Pynk P-words & Dewy Lacunas: What Ben Shapiro and Sappho’s Critics lack in Erotic Tempo
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“How much better is they love than wine — and the smell of thy ointments than all the spices — Thy lips — O my spouse — drop as the honeycomb — honey and milk are under thy tongue — and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon — A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse — a spring shut in — a fountain sealed — Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits — camphire — with spikenard — spikenard and saffron — calamus and cinnamon — with all trees of frankincense — myrrh and aloes — with all the chief spices — A fountain of gardens — a well of living waters — and streams from Lebanon — Awake — O north wind — and come — thou south — blow upon my garden — that the spices thereof may flow out…”
“Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits.”
— The Song of Solomon 4:10–16, King James Edition (bold and dash-edits mine, italicization theirs)
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Lacuna, lacunae (f. 1st declension noun) from lacus (“lake”), a pool, a pit, a hollow, a void, a defect, a gap, a hollow, a cleft
- A small opening; a small pit or depression.
- A small blank space; a gap or vacancy; a hiatus.
- An absent part, especially in a book or other piece of writing, often referring to an ancient manuscript or similar.
- Any gap, break, hole, or lack in a set of things; something missing. quotations
- A space visible between cells, allowing free passage of light.
- A language gap, which occurs when there is no direct translation in the target language for a lexical term found in the source language.
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I’m not quite sure how Ben Shapiro bound himself up to this point, but as a student of narrative who loves to watch ideological breakdown (not to mention bondage as a topic in all its forms) I’m kinda fascinated by it.
Watching a grown ass man build a name for himself over the last half decade as “the bastion of truth-telling against liberals” absolutely lose his mind every time he has to consider Black vulvas has been somewhat entertaining, if not overly predictable. But I’m more fascinated that Shapiro never seems to directly engage with Black feminine rap as its own lyric genre but opts instead to ejaculate his own feelings over it and pretend like it’s some strange shade of his own ideology. Like an eidolon reflecting the dark sides of his ideology back at him as a mirror.
It’s a very masturbatory process. As an ancient mythologist, if I were pressed to make a direct comparison…it would definitely be Narcissus: ignoring the female echoes in favor of his own image in the lacuna.
Most recently it has been his reaction to “WAP (Wet Ass Pussy)” by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion. His clip gained online notoriety this week mainly for his reluctance to use the word “pussy” — opting instead for “p-word” — which gained its fair share of derision. Another notable highlight came when he had to ask his doctor wife if either Cardi or Megan had gynecological conditions due to their sufficient lubrication.
Misogynoir aside, Shapiro’s comment tickled me a bit because they reminded me strangely of some of the testimonies around Sappho that I’ve read, especially trying to parse out her Aeolic dialect and meaning. But see, that’s the magic of Sappho: you’re not going to learn anything if you’re not listening properly.
Much like Megan and Cardi, Sappho not only professes what she needs, but instructs her listener on how to get her to that point by using meter to mimic different aspects of erotic pleasure.
Let’s look at some Sapphic meter:
— ∪ — x — ∪ ∪ — ∪ —
— ∪ — x — ∪ ∪ — ∪ —
— ∪ — x — ∪ ∪ — ∪ —
— ∪ ∪ — x
The traditional Sapphic stanza (so named for her, but probably invented by Alcaeus) consists of three hendecasyllabic lines followed by the Adonic, or the adonean line, named after Aphrodite’s most famed lover.
I’ve been interested in the Adonic since last summer when I built my own lyre at Euterpe Ancient Music School and we played along to some of John Franklin’s compositions of Sappho 1. The rhythm of the Adonic is a dactyl [— ∪ ∪] (a finger) of a long syllable followed by two short ones (supposedly looking like the side of your left index finger, a long unit followed by two short ones) and either a spondee [— —] (a libation) of two long syllables (named for it’s slow liquid nature, but also in the etymology is the conclusion of a pact) or a trochee [— ∪] (running [feet]) of a long syllable and a short one (also called choree — dancing — both named around the actions of feet).
So basically the beat is either:
LAH-da-da-DAH-DAH or LAH-da-da-DAH-duh
I was hooked on the Adonics because there’re such a crucial part of playing the lyre, particularly in concert with others — if you get knocked out of the hendecasyllabic meter, listening for the Adonic allows you to jump back into the flow easily.
After having them knocking around in my head for a few weeks I realized that the finger-fiddling of getting a lyre into tune and upbraiding my harp was similar to the finger-fiddling of sewing and knitting I did growing up was similar to the finger-fiddling in my own lap of violets (and other rose beds) as an adult.
It reminded me of so many contemporary songs with erotic tempos that I love — from Lizzo’s aptly named “Tempo” where Missy Elliot comes in to give a lesson on cunnilingus via rolling her R’s, to Beyonce’s “Rocket” where she stacks and alternates her vocals to mimic the build of her own orgasm and come-down over the entirety of the song, to Janelle Monaé’s breathy implications in “PYNK”, an anthem of Sapphic love out in a desert oasis — which Shapiro also attacked after it received a Grammy nomination.
But it also reminded me of some ancient comparisons, and not just in the realm of the Lesbian lyric poetry — quoted at the start of this article is King Solomon’s lovemaking from the Bible, which gets pretty explicit towards rhythm and tempo as I tried to emphasize with line breaks (despite being translated through three different languages).
I also like thinking about the Song of Solomon alongside Sappho and Black female and nb (non-binary, pronounced “enby/enbies”) rappers because that entire book is centered around physical and spiritual delayed gratification, not to mention it’s a very non-literal part of the bible. But most importantly, 12 year old me’s take away from it:
King Solomon was a fuh-reak.
Listening to Shapiro, it’s clear that he is missing this very key component. And I mean really listening to him, as in analyzing his cadence and vocal rhythms. It’s all rushing to get to the point, to force his words out, to make his opinions known no matter what the consequences because “facts don’t care about people’s feelings.”
But putting that behavior up against a conversation that he’s not even a part of? Like, this is twice now that he’s used Black female and nb sexual expression to say some…pretty interesting things about his wife to the public.
Perhaps Ben has caught himself up in a bind of “facts don’t care about your feelings” because he needs to express how much his internal feelings do not like vulvas (apparently). As a student of ideology, narrative, and identity, this excites me greatly thinking about the potential implications. But we’ll get more into that later.
Let’s start with “WAP” and cadence. I don’t even need to critique the way the Shapiro read the lyrics because Desus and Mero already did a good job of it yesterday:
“We once had the chopped cheese from WholeFoods. What it tasted like is what he sounds like. There’s no soul, there’s no cadence, there’s no rhythm…”
“Yeah no, he makes fucking Jeremy Renner sound like B.B. King.”
To get into the “soul”, “rhythm”, and “cadence” in “WAP” itself, we must turn to the clever interplay between the rhythm in the text of the main hook juxtaposed with the trap beat that it’s been looped into:
there’s some WHORES in this HOUSE
Metrically, this is an anapaestic dimeter (a two-foot meter, each foot having two short syllables followed by a long one). However, that is not the meter that the phrase is sung in, because the way trap beats are looped, the downbeat (or the start of the foot) begins on “whores”, switching around the emphasis:
WHORES in this HOUSE there’s some
With this new emphasis, the trap beat perfectly aligns with what Marius Plotius Sacerdos called “the Sapphic hymenaic dactylic dimeter” (named in part for Hymen, goddess of marriage) and is monoschematist (or eternally one form — two dactyls):
hymenaicum dimetrum dactylicum Sapphicum monoschematistum est: semper enim dubous dactylis constat:
(a) Ἔσπερ᾿ ὐμήναον [Hesperus! Hail Hymen!]
(b) ὦ τὸν Ἀδώνιον [Oh for Adonis!]
I’ve found Adonics extremely useful for singing along to trap beats because their short and mutable form allows them to adhere to the flow of so many different melodies. This double-fingered Adonic in “WAP” looped into a continuous hymenaic dimeter not only helps to set and maintain the rhythm of sexual play but also throws together two clashing belief systems in America — sexual liberation and the inside the house vs outside the house narratives. We see similarities with narratives around women’s sexuality and the house going back to Rome and Athens as well. On the Athenian point, we may say of Megan and Cardi that:
The hetairai are in the oikos.
(Given that strip clubs are the closest association to the ancient Greek symposium that I can think of, especially given the musical/sexual spheres women were relegated to in said environments — but also Sappho calling all her girlfriends hetairai.)
There’s a lot that can be said for Adonics — and not just because they’re the one metrically different part of Sappho’s stanzas —but “WAP” also makes liberal use of the spondee [ — — ] to direct and orient. Cardi utilizes them for standout imperative moments in the middle of her flow to snap out orders: “I-want-you-to- PARK. THAT. BIG. MACK. TRUCK. RIGHT in-this- LITtle-gaRAGE.” I love this use of the liquid foot of meter being used for urgent sexual expression because in epic poetry, I’m so used to the spondee denoting the meter slowing down and dragging.
The urgency matches Franklin’s composition of Sappho that I played last summer, which has birthed so many of these thoughts around the intentions and purposes of performance. Looking at Sappho 1 and just grabbing the Adonics, we have quite the interesting interplay between Sappho and Aphrodite as she’s begging the goddess to comedown from Olympus in her golden car and lead a girl back into her desires:
πότνια, θῦμον, potnia thumon | Revered Lady, my heart
χρύσιον ἦλθες chrusion elthes | golden, came [to me]
-ρος διὰ μέσσω, -ros dia messo | through the middle [of the air]
δηὖτε κάλημμι deute kalemmi | again I am calling out
Ψάπφ᾿, ἀδικήει; | Psapph, wrongs [you]?
κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα. kouk etheloisa | even unwilling
σύμμαχος ἔσσο. summachos esso | be my ally
Sappho’s lyrics dribble and drip in and around her meter, the words always urging and redirecting back to her direct connection to the goddess. Throwing her Adonics into their own looped beat helped me understand her echoes and tones better. Thinking them through in different rhythms has greatly helped to improve my understanding of Lesbian lyric poetry and the versatility of tempos that Sappho’s lyrics inspire.
It also helps me think about the liquidity of her own beats — it wasn’t until I was reading Sappho while listening to looped meters that I realized that her one complete song we have of hers is a loop: both metrically and lyric content-wise, you can pick up right back at the beginning seamlessly when you reach the end. Sadly because the rest of her work is so fragmented, I’m not sure if the same can be said for many more of her songs. Sappho 2 does give me a little glimmer of hope, however: the Adonic it ends on seems to encourage repetition through its fluidity.
οἰνοχόαισον oinochoaison | pour
It calls to mind the pouring of wine, of libations into the earth, but also song pouring forth from the mouth endlessly and continuously.
In turn, it’s a direct ask for the goddess of sex to drench their “cups” in liquid. Which brings me to another comparison from these female celebrities across time: Sappho has quite wet and slippery lyrics herself.
More broadly however, wetness was seen as the general nature of ancient women. And luckily I had a colleague already do most of the footwork on this point for me — Oxford classicist Nicolette D’Angelo gave a wondrous critique of Shapiro’s comments last Wednesday by arguing that “WAP” in fact holds true to the core themes around wetness and womanhood in Hippokratic gynecology (I highly encourage everyone to read her full thread):
And it is in her deconstruction of the gendered notions of wetness and dryness I found our minds starting to align along the same path:
The cultural construction of ‘femaleness = wetness” Hippokratic gynaecology makes woman a threat to man. The source of this threat is her affinity with the natural world, or what Anne Carson calls “a vital liquidity with the elemental world.”
By contrast, man is dry. One of Aristophanes’ characters says a man must “dry his mind” to “speak sharply”; Diogenes of Apollonia says “moisture hinders intelligence.” In other words, “wet ass pussy, make that pullout game weak, woo.”
Wetness, as we see, is aligned with wantonness, the hungry demands of sexual appetite, and “liquefying” feelings such as limb-melting Eros (Sappho 130). Excessive emotions and sexual appetite stem, in the Hippokratic view, from the simple facts of female physiology.
Wetness and sexual desire (especially centered around feminine expression) have been in constant correlation for thousands of years. But because Shapiro has bound himself to such specific belief systems, he chooses to ignore this historical commonality and instead has to act like this piece of a much larger pattern is an anomaly.
He’s getting quite in his feelings over a common historical trope in lyric poetry.
However this plays right along with how he perceives and justifies his own belief systems. When pressed on his beliefs around gay marriage and whether same-gendered couples should be allowed to parent, he explained his own justifications to himself on account of his conservative Judeo-Christian belief system:
“Okay you have these religious principles, is there any justification outside of “the Bible says so” for why this is correct…and as a religious person who’s actually thought through his positions like…I tend to believe there is. As a religious person, I tend to believe that God didn’t create stupid rules. So if you believe that God didn’t create stupid rules, then you have to come up with some sort of justification for the rules that are being expressed.”
I have watched Ben Shapiro try to justify his way out of so many arguments. He often comes at it from the basis of “facts don’t care about your feelings” but the truth of the matter is, Ben Shapiro just has an incredibly limited understanding of language and definitions. He tends towards stagnant fixed expressions that never change, when definitions of words change all the time. Language is liquid and constantly evolving — take it from someone who has to study language difference.
This isn’t news to anyone familiar with his work — his go-to rhetorical strategy is the straw man argument — and others have already taken him to task on it, probably none more decadently as Natalie Wynn in her discussion of pronouns and none more recently than Cody Johnston and his breakdown of Shapiro and systemic racism (which contains his above quote).
What interests me is how he starts talking about his wife when he is confronted with brash Black feminine sexuality — the rhythms and changes in pitch that happen, and especially the irrelevant opinions and content matter borderline on dramatic performance. It’s intense.
When discussing “WAP”, he mentioned that the line “Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass pussy” made him worried and concerned that the girls must have some gynecological issue if there’s a mop. (A man who can’t even respect juice or drip.) He continues to re-iterate these gynecological issues, both on his show and his own twitter.
General embarrassment around essentially telling the world you don’t get your wife wet aside, it was Shapiro’s seemingly oblivious manner to the hole he seemed to be digging himself in by revealing aspects of his personal life that triggered a sense of familiarity in me — which was then hammered home by another familiar tune cropping up: “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”
Shapiro mentioning his wife combined with his anger around the “cancellation” of “Baby It’s Cold Out” made me realize that I’d heard all of this before:
Ben Shapiro went through the exact same temper tantrum when Janelle Monaé was nominated for a Grammy for her “PYNK” music video.
I’m bringing up Janelle for two reasons: 1. Shapiro has the same levels of outrage and annoyance at a song from two Black women explicitly rapping out their sexuality and a song from a Black nb performer who actively leaves out the explicit language in her own artistic lacuna 2. By putting Sappho in conversation with an nb performer, I hope there are further nuances around her own gendered expression that I can tease out. When Horace calls her mascula Sappho (when she’s timing the Archilochan muse by meter) is it in connection with the gendered sphere of poetry, or her gendered sphere of desire? By putting her in conversation with Janelle, who has claimed a lot of flexibility around pronouns and interest around exploring art forms as nb, I hope to expand on the spectrum of identity that they both deal with in a way centered around exalting in queer identity.
(Though a brief aside for Megan, who got rowdy on Instagram after “WAP” and declaring that she was ready for a girlfriend and liked “short ‘tings with tattoos”, that was beautiful.)
I also wanted to end it on queer identity because that’s the context that I first heard Shapiro explain his rationalizations around his own belief systems. As a queer Mennonite who partly got into the field of classics because I found out there were a bunch of other books written before the Bible (which I had to get my hands on, because the Bible was rad and raunchy as hell, especially in that one musical book I loved) and who grew up understanding and empathizing with queer identities in the context of my religious and spiritual beliefs — I find that despite us both technically sharing an appreciation of the Old Testament, Ben Shapiro and I have deeply polarized belief systems.
Part of that is because I have to study so many different foreign and alien-seeming belief systems where I don’t have everything spelled out. I have to look across scant sources and do my best to understand and empathize with those systems so that I can work with them in my research. It also has to do with the type of world I want to help build and grow towards — and so in my past, present, and future I can understand all the different ways and reasons that my own belief systems are on completely separate tracks from Shapiro’s.
I chose to highlight this core difference between us because it’s interesting to see that Narcissus reflection snap up fast with his critique of Janelle and how that mindset causes himself to unintentionally parody many of the points he’s trying to prove and prove many of the point’s he’s trying to parody.
It’s almost as if he is entirely unable to understand or comprehend queer identity when he goes through it.
He starts off the video — entitled “Shapiro RIPS Obscene Feminist Music Video” — with a long rant about “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and his anger that he’s unable to enjoy it anymore. It is the first minute of a five and a half minute video.
He then discusses the first thirty seconds of singing in the “PYNK” video and nothing else beyond that. I’m fairly certain that Ben Shapiro did not watch more than that, particularly his phrasing when he was starting to recount the lyrics:
“So here is Janelle Monaé in PYNK. I will describe this doing my best not to go blue here…”
Which in and of itself is preempted by the final choral line in the song:
“Boy it’s cool if you got blue — we got the pynk.”
He then let’s some more belief systems slip:
“To explain how terrible this video is… This video is so obscene…”
Shapiro once again reiterating that he is uncomfortable around sexual signaling with vulvas. Note the disgusted swallow he goes through after saying the word “clitoris”. He then dives into the lyrical content:
“Pynk like the inside of your….blank, and we’re supposed to know that means genitalia — baby pynk behind allofyourdoors crazypynk like the tongue that goesdown — obviously-a-reference-to-oralSEX — maybe pynk like the paradise found… I mean this stuff is Rated X, I mean these are Rated X lyrics but I mean this, this thing — bytheway — earned a Grammy nomination on Friday. For Best Music Video. For this song. Because true art is dressing up on a beach wearing weird pants that look like………the female anatomy…and this is from her Dirty Computer album… *wrinkles brow in confusion* Just wonderful stuff — ”
A few notes on this one: I wrote it in the above style to try to best mimic the cadence of Shapiro’s voice as he butchered the lyrical lessons being taught through meter. But he has to rush through lyrics quickly because his derisive tone does not match well with Janelle’s cheeky implications. Here are her lyrics more stretched out like the way they’re sung:
Pynk, like the inside of your……baby
Pynk, behind all of your doors……crazy
Pynk, like the tongue that goes down……maybe
Pynk, like the paradise found.
Janelle intentionally leaves lacunas in her lyrics to tease the brain into filling the information in for itself. I also like the reference to paradise because of its etymological roots around being an enclosed garden makes a nice echo for King Solomon’s lustful rhapsodies.
Shapiro’s next lines betray how little he looked into it: “True art is dressing up on a beach looking like the female anatomy!” They’re not on a beach, they’re in a desert (hence the hotel they find is the “paradise found”, their oasis) and not all of them are dressed as vulvas — an intentional move on Janelle’s part to highlight that not all women have vulvas (and conversely that not all vulvas belong to female-identifying folks) during a time period when she was stepping out into the open about her own gender expression.
Her album, Dirty Computer, covers many of these nuances around the expression of identity in growing digital cultures (not to mention a delightful pun on the fact that she had just portrayed NASA human computer Mary Jackson in the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures). But again, these aspects of identity and desire and truly knowing one’s self gets rebranded through biological terminology for Shapiro:
“Do women really feel empowered by talking about their vajayjays? Just…just a question. I know I’ve always found it really off-putting when guys talk about their junk. I-I find it not empowering at all, it’s not gentlemanly, it’s not good — it’s a piece of your anatomy! Do you spend all your day talking about your thumb? Like it’s something that is just there so, uh so the fact that you’re talking about it ad nauseum is really ridiculous — “
Wet Ass Vajayjay.
On the anatomy note: yes, people like talking about their bodies. Look at how much mileage I’ve gotten out of talking about fingers and dactyls in this article. As someone who reads thousands of years old texts everyday, take it from me: humans really like talking about their bodies. There are entire schools of thought devoted to this. What on earth do you think is in the Hippokratic corpus?
However, that doesn’t mean you have to. Some people get really into talking about their bodies and others don’t. You are clearly in the latter party and yet when it comes to trans folks, that’s all you can talk about. Right on cue:
“…and the idea that women think, ‘You know, well it makes me more empowered when society accepts that I have a vagina.’ Right but I’ve learned number one that the vagina can be very male. Kay, that’s what I’ve heard from the left. Is that just because you have a vagina doesn’t make you a female obviously, so I don’t know why it’s empowering to females to talk about the female anatomy, it’s not female anatomy, it’s just anatomy which is sometimes associated with the social construction that is femininity. That is what I’ve learned from, from folks on the left, so this shouldn’t be empowering to women at all. In fact it is cis-gendered to assume that this is empowering to women. It is empowering to all people whether they identify as women or men, many men have vaginas. I have been reliably informed. By the scientific community.”
Janelle deals with many of these nuances with the implicit nature of her lyrics, as I’ve discussed. But that would have required Shapiro to watch more than 30 seconds. Also again, it’s a great song for people who love vulvas. It’s okay if you don’t but…don’t yuck my yum yo.
And then things start to get weird as he hops out of sarcasm territory:
So there’s that — THEN. Even if you assume — I — put aside that idiocy — even if you assume that there is in fact a correlation between…the female anatomy and being female, I don’t understand why that would be the thing in which you choose-to-take-pride. It seems to me females have been making the case for a while that they are more than their anatomy. That femininity involves more than just your genitalia and that if men think of you as just your genitalia, that’s a bad thing, that would be objectifying you. Which I agree (*voice cracks on agree*) with. And if you want to treat a woman as a full fledged human being, you should not be thinking quite so much about her genitalia and start thinking about…the folds of her brain, inside.
Shapiro here ignores the fact that this is a queer nb singing about loving on different forms of femininity, including LITERALLY the folds of “her” brain, as is stated in the second lyric stanza:
Pynk when you’re blushing inside……baby
Pynk is the truth you can’t hide……maybe
Pynk, like the folds of your brain……crazy
Pynk as we all go insane
He then steamrolls directly into talking about his wife, and this is where I started to become concerned and intrigued.
Ben Shapiro’s Assertion of Love:
“You should start thinking about the things she thinks. And feels. And the actions she takes in her life. *swallows* If I were to talk about all the wonderful things that make my wife my wife… genitalia…I mean is a component part, but that is not what makes my wife my wife. Like, every woman on planet Earth has…female anatomy…*shakes head slightly* all of them. But what makes my wife my wife, what makes her special, what makes her unique as a woman, is not that, what makes her unique as a woman is the fact that she’s a wonderful wife, the fact that she’s a wonderful mother, a fact that she is *cocks head slightly to the side and uttering as breathy whisper* a doctor…the fact that she does all of these wonderful things…everydaythat’s what makes her a unique person. That’s why I respect my wife as a human.”
First it’s the universalizing of genitalia, then it’s the roles in which he defines his wife in relationship to himself, and finally the crowning jewel of loving her profession.
It was like he was spelling out on a large whiteboard: I like function, not flesh.
And when you often define flesh as fact, yet bear hard feelings towards it…that does make for quite the messy display of belief systems when you hold central to “facts don’t care about your feelings”, now doesn’t it? You may say “facts don’t care about your feelings” which I actually do believe in some senses is true. But that’s because I know an even more historically relevant idiom:
Ideology doesn’t care about the truth.
Case and point:
“But…youcan’thaveitbothways, if you’re on the feminist Left and you want to reduce females to their genitalia, but THEN say, ALso, that the genitalia doesn’t mean you’re female and ALSO stop mention objectifying your genitalia and ALso if you talk about female genitalia then that makes you a sexist. None of these things can hold true at the same time but if this is the empow — if this is the new empowerment…we gotta ban “Baby It’s Cold Outside” but talking in graphic terms about the appearance of female genitalia — that’s empowerment? Man, what a world you have created, you morons.”
Shapiro ends his analysis there, and has once again missed the mark. This time, however, he is undermined by a lacuna that he probably didn’t even know he was missing: The YouTube video for “PYNK” itself has a lacuna.
You cannot see the full version of it unless you watch the full “emotion picture” (visual album) of Dirty Computer where there is a rapped interlude towards the end of the song that Jane 57821 sings to her girlfriend Zed (played by Tessa Thompson) while they’re in the middle of the desert. As the transition into the interlude happens, Janelle kicks up her feet towards the camera (signaling the change in meter that’s about to occur) before entering a section that’s filled with dactyls of every kind and color. I’ve quoted it below with some of the visuals.
Janelle’s Monaé’s Dewy Dactyled Lacuna:
I just wanna paint the town
I don’t wanna hide my love
I just wanna hold your hand
And be the one that you think of
When you need a holiday
When you wanna drink rosé
I just wanna paint your toes
And in the morning kiss your nose
Cuz when I’m with you, I don’t feel afraid
Maybe this love with indoctrinate
I echo every word that you say
The way you feel, yeah I feel the same way
Remember the night when I combed your hair?
I hope I didn’t freak you out when I stared.
I donate my truth to you like I’m rich:
Truth is, love ain’t got no off-switch.
So if the walls come tumbling down
And if the ocean really does drown
And if my memory’s never come back
I’ll still remember where we first was naked at
Picture our faces and new oasis
Where we made love, we left many traces
Just like the blush that’s one your cheek:
Deep inside? We’re all just pynk.
“PYNK” is a song that is more than comfortable in its dewy lacunas — in fact I would say it exalts in them. It’s the easiest song for me to slip some of Sappho’s fragments into when I need to work on rolling the Aeolic dialect around in my mouth. Especially given her lush imagery with roses (2, 96), there are plenty of pynk pores to dribble Sappho over. Not to mention, companions far more sympathetic to her cosmetics:
Sappho was a Lesbian by birth, of the city of Mytilene. Her father was Scamander or, according to some, Scamandronymus, and she had three brothers, Erigyius, Larichus and Charaxus, the eldest, who sailed to Egypt and associated with one Doricha, spending large sums on her; Sappho was more fond of the young Larichus. She had a daughter Cleis, named after her own mother. She has been accused by some of being irregular in her ways and a woman-lover. In appearance she seems to have been contemptible and quite ugly, being dark in complexion and of very small stature.
— P. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus (late 2nd/early 3rd Century CE)
To hook it all back home — men historically have had issues with non-men being open and happy about their sexuality, so I’m really speaking of nothing new under the sun. It’s Shapiro’s commitment to speaking out against the full spectrum of sexual agency of Black female and nb performers that fascinates me, because it’s this commitment that bares and undermines so many of his stated belief systems.
It’s also in his inability to deal with liquidity — of vulvas, of language, of lacunas — yet his constant need to engage around it (but not touch it, just give his opinion of his gaze of it, touching it ruins the effect…) that’s making it impossible for me to shake the Narcissus association from my mind. As I’ve hopefully illustrated, there is so much more going on with both of those songs, but musical analysis is not what Shapiro is doing here. This is something far more self-serving and emotions-oriented.
Take it from eroticism in antiquity via Sappho and the Song of Solomon — Shapiro, maybe you’re just lacking in the general temperament (and tempo) required to thoroughly enjoy some vulva in the bedroom. You may be too Hippokratically/hypocritically dry. There are plenty of other forms of pleasure to engage in, so why do you keep trying to seek your own reflection in damp dark velvet folds?
But also maybe you should stop complaining about Black women and nb folks enjoying their own sexuality just because you’re insecure in your own.
I know, I know. That’s a lesson you’ll probably never willingly learn from a queer Black woman. So don’t take my word for it.
Take Seneca’s:
quattuor milia librorum Didymus grammaticus scripsit: misererer si tam multa supervacua legisset. in his libris de patria Homeri quaeritur, in his de Aeneae matre vera, in his libidinosior Anacreon an ebriosior vixerit, in his an Sappho publica fuerit, et alia quae erant dediscenda si scires. i nunc et longam esse vitam nega.
Didymus the grammarian wrote four thousand books: I would pity him if he had merely read so many useless works. In some he investigates the birthplace of Homer, in others, the real mother of Aeneas, whether Anacreon was addicted more to lust or to liquor, whether Sappho was a whore, and other matters that you should forget if you ever knew them. And then people complain life is short!
— Epistles 88.37
