the anything girl

“I always tell the girls never take it seriously. If you never take it seriously, you never get hurt. If you never get hurt, you always have fun. And if you ever get lonely, you can just go to the record store and visit your friends.” — Penny Lane, Almost Famous

anything girl- 1. A [black] girl or woman who is perceived to be more sexually or otherwise adventurous, i.e. fun and easy, particularly by men. Can be impulsive, and may be an experience junkie. Tends to be branded a “rebel” or “free spirit,” at the most positive & “hoe” or “crazy” on the negative end of the limiting-women spectrum. 2. Also could be a synonym for a “ride or die chick” with similar qualities, i.e. “she’s down for anything.” Similar: Manic Pixie Dream Girl[1], Penny Lane.

According to some people, I am a free spirit. According to others, I am a hoe. My mother claims I am a contrarian, a know-it-all, a self-absorbed freeloader. My family thinks I am a disobedient almost-adult. Some people think I am ugly. (I might be.) Some people think I am crass. (I might be.) Some people wanna slap the shit out of me. (I mean…) Some people hate me because they know me, and some hate me because they don’t. According to a friend of my ex’s whom I have never met, I am an attention-hungry jackass. According to my first ex, I am a goddess, and a survivor. (But he hit me anyway.) According to a friend of mine, I am talented and rare. But in my experience I am always too much of something, not enough of something else.

Elegant Heaux

When I tell people I stripped for two years, the first thing out of their mouth is: You don’t look like a stripper! What does a stripper look like? Is it lounge singer Ethel in McKinney-Whetstone’s Tumbling, bodied out and brown-skinned, with pressed hair, curve hugging slayage, and vocals like velvet pussy? Is it Sula’s mama Helen, fucking other women’s husbands in the storage room without a care in the world? Who is more hoe: Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj or Kim Kardashian West? Are Blac Chyna, Kardashian West or any other woman who is famous purely for aesthetics, a victim? What about poor women like me who also use our bodies for profit, albeit on a much smaller scale? Are we all victims, and by this I mean, completely lacking in agency? This is more complicated than it seems. Perception is a motherfucker.

I am slender, average height, brown but not dark, curly-haired but not in the way you think, intellectual and “artsy.” My thinness and intelligence sometimes allow me to bypass certain stereotypes, albeit with white people it’s more like I proved myself. With black men I become elegant heaux. Badu with the crew. The offbeat Natural woman they can take to parties and fancy restaurants to show off to their friends, but not to they mama’s house. The one who they can fuck and have fun with, and even have those late-night weed-fueled intellectual conversations with, but don’t post pics of us on the gram. You’re worried about nothing; you’re trying too hard, they say. The shame.

I love to talk about sex. I also love talking about parallel universes, books, comics, critical theory, fantasy, tv shows and education. This is just a short list. I am highly informed on a plethora of topics. This is 30% formal education and 70% reading and doing my own research. My goal is to become a skilled generalist. But sex, and sex work, along with feminism/womanism and art, are my passions. I am very upfront about my sexual needs, though once in a relationship I always tend to subjugate my needs to a certain extent. (This begs an explanation, but not in this essay.)

What For

So what happened between my recent ex and I was my fault, no? We met in an adult super secret sexy Facebook group, where I later was asked to be an admin because I am a super secret sexy fun ex-skrippah, and fond of posting nudes and promoting other’s beauty. Nudes are rarely sexual for me (sans emotional connection), although you wouldn’t be able to tell from the way I engage. I have mastered the art of flirting and compliments in this context. I saw him, I thought he was beautiful, I casually requested a video. This manchild, who I did not know then was more boy than man (he looked closer to my age) shyly slid into my DMs the next morning to apologize for forgetting about a request I had forgotten about. Following?

That one line led to a days long conversation during which I learned his age (six years younger than me), his interests (he is an anime dude and a film buff, cue swoon), and attempted to learn his dreams (he is ambivalent and decidedly undecided about practically everything). I carefully bounced the idea of pursuing a dating relationship back and forth in my head. I made sure to be upfront about my work, my beliefs, my values, and what I wanted — I didn’t want to make the same mistake as before.

On impulse I decided to go and see him. We started dating, and I was much more distanced from S’s life than I had been with my previous ex, which was a purposeful decision. With my son’s father I became so wrapped up in “our plan” that I became the force, the motivation, the pusher and the dreamer for the both of us. It was emotionally exhausting being someone’s “sex mommy”[2], not an experience I wanna repeat. Most of me and S’s relationship was talking, camming and sex visits, during which we sampled each other in various public and private locations, fascinated and thrilled with each other’s bodies and recording and sharing our exploits. But over time, I got more and more real. I am a single mom/full time student who is struggling financially, battling anxiety and the desire to bolt from this city I hate, with a domestic violence restraining order against a man who doesn’t understand boundaries. I am living off of my refund checks and occasional camming and freelance projects. I have a long history of emotional and physical abuse, and most of the emotional support I receive is from black women online.

I became less “the anything girl,” and more of a real person, with grown woman needs, grown woman problems, and not just the fun, sexy, sex worker girlfriend who’s down for whatever and willing to teach. This dude’s ego was bolstered because I was the woman (woman, not girl) who was willing to drive ten hours to see him, was willing to fight for him, would hold him and call him beautiful and make him blush, who wanted to kiss the inside of this person who always seemed so scared and reluctant to be vulnerable with me. Every visit got more difficult for me because he would distance himself in between, something he apologized for constantly but did almost nothing to remedy. I wasn’t fun anymore. In return I became jealous, insecure, unsure of where I stood with this guy who I loved so openly who dismissed my worries as unimportant, overreaching and frivolous. We spoke on the phone less than ten times during our nine month relationship, and the first time I called him out of the blue he answered so nastily and was so openly annoyed with me that I never called him without texting again unless it was an emergency that affected him directly. He never showed any intention of introducing me to any of his family, and was unexpectedly cruel to me after we broke up, to the extent of claiming I stalked him (lying about his location and about not receiving my calls and messages when I came into town to talk to him). He also never returned my things, even after several requests, instead claiming I am obsessed with him. Emotional intensity in women is often construed as desperation or mental instability. I went from great, fun girlfriend to crazy bitch in a matter of days, and any reaction I had was painted as manipulative and irrational, even by women I thought knew me.

He told me I made him feel confident. I endeavored to pull out whatever feelings I could, to coax the emotions out of him, to help him name whatever he was feeling. I tried to make him feel like he was never lacking except when he overtly dismissed my feelings, and I attempted to do this without being overbearing and overly involved, the way I was with my son’s father. I (hesitantly) offered advice when it was relevant, and asked the questions a life coach or fellow soul searcher would ask (the same questions I ask my best friend btw, who is also male). We jokingly called each other twinflame, an apt term hinting at the way that I tend to love my partners, like a half-blind baby, imagining them ensconced in Greek-like paradoxism, imperfect and fallible, yet divine. This feeling that we both felt at times I named “what for,” and that phrase pretty much sums up our entire courtship.

Get to the Fucking Point

For those of you who got this far you are probably like what the fuck does this have to do with Almost Famous? It has fucking everything to do with Almost Famous! When we first see Penny Lane she is the archetypal MPDG, the white anything girl. She was DTF, she was a famous groupie socialite, and she was the object of affection for that ugly musician and that little almost-man slash wannabe reporter. (Obviously Penny Lane was the most important character in this movie, duh. IDGAF about these dudes.) She was both of their crush/love and muse, and through their eyes it was almost as if she existed purely to further their stories, to provide inspiration and beauty and experience. We don’t learn her story until she attempts suicide by taking a shitload of Quaaludes after being publicly sidelined and dismissed by the ugly band dude in favor of him propping up his “proper” girlfriend. In short, me and Penny Lane are not the type of women men are conditioned to be serious about, nor respectful toward. Penny Lane was an elegant heaux, a beautiful, intelligent soul, and in this moment, the moment she broke, she was suddenly a real fucking person. A person with feelings and desires and ambitions outside of these two men who wanted her and the permission she gave them to be themselves And you know what Penny Lane did when she recovered? She went to fucking Morocco, because that was her dream adventure.

So there you have it. A long, personal explanation of the sexism, objectification and dehumanization implicit in one specific way we label women. In attempting to identify and categorize people, we can end up stripping a person of selfhood. I can’t seem to escape “the anything girl” box with certain people, even as I grow older. Men see me and they hear what I do and they think, she’s a fun girl. They don’t consider the dedication, the sweat, the poverty of my life. My real life situations, my intellectual pursuits, the child I am raising alone — those things are distractions from the me that they need me to be. The me that exists mainly to free them, boost their egos, and render them whole.

Now that I am single again I remind myself constantly: I exist for me.

If you like what you’ve read here consider donating to my Patreon or my cash.me/yayarose, because I’m awesome and a single mother, and I’d like to stop stripping for cash by the time I’m 35. You can also follow me on Twitter: @suprihmbe or Instagram: @mymphisbae

Notes:

[1] The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown is where the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl was coined, a fact I did not know when I first started writing this, but found through a quick Google search after wanting to see if it actually was a close enough synonym to what I am describing in the essay.

[2] A useful term I borrowed from an episode of Bojack Horseman.