creativity actually produced it.

Most of the time, that answer is no.

Lesson Five: Purchasing someone else’s creativity is not the same as developing your own

The Toros eventually decide that they need a routine because of the embarrassment at the football game. As a solution, they hire Sparky Polastri, a choreographer.

Problem solved, right? Well, not quite.

Sparky sells the same routine to many other teams, and this is a fact that the Toros discover in a spectacularly embarrassing manner, in competition, when they are forced to perform it directly after another team that had the same routine.

Yikes on trikes.

As an aside, this is also another place where their historical theft benefits them. Despite this spectacular failure, the Toros are still the defending champions, so they get to advance anyway.

I love this plot point because it gets to the heart of the real issue. The problem with the Toros is not that they stole from Black girls. The problem with the Toros is that they have been outsourcing creativity instead of cultivating it.

We know that the Toros are talented. They have to be able to do complex routines perfectly. What they lack is creativity.

This is one of the biggest things that I would like white women who read this to reflect on. You have experiences. You have histories. Your people have precolonial identities. You have your own regional cultures, hobbies, skills, aesthetics, ideas, artistic interests, and perspectives. Use them.

Why do so many of you find contentment in being human xerox machines and cosplaying other cultures?

Creativity is not a scarce resource.

Lesson Six: If you can purchase it, it’s probably not creative

The Sparky disaster is a great metaphor for trend culture as a content creator.

People want originality without the vulnerability involved in the process of creation. Franschesca Ramsey talks a lot about the importance of being okay with being cringe as a creator. If the Toros were okay with being themselves and even stumbling a little bit, they would never have ended up with Sparky as a choreographer.

Following an established aesthetic, format, or vocab is safer because other people are doing it. Being original requires risk and bravery.

The Toros’ real creative breakthrough comes when their shortcuts all fail.

Lesson Seven: Stopping the active theft doesn’t automatically repair the theft

This is where Bring It On graduates from another teen movie to something more IMO. It would have been a very convenient plot point for the Clovers to have immediate access to nationals, but that’s not what Bring It On does.

It forces Torrance to deal with the injustice of the fact that the Toros have inherent access, and the Clovers do not.

Torrance has stopped the stealing and falling flat on her face as a result of trying to shortcut creativity. That makes it better, right?

No, actually, it doesn’t.

The Toros still have the trophies, they are still going to nationals and the Clovers still don’t have the resources they need.

This is where the movie forces a bunch of teenagers who thought they were going to see a simple cheerleading movie to think about reparations. People always try to diminish the reparations argument to punishing people who are alive today for what their ancestors did, but the useful question in the reparations argument isn’t “Did you personally commit the harm?” and to questions that are more apt.

Where did the benefits go?

Where did the property go?

Where did the institutional power go?

Where did the cultutal capital go?

Did the Toros give the trophies back? Did they publicly own their harms and turn over everything they earned from their lies? No, but Torrance does recognize that she accumulated the advantage from Big Red’s harm, and she has a responsibility to try to repair the material consequences of this injustice for the Clovers.

So she decides to give the Clovers a check for nationals.

Lesson Eight: Reparations are not a down payment for gratitude

Isis tells Torrance no and turns down her check. This is one of my favorite places in the movie and yet another place where the convenient decision for the writers would have made a less complex movie.

Not only does Isis tell Torrance no, but she also rejects Torrance when Torrance gets upset about it and calls her mean.

Girl.

The Toros stole from the Clovers for yeas, built a championship reputation, and you think you have the right to be upset that they rejected your down payment on ridding yourself of your guilt.

That said, this reaction is also a real thing.

Torrance has corrected her ignorance. She’s been taught the consequences of trying to buy her way out of this mess twice now, and now she’s attempting restitution because of recognition of point three.

Doesn’t that count for something? Sure. Here’s a pat on the head as a personal character point. It does not erase the colonial aspects of the relationship between Isis and Torrance or the Clovers and the Toros.

If you are repairing harm, step one is consulting the harmed party on what they need, if anything. All Isis wanted the Toros to do was Bring It. Torrance expected gratitude. Isis refused to perform it. What she received was a boundary.

This is not an argument against reparations. This is an assertion of agency and self-determination.

Lesson Eight: Helping someone doesn’t mean deciding what they need

If you give a ham sandwich to a homeless person that eats halal, you did not help them. In fact, you insulted them whether you meant to or not.

There is a paternalistic dynamic built when the dominant group shifts from the idea “We are entitled to take from you” to “we are now responsible for deciding what’s best for you, and how and when you get it”.

That is still hierarchy.

Isis says HELL NO to that hierarchy.

She doesn’t want anything from Torrance, but especially for her to be their white savior. The Clovers find their way to nationals from their own community and creativity.

This is an important moment in the movie because marginalized people are constantly being framed by the dominant social group as passive recipients of their geneorsity.

The Clovers did not need the Toros. They already had the talent and material. And they didn’t need the Toros to prepare their seat at the table, they were prepared to take it and own the space in their OWN way.

Lesson Ten: Self-determination means taking up space on your OWN terms

When the Clovers arrive at nationals, they are nobody’s charity case. The found the resources, they perform their material, they take up space. There is no shrinking, no graititude, no apology, no “just happy to be here”.

They are empowered in a way only self-determination can provide. Isis knows that they deserve to win.

There’s something special about that kind of certainty being completely detached from the larger structure and from their previous harm.

Black confidence, especially Black femme confidence, is often treated as aggression or anger. There is a level of fawning that is expected when people assume that you don’t deserve space in a room because of your economic position. Pretty much all arguments against DEI hinge on the idea that marginalized people are not good enough to exist in certain spaces.

The Clovers do not do that shit.

They know who they are. They know they belong there. They know nothing but their talent gave them access.

That’s self-determination too.

Lesson Eleven: Being told that something isn’t for you doesn’t mean you can’t be creative in other ways

This is another huge lesson. The Toros don’t stop or give up. They make another routine. Their OWN routine. They study martial arts, swing dance, fosse, etc to make their own statement.

Ths is where a lot of conversations about appropriation become uselessly reductive. You can be inspired or influenced by other people and even other cultures. Cultural exchange exists. You can enjoy things created by people who do not look like you. You can collaborate. You can learn, study, and admire.

You can create.

There are so many different beautiful ways to braid that are indigenous to Europeans. Why have you not interrogated why you’re obsessed with cornrows and box braids?

Lesson Twelve: Someone else being better doesn’t mean you’re not good

The Clovers win nationals. The Toros are second place.

This is probably the most radical thing that the movie does. Often times, movies would reward someone like Torrance’s personal growth by letting them be the winner.

The Toros did all of the right things eventually and they learned all of the lessons that the experience was meant to teach. They still come in second.

The Clovers win because the Clovers are better.

Whiteness has historically placed an expectation that true equality and access would somehow preserve white exceptionalism or that white people would still be the best in an entirely even playing field. Whiteness is obsessed with hierarchies and being at the top of them.

The Toros’ second place finish is more meaningful than their championship win built on theft. It belongs to them and it is special in it’s own way. They know what they can do and their have a truly original identity to build upon.

Lesson Thirteen: Skepticism from people you’ve harmed is okay. Trust and respect is earned

At the end of the movie, Isis shows a degree of respect for Torrance and all of the work that they have done throughout the year. Prior to this moment, all of the interactions between Isis and Torrance, Isis has been openly resistant to offering any degree of grace, trust, or understanding.

This is a reasonable reaction and one that should be discussed in the concept of racial justice.

Torrance did not personally harm the Clovers. Torrance did all of the right things eventually and learned the right lessons. Isis offered her not one crumb of respect until the end of that journey.

Oftentimes, well-meaning white people expect any Black people to function as their personal white guilt doulas and they take rejection of that role personally. I mean, they weren’t the slave owners, were they? No. That still doesn’t mean you’re inherently trustworthy.

Time and observing long-term behavior is a reasonable thing for racialized people to do.

Make your own routine

Bring It On has many useful lessons more than 25 years after its release. It could have stopped and started at “stealing is wrong” and still been a great, blockbuster teen movie. But it didn’t. It went way, way deeper.

We learned that stealing was bad in kindergarten, the harder lesson is that extraction has a living legacy. The Toros success had a direct connection to the Clover’s exclusion and stealing from them. One team had been accumulating the benefits of another team’s creative labor.

Fixing that requires more than a check and a “my bad”.

It required stopping the harm. It required respecting their right to self-determination. It required accepting that the Clovers taking their proper place meant that the Toros were no longer the best. It meant the Clovers taking up space in their own way.

And, after all that, the biggest thing that it needed was creativity.

White people, especially white women, you are not doomed to spend eternity trying to figure out which racialized beauty trends you can siphon. You can create your own things, and they can be just as good.

The journey is learning the difference between being inspired or influenced and treating someone else’s creativity as a resource ripe for extraction.

The Toros only became genuinely interesting once they asked themselves one question: Who are we when we can’t use the Clovers or anyone else?

You should ask yourself some version of that question.

The Clovers already have an amazing routine. You can (and should) make your own.

Ok so picture it. It is Saturday morning. I have just awakened, tended to my rainbow baby, shat, showered, and shaved. Then I open my phone to review my Facebook notifications. As a monetized creator on Facebook who values keeping my community moderated, I make it my business to check as many notifications as I can to ensure I am keeping my community safe.

This is a lotttt of work considering that my page is interacted with about 10 million times per month, but it is a labor of love for my community.

Some of the things that get people blocked immediately:

1. Being TRASH (transphobic, racist, ableist, sexist, or homophobic)

2. Using slurs

3. Being disrespectful to me

4. Generally not passing the vibe check.

I do try to issue warnings for people who may just be making bad jokes, but mostly, I’d rather block and be wrong than let certain things slide. I easily block at least a dozen people per day.

I wake up on Saturday and am tagged in a thread by content creator Khala, where she is jokingly holding an open call for people’s “beef” with me after someone went out of their way to comment a silly grievance on one of her posts.

I don’t really do internet beefs. People may disagree with me, but I really don’t care much. I don’t have long-standing investments in drama with people. That’s kinda boring to me. What I do like is discussing ideas. Even when I am discussing what a person may have done and said, I like to look beyond the person themselves and think more about what that person may be seeing about the world around us. That is much more interesting.

Most people on the thread recognize that this is not a serious call to action because they are aware of how to read the room and aren’t chomping at the bit to attack me.

Then there’s Angelo. We’re gonna discuss many of the comments that came from that thread, starting with Angelo, who, to my understanding, is a white afab person who is trans and/or nonbinary. I am unsure of pronouns, so I will use they/them/musty weirdo/salty bitch.

Why Angelo is mad and what it says about Angelo

Angelo has been a salty bitch fuming since October of 2025, when I blocked their musty ass for trying me.

In October 2025, I posted that I was a dominatrix. That was the post. I was not asking how to become one, asking whether I should become one, or soliciting advice about how much I should charge.

I posted a picture of myself in a mask and said, “I am a dominatrix. You are welcomed.” Someone (a white woman, whose identity I have obscured) replied with very specific instructions about my pricing. They told me to “always charge a corporate rate,” said I should have a four-hour minimum, and advised me to charge at least $250 an hour.

I responded that I had not asked for their advice and that my hourly rate was three times what they were recommending. I was irritated, because unsolicited advice is irritating, but I did not launch a campaign against this person or suggest that someone charging $250 an hour was worthless or worth less.

I told someone who had decided to instruct me about my own business that their advice would have been terrible advice for my actual business. My sessions were shorter, my hourly rate was much higher, and following their suggested structure would have meant doing substantially more work at a much lower hourly rate. The larger point of my follow-up post was that people should stop giving strangers unsolicited professional advice when they have no idea how that person already operates.

This happened in October 2025. It is now August 2026.

For additional context, I have been a kinkster since I was 19. As dommes go, I have been fortunate. I always had access to private spaces and didn’t need to rent space or become a worker at a dungeon house that would take half of my earnings. I learned privately from experienced dommes. I worked freelance, and this was not my primary way to make my living and I never desired it to be. I did not engage in allowing clients access to my body, only my… tools. It was a part time gig that I would take when simeone wanted to play with me but I did not desire to play with them.

I have been inactive in the community the last few years, focusing on my family.

Angelo did not like my post. Angelo also did not like the fact that I deleted their comment full of personal attacks towards me after they attempted to price my services as well and give more unsolicited advice on a post where I am rejecting unsolicted advice. I don’t argue with people who attempt to get personal.

Reminder: You bitches do not actually know me.

This advice was not needed. I was already as successful as I desired to be. I got paid what I wanted or the answer was no. And I got paid what I wanted often enough for it to be worthwhile when I did it. Now, I prefer jobs that come with health insurance and can be put on a resume. Maybe that makes me a bad whore. I’ll accept that.

That said, I know an obsessed hater when I see one, so I took these screenshots because I guessed that they would someday come in handy, and then I blocked this salty bitch and moved on with my life.

Angelo took it upon themselves to pathologize me. Let’s talk about musty-ass Angelo (don’t ask how I know, I can just tell) and what I think all of this says about them. ^_^

How Angelo’s story has changed:

Angelo apparently had a different post-blocking experience. Nearly a year later, they are still discussing the incident, still explaining what supposedly happened, still using it as evidence about my character, and still expanding the disagreement into increasingly personal assessments of my body, my motherhood, my relationships, my sex-work history, and my entire brand.

This is what Angelo’s current versions of events looks like along with their new opinions of me, my body, and my past work.

This is Angelo’s version of events:

But, you just saw the exchange. We do not have to rely on anybody’s memory, including mine. We can look at what was actually said and think about what it tells us about Angelo.

Angelo’s current version is that some well-intentioned person basically came along saying, “good for you, make sure to charge X amount,” and I “tore that person down.”

That is not what happened. The commenter gave me a pricing model. They told me what hourly rate to charge, how many hours to require, and how to structure the rate after the minimum. I responded that I did not ask for the advice and that their suggested hourly rate was a third of mine.

That may have been curt. It was also true.

There is an important difference between encouragement and instruction. “Get your money, girl” is encouragement. “Remember always charge a corporate rate, minimum four hours, at least $250 an hour” is advice. More specifically, it is unsolicited advice. Angelo’s retelling softens what the original commenter did while grossly exaggerating what I did in response, because the story works better if I am irrationally attacking someone who simply wished me well.

Also, somehow it’s now “$1000 for an hour or two.” Isn’t it interesting how Angelo changed the numbers to something closer to what I originally stated and is now positioning themselves as the reasonable one?

This is one of the things that fascinates me most about the nearly year-long timeline. The farther Angelo gets from the actual interaction, the larger the indictment becomes and the more flattering their own role in it gets. In October, we disagreed about unsolicited advice and pricing. By August, I apparently hate sex workers, lie about my professional experience, am fundamentally fake, have children for men, repeatedly get abandoned by those men, and have deluded myself into believing clients would pay significant money for someone with my race and body type. The accusation has somehow grown while the actual event has receded into the past.

Women are encouraged to “know our worth” constantly, but people tend to prefer that sentiment when it remains vague. Know your worth. Charge your worth. Do not settle. Value yourself.

These are socially acceptable messages because they do not require anybody else to confront the possibility that the woman in front of them may know something they do not. The mood changes when a woman says, “Actually, I already know what I charge, and what you just recommended is dramatically below it.”

When you’re not a thin, white femme or someone who can pass for such- apparently, that’s a problem.

Now self-confidence starts looking like arrogance. Suddenly stating your own rate becomes an indictment of everyone who charges less. Saying that someone’s advice is not useful becomes “tearing them down.” Knowing more about your own business than a stranger becomes an interpersonal offense you are expected to soften so the stranger does not feel embarrassed for having advised you at all.

I was never saying that every dominatrix should charge what I charged. I was saying that I charged what I charged.

Those are not the same claim.

Angelo disagreed, and they did not simply disagree about manners. In the original thread, they began positioning themselves as the person with the most legitimate industry perspective. They referred to themselves as “the actual trans sex worker,” dismissed other people as having maybe had “one thing that happened to them that one time in college,” and argued that my pricing would not produce many clients without “a whole lot of other work & or additional sex acts.” They also told another commenter that thinking cost could be part of the dominatrix experience was “a weird thing to think.”

There is a perfectly ordinary business argument buried somewhere underneath all of that. Higher prices generally narrow the number of people who can afford your service. A person who charges more may have fewer clients. Different sex workers operate in different markets. FOSTA-SESTA, changes in online platforms, the growth of OnlyFans, the availability of kink spaces, geography, clientele, specialization, and broader economic conditions can all affect how sex work is marketed and purchased. Angelo and I could easily have had different experiences in the industry without either of us being incorrect.

Angelo clearly made being a sex worker their career, it was not mine and was never meant to be.

The problem is that Angelo was not content to say that our markets or business models differed. The conversation very quickly moved toward the idea that their model of professional sex work was the realistic one and mine required their examination.

Angelo, I mean this as disrespectfully as possible: who the fuck are you?

Ironically, Angelo acknowledged in that same original thread that someone could set a price at $10,000 and find a person willing to pay it. Their argument at the time was that a very high rate might not generate enough clients to constitute a sustainable business model. That is a completely different claim from the one they would make nearly a year later.

In the more recent discussion about me, Angelo said, “no one is spending serious stacks on a Black woman who is short and chubby and had two kids.” They followed that by explaining that this was simply the reality of racism and fatphobia among clients.

This is where we stop having a disagreement about business strategy and start having a much more revealing conversation about who Angelo believes can plausibly be expensive.

In October, the argument was supposedly that “anyone” can get somebody to pay an unusually high rate, but doing so regularly might be difficult. Nearly a year later, the argument is that nobody is spending “serious money” on someone like me because I am Black, short, chubby, and a mother.

The first says the customer pool at a certain price point may be small.

The second says I am personally implausible at that price point.

One is about economics. The other is about VALUE.

Angelo clearly does not think Black women like me have value, and Angelo thinks they’ve obscured that fact well enough with insights about “the market” because they “know a Black Sex worker”. Angelo is also pissed the fuck off that my experiences do not match that evaluation and they’re especially pissed that I value myself highly and refuse to do less than that.

I did not say a woman charging $250 was undesirable. I stated MY rate.

Angelo said a Black, short, chubby mother was unlikely to inspire clients to spend “serious stacks.”

Only one of these statements is quite obviously establishing a hierarchy of desirability, and it was not mine.

Anyway, Angelo, you sound like a pimp exploiting sex workers. I did not have a pimp who was willing to sell me to whoever was willing to buy. I was fully autonomous. Maybe that’s the difference between my market and the one you “book for”. Also, I am confused because in October, you claimed that you don’t work anymore because you’re retired and now you seem to work booking other people’s services. Fascinating.

Is it “The Market”… or it is YOU?

There is also no single “going rate” for sex work in the first place.

Sex work encompasses enormously different kinds of labor performed under enormously different conditions. Professional domination is not identical to full-service sex work. Stripping is not identical to professional domination. Online content is not identical to stripping. Sugaring is not identical to survival sex. Independent workers with established private clientele do not necessarily price services the way workers in clubs do, and workers whose primary clients are wealthy professionals are not operating in the same market as workers targeting customers with average disposable incomes.

The idea of one correct rate becomes even sillier in professional domination because the experience being purchased can itself be bound up with exclusivity, status, control, ritual, indulgence, or financial submission.

Some clients are specifically attracted to expense. Some are not. Some want a highly specialized experience from a particular provider. Some prioritize affordability. Some book frequently. Others may book rarely but spend much more when they do. There is no contradiction in Angelo having worked successfully with one model while I worked successfully with another.

And Angelo has now accidentally agreed with me.

While continuing to discuss me on Khala’s thread, Angelo announced that they used to handle bookings for Black sex workers and still handle booking for one, which they believe gives them firsthand knowledge of how frequently Black sex workers are likely to be booked depending on their price. But even Angelo qualified that statement with “at least here in my city.” In the very same comment, they dismissed OnlyFans as irrelevant because it is “completely different work, completely different market, completely different clientele.”

Well, yes.

Different work. Different market. Different clientele.

Welcome to my fucking point.

Angelo clearly understands that one sex worker’s market does not automatically translate to another sex worker’s market when they are explaining why someone else’s experience should not be generalized. They understand geography. They understand different forms of sex work. They understand different clientele. They even understand that their own booking experience applies, in their words, “at least here in my city.”

Somehow, however, when the subject becomes me, all of those qualifications evaporate. Their experience booking some Black sex workers in their city suddenly becomes authoritative enough to establish how much I could plausibly have charged, how often I could plausibly have been booked, and eventually whether a Black woman with my body could plausibly inspire men to spend money.

You cannot have this both ways.

Either sex work contains different markets, different clientele, different specialties, different geographic conditions, and different business models, or Angelo’s personal experience is universal enough to audit my former business from Facebook. Their own newest comment establishes that it is the former.

I also need us to further interrogate the strange little credential drop of “I handled bookings for Black sex workers” being used to justify what they said about me. Working with Black women does not inoculate somebody against misogynoir. Knowing Black sex workers does not transform “no one is spending serious stacks on a Black woman who is short and chubby and had two kids” into objective economic analysis. Proximity to Black people has never magically prevented people from holding racist beliefs about Black people, and I am not sure why Angelo apparently believes having booked Black women gives them special authority to establish the upper limit of what Black women can earn in the industry.

If anything, someone who has supposedly witnessed how racism affects Black sex workers should be especially careful about taking the racist assumptions they have encountered, reproducing those assumptions themselves, and then using them as evidence that another Black woman must be exaggerating her success.

Anyway, Angelo eventually abandoned the business-model argument and started inventorying my body instead.

Black. Short. Chubby. Two children.

I keep coming back to the children because I genuinely do not understand why they are in this analysis at all.

Why would a client know how many children I have?

I was providing professional domination services, not completing a mortgage application with them. There is no obvious reason my reproductive history would come up during booking. Unless I chose to disclose that information, my clients would have no reason to know whether I had no children, one child, two children, or ten children.

Were we supposed to discuss school pickup before the session? Was I meant to provide birth certificates with the deposit instructions? Did the client need to know the age gap between my children before deciding whether he wanted me to humiliate him?

And actually chat, what kinds of conversations is Angelo having with their clientele? Cause clearly they were a lot more personal than the ones I had.

This is not a minor point because it reveals that motherhood is not actually functioning as information about the client’s preferences. It is functioning as information Angelo believes should lower my value as a person, not just as a service provider. This is not a point that Angelo can try to obscure behind “the market” or “their Black friend that’s a sex worker”.

This is ALL Angelo’s misogynoir on full display.

A client can see that I am Black. A client can see my general body type. A client can see my height. Motherhood is different. You cannot reliably look at a woman and determine how many children she has. Angelo had to manually insert that fact into the imagined transaction.

Angelo alone felt the completely unnecessary need to include my children in the equation.

That tells me much more about Angelo’s assumptions about women than it tells me about “the market”.

There is a long-standing cultural belief that women depreciate through motherhood. We are supposed to become less sexually interesting, less desirable, less glamorous, and less entitled to imagine ourselves commanding intense erotic attention once we become mothers. A woman can be considered sexual or maternal, but people still become oddly uncomfortable when she is unapologetically both. Motherhood becomes treated as evidence that some previous sexual market value has been used up.

That logic becomes even uglier when paired with Blackness and body size. Angelo is effectively saying that my Blackness, fatness, and motherhood should have compounded against me so severely that my own report of what clients actually paid becomes unbelievable.

Then they attribute that conclusion to the racism and fatphobia of clients. I believe that racism, fatphobia, and intense hatred of mothers belong to them alone.

That rhetoric deserves attention because it is one of the easiest ways people who consider themselves “socially conscious” display the very prejudices they claim merely to be “observing”. You say something racist or fatphobic, then assign the belief to society. You are not devaluing the Black woman; you are simply explaining that other people devalue Black women. You are not saying the fat woman could not command a high rate. You are merely “reporting” that clients are fatphobic.

Except Angelo is the person who selected those characteristics as evidence against me.

• Angelo decided that my Blackness was relevant.

• Angelo decided that my body size was relevant.

• Angelo decided that my children, whose existence the clients did not even need to know about, were relevant.

• Angelo changed several details of the objective record of the events

• And Angelo assembled those facts into a case for why my account of my own professional experience was difficult to believe.

At some point, you cannot continue pretenfing you are merely “borrowing” or “parroting” racist and misogynistic assumptions for your argument while insisting that racism and misogyny are solely the property of some third party.

Angelo is obsessed with the fact that I am a mother

The children appear elsewhere in Angelo’s grievance too, and this is where the original October thread becomes especially useful. At the end of one of their comments, after explaining that I was supposedly misrepresenting the industry and that my supporters were not the real experts, Angelo wrote, “I guess you gotta pay your bills somehow since those baby daddies aren’t doing it.”

That was October 2025.

So the attempt to turn my family into an insult did not emerge ten months later after some thoughtful consideration of my work on decentering men. It was there during the original argument about my pricing.

Nearly a year later, that little jab has grown into a much more elaborate story. Angelo now says they became suspicious of me because I built an entire persona around “labor digging” while supposedly “popping out kids for every man that makes you feel a little bit wifed up and they keep leaving your ass.”

None of that describes my life.

I have two children who are thirteen years apart. My first child was with my ex-husband. I have not spent my adulthood producing children for a parade of men because somebody made me feel temporarily “wifed up.” Angelo took pieces of publicly available information about me and arranged them into a fictional biography in which I repeatedly pursue men, have their children, get abandoned, and then build an entire brand around resenting the consequences.

ut there is another assumption inside that insult that I do not want to breeze past: why does Angelo assume women have children for men in the first place?

Seriously.

“Popping out kids for every man that makes you feel a little bit wifed up” only makes sense if you begin with the assumption that the baby is a strategy and the man is the prize. In Angelo’s imagined version of motherhood, a woman gets pregnant because she is attempting to convert male attention into permanence. The child is basically a human engagement ring.

What if the woman wanted the fucking baby?

Why is that possibility apparently so difficult to imagine?

Women can want children independently of whether a particular romantic relationship lasts forever. A woman can want motherhood because motherhood itself is meaningful to her. She can want the relationship and want the child without one desire merely existing as a strategy to secure the other. She can have a child with someone she loves and still understand herself as an autonomous person with reproductive desires of her own.

There is something deeply male-centered about looking at a woman becoming a mother and immediately imagining what she must have been trying to obtain from the father. The baby cannot simply be someone she wanted. The woman must have been trying to catch, keep, secure, or obligate a man.

And I think that assumption tells us quite a lot about how Angelo views mothers.

Look at the pattern. In one argument, my children supposedly make me less sexually valuable. In another, “baby daddies” are invoked as an insult about my finances. Later, the fact that I had children becomes supposed evidence that I was desperately trying to be “wifed up.” Motherhood repeatedly appears in Angelo’s descriptions of me as a derogatory fact. It lowers my desirability, suggests financial dependence, and demonstrates romantic desperation.

At some point I have to ask whether Angelo actually has a problem with me being a mother or whether this is simply what they think motherhood says about women.

Because this is a very peculiar framework. If a woman has children with a man, she must have been trying to secure him. If he does not remain her partner forever, the children become evidence that she failed to secure him. If she financially supports herself and her children, her work becomes something she “has to” do because “baby daddies” supposedly are not paying her bills. And if she remains sexually confident afterward, motherhood itself becomes evidence that she should command less erotic value.

Where exactly does the mother win in this worldview?

She doesn’t.

And perhaps that is the point.

Decentering Men requires imagination that Angelo clearly lacks.

A significant portion of my work is about decentering men. I write about gendered expectations, women’s unpaid labor, romantic entitlement, boundaries, and the ways women are encouraged to build our identities around being chosen. Labor Digger™ came directly out of that work. If somebody wants to undermine those ideas without actually engaging them, one of the easiest strategies is to portray me as secretly consumed by the very thing I tell other women to decenter.

This is textbook misogynoir and, honestly, the most uncreative insult people levy towards Black women and feminists in general.

Women’s political and intellectual positions are constantly reduced to romantic pathology. A feminist must have been hurt by a man. A woman who questions marriage must secretly want marriage and be angry she could not get it. A divorced woman who critiques heterosexual relationships must simply be bitter about her divorce. A Black mother who is not married must have deadbeat baby daddies. The substance of what she says becomes irrelevant because a story about her relationship to men has been offered as an explanation for why she says it.

The problem is that decentering men has never meant men are prohibited from existing in your life.

It does not mean never loving a man, dating a man, marrying a man, having sex with a man, or having children with a man. It means the acquisition and maintenance of male approval is not the organizing principle of your identity. It means being partnered is not treated as proof that you are more worthy than an unmarried woman. It means having a relationship end does not automatically mean your life failed. It means a woman is allowed to ask whether the labor, sacrifice, and social expectations attached to heterosexual partnership are actually serving her rather than treating partnership itself as an unquestionable good.

I have good relationships for the simple fact that when relationships stop being fulfilling to me, I leave them. I am happy being single and I do not allow my peace to be trampled just to say I have a partner. That is the message.

Most women will become mothers. Most women will become mothers because of their relationships with cis men. Most women are straight. Most women like sex. My work would be remarkably useless if only women who had never loved men were qualified to talk about decentering them.

People generally develop analyses because they have lived enough life or done enough research to recognize patterns. Nobody says you cannot discuss labor exploitation because you once accepted a bad job. Nobody says you cannot teach financial literacy because you have ever been broke. Nobody says a person who learned to establish boundaries only after years of having terrible boundaries is disqualified from discussing them.

Yet women are regularly expected to demonstrate impossible ideological purity before speaking about relationships. If I have ever centered a man, I cannot talk about decentering men. If I have loved men, I cannot critique the social importance assigned to male love. If I have children with men, my analysis is supposedly disproven by the existence of the children.

It is a convenient standard because nobody can pass it.

What makes Angelo’s version of events especially ironic is how thoroughly their evaluation of me centers men.

• Their argument about my professional worth asks whether men would pay enough for my body.

• Their argument about my ideological credibility asks whether men stayed with me.

• Their insults invoke “baby daddies.”

• Their later version of my life revolves around men making me feel “wifed up,” men impregnating me, men leaving me, and my supposed desperation for those men.

Now we can add that even my desire to become a mother is apparently unimaginable without a man functioning as the ultimate objective. That is a great deal of male attention being used to explain why they are “beefing” with me.

Very fucking basic, actually.

The Parasocial of it all

There is another issue here that has become much more interesting to me because of the timeline. Angelo has been blocked since October 2025.

For nearly a year, they have not had ordinary access to me. We have not been having an ongoing fight. I have not been periodically messaging them or reopening the disagreement. I blocked them and moved on.

Not only did it keep developing without my interaction, it became more elaborate. The original argument was about an unsolicited pricing suggestion. Angelo eventually turned it into a theory about my professional ethics. Then my credibility. Then my body. Then my children. Then my relationship history. Then my motivations for becoming a mother. Then the legitimacy of an entire brand I built long after the original interaction had ended. At some point this stops being a disagreement and becomes worldbuilding.

That is one of the stranger things about having a large online presence. People can form years-long relationships with a version of you that exists almost entirely in their own head. They can remember a disagreement you forgot, develop theories about why you behaved the way you did, gather bits of information about your life, discuss you with other people, and construct a detailed psychological narrative about who you are while you have no reciprocal relationship with them whatsoever.

To Angelo, apparently, the October 2025 interaction became important evidence about the kind of person I am. It is a campaign they are openly recruiting for. To me, Angelo was someone I blocked because they were weird as f*ck about me in a Facebook argument.

These are wildly unequal levels of investment.

I think social media encourages that kind of confusion because access feels intimate. And, to be fair, I do share a good amount of personal things, although over the last year I have stopped sharing as much due to weirdos like Angelo.

People see your pictures, read your thoughts, learn about your family, encounter your arguments repeatedly, and begin to feel as though they know you.

Over time I have learned that with some people, ESPECIALLY WHITE PEOPLE, that familiarity somehow starts to feel like a sense of authority, ownership, and entitlement. Then, when you block them, the access ends but the imagined authority does not.

The original argument was not really about whether $250 an hour is a good rate for sex work. It was about authority.

A white woman (because it is almost always a white woman) assumed the authority to tell me what to charge.

I declined that authority.

Angelo assumed the authority to tell me what my response really meant.

I declined that too.

They then assumed the authority to explain the industry to me, explain what clients would realistically pay, explain what my pricing suggested about my business, explain what my supporters did and did not know, and eventually explain what my motherhood and relationships supposedly revealed about my character.

I blocked them and moved on with my life.

Almost a year later, this weird bitch is still trying to establish authority over me… and I am still denying that fucking authority.

There is a strange expectation placed on Black women that confidence should always remain negotiable. We can believe in ourselves, but apparently we should leave enough room for strangers to revise the number downward. We can establish boundaries, but we should explain them gently enough that nobody feels rejected. We can talk about our expertise, but we should be careful not to make someone who knows less feel as though they know less. We can discuss racism and fatphobia, but if someone invokes racism and fatphobia to explain why our success seems improbable, we are somehow expected to accept that as realism instead of recognizing the insult contained inside it.

I am not interested in doing any of that. And that is why your musty, entitled, racist, fatphobic ass was blocked.

If you find yourself ten months later explaining why a Black woman could not possibly have been as expensive as she remembers because she is short, chubby, and has children, pathologizing reasons she became a mother, rewriting the circumstances of her relationships, and using your experience with other Black women to explain why she could not possibly know the value of her own labor, perhaps the interesting question is no longer whether she valued herself too highly.

Perhaps it is why you have remained so deeply invested in convincing yourself that she should have thought less, you Crimson Chin having ass bitch.

People like Angelo are why I have a chapter called “Beauty and Body” in my Decentering Whiteness journal.

“When whiteness defines beauty, it also defines who deserves visibility, care, respect, and even safety. For centuries, Black features and bodies have been labeled as “too curvy,” “too loud,” or “too unprofessional.”

Decentering whiteness in beauty and body means recognizing how much space whiteness has taken up in defining worth. It means admitting that what you thought was “normal” was actually a set of exclusionary rules. It requires you to see how those rules have shaped your assumptions about attractiveness, professionalism, and respectability.”

Someone should send Angelo a copy… pay the reparations rate.

Anyway, this is just a snippet of the kinds of nonsense I am subject to, and this is a person who considers themselves to be left-leaning. Baby Cthulhu, send the flood.

Edited to add:

Every accusation seems to be a confession. Angelo is the one who devalues sex workers. Angelo believes in the whorearchy and believes they belong at the top of it as a thin white person. Their true issue seems to be that they believe in a hierarchy and that they belong at the top of it.

They lash out and reveal themselves to whoever threatens that perception.

They are also still misrepresenting what happened here so they look less like a lying bigot. We can see you, Angelo. Your slip is showing.

This is not because I am deeply committed to traditional family values. It is because somebody has to stay home and do all the boring shit while I play with the interesting characters.

Somebody needs to become a famous writer. Somebody needs to open a business. Somebody needs to become a criminal mastermind, have six illegitimate children, get abducted by aliens, or seduce the Grim Reaper. There are important stories happening... to everyone but one chosen Sim.

Unfortunately, Sims are needy. They have to eat several times a day. They need clean clothes and functioning appliances. Their children need attention or some government worker appears and takes them away.

Left unattended, these people will stand beside a perfectly good refrigerator and starve. They are grossly incompetent.

So, in an effort to keep everything running smoothly, I create a Sim whose sole responsibility is to keep the household intact while I am off gallivanting with the more fun, interesting Sims whose stories mostly occur outside the home.

That Sim cooks, cleans, changes diapers, helps with homework, pays bills, repairs sinks, and keeps everyone’s social and emotional needs from collapsing. Some Sims want to be president. This Sim has laundry.

If you’re a Sims player, I bet you’re wondering why I don’t just hire a butler. Butlers cook, clean, fix things, and look after the children, right?

The problem is, butlers also cost money.

Eventually, I realized that this is the key difference between a butler and most people’s expectations of a wife. A butler is understood to be performing labor and deserving of compensation. A wife is expected to provide the same labor for free as evidence of love.

This is also why I coined the term Labor Digger™. A labor digger is someone who approaches a relationship with a sense of entitlement to a woman’s labor. Not only the cooking and cleaning, but the childcare, household management, emotional support, social planning, administrative work, and all the other shit that keeps his life from falling apart while he concentrates on being interesting.

We talk endlessly about gold diggers, women who supposedly enter relationships because they want access to a man’s money. We do not talk nearly enough about people who enter relationships because they want access to a woman’s labor. Apparently, wanting financial security makes a woman a predator, but wanting a full-time domestic employee you can compensate with occasional affection is just wanting a traditional marriage.

For most labor diggers, a wife is a supporting background character and invisible laborer whose lack of a meaningful storyline allows everyone else to have one.

To be fair to the service Sim, The Sims does include traits and aspirations that can make a character genuinely happy living this way. You can create a Sim who is family-oriented, neat, domestic, and absolutely thrilled to spend the afternoon scrubbing toilets and preparing a grand meal for people who will leave their plates on the floor.

The game will even give them a little green mood boost to prove that they are having a wonderful time.

I am less convinced that this occurs naturally in human women anywhere near the rate patriarchal standards would have us believe.

There are women who genuinely love homemaking. There are women who feel fulfilled cooking, cleaning, raising children, managing a household, and organizing most of their lives around their families. I do not think those women are stupid, brainwashed, secretly miserable, or wasting their lives because they failed to become corporate attorneys. Some people really do enjoy that.

What I so interrogate is the extraordinary coincidence that ALL women supposedly possess a natural desire to perform exactly the labor men have historically needed someone else to do for free.

How convenient that women naturally enjoy preparing every meal, cleaning every room, raising every child, arranging every appointment, managing every social obligation, caring for sick relatives, and absorbing everyone’s feelings. How fortunate that the work required to sustain human life happens to satisfy us so thoroughly that compensation, recognition, authority, rest, and reciprocity are unnecessary.

Patriarchy does not simply claim that women are capable of domestic labor. Obviously, we are. It claims that serving other people is our natural source of fulfillment, which makes it much easier to treat the work as instinct instead of labor.

A Sim has visible traits. You can open a menu and confirm that my created domestic Sim loves family, enjoys cleaning, and receives genuine pleasure from removing mysterious puddles from the bathroom floor.

Human women do not come with those settings displayed above our heads.

Instead, girls are praised for being helpful, mature, nurturing, selfless, quiet, accommodating, and responsible long before they are old enough to determine whether they enjoy any of it. Then, after years of rewarding women for serving and punishing them for refusing, society points to the women who comply and calls it female nature.

Maybe you love laundry. Or, maybe you’ve learned that everybody likes you better when the laundry is done.

Those are not the same thing.

I was married once.

I now identify as happily divorced.

Over time, I have realized that it is because I refused to be this Sim. I was a SAHM and I loved being able to be there for every moment of my child’s formative years. I filled my free time by sharing my writing online, and when I felt my child was old enough, I started seeking opportunities outside my home.

Online, on my personal page, I was building a small community of followers who thought that my thoughts were insightful and funny. It became a fun hobby while I cared for my little one and it was deeply fulfilling.

My ex-husband did not approve. In fact, he told me that I was writing too much “Black stuff”. He wanted me to “focus more on being a mother and wife”. He did not say it like someone announcing that he did not respect my interests or care about my work. He said it like he was giving me practical advice.

The mother part was never the problem. I love being a mother. I have always loved being a mother. Few things in my life have given me the kind of joy and purpose that motherhood has given me. Even as I have restarted my journey as a mother with a new baby, it is as clear to me that I was meant to be a mother just as I was meant to be a writer.

The wife part was where things are significantly less clear.

I do not think my ex was really criticizing my writing. The writing required time, attention, and energy that he believed belonged somewhere else. To him. To the home. It made me unavailable for uninterrupted wife labor.

Probably worse, it gave me an identity and purpose that did not exist in relation to him.

Labor diggers tend to become uncomfortable when the woman providing their support develops a life that competes with their access to her. Her ambition is not simply an ambition. It is time, attention, and energy being redirected away from the person who had already decided it belonged to him.

Nevertheless,I tried to make myself smaller. I tried to be less argumentative, less demanding, less visible, and less committed to the things that made me feel like myself. I tried to stand behind him because that was where I understood a wife was supposed to stand.

The problem was that there was never enough room back there. Ultimately, no matter how much I shrunk myself, I still could not fit behind him.

I would not make a good wife to most men because most men’s definition of a wife still sounds suspiciously like the household Sims I would create. They want someone who is allowed to have interests as long as those interests do not inconvenience anyone. She can write, paint, study, exercise, start a business, or pursue a career after everyone has eaten, the house is clean, the children are settled, her husband has been served, and every other living creature has had its needs anticipated.

Her ambitions can exist, but they should remain reasonably adorable. It is nice for her to have a little hobby or something to discuss at dinner, but it should not become serious enough to compete with the ambitions of the people she is supposed to support. A woman’s dream becoming important can create all kinds of household emergencies, like a man occasionally needing to locate his own socks.

She is also expected to prevent family life from interfering with everybody else’s goals. Children, meals, appointments, groceries, holidays, school projects, aging parents, emotional problems, and the endless administrative requirements of being alive are supposed to pass through her. Everyone else gets to experience a functioning home without thinking too hard about who and what is making it function.

The better she performs this labor, the less visible it becomes. Nobody notices that the house remains stocked, the children have clothes that fit, the birthdays are remembered, the paperwork is completed, and nobody has died from eating expired lunch meat.

They do notice when she stops, stalls, or slows.

The domestic Sim is useful because I can click away from the house for several in-game days and trust that she will continue doing the boring shit while I pursue the storylines that make the game worth playing.

I am self-aware enough to understand that this is kinda exploitative when I do it to a collection of pixels, so I am certainly not volunteering to have it done to me in real life.

This was never a debate about whether I could write and still wash dishes. Obviously, I still do in my lovely home with my beloved children sans husband. Women have been expected to perform paid labor, unpaid labor, reproductive labor, emotional labor, and sexual labor simultaneously since forever. We are very talented and capable.

The real question was which part of my life was supposed to count.

Being a wife and mother was real. Writing about my thoughts on the internet was something I was doing too much of.

Which is funny now.

My “Black stuff” reaches an average of 40 million people per month. I have a successful Substack subscriber base. My monetized social media bought the house my children and I live. I am happy because the life I built allows me to be the most complete version of myself instead of a more convenient version arranged around someone else’s goals.

This is not an inspirational story about believing in your dreams because I hate when people turn every woman surviving somebody’s attempt to diminish her into a decorative quote about resilience.

I should not have needed to prove that my writing could make money for it to deserve space in my life.

It was mine. I cared about it. That should have been enough.

The money simply makes the original advice look especially stupid.

Imagine if I had listened. Imagine if I had spent the years that I have been divorced treating the most alive, curious, opinionated, and creative parts of myself like distractions from my actual purpose of being a wife. I might have been more available. I might have been easier to live with. I might have made someone a very good little wife.

I also would not have been me.

I am sure there are marriages where both people are allowed to be fully developed characters with ambitions, flaws, hobbies, goals, and ongoing storylines of their own. The Sims also has vampires, mermaids, aliens, and men who autonomously wash dishes, so almost anything is possible.

I was simply never meant to be someone’s little wife within this construct..

I do, however, love being someone’s mother who writes and shares my “Black stuff.”

I am not going to be the Sim you click only when the baby is crying, someone is hungry, or the toilet is broken.

I have my own shit to do, and I love it here.

Cool. Let’s talk about it though. Starting with the fact that Jasmine did, in fact, endorse Talarico. She is just not actively campaigning for him.

Then let’s visit my response.

And then, it hit me. This request, and similar requests aimed towards Kamala Harris, both fall under “requests for mammying”.

When they say Jasmine Crockett is “uniquely positioned to be helpful” to James Talarico, a man she ran against in a primary that, in my opinion depended largely on misogynoir and misinformation towards Jasmine, they are not making a neutral strategic statement.

They are falling into a very old pattern.

They are saying Black women are not allowed to be full political actors with our own grief, our own calculations, our own timelines, our own priorities, our own boundaries, and our own memories. We are allowed to be useful. We are allowed to be helpful. We are allowed to be summoned. We are allowed to be strategically important after we have been defeated, humiliated, dismissed, or undermined. We are allowed to save the house after being told we were never qualified to live in it.

That is political mammying.

People hear “mammy” and immediately think I am being dramatic or inflammatory because they only understand the mammy as a cartoon. They think of the big smiling Black woman in an apron, in somebody’s kitchen, loving on white children who were never going to see her as fully human. They think of syrup bottles and old movies and plantation nostalgia and all the embarrassing Americana people like to call “history” when what they really mean is “a lie we got comfortable with.”

But the mammy was not just a caricature. She was a job description and a white power fantasy. She was an arrangement that framed Black women’s forced subservience as “natural”" love, loyalty, and devotion. The mammy figure was useful because she did not threaten anybody’s power. She could be trusted with the children, the food, the secrets, the emotional temperature of the house, and the daily labor that made other people’s lives function, but she could not be trusted with power or authority. She could run everything and own nothing. She could hold everybody together and still not be considered a full person with in her own right.

And, unfortunately, that archetype seems to carry over into “liberal” and “progressive” politics.

People may not call this “mammying”, but they absolutely still want the function.

They want the Black woman who will nurture the movement without making demands of it. They want the Black woman who will keep the coalition warm, organized, morally legible, and electorally viable without asking why her own leadership abilities were treated like a insignificant or lesser until somebody else needed he’r credibility.

That part pisses me the fuck off, tbh.

During the primary, Crockett was supposedly not the “right person. Not strategic enough. Not electable enough. So on and so forth. I am not going to argue if those critiques were all made in good faith because we all have eyes and internet access. A lot of what gets called “electability” is just people dressing up their discomfort with Black women with political power, especially ones that are “loud” and “ghetto” and “angry”. A lot of what gets called “tone” is just misogynoir in a tacky trenchcoat.

Then the primary ends, and suddenly the same Black woman who was not enough to win is “uniquely positioned” to “help” the winner.

That is where the math stops mathing for me.

If her influence was not enough, why are people acting like her campaigning is so important? If shes so “unelectable” based on her supporter base, why is everyone so pressed for her to deliver her voters to him? If she was such a liability, why is she now being treated like a necessary asset? If she did not have the political weight people spent months denying her, why are they now putting the emotional responsibility of the general election on her shoulders?

And, kinda more importantly, if you think she failed because she lacked appeal to the people who voted for Talarico and it made true sense for her to lose, does Talarico not deserve to lose if he doesn’t do his job as a candidate and successfully court and sway her supporters?

That is the mammy role.

She is important, but only in relation to the person who is supposed to matter more. She is powerful, but only when her power can be routed to someone else. She is influential, but only when that influence can be handed over. She is respected, but only as long as she does not confuse that respect for authority. The minute she wants to lead, she becomes a problem. The minute she is useful to the man who beat her, she supposedly inherits a responsibility.

And I know people are going to say, “Well, the stakes are high.”

Yes. The stakes are high. The stakes have been high. The stakes were high before the primary, during the primary, after the primary, and every day people were acting like disrespecting a Black woman candidate was just the cost of doing politics. The stakes being high does not mean Black women become publicly owned emergency equipment.

Please be for real.

People like this invoke crisis to make boundaries seem selfish. Mammies are public utilities, they are’t allowed to have personal boundaries as private citizen with their own lives. They invoke ICE, Paxton, the Senate, the courts, the country, the future, and every other very real threat as though naming those threats means nobody is allowed to question why the burden of fixing everything keeps landing on the Black woman who was just told, loudly, disrepectfully, and repeatedly she was not fit to lead.

That does not mean Crockett should do nothing. That does not mean people should not organize. That does not mean the general election is not serious. It means we need to stop using urgency as a spiritual pressure washer for misogynoir.

That urgency did not suddenly appear after she lost. It was already there when people were treating her like a joke. It was already there when people were spreading, tolerating, or benefiting from narratives meant to make her look unqualified, unserious, or embarrassing. It was already there when her supporters were talked about like they were not real voters with actual political agency. It was already there when people were deciding that harming her was acceptable because they liked the man who stood to gain from it.

To add wtaf to injury, now those same people want “helpfulness”.

They dont want healing or repair. Not accountability. Not even an honest admission that the way this played out was gross. Just helpfulness. Preferably quick. Preferably public. Preferably gracious. Preferably without making anybody feel like maybe their little “it’s just politics” routine had a racial and gendered smell to it the entire time.

Bend the knee, Jasmine.

This is why “political mammy” is the correct frame. The expectation is not that Black women participate fully in democracy. The expectation is that Black women absorb democracy’s dysfunction and still center everybody else. We are supposed to carry the moral weight of the movement while being denied the power to shape it. We are supposed to soothe people who did not protect us. We are supposed to make coalitions look whole after they have elevated themselves by standing on our backs in spiked cleats.

And then, when we do not perform that role cleanly enough, people act wounded.

A Black woman can be insulted for months and everyone is supposed to call that “strategy”. She can be undermined and people call it “politics”. She can be dismissed and people call it “realism”. Then, if she hesitates before handing over her enthusiastic labor, suddenly develops a delicate concern for “unity”. Now everyone wants to talk about “responsibility”. Now everyone is standing at the edge of the burning house asking why she is not rushing in with a bucket.

It is because you set the fire.

Or, at the very least, it’s because you watched people playing with matches and decided it was fine as long as the flames moved in the direction you preferred.

We are only good to put out the fires or pushed over glass cliffs. It is exhausting.

That is where the demand becomes insulting. It is not simply “please help stop something terrible.” The messaging is always “you aren’t good enough or qualified enough to be anything but a (uncompensated) helpmate to a white man’s ambitions”.

No.

Jasmine has her own work. She is doing it in her own time and living her own life. You didn’t want her for this job. She is doing others. Black women are allowed to oppose harm without becoming somebody’s campaign accessory. We are allowed to do political work that does not revolve around a white man’s ambition. We are allowed to decide that our time is better spent elsewhere. We are allowed to organize in ways that do not provide convenient optics for people who treated us as disposable. We are allowed to remember.

If any of that bothers you, you are the problem.

The mammy is not supposed to remember in a way that interrupts service. She is not supposed to keep receipts. She is not supposed to say, “Actually, before I make your life easier, I want to talk about what you did.” She is supposed to be bigger than the harm, which is a cute way of saying she is supposed to swallow harm for everyone else to move on without consequence.

And often, they are correct. Black women do swallow a lot for the “greater good”. They just do not love our autonomy, because it means we might say no.

A Black woman said, or even merely implied, that her labor might not be available in the exact form and timetable people wanted, and suddenly the same folks who had every excuse in the world for disrespect during the primary have discovered moral urgency. Democracy, especially for the DNC, does not get stronger by demanding that Black women keep swallowing the same old roles.

If people want Black women’s work, they need to stop treating Black women like “the help”.

This is not just about one campaign. It is about the way Black women are routinely told we are too much for leadership and then just enough for service and about a political culture that still knows exactly how to use Black women while acting like it has no idea how to VALUE us.

That is political mammification, and it is offensive

Black women are not here to be the silent, compliant helpmates of political movements that only remember our value when they need rescuing. We are not here to turn every insult into service. We are not here to make people feel better about the way they treated us because the calendar moved from primary to general.

Black women are not here to clean the house after being told we had no business trying to own it.

So yes, the stakes are high. They usually are. But if your plan for saving democracy depends on asking a Black woman to become a political mammy after months of disrespect, maybe the problem is not her reluctance.

Maybe the problem is that your politics still require a mammy at all. You chose the candidate you wanted. Why do you seem to doubt that he can accomplish this without the one you didn’t?

Obviously, I don’t mean all of them. Some of those women were absolutely doing too much. Like, Cinderella’s stepmother… enslavement and imprisonment is just a bit excessive.

That said, I DO think it is worth asking why so many stories needed the stepmother in the first place to understand why the evil stepmother became so prevalent.

When you look at the history underneath the trope, the evil stepmother starts to look less like a true villain and more like a woman dropped into a household, handed another woman’s children (usually when that woman died birthing one of those children, denied real power, expected to produce heirs, manage grief she did not cause, absorb resentment she did not earn, and perform unpaid domestic labor for a man who very likely remarried because he needed help.

Not love; help.

That’s where the story gets less fairy tale and starting getting very, very real.

For most of history, becoming a stepmother was not a soft-focus blended family moment with matching holiday pajamas and a court-approved co-parenting schedule. It was often the result of death, survival, property, labor, and male convenience. A mother died. The father remarried. The children stayed. A new woman entered the home and was expected to become mother, servant, nurse, housekeeper, reproductive laborer, emotional shock absorber, and family scapegoat.

The existence of previous children in this context is not neutral. In many households, that child represented inheritance, legitimacy, loyalty to the dead mother, and a claim on resources. The new wife’s future children (which she would absolutely be expected to birth at some point) would be born into competition with children who were already there and they would often lose.

The husband’s property, attention, food, land, name, and status were not abstract symbols. They were survival. Lack of these often meant that a woman and her children were at risk of starvation, exploitation, and homelessness.

Also, lest we forget, many women were not in control of if they married or who they married. Marriage was often arranged, pressured, economically necessary, or socially unavoidable. Choice, as we understand it now, was not always on the table.

What if the evil stepmother was what happened when a woman was given responsibility without authority, obligation without protection, and blame without power?

You know that pisses me of the most about this dynamic?

The father is almost always conveniently absent in these stories. Cinderella’s father either dies or becomes passive. Snow White’s father disappears into narrative fog. The children suffer, the household collapses, and somehow the woman who married into the mess becomes the face of the problem.

The man who created the conditions is treated like furniture.

Ain’t it about right that the woman takes blame for the failures or absence of a man, especially in a context where he’s supposed to be the “leader”? Well, most fairy tales were written by men, after all.

The evil stepmother became a perfect cultural container for everything patriarchy did not want to admit about men, marriage, inheritance, and domestic labor. She carried the resentment children felt toward replacement. She carried the fear of maternal death. She carried the anxiety of remarriage. She carried the threat of new heirs. She carried the rage of a household where everyone needed a woman’s labor, but she was immediately set up to receive less by being second.

Wouldn’t you be a villain too in those circumstances?

And guess what? The trope hasn’t really gone anywhere although there’s been a lot of social progress to protect women.

Men are still expecting women to carry all of the labor of raising their children and creating inequity that women have to navigate at the cost of their happiness, lifespan, and earning potential.

That is a bad contract.

Historically, many women did not have the luxury of refusing bad contracts. Marriage was economic survival. Domestic labor was expected. Legal independence was limited. Birthing was compulsory or close to it. Under systems like coverture, married women’s legal identities, property rights, wages, and autonomy could be absorbed into their husbands.

That is why “evil stepmother” is such a useful phrase. It lets the story skip the labor conditions.

It lets us avoid asking why a man with children needed a woman so badly.

It lets us avoid asking whether the villain was evil, or whether she was the only person in the house expected to make an impossible arrangement look natural.

That is where I want justice.

Justice means we can admit that some stepmothers were cruel while also admitting the role itself was often built inside a cruel container where it was next to impossible to “win”. Justice means we can stop pretending women invented these family conflicts out of sheer vanity and greed. Justice means we can name inheritance, property, patriarchy, unpaid labor, reproductive pressure, and male convenience as part of the story.

Justice means asking where the father was. It means asking why any of this was considered acceptable.

The evil stepmother did not become a villain because women are naturally wicked, jealous, or greedy. She became a villain because someone had to absorb the inherent flaws of a household built on women’s replacement.

I’ve stated before how Patriarchy Creates Bad Parents… of course it creates bad stepparents too.

Picture it. The Internet. 2026.

You are a woman. You are post partum. You are breastfeeding. It is 1 in the morning and you look in the mirror at yourself.

You are tired. You are hungry. Your boobs are empty and so they are sagging. You aren’t wearing any makeup so your dark circles are darker than usual.

Despite all of this, you feel very beautiful in this moment. You’ve been struggling with post partum depression and anxiety and it’s been a while since you’ve felt yourself at all, much less feeling beautiful.

You take pictures and post them on Threads.

On Threads, your profile picture is a branded scowl. This is an intentional choice because you are not performing for the male gaze and men tend to be more honest when they do not think a woman is attractive. The picture you’ve chosen as your profile picture intentionally obscures your natural beauty, but the photo you’re about to post highlights it, especially a feature that can only be seen when you smile- your dimples.

The comments are pretty mild and funny even. Then you take a screenshot of a man from Canada shooting his proverbial shot by offering you healthcare because it is funny and you upload it to Facebook— then shit gets very weird.

Suddenly, you are the mastermind of a great conspiracy to make people look at your titties.

Here are things that I have been taught about myself by men throughout this experience:

1. Having breasts in a photo means that you are attention hungry and “skill less”, also very annoying. Unfortunately, it also seems to mean that the men who think that having visible breasts equates to a lack of skill and a desire for attention will suddenly become physically incapable of continuing to scroll. It apparently creates a mandate for men to tell you that you are seeking their attention and also for them to insult you for it.

2. If there are breasts in the frame of a photo at all- they are in the center. This is not a personal reflection of where a person’s eyes are drawn at all. If they are there, they are the subject and the photo taker and poster is responsible for this. It is not actually relevant to the discussion if the breasts in question are actually, objectively, at the bottom of the frame.

3. It means that breasts are ALL that you have to offer and that you lack personality. As we all know, the most important thing in the world to men is a woman’s personality. In fact, most men don’t even look at women they pursue. They operate strictly on vibes. Given this, it makes absolute sense that a man would demand that a woman exist separately from her corporeal form, in favor of a personality alone.

1. Titties make guys horny and it is your responsibility to prevent guys being horny, especially if you have no intentions of touching their wee-wees. Also, having cleavage is basically the same as exposing a penis and you are a pervert. If any of this sounds like incredibly stupid, incel logic, you are immature and abusive.

1. You can have breasts or basic human respect, but expecting all of the above? Nah. Impossible to conceive. The presence of breast is the absence of respect.

1. Breastfeeding is essentially sexual harassment. If you breastfeed in public and a lecherous man is incapable of controlling himself, you are, in fact, the problem. But also, men don’t care about breastfeeding.

1. You are unintelligent. Clearly if you take a photo and don’t crop out your breasts, it means that you have made a concerted effort to show your tits or that you simply don’t have the cognitive ability to figure out how to prevent breasts. There are literally only these options and no others.

1. You have ulterior motives. If you mention a feature of a photo and there are breasts in the photo, clearly you are actually creating a conspiracy to make people look at your breasts, for what I can only assume is the purpose of enslaving innocent men under the immense power of your boobies on your endless quest for world domination. This is why they don’t want to free the nipple. They’re aware of the power it holds.

1. It is “inconvenient” to fit your face and breasts in a photo and make both look good. It clearly takes special effort to do and so the existence of such a photo in and of itself means that you have proven intent in the court of… tit?

Anyway… This is why I will be keeping my Threads photo as the scowl. Men do not deserve nice things and apparently, my smile, dimples, and tits are enough to break the internet and cause over 24 hours of consistent dialogue.

Anyway, most of these weirdos have been blocked, but you can join the conversation about the magnanimousness of my massive mammaries here and here.

Or not.

Maybe there’s no grand conspiracy to make people look at my tits. Maybe I am just a woman existing while having titties and men and pick me women project all kinds of meaning onto that existence and then expect me to take ownership of their thoughts.

Maybe that’s fucking stupid.

Anyway, it fixed it. Men can focus on my dimple only, now.

We have a cultural script for women who expect provision.We call them gold diggers.

What we didn’t have is language for the far more common reality: men who benefit from women’s unpaid emotional, domestic, sexual, and psychological labor while calling that extraction “love.”

In this opening episode of Clapbacktivism, Kiki breaks down:

-Why the gold digger myth persists

-How women’s labor is erased even in so-called “transactional” relationships

-What a Labor Digger™ actually is

-The economic and emotional cost of invisible labor

-Why naming exploitation is the first step toward freedom

Key Takeaways

The problem with the gold digger narrative is not rarity. It is erasure of labor.

Beauty, social presence, sexuality, and emotional regulation are forms of work men routinely pay for outside of their relationships. However, when women provide the same labor inside relationships and expect reciprocity, they are shamed.

Labor Diggers rely on normalization of “invisible labor”.

Stay Connected:

For essays, long-form analysis, and daily cultural commentary:

Substack: Essays and full frameworks

YouTube: Extended breakdowns and visual commentary

Threads: Real-time conversation and cultural analysis

Find Kiki, the Uppity Negress across platforms and keep building the language that makes exploitation visible.

Next Episode:

Ghosting, rejection, and the difference between hurt and harm.

White women used to take pride in NOT breastfeeding their children.

You see, breastfeeding, especially in the 18th and 19th century was mostly a practice that was considered “low class” or poor because if you were a person who had to do it, it was likely because you weren’t rich enough to pay for someone else to do it for you (usually an enslaved Black woman or a poorer white woman acting as a wet nurse) or you couldn’t afford formula (once they became commercially available). In fact, many upper class women considered the practice to be dirty or barbaric. There was also a layer of racism, as the practice was especially common among Black and indigenous women.

As a Black woman, the history is even more grotesque and layered. Black women have historically been a ripe and vulnerable demographic for this brand of white woman to exploit.

Enslaved Black women were routinely forced into the role of “mammy” for white children. In many cases, enslaved women were separated from their own babies at birth so that their lactating bodies could be used exclusively to nourish the slaveholder’s children. The logic was explicit and violent. A white baby could not be allowed to share a breast with a Black one.

Can’t possibly have a white baby sharing a tit with a colored, could we?

After the abolishment of slavery and sharecropping, Black women often found themselves in similar mammy positions as nannies and maids, again serving the needs of white households. Formula availability reduced the desire or need to breastfeed and lingering cultural ideas about breastfeeding being dirty or low class, in addition to larger numbers of women entering the workforce resulted in less than 25% of babies having mothers that even attempted breastfeeding by the 1970s.

Scientific research has since confirmed that the benefits of breast milk cannot be perfectly replicated by formula. The sheer physical and temporal demands of breastfeeding have led to a modern rebranding of the practice as a form of virtue and, increasingly, privilege.

And, to be fair, now it is.

Being able to breastfeed requires time, bodily autonomy, and workplace flexibility. It is extraordinarily difficult for working mothers, particularly those in low wage jobs where pumping is discouraged, impractical, or outright impossible. Poor women are far less likely to have jobs that accommodate breastfeeding. Black women are disproportionately poor.

Now, suddenly, white women love breastfeeding their children.

In fact, if you listen closely, they’ll try to convince you that it’s always been this way.

To be clear, I think it is great that more white women are feeding their own children with their own breasts. Truly. That part is not the problem.

What I resent is the way white women seem constitutionally incapable of engaging in a practice without turning it into a competition or locating their sense of purpose in feeling superior to someone else.

Before, white women felt morally elevated above women who breastfed because breastfeeding signaled poverty. Now, they feel morally elevated above women who do not breastfeed, reframing the same practice as evidence of discipline, sacrifice, and privilege. The hierarchy remains. Only the criteria has changed.

“BREAST is best” started as a medical recommendation to get more women to start breastfeeding. It stopped being about infant health and slowly became about maternal worth. And because that worth was being assigned in ways that predictably punished poor women, disabled women, working class women, and Black women, the rest of us were forced to respond with the obvious corrective.

“FED is best”.

That phrase did not come from nowhere. It emerged as a rational response to moralization, not as an attack on breastfeeding itself. It exists because when white women decide something is virtuous, they also decide who is failing.

And as always, Black women are expected to absorb the consequences of a standard we did not create, under conditions we did not choose, while being lectured by the very people who once outsourced this labor entirely.

“Fed is best” is also a somewhat privileged take in my opinion.

It assumes a world where everyone has access to choice. A world where feeding decisions are made freely rather than under economic pressure, workplace punishment, medical neglect, or exhaustion. That world does not exist. Black women have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country precisely because access has been systematically restricted.

If Black women could actually choose breastfeeding under the same conditions as white women, “breast is best” would have no teeth. It could not be used as a moral weapon. The outrage only works because inequality already did the damage.

So when we say “fed is best,” we are not necessarily speaking of liberation. We are naming survival under capitalistic constraint.

I have been privileged to be able to exclusively breastfeed my baby, who is now one month old. I am fully aware that this is not a universal experience, and I do not treat it as a moral achievement.

What has been most striking is the reaction.

Some of the most passive aggressive, and at times openly hostile, responses have come from white women who assume that me sharing my breastfeeding journey must be a commentary on them. As if my body, my child, and my experience exist primarily as a referendum on their choices, particularly if they’re formula feeders.

There is an almost reflexive defensiveness at play. A need to preemptively center themselves, to interpret any mention of breastfeeding as judgment, competition, or moral posturing, even when none is present, and especially, it seems, when the nursing mother is a Black woman.

This reaction is not new. It is damn near epigenetic.

Historically, white women have been deeply invested in controlling the meaning of breastfeeding. During slavery, Black women’s bodies were used to nourish white children while rich white women distanced themselves from the practice and poorer white women relied on artifice, framing breastfeeding as dirty, animalistic, or beneath them. Breastfeeding was something Black women did. White women merely managed it.

What mattered was not the act or how it benefited the children, but the authority to define it and control it, especially who does it.

That pattern never disappeared. It simply evolved.

When breastfeeding was stigmatized, white women claimed moral superiority by refusing it. When scientific research and cultural shifts rebranded breastfeeding as virtuous, white women reclaimed the practice and recast themselves as its standard bearers. In both eras, Black women were positioned as either laborers or failures, but never as fully autonomous beings that not defined by white women.

This is why a Black woman breastfeeding publicly, and speaking about it without centering them, triggers defensiveness. It disrupts a long standing arrangement in which white women get to decide what breastfeeding means, who it is for, and what it signifies morally.

My sharing is read as judgment because historically, Black women’s bodies have been used as moral reference points without our consent. When we step out of that role and speak for ourselves, it feels like an affront to those accustomed to interpreting us rather than listening.

So the hostility is not about feeding choices. It is about power. About who gets to define motherhood, virtue, and sacrifice, and who is expected to quietly serve as the backdrop… or the help.

In this dynamic, it makes sense that a white woman might feel some kind of way about a Black woman feeding her own child with her own breast, especially if she cannot do the same or is facing judgment for not doing so.

But that feeling is not mine to manage.

I do not have the time, energy, or obligation to mammy white women’s discomfort. I have a baby… my OWN baby to comfort. You will have to work through that on your own.

Before we start, I’m going to ask you to keep a question in mind: Do you believe that targeted, sustained harassment of Black women should be a consequence free and profitable behavior?

I feel like most people would immediately say no, but clearly that answer is less clear with others.

I am a person that upsets a lot of people by nature of existence. That is okay with me. I exist in many ways that are counter the popular culture and I understand that not everyone will understand me.

My personal mantra is “I’m not for everyone… and I’m okay with that”.

I am Black. I am woman. I am atheist. I am disabled. I am many things… and I exist and operate from within intersectional liberation thought and praxis on them all.

Despite this, I’ve managed to build a relatively large community just by nature of sharing. With visibility, however, comes a lot of unwanted attention and commentary in addition to the kindness and fun that can come along with my posts. Due to this, overtime, I have developed pretty well thought out interaction guidelines that protect both myself and my community from the people that get off on subjecting me to their digital dehumanization.

I moderate my commnents, something that makes me immediately different from people who have similar levels of visibility to me. Many do not and discussions on their pages pretty immediately become cesspools because they value the engagement and monetization that comes from it more than they value creating safe community.

The reason that I call my following a community is because that is how I view them. These are people who have taken time out of their lives to connect with me, most of them genuinely given that my content is largely cultural or personal. I view myself as having a responsibility to protect them, even at one point creating a whole new social media app, at GREAT personal expense, where they could be safe. There is mutuality between myself and my community. They trust me to protect their right to exist in my little corner of the internet and that is something that I take seriously.

However, no space can be safe for every single person. Safety has to be specific to be effective. My space centers progressive Black women and LBGT+ people. Dassit. While other demographics may benefit tangentially, if they are being unsafe towards who I have decided to protect, then they will not be centered. They will be corrected and if that fails, they will be removed.

For as many followers as I gain, I block just as many.

This is again, uncommon, as a content creator with my level of visibility. I could easily make three times as much from my social media presences if I allowed the cortisol addicted troll losers to run rampant in my comments being disruptive, harmful, and harassing. I do not value money more than I value my community.

Threads is where I have the most followers, but my Threads followers aren’t really my primary community. That is my Facebook. People on my Facebook have been in community with me for the greater part of the decade. Threads has only existed for about two years. While I do believe that we are building true community among Black Threads, that takes time.

Why is this relevant?

Well I’ve written many times at this point about Scamtifa, an coordinated harassment and misinformation campaign by a group of users on Threads who have decided that engaging in misogynoir, defamation, and obsessive parasocial behavior is a suitable promotional tool for their mutual aid asks.

After months of this and really getting fed up with myself and other prominent (and sometimes even innocent, small content creators) Black women on the app be attacked by this same group of people, I decided that enough was enough and that it was time to strike back.

Since it was clear that this was all a promotional tool for their mutual aid asks, I encouraged my followers to specifically to report SPECIFIC accounts and the asks associated with them, as these people were promoting their campaigns on literally the SAME EXACT POSTS THEY WERE ATTACKING BLACK WOMEN.

Please note: This call was targeted to specific people for a specific reason and it wasn’t even coordinated or organized, just a suggestion. However, that didn’t seem to matter to the people that descended on the post to suggest that I was being cruel and unusual to anyone who could ever need mutual aid because this *could* impact them.

If I say “I will report you if you’re harassing me” and you say “but that could impact me negatively”… am I actually supposed to give a flying figgity fuck?

The comments filled with clear attempts at gaslighting me from people who are either too dumb to read what I said, or people who were a part of this harassment campaign, I told them that what they were doing was also harassment and that I would promote reporting their campaigns as well and the campaigns of people liking their harassing comments.

I do not feel any shame about any of this. Back to where we started: Do you believe that targeted, sustained harassment of Black women should be a consequence free and profitable behavior? I only wanna exist in a community where the answer to the question is a CLEAR and UNAMBIGUOUS NO.

In the time since the original call, I have been busy having a high risk pregnancy so I have not actually devoted any real time to getting these people shut down until yesterday.

What’s funny though? Despite the fact that I and my followers have not actually made a concerted effort to report these people, this certainly has not stopped this group of people for blaming me every time they get their accounts shut down for fraud (even if it was later proven to be normal security checks or legitimate fraud since many of these people have been stealing from Palestinian aid).

The funniest instance of this came yesterday, when I was blamed for the fact that a man I believed I had never interacted with blamed me for him being hungry and being unable to afford pizza rolls for $2. This is not hyperbole.

It is revealed that this is allegedly the person behind the Antifa communications account that was actively harassing me, but notice how he posted this from a different account so that it once again seems like I have an issue with random people who are struggling and not people who have engaged in harassing me? I have all of the Antifa accounts blocked… This account was not blocked because I didn’t know about it and clearly has been monitoring mentions of my name to spread misinformation. This is how I know that the Antifa accounts are purposely being created to not be linked to their mains, because if they were, they would automatically be blocked whenI blocked the original.

They created an entire bot farm to spread misinformation about a high risk pregnant woman because she refuses to be bullied by them into providing labor or responsibility to people who she has not agreed to be a safe space for.

This is what I mean about SUSTAINED harassment. This person could literally leave me alone, but he would rather spread dangerous lies about me in the hopes that someone will believe that I’m some big evil person who is starving him for no reason and he’s hoping that the power of misogynoir or maybe even jealousy from someone who feels more deserving of my platform will grant it to him.

I will NEVER be a perfect victim.

I will NEVER sit idly by as people like this exist and attack me.

I will hit below the belt.

I will cut off your resources.

I will ask my community for their support.

Reactive abuse is ALWAYS self defense.

Gaslighting is also abuse.

I will do anything that I feel is necessary to protect myself from these sick and obsessed people, because the alternative is taking the harm in silence and compliance. I will not be gaslit or manipulated about what’s happening.

That simply does not fucking work for me.

No amount of out of context screenshots will change the truth of the matter. You people are attacking and harassing me and then demonizing me for not being quiet about it. I will never be quiet about it.

I will never, ever be a perfect victim... And you should unpack why you think I should be. Oh, and before I go, a question- Do you believe that targeted, sustained harassment of Black women should be a consequence free and profitable behavior?

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Basically, a GFM was made by a dad for a “memorial fund”. However his children died after living in a van and he refused to house them.

We knew that GFM wouldn’t act on reports soon enough and so many of us came together and donated small amounts like $5 and then asked GFM for refunds until they shut down the campaign.

I’ve located another campaign that I believe deserves this kind of attention.

As some of you have been made aware, myself and several Blk women have been subjects of months of targeted and sustained harassment on threads. We also exposed them for stealing money from Palestinian mutual aid.

A few weeks ago, I and several Black women went live on Youtube and I posted Part 1 of an unfolding saga on threads, which we are referring to as Scamtifa. The Youtube is LONGGG and the articles are taking time because, again, there has been MONTHS of this. We were hoping that documenting and exposing this mess would be the beginning of the end of the shenanigans, but unfortunately, this only escalated their efforts, particularly against one Black woman.

The TDLR version of events is that in about August of this year, a seemingly organized group of trolls started popping up up in the comment sections of popular Black women threads users with very, very targeted and coordinated messaging:

• Black women aren’t doing enough to support Palestinians in their resistance against genocide

• Black women aren’t critical enough of Kamala Harris and that makes us Zionist

• Black women should be supporting more mutual aid efforts than just those for the Black community

• If you disagree with any of these points or push back against this sense of entitlement to determine your political priorities, then you are anti (insert marginalized identity here )

It has been annoying for me, but as someone who has watched them relentlessly attack Kiandria, an activist- both personally and professionally- I have not gotten the brunt of their harassment.

Before we get into what you need to know to make an informed decision on what I am about to ask you to do, there is some critical context that you need to have.

What do I mean when I say that this is a targeted and coordinated?

• They have been devoted to this for MONTHS since August

• When they are blocked, they create new profiles, often from VPNs etc because when you block a user on threads, it automatically blocks their linked profiles, using these methods allows their fake profiles to be unlinked from their mains.

• They have admitted to having a discord server and “archiving” people’s posts, usually so that they can misrepresent context and attack them later

• They have literally put a hit out on Kiandria through one of their associates

• They have particularly honed in on Kiandria, even going as far as reaching out to Kiandria’s BROTHER, an ALLEGED PRODPHILE with whom Kiandria is estranged JUST so that they could seek information to defame and attack her

• Manipulating the threads algorithm using their MANY bot accounts and burners to have people involved trending for negative and untrue reasons

• It has been never-ending and non-stop obsession.

I am tired of this shit and I have not even been their special target. Almost immediately, I was able to connect the dots on common threads in their whinging and came to a simple conclusion: this is about money, mutual aid, and attention currency.

You see, whenever these people are engaged in active harassment, they will do so SO RELENTLESSLY, that they will actually manipulate the threads algorithm from their bot accounts that it will have Kiandria TRENDING for (usually some nonsense like “attacking disabled activist” when it was literally her telling a disabled person that they are not allowed to tell damaging lies about her). Then you know what they would do? Drop links to their personal fundraising needs. They were literally using the popular Black women of threads to get attention and hopefully make money from their harassment, an act that I personally find to be repugnant.

Then, we discovered that one of the main actors, CommiexMommy has been involved in stealing money from Palestinians and has a noted pattern of anti blackness, harassment, and a dedicated angry mob willing to do her bidding, this pattern was noted by Lovette Jallow as early as APRIL of this year. How did we discover this? Well, her profile was removed from Threads for fraud and she blamed me and Kiandira for it, which made zero sense but got us wondering- who was accusing her of fraud and why?

And that is how we found Mohammed.

Mohammed is just the beginning. Since then, other alleged Palestinian victims of CommieXMommy and Amal Absoud of FedUp4Palestine, have come forward reporting that they do not receive the funds they are supposed to and that those that speak out (both donors and genocide victims) are subject to similar harassment to what BW have been subject to. Our count of funds that Palestinians have reported as unaccounted for has totaled between 50-100k as this situation continues to develop.

We had hoped that exposing this scheme would make people see these people for who they are- GRIFTERS and that it would make them leave us alone. Unfortunately, they have only escalated in their obsession and harassment, with CommiexMommy pretending that she has had her life threatened by Kiandria, among other stunts.

I have since suggested that we should report the fundraisers of these people who use misogynoir as a promotional tool (which they immediately cried about because it means I apparently hate all mutual aid, yet another narrative manipulation strategy), but I have not lead or called for a coordinated effort until now.

Here’s what’s different.

After months of this harassment, Kiandria has had enough. She started naming these actions for what they are- TERRORISM. These people are terrorizing her because she is an activist, has presence, and they want to tear her down and reclaim the attention currency that she has EARNED by DOING THE WORK for themselves.

One of these people started their old tricks. They and their friends and all of their associated accounts started spreading the lie that Kiandria called Muslims terrorists. When Kiandria figured out the identity of that person and called for accountability for the dangerous lie told, they and their many bot accounts had Kiandria trending on the app for ATTACKING A DISABLED PERSON.

At that point, enough is fucking enough.

Kiandria has started taking legal action against her harassers. She issued the two people whose identities she could find that are located in the US (many of those involved are Canadian) with restraining orders that force them to cease their cyberstalking and harassment. These people are CommieXMommy and Comradical_T. They have spread some of the most vicious lies and CommieXMommy seems to be the ring leader of this entire group (along with Mia Taylor and Political Persian, however they are both Canadian).

These are civil orders, meaning that all that they really have to do is leave Kiandria alone. Pretty simple right?

Surely, activists can discuss an issue and center their work on something besides one individual that does not have any tangible impact on what they’re advocating against (it’s not like Kiandria can personally stop Israel from genocide, right?). Should be a fairly simple thing to do. If this is about Palestine and NOT about being harmful to Black women, this should be a fairly simple thing for them to do.

These people don’t want to stop lying and harassing Kiandria though. In fact, they’ve posted a fundraiser being intentionally vague in their language to ask for money to fight against it.

If you watch the live that we did on this, you’ll notice that I keep asking one enduring question: “Why do these people believe that harassing Black women should be a consequence free behavior?”. And it’s a poignant one. These people believe that the power of misogynoir is so strong that it will allow them to steal from Palestinians, lie, and be foul to Black women and somehow come out of that with not a single consequence. Are they correct?

And if you think that the answer to that question is F*CK NO, I have a follow up question: “Do you think that harassing and defaming Black women should be a crowdfunded behavior?”

If your answer to that is no as well, then I have an assignment for you. I am asking you to report the fundraiser for multiple reasons:

• Firstly, they’re lying about the identity of who the fundraiser is for. “Aanya” is commiexmommy and her name is Sara. They are not allowed to lie about or obscure the identity of who they’re fundraising for and the fact that they’re trying to should be the biggest possible red flag.

• They’re asking you to fund their crimes, a clear violation of GFM policy.

• Harassment of Blk women, especially to cover your scamming should be either consequence free nor crowdfunded behaviors

If you agree with this after reviewing the totality of the information, I’m asking you to report the campaign. I am also asking those able to donate a small amount first ($5-$10). If you donate first, leave the comment “scamtifa” and do so anonymously. Then ask GFM for your money back and tell them why. Tell them that this is a group of scammers who are lying about the reasons they need this money. Send them links to CommieXMommy’s and comradical_T’s harassing, defamatory posts.

Enough is enough with this den of thieves. Do not allow them to try to insulate themselves from the consequences of their behaviors with other people’s money.

And when they eventually do what scammers do (which is come back on other accounts with the same lies, SHUT THOSE DOWN TOO). It is time to limit their financial incentive for these behaviors. It is the only way that they will ever learn that it is unacceptable.

If you’re in, here is the campaign and this article will be updated with a new link every single time that they change it up. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

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Let me start with something essential about relationships.

Women are not responsible for managing, supervising, anticipating, or preventing the behavior of adult men. This comes up in conversations about labor diggers, about male-centered women, and about why so much relationship discourse sounds like performance management for men who do not want to be accountable.

The situation with Akira and Brenay is no exception.

The discourse around their case has become another episode in a very old story. The internet drags the woman who was present rather than the man who made the choice. People suddenly become experts on marriage, morality, and home wrecking. And through it all, the husband at the center of the situation fades into the background, and the other woman becomes the story. This dynamic is part of a broader cultural pattern that treats women as responsible for the behavior of men.

In case you need some background:

Akira Montague married Tim Montague in October 2018. Influencer Brenay Kennard had a working or business relationship with Tim (this has been disputed by commenters who followed the parties on social media despite being reported by official outlets) and, according to the complaint, spent time with the couple socially and online.

Things escalated when Brenay allegedly moved into their home in December 2023 during a period of marital strain.

In February 2024 Brenay publicly announced her own divorce and soon after began appearing with Tim in content on social media. Akira and Tim legally separated in early March 2024. In May 2024 Akira filed suit in Durham County under North Carolina’s alienation of affection and criminal conversation laws.

In November 2025 a jury found Brenay liable and awarded Akira 1.75 million dollars, 1.5 million for alienation of affection and 250,000 for criminal conversation. Reports also note that the public nature of the affair, and the appearance of Akira’s children in some videos, were raised as part of the harm.

Let’s be clear- this is not a defense of or any kind of judgment of Brenay’s character. It is a broader cultural conversation that is not specific to any of these individuals.

The details are twenty-first-century, but this structure is ancient. The mistress becomes the villain. The wife becomes the wronged party. The man becomes a passive accessory whose decisions somehow no longer belong to him. Then the law steps in to formally assign responsibility to the woman who never made the marital vow.

To truly understand why this happens, it is important to examine the origins of these laws.

Alienation of affection laws were created in a time when women had almost no independent economic or legal power. A husband was not just a romantic partner. He was often a sole source of income, the person on the deed, the only one with legal authority to sign contracts or access credit. If he left, a woman could lose her home, her financial stability, and her social standing in one move.

In that context, the law treated husbands like economic assets, because losing one could genuinely ruin a woman’s life. Suing the other woman was framed as a way to compensate for that loss.

That context mattered then. It does not translate neatly into modern life. Most women today work, have their own bank accounts, own property, and have legal rights that do not vanish when a husband walks out. Divorce is still painful and can be financially devastating, but the law no longer treats women as legal dependents whose survival rests entirely on a husband’s presence, and alimony and child support are available to stand in the gap when a man decides to end his marriage.

The original economic logic behind alienation of affection has eroded. What remains is the part that should have been retired with it. The part that treats men as passive objects rather than adults with agency. The part that makes women responsible for the decisions men make.

It also matters that these cases are not usually slam dunks for the spouse who files them. In North Carolina, somewhere around two hundred to two hundred fifty alienation of affection or related tort cases are filed each year. Most of them never go all the way to trial, and only a small portion end with a money verdict for the complaining spouse.

These claims fail for predictable reasons. The plaintiff has to prove that there was genuine love and affection in the marriage, that the affection was destroyed, and that the third party’s intentional conduct was a real cause of that destruction. If the marriage was already collapsing, if the couple was already separated, if there is little evidence of affection, or if there is no clear proof that the third party did anything more than exist nearby, the case weakens or collapses completely.

In North Carolina, an affair that begins after a real separation can defeat the claim altogether.

As a result, most of these lawsuits get used as leverage during divorce, get settled in mediation, or die quietly because the evidence is not strong enough or the risks and costs are too high. The fact that Akira’s case made it all the way to a jury verdict with one of the larger awards in the state tells you that something unusual happened here. This was not routine.

Look at how both sides showed up. Akira came to court with counsel and with a theory of the case that lined up closely with how these laws are written. She framed the marriage as still having real affection and presented evidence that Brenay’s relationship with Tim, the move into the marital home, and the public nature of their interactions contributed to the breakdown of the relationship and to her emotional harm.

Brenay, on the other hand, chose to represent herself. She argued that the marriage was already over, that Akira had accepted this, and that she did not destroy anything that was still intact, she provided little proof. That is a very thin version of the defense that usually defeats these cases. A strong defense often includes documentation of separation, evidence of long-term marital breakdown, clear timelines that place the affair after separation, and testimony that the marriage lost its affection for reasons completely unrelated to the third party. Instead, Kennard mostly offered her own statements and Tim’s testimony that he had not truly loved Akira, which was ultimately a silly decision.

We do not know what each juror was thinking, and we cannot say with certainty why they reached this verdict after relatively short deliberations. What we can say is that alienation of affection cases often fail when the defendant offers a detailed, evidence based narrative that the marriage was already over and that their involvement did not cause the loss of affection. In this case, Kennard did not present that kind of defense. She chose to stand alone against a represented plaintiff, in a rare type of lawsuit, in a state that still takes this tort seriously. It is reasonable to argue that she lost in part because she did not mount a full defense that attacked the specific elements the law requires. It is also reasonable to assume that if she appealed the decision and returned with a lawyer who is as capable, she could actually had the suit dismissed before it even made it to a jury.

Now zoom back out.

Alienation of affection laws may claim to protect marriages, but in modern practice they protect the idea that men have no agency. They encourage a story where a man can be lured, taken, or stolen by another woman, as if he were a misplaced wallet. They support the idea that the mistress is the agent of destruction while the husband is simply acted upon. In the Montague and Kennard case, the public conversation reflects this logic. Most of the focus is on what Brenay did, how she behaved, the posts she made, the captions and the optics. Tim’s role is minimized even though he was the one who took the vow.

And it really makes me wonder- what did Tim have to offer in divorce to compensate his ex wife? Surely, Brenay should not be more financially responsible to Akira and their children than HE is.

These laws also create a sense of control. They allow a spouse to punish a third party while avoiding the hard truth that no court can make a relationship safe from a partner who wants to leave. They encourage women to police each other rather than confront the person who actually broke the commitment. They reinforce the idea that if a man cheats, there must have been an external seduction that he can not possibly resist, not an internal choice that he willfully made.

It is important to separate responsibility from participation.

The other woman can absolutely make harmful or irresponsible decisions. She can contribute to pain. She can be unkind, reckless, or inconsiderate. And given this, I understand the urge to WANT to punish and hold her accountable for your pain in some way for these behaviors.

However, the fact remains that she is not the one who made the vow. She is not the one who promised fidelity. She is not the one who had an obligation to maintain the commitment. Participating in something unhealthy is not the same as causing the betrayal. It is transference.

Stories like Akira and Brenay’s expose the deeper pattern. Women are expected to maintain the relationship. Women are expected to manage emotional labor. Women are expected to guard the relationship from outsiders. Women are expected to absorb blame and shame. Men, it seems, are just… there. Hapless, helpless, defenseless… and yet somehow worth fighting for and fighting over.

Alienation of affection statutes do not serve a meaningful purpose in a modern society. What they do is reinforce outdated beliefs about gender, possession, and blame. They hold women responsible for the choices of men. They turn adult men into passive figures whose actions must be answered for by the women around them.

The truth is much simpler. Men are not property. Men are not helpless. Men are not stolen. Men make choices. If a man cheats, he cheats because he chooses to. The responsibility belongs to him. The consequences should belong to him. Everything else is a distraction and misguided blame.

If you’re reading this and you were triggered. Good. Sit with that.

If you want to argue, I won’t be arguing with you.

However, if you know that there is some truth in this and you want to grow past the forces that are making you feel that fragility… I made something for that. It’s called Decentering Men, Reclaiming Self. It’s time to grow past that male centricity.

If you want healthier interactions with Black women online, it starts with accepting a few things that many of you have never actually examined.

Everything is not for you and does not require your input

Even when you are well-meaning, every space in the world does not exist for you. That is simply the truth. I would not walk into a Cracker Barrel and complain about feeling unwelcome. Some things are not for me, and that is fine. White people are used to the whole world being set up to make sense to them, cater to them, and center them.

Black people do not move through the world with that expectation and doing so would be dangerous and delusional. This is a uniquely white problem.

So when you see Black women talking to each other, processing something, joking with each other, or venting about something specific to our lived experiences, your confusion or your curiosity is not a signal for you to jump in, depending on the conversation.

Everything is not an open invitation.

I literally posted this morning to say “Good morning to Black women and Black women ONLY” and got so many comments that started with “I’m not Black but-”… was silence not an option? Were there not other posts?

You are not an authority on anything

It does not matter what you think you know. Assume the person you are talking to also knows it. Assume your advice is not some rare gem. Assume the Black women you are addressing are just as knowledgeable and capable as you are, because most of the time, we are.

A lot of you talk to Black women like we are slow, simple, or in need of guidance. You do not even realize you are doing it, because you are so used to assuming expertise in every room you walk into. Stop assuming authority where you have none.

You are also not the Negro Police

In addition to not being an authority, a lot of you take on the role of the state when you talk to Black women. You do not realize how often you position yourselves as overseers, monitors, and disciplinarians.

I created the term Digital HOA to describe this behavior. You show up in Black women’s replies like nosey neighbors measuring the length of someone’s grass to see if it violates a rule no one agreed to. You act like Black women are part of your gated community and are subject to rules you wrote for yourselves. You are detectives and interrogators… Who the fuck asked you to be?

Black women are not in your gated community. We are not actually subject to your bylaws and do not need you to approve the permit for whatever we are doing.

Leaving your enclave and wandering into a neighborhood you do not belong to, only to start policing it, is ridiculous. You should stop. Immediately.

You are not entitled to our labor

Any of it. Not emotional, not intellectual, not physical.

We are the sole arbiters of our labor and where it goes. We do not work for you, and we have every right to tell you no for any reason.

This is especially important because historically we were forced into service positions to non Black families. Generations of Mammies were expected to accommodate, soothe, manage, and prioritize white people and their children while they enjoyed privilege and leisure. That is not the world anymore.

A random Black woman minding her business does not owe you education, emotional support, gentle guidance, or patience for your ignorance. And if she offers you her time anyway, you should be compensating her for her labor instead of treating it like a favor you inherently deserve.

Apply these ideas, and your interactions with Black women will improve

None of this is complicated. None of this is hostile. These are basic recognitions of boundaries, autonomy, and personhood.

If you apply these ideas to the way you engage with Black women, especially online, where entitlement thrives, I promise your interactions will improve.

Black women are not difficult. What is difficult is dealing with people who believe they are entitled to access, authority, correction, and labor that does not belong to them.

Accept that truth, and everything else becomes much simpler.

If you feel seen by any of the things that I’ve mentioned and you would like to work to be better from a genuine place, I have a resource that can help you.

It is a reflection journal called Decentering Whiteness. It is a safe space for you to unpack, without needing personalized labor from Black women AND compensates me for the work I’ve put into creating it.

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The only org that I share unconditionally and publicly is Voix Noire, because I have watched them for a period of nearly 5 years do the grassroots hard work of vetting people in legitimate need and meeting those needs. Last year, when I was on disability and could not access traiditonal support like SNAP due to my situation being temporary (I still had a job and would be getting back pay), Creighton, Buffye, and Voix stood in the gap when I needed it and fed me and my baby for the month, accomodated my dietary needs (I am diabetic and follow a special diet), and it was incredibly helpful as a person who has zero familial financial support.

Across social media, I have nearly 300k followers. Each month, I easily reach 100 million people on average. That is a lot of visibility, especially for me as a person who is not a celebrity and doesn’t consider herself to be a public figure. I am working-class and expecting a child. It is a high-risk pregnancy, and I have lost two prior pregnancies, a journey that many people have seen me publicly document. People often come to me asking to essentially be their personal fundraiser and share their campaigns. My answer to this is a non-negotiable no.

To be done safely, mutual aid requires a level of labor and responsibility that I am not willing to take on. With the level of visibility that I have, if I spent my time vetting every single ask that I get in my inbox or tagged in, I would literally never have time for anything else and that is not something that I have the luxury of doing. I am not an activist, I am not an organizer. I am just a person who posts about my life and opinions. I did not ask for any labor or responsibility outside of that, and I will not be accepting any. I am working class, disabled, and my time and resources will be limited to my family and friends because that is what I have capacity for.

When I needed help, I went to Voix Noire and felt the mutuality in doing so because I had supported them, built community, and contributed in the past. I do not like the idea of people thinking that they have the right to labor from me because they may have liked some of my opinions.

This has been my policy in regards to fundraising and “mutual aid” asks for years.

When I started to really become popular on Threads, a short-form social media app by Instagram, I started getting random tags from literally 20+ accounts per day asking me for money or to share their fundraiser. I would politely tell these people no and to stop asking me and then share this policy but it was unrelenting and it STILL is to the point that my Threads-specific policy is not even to respond at all and to block immediately because I believe that these accounts may largely be bots anyway.

And it actually felt gross. A lot of the accounts claimed to be from Gaza and they would be tagging or subjecting us to a constant stream of traumatizing imagery and asking for money.

I am not the only popular Black woman who was experiencing this. The Petty Auntie was experiencing this as well and made a public statement on why she would be adopting a policy on mutual aid similar to mine in relation to tags in random fundraisers.

It was polite, respectful, and a clearly defined boundary.

Enter Political Persian, who has now changed her username to tea.time.tehran for reasons that we will cover later.

In response to TPA’s boundary, she decided to lead an entire harassment campaign for days, painting this boundary as disrespectful and harmful to people experiencing a genocide. Black women across Threads defended TPA, asserting her rights to boundaries around her labor and fundraising (TPA was already doing live and direct action fundraising for Palestinians that she had vetted; she simply placed a boundary around RANDOM TAGS).

This was the beginning of the obsession of Political Persian with how Black women, in particular, used their platforms in relation to Palestine. She also somehow appointed herself the Palestine Police, and made a whole platform for herself among single-issue American voters opposing the Palestinian genocide and viewed the DNC and their voters as inherently open to harassment as a result, especially ones who they felt were not critical enough of Kamala Harris, whom 92% of Black women voted for.

In case context clues have not made this clear, Political Persian is not Palestinian; she is Persian. She is also Canadian, so she has no real stake in the American electorate. I have been incredibly openly critical of Harris and the DNC for their complicity in Palestinian genocide, but I am not a single-issue voter. I voted for Harris because I believed that it was the better thing to do.

I called PP out multiple times for her emotionally manipulative response to this issue, as well as her unmerited feelings of entitlement to Black women’s labor, resources, and the idea that we needed to prove our loyalty to Palestine (which, in this case, meant kissing her ass and allowing ourselves to be policed by her and her rabid following). I am not a good person when it comes to Black women being policed and having things demanded from us, especially since, when Black women are in need or experiencing harm, we are often the only people who show up for each other (we will also come back to this). NO ONE IS OWED A DAMN THING FROM US WHEN WE ARE ALL WE GOT. Period.

Black women have the right to say no. The end. Any other argument is gaslighting.

After a while, things died down and PP and co went and found some other people to harass… and then Taylor Lorenz released an article about Chorus, a program that funds liberal and leftist creators in an effort to combat social media influence of right wing propaganda and misinformation. Several people have criticized the article for having untrue, skewed, and defamatory claims.

Single-issue constituents went on a WEEKS-LONG harassment campaign targeting creators, especially marginalized ones like Bookersquared. The primary claim by these people was incredibly unfounded, that the Chorus creators had accepted “dark money” to essentially not speak out on Palestine. It is objectively false, nevertheless, Political Persian decided once again, as the Palestine Police to lead a crusade against Chorus Creators and honed in on James Crocker, a literal 18-year-old, who had just graduated high school.

And… it was weird and objective sexual harassment. He politely let her know that they were not true and that he was not interested in engaging, when she pressed, he noted that she looked like Republicans who had Mar a Lago face. She began talking about how “sexy” she was and insinuated that James would pleasure himself to her visage, which made James uncomfortable because in addition to being a literal teenager, he is also gay. At this point, he put up a hard boundary around sexually harassing language and PP pressed the point, stating that if James was old enough to take “grown-up money”, he was old enough to be harassed by her and went on about how “sexy” she was… Yeah- that’s what Palestine needed. Sexual harassment on their behalf.

Enter me. And yes, I was being petty. I attacked a physical facial feature of Political Persian, her very notable chin, which is clearly the result of bad cosmetic procedures.

While completely glossing over PP’s sexual harassment of a teenager, her followers descended upon me. Not only were my comments about PP “mean” and “bullying” (rich from the person harassing a teenager), they were also transphobic (PP is a cis woman), racist (Anti SWANA because apparently everyone from South West Asia and Northern Africa has this fucked up jaw and not just her), and Zionist (because ???, I’m still trying to figure that out. Oh, and it also “threatened her safety”.

I pointed out multiple times that framing a clearly personal insult as a social justice issue was manipulative and that this pattern of manipulation was becoming very common for PP but her defenders went on for literal days. Me Feminista Jones, cover all of what happened on her Youtube Channel. It was an absolute mess.

You see, this is what Political Persian does. She instigates conflicts, hides behind social justice language, and then sends her flying monkeys to do her dirty work. I think that the people who support her are genuinely well-meaning. They are convinced that they are fighting back against people attacking their culture instead of people who are fed up with HER. It is very cultish “charismatic leader” energy.

It really reminds me of how Chelsea Black tried to mobilize her following against Lance for breaking her heart on an interpersonal level. It couldn’t have just been that her feelings got hurt, she had to insinuate that he had in some way sexually violated her, and that level of manipulation is what launched “Womblands” as a cultural watershed moment on TikTok. This pattern of weaponized fragility is not new. I have been documenting it for years and it is especially prevalent in White Women.

I ended up blocking, no lie, nearly a thousand people from this dogpile.

Eventually, things died down again and I went on with my daily life, but every now and again, trolls would pop up to accuse me of being “an anti SWANA racist”, to which I would remind them that SWANA isn’t a race. This still continues to this day, and was a hint of something bigger from Political Persian and co that was coming.

A targeted, coordinated, harassment and misinformation campaign by Political Persian and her cronies against me and other Black women who were popular on Threads, and how I connected the dots that this was a scheme set up by Todd for them to manipulate mutual aid and profit from their harassment, PP’s fall from grace, and a wholeeee lot of Black femme gloating and “told ya sos”.

And we did tell you so- LITERALLY months ago.

Part two coming soon.

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Gold diggers painted as lazy, manipulative, and materialistic. The story goes that these women live off a man’s money while doing “nothing.”

But here’s the truth: gold diggers don’t exist. Labor diggers do.

Let’s talk about the difference.

The Myth of the Gold Digger

The “gold digger” is one of patriarchy’s favorite fables.

She’s supposedly a woman who “uses” men for their money instead of “earning” her own. However, if you look just a little bit closer, the “gold digger” is usually a woman who understands exchange value.

Even when a woman’s role is to be beautiful, maintain her appearance, have sex, and serve as a living status symbol, that’s still work. It’s demanding, high-maintenance, and often requires more discipline than most nine-to-fives. Beauty work, social hosting, emotional regulation, and sexual availability are all forms of HIGHLY COMPENSATED service. The difference is that some women are compensated fairly for that service, and others are not because they buy into the idea that providing it and nothing else is “wrong”.

Given this, when men mock women for being “gold diggers,” what they’re really angry about is that some women have stopped accepting vibes and potential as payment.

The Real Exchange

A “kept woman” still works. She just doesn’t clock in for minimum wage.

She curates her body, manages her image, acts as therapist and cheerleader, keeps the household managed, and becomes a walking billboard for her partner’s success.

Men with resources understand this. They don’t complain about paying for nails, rent, or handbags because they recognize that they are getting something they value in return and have it in home instead of having to constantly seek it and haggle their way to it. Companionship, admiration, youth, presentation, and social access all have currency. These women are managing theirs to make sure it nets resources.

Here’s the irony: the same culture that mocks “gold diggers” also pays top dollar for the very same labor under different names. Escorts, companions, and high-end models perform nearly identical roles without the stresses of becoming integrated into that man’s life and bearing and caring for his children. They are paid to be attractive, emotionally available, discreet, and socially polished. The difference is that those professions are formalized and transparent.

What we call “gold digging” inside relationships is simply unpaid companionship work. It’s usually the men who cannot afford that lifestyle who start moralizing about it. Moralizing is nothing more than gendered class resentment.

The Labor Digger

If gold diggers are supposedly women who take resources without doing labor, labor diggers are the opposite. They are men who take labor without providing resources.

“Labor digger” is a term (pending trademark) that I coined to describe a social phenomenon that I noticed.

They are the men who dig for free labor: cooking, cleaning, emotional support, career motivation, housing, transportation, and social credibility. They live off the invisible work women do to hold their lives together and all that they offer in return is a portion of payment on the bills.

Studies show that this is not a worthwhile or equivalent exchange. Married women do more labor than single women (even single mothers, meaning the man is the difference) in their homes, and this leads to negative life outcomes for women- taking years off of their lifespan, reducing their overall lifetime happiness, and reducing their lifelong earning potential. The inverse of each of those outcomes are true for married men. They live longer, work less in their homes, are happier, and earn more.

Married women, even ones who work just as much are improving the lives of their husbands with their labor, and it is draining them.

Emotional and Domestic Labor Are Currency

In the Boundaries Bible Reflection Journal and Decentering Men, Reclaiming Self Reflection Journal, I wrote about how women are socialized to give without measure. We perform domestic and emotional labor so automatically that it no longer even feels like work. We perform it so much that it becomes “invisible”.

That’s why so many women don’t recognize when they’re being labor-dug. They’ve been trained to believe that washing dishes, listening to him process his trauma, managing appointments, remembering birthdays, and softening their tone are all just part of being a “good woman.”

Every one of those things has economic value. The emotional and logistical labor that keeps households and relationships functioning has been historically undervalued precisely because it’s unpaid.

So when a man contributes little beyond the bare minimum yet expects you to be his maid, therapist, publicist, and sex worker all at once, that’s not love. That’s extraction and exploitation, and at a certain level, it can become financial and emotional abuse.

Why Gold Digging Isn’t Real but Labor Digging Is

Gold-digging implies that women exploit men for their resources with nothing in return. But… what resources? Most modern women work. They contribute financially and domestically and in response most men still do not do their fair share in the home even if they have the same amount of free time. Even if the “gold digger” existed in the form that men imagine, the reality is that the vast majority of men would not be able to access her.

Labor digging, on the other hand, happens every day on a much more exponential level. Men live off women’s emotional bandwidth, financial resources, and unpaid labor.

Here’s where the double standard becomes glaring. When women exchange their companionship and emotional availability for payment as companions, society calls it “work.” When they do the same thing within a relationship and expect to be provided for, society calls it “manipulation.”

Gold digging requires power and access. Labor digging only requires entitlement.

The Economics of “Holding Him Down”

The “ride or die” myth is the spiritual cousin of labor digging. It convinces women that unpaid labor now will turn into shared wealth later. In reality, most women who “hold a man down” end up holding the bag.

Gold diggers understand the economy of relationships better than these women. They negotiate upfront. They recognize that sex, emotional labor, and companionship are valuable, especially to men who desire those things in a partner. They just refuse to pretend that it should be unpaid work.

The Real Fear

Men don’t hate gold diggers because they’re greedy. They hate them because they represent boundaries and standards that they can not manipulate or meet.

A gold digger forces a man to confront what he brings to the table when vibes are no longer accepted as default payment in exchange for an empty promise of equal partnership.

Gold diggers threaten the fantasy that women exist to nurture without need.

Labor diggers depend on that fallacy to survive.

Boundaries, Standards, and Reciprocity

Let’s circle back to some ideas from the Boundaries Bible and Decentering Men Journal.

• Boundaries define what you will or will not do.

• Standards define what you require from others.

A woman with standards and boundaries says, “If I’m providing emotional, physical, and domestic labor, there must be equal contribution or I must be provided for financially for what my labor is worth.”

A woman without boundaries says, “I must accept whatever he offers to prove that I’m a ‘good woman’.” Building good boundaries and standards requires a lot of personal reflection and growth to not be pressured to settle.

Stop Calling It Support When It’s Actually Service

Every relationship has an exchange, whether emotional, physical, or financial. The healthiest ones have mutual exchange.

What most women are taught to call “support” is often just service.

You shouldn’t be working two shifts: one at your job and another managing your man’s life. If he can’t reciprocate financially (especially in ways that don’t make you completely dependent), he should compensate emotionally, domestically, or intellectually. That’s reciprocity.

Love without balance isn’t love. It’s exploitation with good PR.

Final Word: The Real Scandal

The real scandal isn’t women who seek wealthy partners. It’s men who seek women they can live off emotionally, sexually, and financially and call it love.

Gold diggers don’t exist.

Labor diggers do.

They’re everywhere, hiding behind words like “real love,” “partnership,” and “building together” while leaving women emotionally bankrupt.

Stop calling it loyalty when it’s unpaid labor. Stop calling it love when it’s extraction.

Start calling it what it is: labor digging.

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That’s… a mess. Cardi B is still married to Offset, her youngest child is barely a year old, and most of the public discourse around her pregnancy has centered on ideas that I think are just outright weird and gross- but mostly in need of exploration.

The minute Cardi B’s pregnancy hit the timeline, the takes started flying. Most of them weren’t congratulatory. They were full of disdain, side-eyes, and warnings that she’s “ruining her life” by having another child. Folks turned her womb into a battleground for their personal moralizing, which, if nothing else, is an interesting choice in a Post Roe V Wade society.

What do I think? I think that this converstion isnt’t really about Cardi B, Offset, or Stephon Diggs, at all, it’s about how deeply our culture is invested in punishing women for the means by which they choose to become mothers if it doesn’t pass their arbitrary standards of respectability.

Let’s start with the obvious: Cardi is still married to Offset. Their relationship is messy, public, and often humiliating. It makes sense that people side-eye her choices through the lens of “Why would you tether yourself further to that man?” through her second and third pregnancy. That part is fair. Cardi is undeniably male-validated, male-identified, and deeply invested in performing for the male gaze. She has said and done plenty to signal that her power is still tied up in men’s approval. She has publicly and happily humiliated herself and attacked other women (including physically) behind a man she should have (and has all the necessary resources to) leave years ago.

But I also understand why she stayed. By all accounts, Cardi B is a great mother to her children, and she has a clear desire to have a big family. In the world we live in, the only “acceptable” way to do that is to get married first. Cardi did that. She got married and had her children with her husband. She fought to protect her family unit. I personally think that she should have cut her losses sooner from that philandering hot mess of a man, but the reality is, as a racialized woman from a lower-class background who is hyper sexualized, she has been unduly pressured into believing that the ring she got from him was a validator of her worth and worthiness and a level of permissiveness for her sexuality, and that’s a trap that many women fall into. “I don’t cook, I don’t clean, but let me tell you, I got this ring”.

However, multiple things can be true at once.

1. Cardi can be operating inside a patriarchal fantasy of love and family that centers men, the male gaze, and male validation.

2. Cardi can also be a grown woman who wants another child and has the resources to provide for them.

3. The critiques of her don’t happen in a vacuum… they sit inside a culture that relentlessly polices women’s reproductive choices. There is no “right” one.

All of these truths are concurrent.

We can’t talk about Cardi without naming the parenting double standard and gendered labor gap. The reality is, men are not doing an equal share of parenting, even when the children are conceived the “right way”.

There have been numerous studies that show that married women are still spending more time caring for their children and home and being the “default” parent than single women- even when they cohabitate with their husbands. Although everyone in this specific scenario is a celebrity, and that changes the dynamic a bit from an average family, for all intents and purposes, Cardi is the breadwinner of her family (which is why Offset is seeking spousal support) and yet- somehow- still the primary parent of all of the children she shares with her soon-to-be-ex-husband.

Clearly, that dynamic has not stopped Cardi from being the mother that she wants to be or showing up and providing for her children the way she pleases. Cardi is independently wealthy, but this same dynamic of being the forced default parent in addition to the labor commonly associated with being a “wife” cripples the life expectancy and lifelong happiness of married women compared to single women- even if those single women are ALSO MOTHERS.

In a patriarchy, we are made to believe that children need the provision and constant presence of their fathers as a nearly sole means of outcome prediction, but the reality is, many fathers are like Offset and Diggs. They have reduced themselves to what they can provide in occasional (if any) material support because they are not expected to be fathers the way that mothers are expected to mother ANYWAY, and that dynamic doesn’t actually change much with marriage and cohabitation. The work will, as a default, still fall on Cardi. Since she’s already ended up caring 100% for the three children she had “the right way”, why should she realistically balk at another?

The reality is Cardi has the means to support all of her children and does so consistently, with or without a man.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the only legitimate reason for a woman to have a child is that SHE wants one and knows SHE can take care of it. Everything else- marriage status, men’s behavior, public opinion- is background noise. If all of the labor will fall on the mother and the mother is able and willing to do it, really, that is all that matters.

I know that the concept of a woman desiring parenthood, regardless of the role a man may or may not play in that parenthood, is foreign in patriarchal minds, however. I am willing to bet that most women reading this would never have children unless they felt they found “the right man” and are willing to hold off on their dream of being a mother (if they have one) because that dream is about having a FAMILY that centers on a man… not actually much about a child at all. Many women have structured their lives and reproductive decisions around a man in all directions, having or not having.

The only ones happy with their choice at the end of the day are the ones who had (or didnt have) children because of what THEY wanted or THEIR limitations.

This doesn’t mean a partner’s and coparent’s behavior doesn’t matter at all, and I will concede that the idea of having a baby to “get back” at your ex is bird-brained, but people are only speculating about that being Cardi’s motive. It DOES mean that our critiques are often misplaced and misframed. Cardi is not ruining her life by having another baby. If she wants another child and has the resources, then she’s doing what women should do: choosing for themselves. And if she’s having a baby as a “gotcha” I can only hope that that truth coincides with her wanting a baby as a concurrent truth.

The danger of constantly filtering women’s choices through the lens of men is that it re-centers men even in conversations that are supposedly about women’s autonomy.

To understand why the Cardi conversation looks the way it does, you have to pull back and see the bigger picture: society expects men to be active parents, but even in the “right” circumstances, they rarely are; otherwise, the term “married single mother” wouldn’t exist.

Historically, men’s fatherhood has been defined through provision, not caretaking. If a man pays child support, or simply doesn’t abandon the household altogether, he’s already seen as “doing his part.”

Women, on the other hand, are defined by their parenting. Every choice they make is filtered through “what does this mean for the kids?” A woman can be a CEO, a millionaire, or a celeb like Cardi, and she’ll still be judged by whether people think she’s “ruining her life” through her family decisions.

So what does all this mean for conversations about Cardi and similar discussions of reproductive autonomy specifically? It means we don’t have to flatten the choices into either celebration or condemnation. Multiple truths can sit side by side:

• Cardi is a male-identified woman who often moves in ways that reinforce patriarchy.

• Cardi also has every right to have another baby because she wants one and can provide for them.

• Men often escape real accountability because we still don’t expect men to actually parent, anyway.

Nuance doesn’t mean protecting Cardi from critique. It means critiquing within proper context.

In short: yes, Cardi’s situation is messy, and it’s not what I would choose for myself, but I am not a multi millionaire who can have all of the children I want without having to factor in paternal involvement at all. Yes, it’s frustrating to watch women tie themselves to men like Offset and Diggs. But also, yes, she still has a right to make choices about her body without the internet turning her pregnancy into a moral panic.

So when people ask, “Why would Cardi have another baby?” the answer is simple: because she wants to, and because she can. Every other layer of judgment, the marriage certificate, the messiness of Offset, the speculation about Diggs, is noise meant to disguise an uncomfortable truth.

Women will always be expected to mother, whether the man is in the picture or not, and Cardi has already proven she will show up for her children. The question isn’t whether she’s “ruining her life,” it’s why we still cling to the fantasy that men are central to parenting when, in reality, most of the labor was never theirs to begin with and a lot of you will feel deeply uncomfortable pondering the truth of that matter if you’ve bought into the lies that patriarchy tells us about parenting.

In a world where women can make their own money, provide their own resources and support, and build their own communities, men have effectively made themselves less needed in the one way they’re expected to show up (financially)… I feel like we don’t talk about THAT enough.

I would also rather talk about how Cardi has zero Black parents but y’all let her say “nigga” but that’s a conversation for another day.

Anyway, if you like this article and it gave you some things to think about, you should check out my Decentering Men, Reclaiming Self Reflection Journal. I think you’ll like it. If you didn’t like this article, I hope that relying on men to father like you mother works out for you and you win the lottery, truly… but I also hope that you thoroughly prepare yourself for the likelihood that they don’t. Your babies will need it.

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So many people love weddings but not marriages. The party, the applause, the pictures… those are easy to want. Fun, even. However, the reality of marriage is the slow, unglamorous work of partnership and blending lives with another human.

I think the same thing happens with children, or rather the process of having children. People want babies or the idea of a (usually nuclear) family, but not children.

This is where patriarchy warps the picture. Under patriarchal expectations, marriage is not just about love, it is about women securing legitimacy through their being chosen by a man. Motherhood is not just about children; it is about creating or maintaining a family with a man.

Children stop being people in their own right. They become symbols, proof, byproducts… receipts of what adults want to say about themselves, their lives, their abilities, or their relationships.

That is why so many women stay in relationships they should not, hoping the child will somehow make the man better. That is why single motherhood is treated as a shame to be avoided, rather than an arrangement where a woman can thrive on her own terms. That is why fathers can coast on bare minimum involvement while mothers are expected to contort themselves into exhaustion.

Patriarchy centers men so deeply in the process that the child gets lost in the shuffle, an accessory to the man-woman dynamic… rather than the reason parenting even exists in the first place.

And that’s just in conception. Beyond birthing children as byproducts, patriarchy even encourages competition between mothers and their children, particularly daughters. Instead of nurturing the next generation, it primes mothers to resent the next generation. As it relates to daughters, it primes mothers to measure themselves against them or even sabotage them. You can see it in everything from mothers who discourage their daughters’ confidence to women who frame their daughters as “attention seeking” or “being fast.”

It is ugly, but it is not an individual pathology. It is a consequence of a society that teaches women that their only value is in their beauty and youth (which may be impacted and considered lessened by the process of birthing and raising children as well as aging) and in their ability to take on as much labor as possible (usually tied to the maintenance and care of those children. This creates resentments and regrets. There has been an increase in public dialogue about women who regret having children for this very reason.

Fathers compete with their children, too, although in a different manner than mothers. Rather than beauty or validation, the contest is over the mother’s labor and attention. Men often resent the time and care a mother gives to her children because it means less energy left over for him and sometimes less desire for sex.

In fact, data from the American Time Use Survey shows that married mothers do more housework and get less sleep than single mothers. Never-married mothers spend about thirty minutes less per day on housework and thirteen minutes more sleeping, while spending just as much time on childcare as married mothers.

Having a man in the home often increases a mother’s workload instead of reducing it. The result is that mothers are forced into an impossible bind: managing the full weight of child-rearing while also managing the fragile egos of men who want to be centered without doing the work. This also creates resentment, deeply unhappy marriages, and broken, dysfunctional families.

This framework also explains why LGBT+ families are so often treated as “immoral” or “unnatural.” Families that do not center men, especially those that exclude men altogether (like two lesbian mothers) or include members who openly reject masculinity (like trans women, fem boys, or effeminate men), disrupt the nuclear family fantasy that patriarchy insists is the only legitimate arrangement. This challenges the idea that a child’s “legitimacy” is tied to a married cis het man’s presence. Patriarchy responds by demonizing these families, painting them as dangerous, dysfunctional, or deficient- when in reality they are simply living proof that children can thrive without being tethered to patriarchal structures.

Growing up on the south side of Chicago in an intergenerational household comprised of a lot of single mothers, I would romanticize the smaller, nuclear families on TV, especially because they had dads. I do not do that anymore. I got a scholarship to be schooled alongside richer, whiter, more nuclear families. Almost immediately, I noticed a pattern in these families. The children hated their parents. The parents hated each other. That was not true of the single-mother-led families I had observed growing up (which isn’t to say that children and parents never got upset with each other).

Single mothers challenge this idea in a similar way. By raising children with a man who is outside of or who has abandoned the home, they expose the lie that a father’s presence is the only thing that makes a family legitimate and functional. Single mothers are punished heavily for this circumstance in ways that single fathers are not.

About 30 percent of single-mother households in the United States live below the poverty line, compared to less than 10 percent of married households. They are stigmatized, blamed for every possible social ill, and given less support, even while carrying the heavier load of child-rearing almost entirely on their own.

Single fathers, on the other hand, do not disrupt patriarchy’s story. They are celebrated as heroic for doing the bare minimum and often receive more help, more praise, and more acceptance. The outcomes for children of single fathers are often better, not because fathers parent better, but because single fathers are more likely to have higher incomes and because society actually supports them instead of treating their existence as a moral failure. If a man is a single father, it is assumed that their partner died or the woman failed. If a woman is a single mother, it is assumed that she, as a woman, failed. In either case, a woman is seen to have failed, and any man who steps up must be a saint.

When the way that children and parents are given or denied support is linked to cis het male legitimacy, and the children themselves are viewed as proof of a man’s presence, as rivals for his attention, or as burdens that pull mothers away from serving men, they stop being seen as whole human beings. They become props. That is why so many parents find themselves disappointed, resentful, or detached: they did not really want a child. They wanted a man, a marriage, a family unit that looked right to other people. The child is just… there.

But children are not just there... They are not leverage in a relationship, or trophies in a competition, or humans in need of legitimacy. They are people who deserve to be loved, desired, and equally socially supported for who they are and who they can become, not for what they symbolize.

If more people could separate children from patriarchy’s demands, if they could see them outside of the man who may or may not be there, parenting would look less like performance and more like care.

Until then, we will keep living in a world where weddings matter more than marriages, babies more than children, and patriarchy keeps winning at the expense of literally everybody. We deserve better. We ALL deserve better.

Further Reading

• Musick, K., et al. (2016). Mother’s sleep, housework, and child care: A comparison of married and single mothers. American Time Use Survey, 2003–2012. National Institutes of Health (PMC).
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6560646

• Population Reference Bureau (2016). Married Women with Children and Male Partners Do More Housework Than Single Moms.
  https://www.prb.org/resources/married-women-with-children-and-male-partners-do-more-housework-than-single-moms

• U.S. Census Bureau (2022). Income and Poverty in the United States.
  https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html

• Pew Research Center (2013). The Rise of Single Fathers.
  https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers

• Bureau of Labor Statistics. American Time Use Survey. Data on gendered division of labor in childcare and domestic work.
  https://www.bls.gov/tus/

Last year, I had two miscarriages, nearly back-to-back. I thought that I was done with the process of childbearing and was uninterested in having more children than my 12-year-old theyby. Then, I became pregnant. I was temporarily off birth control due to health issues. It was completely unexpected, and I realized that I was a lot more open to the idea of additional children than I thought. I began to get excited about the prospect of a new life and expanding my family.

I love being a mother. I love children. I love watching a young mind grow and expand. I love supporting my child as they discover who they are. I am many things, but being a mother is the thing that I love the most.

At about ten weeks, I had a spontaneous abortion. This means that my body decided that the pregnancy was not viable and expelled it.

I saw it coming. I smelled it coming. I recall sleeping on the couch, wrapped in the embrace of my partner. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I returned, I informed him that I had gone to the bathroom and there was a different smell than there had been… like my body smells during my period. We were both concerned, but I am well aware that when it comes to first-trimester miscarriage, there is very little that can be done. I hoped for the best, but I prepared for the worst.

The worst came to pass. At about 2 am, I woke in a pool of blood. We cleaned… and then we mourned.

The bleeding was awful. It was nonstop and heavy for about two weeks before I went into the emergency room, concerned about the fact that the end did not seem to be in sight. I was given Misoprostol to help pass the products of conception faster and before they became septic. Then, with lots of support, I healed.

After this experience, I realized that I did want another child way more than I had previously considered. And although the loss was still very fresh, I became pregnant again. Since this was more intentional, I was able to establish prenatal care and even get ultrasounds pretty immediately. Then, at 13 weeks, I went in to get a routine ultrasound, and my baby did not have a heartbeat. Estimates of gestational age suggested that my baby had not had a heartbeat for at least two weeks. I had been walking around cradling a little bump that held a dead baby.

It was devastating.

Because the products of conception were not passing on their own, I had to have an abortion procedure to have them removed. The surgery was fairly quick. I also honestly preferred this process to the spontaneous abortion because there was less bleeding after the fact. My body healed and so did my mind.

Here’s the thing- being pregnant made my diabetes much harder to manage.

After loss number 2 was physically healed, I concentrated my energy on mental and physical healing, taking care of medical issues that needed additional attention, and moving forward.

Some changes made since then:

• had Nexplanon installed, and that meant no more periods

• started Mounjaro to help manage my diabetes

• had a colposcopy and then a LEEP procedure under anesthesia for my cervix (this makes future child bearing more risky and unlikely

It was great… all of my labs indicated that I was improving my health. My mental health was thriving. I was centering myself and my needs. I decided not to worry about additional biological children but started the process to become a foster parent so that all of the love I have to give has a place to go.

And then June came, and I just felt awful with no clear idea why. I went on leave from work to figure out what was going on. Primary complaints: unexplained but constant fatigue, my teeth were weirdly getting duller, diabetes was slightly less manageable, and just a general feeling that something wasn’t right.

However, of my labs were okay, and I had even lost ten lbs, so the docs assumed it must have been my mental health. My doctor did suggest that I increase my Mounjaro dose to lose more weight since I didnt see the typical rapid weight loss (which was annoying as I’m on Mounjaro for health, not aesthetics), we decided that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on physically.

Typical. A woman walks into a doctors office. Dr says “Have you considered losing weight?” I engaged in therapy and then returned to work in July.

Fast forward to the beginning of August, I started to put on weight, most specifically in my midsection. I am not a super active person, but I maintain a fairly standard weight, especially on Mounjaro. I made a note to be more discerning with my diet and moving around more (I work from home) and that was it.

Then last week, I felt a thud in my stomach. This wasn’t gas. It felt… like a kick. But- that’s crazy. I’m on Nexplanon and haven’t engaged any unsafe sex practices.

I ordered at home pregnancy tests. All three of them were IMMEDIATELY positive. It didn’t even need the whole three minutes to report back.

I went to an urgent care with an ultrasound machine. Immediately, I knew that if I were pregnant, I would have had to have missed it for 20-22 weeks, because conception was most likely to have occurred after my last period but before my Nexplanon was installed. I was correct. I am 22 weeks along, and it’s a boy.

To be honest with you, I am concerned. This entire pregnancy, I have not been behaving “pregnantly”. I do not smoke or do drugs, but I have had a handful of drinks. I have been taking medications that pregnant women are not supposed to take. I have not gained any weight, despite my belly growing. In fact, at several points during this pregnancy, I have lost weight. I still have my Nexplanon installed, although I have an appointment for its removal. My medical team and I are still figuring out exactly what the plan is from here, so I’ve taken a little more time from work to focus on making sure that the baby is okay.

Although there is a lot of uncertainty, there are a few things that I know for certain.

• The first is that I am a great and capable mother.

• The second is that the baby’s father is just as great and capable, which I credit for being intentional with only dating men who father the way that I mother and my commitment to avoiding dating labor diggers.

• The third is that this baby will be loved and provided for if he makes a safe passage earthside.

• The fourth- and this is the hardest one- is that losing this baby, after feeling him moving inside me after seeing his little face, his hands, his little heart beating- would be absolutely devastating in ways that previous losses have not been.

For now, all initial exams indicate that this baby is healthy and strong. Despite all odds, he is developing normally. I have immediately stopped taking the medications that are contraindicated for pregnancy. I’ve already started gaining a little weight, and in the last few weeks, my belly has started to “show”.

I am allowing myself to become excited. And hopeful. Send me and my rainbow baby your good vibes. 🧿

Another day, another post on my Facebook page about dating and relationships. More members of the digital HOA showing up to finger wag… Let’s talk about it.

I wanna talk about it cause I’ve noticed a trend that I find annoying and disturbing.

More and more people are using the language of social justice, not to name actual harm, but to process their own rejection through a lens that I honestly believe to be manipulative.

Let me be clear, desirability politics are real. The ways white supremacy, fatphobia, ableism, and transmisogyny shape who is seen as lovable and who is ignored or fetishized are very real, since those things do not exist in a vaccum, they can absolutely seep into one’s “preferences”. We absolutely should be critiquing those patterns and their roots. But what we cannot do is pretend that every individual romantic rejection is an act of systemic oppression.

That is not justice. That is just entitlement with a progressive vocabulary.

It is one thing to challenge the structures that shape attraction. It is another thing entirely to believe you are owed someone’s desire because of your politics, your pain, or your identity. Too often, people are not asking for equity. They are asking for compliance. It is natural to want to be wanted, however, when that doesn’t happen, that doesn’t inherently mean that harm occurred.

Here is the truth: no one actually owes you attraction. No one owes you intimacy. No one owes you the starring role in their romantic story. There are no laws that govern your access to any person you’re interested in. They are allowed to want something else. They are allowed to say no. People are allowed to not want you- and they’re allowed to not want you for whatever reason they please.

Sometimes those reasons can be problematic, but mostly, you just suck at accepting rejection.

Liberation is about the right to exist without oppression.

It is not about forcing people to date you, desire you, sleep with you, or overlook their own needs to make you feel validated.
Romantic disinterest is not political violence.
Being told, “come correct or don’t come at all” is not marginalization.
We have to stop calling hurt feelings oppression.

Some of us are trying to get free. It seems like the rest of us are trying to get fucked more. Conflation of those things feels incredibly wrong.

Desirability is political, yes. Mostly, though, desire is deeply personal. It is not always fair. It is not something you can legislate or guilt your way into. Attraction is not a public accommodation. You do not get to use your social marginalization to demand someone else’s body or emotional labor.

Then there’s this: many of the same people demanding unconditional acceptance often turn around and vilify anyone who does have standards. It seems especially prevalent when that person is someone who is not supposed to have any in the first place. Like Black women, for example. In this actual example from my Facebook page, a Black woman denying a man access to herself when it’s clear he has neither reliable transportation or a home, is not just a simple statement of a standard. It’s ableist and killing the environment according to the Digital HOA.

Let a Black woman say she won’t date a man who doesn’t have his own car, and suddenly she’s classist, elitist, or even ableist… ARE Y’ALL OK?

It is fascinating how quickly people abandon their commitment to autonomy and agency the minute someone from a marginalized group asserts that they, too, have preferences. Standards that are completely reasonable when voiced by others but become oppressive when they come from people who are not socially expected to have any power.

You will never see entitlement unravel faster than when someone the world expects to be desperate dares to be discerning. When they lack access to someone who’s supposed to be the bottom of the barrel.

This behavior isn’t a call for equity. It’s a demand for access. It’s not about mutual care.

It’s about control.

When people misuse social justice language to pathologize rejection, what they are really doing is trying to shame others into affection. That is not advocacy. That is coercion.

I want to be clear about this next part, because it matters.

This logic is not new. It is the foundation of incel ideology.

Yes, the involuntarily celibate crowd. The men who gather in forums and comment sections to rage about how no one wants to sleep with them. The ones who believe that sex is a human right and that women are violating their civil liberties by having preferences, especially ones that exclude them. The ones who believe society has failed them because they are not attractive by most standards and therefore must be compensated with romantic access, forcibly if necessary.

That is where this leads.

The idea that someone not wanting you is oppression. The idea that attraction should be redistributed like public housing. The idea that a marginalized identity or even a marginalized feeling creates a moral obligation for someone to desire you.

Now we are seeing some people in so-called progressive spaces repackaging this entitlement in a prettier outfit. Instead of calling women “femoids,” they talk about internalized bias. Instead of screaming on Reddit, they make carousel slides with academic jargon. But the core belief is the same. That your pain and unreciprocated, unrequited desire should give you power over someone else’s choice.

It does not. And kinda more importantly- it SHOULDN’T.

Your identity does not override someone’s autonomy.

I say this with care because I know the longing behind it.

I want you to be loved. I want you to be desired by someone who sees you fully and says, “Yes, exactly like that.” That longing is valid. That pain is real.

But you cannot coerce your way into being seen. You cannot shame someone into wanting you and expect it to feel good when they stay. And if you do get someone to pretend they want you out of guilt or social pressure, you will always be wondering if it is real. That is not love. That is a performance built on fear.

The love you are searching for has to be mutual. It has to be voluntary. It has to be grounded in truth, not pressure. You want to be seen, understood, and chosen. We all do. But none of that can be demanded. It has to be offered.

You can’t call every rejection oppression just because it hurts.

Yes, desirability can be shaped by larger systems, as nothing exists in a vaccum. Yes, we should interrogate those systems. However, we cannot confuse a personal disappointment with a political crisis. We cannot take the language meant to protect the vulnerable and twist it into a weapon against people who simply don’t want to fuck you.

There is a difference between being systemically excluded and being denied access to something you were never actually entitled to. There is a difference between “you’re not my type” and “you don’t deserve to exist.”

At the end of the day, liberation means you get to be free. It means you get to want what you want, say no when you mean no, and pursue connection on your own terms. That goes both ways.

No one owes you romantic love. You are worthy of love anyway. Just don’t confuse worthiness with entitlement. That’s where people lose the plot.

And if this feels uncomfortable? That’s okay. It’s supposed to. Growth usually is.

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I just blocked someone.

They asked a question that could’ve been answered in three seconds with a simple Google search. I mean that literally. Type it into the search bar and boom, multiple sources, explanations, videos, even forums if you want it broken down Barney-style. When someone pointed this out (kindly, I might add), they got mad. Defensive. Belligerent. They doubled down on the idea that they were entitled to someone else’s time, energy, and knowledge. Like they were a personal, on demand tutor.

You are walking around with a supercomputer in your hand. Something people would have killed for a few decades ago. Instead of using it to learn something, expand your worldview, or even just be quiet until you understand more, you’re using it… to argue.

And not just to argue, but to argue with people who’ve already done the work.

This isn’t about one person or one moment. This is a pattern. And I need folks to understand: I do not want to be in community with people who are proudly, stubbornly, and performatively uncurious.

Especially not now. Not under this current administration. Not while book bans are spreading. Not while critical thinking is being labeled "indoctrination," and entire curricula is being stripped down to prevent young people from asking hard questions. The attack on education is real. Some of y’all are out here volunteering to be collateral damage because you don’t want to Google something.

It’s fucking ridiculous and I’ve had enough.

Information Used to Be Locked Behind Doors

Before the internet, knowledge was limited. It was locked away. If you didn’t have access to a university library, academic journals, encyclopedias, or someone who was formally educated, you were out of luck. Certain kinds of information were hoarded behind paywalls, institutions, and ivory towers. Even public libraries had limitations, especially if you were poor, rural, or marginalized.

People literally had to know someone or be someone to access the kinds of knowledge you can now summon with a voice command.

And now? We are in the golden age of information. Primary sources. Academic breakdowns. Expert analysis. You can audit Ivy League courses for free. You can learn world history, economic theory, and algebraic proofs from industry EXPERTS while cooking dinner. Yet, some people are still out here asking others to chew their food for them first.

It is disrespectful to the people in your life who are doing the intellectual labor you refuse to do. It is dangerous when weaponized in service of disinformation.

“But what if I can’t tell what’s real?”

This is the next line of defense for the proudly uninformed. “I don’t know what to trust. There’s so much misinformation. How do I know what’s real?”

Let’s be real. Being able to evaluate a source and practice media literacy are foundational skills that every adult should have by now. If you don’t, I’m not mocking you; however, I am saying it’s YOUR responsibility to fix that. You should not be online arguing without having learned how to vet a source. You should not be looking for shortcuts from strangers if you haven’t even tried to develop that muscle on your own.

Because here’s the truth: I could feed you total bullshit, and you wouldn’t know the difference.

If you haven’t learned how to cross-reference, how to read laterally, how to ask, “Who benefits from me believing this?”, then you are vulnerable. Not just to being wrong, but to being manipulated. To being radicalized. To being weaponized. In the year 2025, when every fascist movement in the world is figuring out how to blend propaganda into pop culture, that is not a neutral state of being. That is an open, active threat.

You want me or someone else to explain things to you? Cool. But what’s your plan when I’m tired? What’s your plan when I’m wrong? What’s your plan when someone with worse intentions and a shinier aesthetic and better production tells you the opposite?

Community Requires Effort

This is where I need to be blunt. Community is not a customer service desk.

People are so quick to shout about the responsibility of marginalized people who build community with those who oppress them when they want free support, answers, affirmation, or a listening ear. But that same energy vanishes when it’s time to do their part. When it’s time to contribute, research, read, or simply listen. The only time that we see an exception to that rule tends to be if the person has found to way to profit by sanitizing the information they learned and marketing it for white audiences (this is shade towards Robin DiAngelo).

Real community means reciprocity. Real community means shared growth. Real community is GIVE and take. And real community means respecting the fact that other people worked hard to learn what they know. You are not owed their labor just because you’re unwilling to discover those things for yourself.

I don’t say this to shame people. I say it to warn them.

If you cannot be bothered to develop literacy (academic, cultural, emotional, or otherwise), you will either get left behind or led astray. I’m not sacrificing my peace, my energy, or my time to drag folks along who refuse to walk.

I say this with some measure of love. I say this with absolute clarity. I say this with iron-clad boundaries. I am leaving you behind. You are dangerous.

Enough is ENOUGH.