Rethink What You Know

Being Selective:

As sexually liberated as I am, I don’t want to do EVERYTHING with all my partners.  I wouldn’t say that I pick and choose what men I do certain things with but I do not give away my goodies casually.  Not every partner is deserving of everything I have to offer.  Especially if his motivations are not pure or transparent.  My partners and I get tested prior to having sex so it’s not about the higher risk for HIV.  It’s about the fact that it’s something so intense and explosive and thrilling and I don’t want to share that with just anyone.  I want to explore anything and everything with my partner.  I want to experiment and find new and exciting ways to please my partner and I’m always looking to introduce new levels of play with my partners.  I don’t, however, have casual sex, friends with benefits, or fuck buddies so I’m vastly different than most people in that anyone who is invited to share my most sacred space only gets an invitation because he has passed my very rigorous standards.  Were I to have casual sex partners, I would certainly not be motivated to give them my most erotic self; I would limit that to only the partners who had proven themselves to be exceptional. 

Swallowing:

If I’m in a relationship with my partner, I don’t have a problem swallowing my man’s ejaculate.  That being said, unless his diet is vegan and he takes extra precautions to eat well, drink water, drink pineapple juice etc., ejaculate doesn’t taste great.  It’s not the worst thing in the world but it’s certainly doesn’t taste like pussy, that’s for sure.  Most of the men I date at this stage in my life are in their 50s.  They don’t have the recovery time they had when they were in their 20s.  Cumming more than once a night is not very likely for the men I date.  That being said, at this stage in my life, I’d rather save that nut for our intercourse if we have time and energy.  If we’re out and I’m giving him head as a special treat or it’s something I want to do just to please him, I don’t have a problem swallowing at all.  The problem becomes when most men hold a woman’s head to force her to swallow.  I say, if you want me to swallow your nut, you need to be able to show me that you will eat it too.  If it’s disgusting to you, and you want eat your own, then don’t expect me to swallow it.  Most younger men are selfish.  They only think about their pleasure and they will hold a woman’s head to force her to swallow or they will cheat on a woman if she doesn’t swallow in order to appease their ego.  That’s where the problem lies. 

Satisfaction:

I would like to think that women and men will eventually come to understand that when they allow themselves to be emotionally open, honest, and vulnerable with a partner, when they expose their secrets, when they open their hearts and souls to loving and being loved that they will experience greater pleasure than just a maintenance date or a casual fuck.  Satisfaction comes from being able to tell all your sexual secrets to another person and knowing they still love you, want you, crave you.  Satisfaction comes from pouring out your heart and soul to someone and being able to be emotionally nude and go to a place where you don’t have to hide.  Most people assume that satisfaction and pleasure comes from some magic nut that makes you lose your mind.  We are sexually immature when we look at sex that way.  There will always be someone with a bigger dick, a bigger butt, someone more attractive, that’s not where satisfaction lies.  Satisfaction is in the connection and the bond and the unadulterated intimacy you form with your partner.  Once you get that, you won’t want to look for anyone else to satisfy you. 

Individuality:

What every woman wants in sex is different.  It should be based on her own body and turn ons.  I crave creativity, sensuality, eroticism, a willingness to go beyond just a pump and dump.  I want seduction and passion.  I want a slow, simmering building of extended foreplay that leads to mind-blowing sex.  I look for a partner who is committed to being honest.  That turns me on.  Fuck, that makes me explosive!  I’m definitely NOT looking for someone who thinks that blowing my back out is going to make me come back for more or someone who doesn’t care about me as a person.  I look for a man who is expressive.  He needs to be able to talk in bed and more than just saying, “Whose pussy is this?”  He has to tell me what turns him on and why.  He has to tell me what makes him feel good.  He needs to be able to communicate to me in very explicit terms what he is experiencing in the moment. 

Making Love:

Most men think that making love is fucking slow.  That’s not making love, that’s pretending to be tender when you really want to be blowing a woman’s back out.  Making love is being in love with my partner and having mind-blowing sex with him.  It can be fast, slow, it can be vigorous and rough.  If we are in love with each other, it’s making love.    I want to fuck like animals with the person I’m in love with.  That’s making love.  The connection is what makes it making love, not the pace at which the man pounds the woman. 

Inhibitions:

I’m not at all sexually inhibited and I haven’t been since I was in my 20s.  Most of what I had to overcome then was just insecurity about my body.  I was tall and skinny but somehow, I felt that I was fat and out of shape.  I think every woman goes through the counting stage.  You count the number of men you have sex with because you don’t want to hit that number that makes you a slut, whatever that number is for you.  Once I hit my 30s all my minor inhibitions disappeared and I was completely comfortable with my sexuality, what I wanted, what I needed, what I asked for, and how to get it.  Most people, and by that I mean men who want to fuck me and women who want to condescend to me because I’m not promiscuous, think I’m inhibited because I refuse to have casual sex.  I’m not slut shaming women who want to have multiple sex partners at all.  FOR ME, I choose not to share my most sacred space with undeserving me.  That’s not being inhibited, that’s being selective, having standards.  With my partner I’ll do anything and everything that we choose to explore as long as it’s consensual. 

Freaky:

Black people LOVE to throw the term freak around.  Sadly, pathetically, the term is used in place of meaning healthy sexuality.  There is nothing freaky about liking sex, wanting sex, or enjoying sex.  Unfortunately, because Black people are sooooooo incredibly sexually immature, they associate enjoying sex with being freaky. Even Black people who claim to be freaks are sexually conservative.  Most times they don’t like anything other than regular oral/vaginal sex and at times anal.  Being expressive with your partner isn’t freaky, it’s normal.  Exploring different fantasies with your partner isn’t freaky, it’s normal.  Wanting to open up your relationship and be poly isn’t freaky, it still falls within the realm of healthy sexual expression with your partner.  Freaky is wanting to mutilate your genitals for sexual pleasure.  Freaky is being aroused by inanimate objects more than human beings.  There are a whole host of things that are abnormal and extreme that are freaky but Black people are not into any of them for the most part.  As long as we identify ourselves as freaks for liking sex we are sexually stunted and immature.  I am sexually empowered.  I am sexually expressive.  I’m sexually mature.  I’m not a freak for enjoying pleasure.  I’m not a freak for wanting to explore sexuality with my partner.  I’m not a freak for liking more than vanilla sex on a Friday night with the lights out.  There is nothing freaky about my sexuality. 

Horny:

When I’m insatiable, when I feel like I’m about to crawl out of my skin with desire, when I can’t focus on anything but sex, I feel like a laser, everything is centered on the sensations of pleasure.  I crave stimulation.  I need visual stimulation, I need physical stimulation, I need the pleasure that comes from the journey, not the destination.  For me, when I get in that zone, I’m all about the sensations that come from arousal, I don’t really want the nut so much.  I want the pleasure to last as long as possible.  I never feel tense or evil or anything negative.  I feel a certain amount of frustration that I don’t have a partner with me to help me express my sexuality but that’s secondary to the sensations of wanting my nipples played with, wanting to revel in the sensations of my clit being stimulated, in feeling my wetness flow. 

Compartmentalizing

Morality and integrity, really and truly, are figments of my imagination.  They don’t exist.  Everyone has a need to lie, to cheat, everyone has a need to seek out the taboo and the forbidden.  Everyone has a desire, a very much socialized, driving, obsessive imperative, to portray themselves as righteous and without flaw which creates in them a secret drive to behave in ways that are exactly the opposite of what they portray in public.  It creates dysfunction, a mental disconnect.  This need to deny your sexuality in public and pretend to be asexual creates mental illness; it creates people driven by deviance, and it creates a world of liars, cheaters, adulterers who have absolutely no problem condemning and shaming people who get caught doing the exact same behaviors that they possess.  People don’t have a need or drive to do what’s right, we set up people in childhood by teaching them that the names for their privates are bad, we perpetuate the social disorder by calling natural, healthy sexuality “freaky”.  And we display the mental disorder every time we publically shame someone for expressing their sexuality when we have done the same or worse ourselves. 

Are lying and cheating and this compulsive need to behave in ways that are antithetical to what is right, just and good inherent in human beings?  I don’t believe they are.  I think that the social architects, the individuals who DECIDED to convince people that sex and sexuality was bad and wrong engineered this paradigm.  The leaders who set out to control the masses knew on some intrinsic level that once they convinced the world’s population that sex was bad and shameful, that they could control them because the need to have sex in inherent in human beings.  What I don’t think they could have anticipated or predicted is how detrimental it would be to humanity.  I don’t think they could have ever foreseen how perverted and dysfunctional people would become in their need to hide their sexuality. 

The need to deny one’s sexuality, to compartmentalize it and to pretend to be chaste and pure has created pathological liars and people disconnected from reality.   I’ve seen the evidence of this all around me.  I’ve seen it in my mother who had an affair with her current husband for more than a decade, who now, BELIEVES in her heart that she didn’t start dating him until after he was married.  I’ve seen her ridicule and shame other women for the EXACT same things she’s done without even the faintest hint of irnoy.  I’ve seen her alienate and ostracize people from her life who know her secret, not because she consciously is self-aware enough to recognize her behaviors but because she’s so warped and deluded that she needs to pretend she’s saintly and holy and could never do anything that was immoral and her subconscious mind needs to create a world where her reality fits her delusions.  I’ve seen married spouses who cheat and lie get offended when their spouse does the same thing, only difference being they never got caught.  I’ve seen the same people who tell me how offensive and pornographic my website is behave in ways that are exponentially more dysfunctional behind closed doors than anything that could be found on AfroerotiK.  I’ve seen the evidence in my disgusting ex boyfriend who actually believes that his juvenile sexual techniques are so superior that he is able to entice married women to behave in ways that are contrary to their own, supposedly asexual natures.  Only problem is, no one is asexual.  He’s not enticing anyone with his very little dick and his substandard sexual skills.  He’s only boosting his ego by convincing himself that women would never be sexual without his ability to become whoever and whatever his latest conquests want him to be (those skills, I can testify, are exceptional).     I’ve seen the evidence on a daily basis of white men who beg me to do things to them that are so extreme and so deviant yet they walk around and pretend to be the pillars of morality and asexuality in public. 

Discomfort with one’s sexuality creates a mental disconnect, mental illness in fact.  People justify whatever behaviors they have, no matter how unhealthy they are, and then they find a nice little place to hide them away and pretend that they don’t exist.  Look at the Catholic Church.  How much more obvious could it bebthat sexuality is natural and when one shuts off their sexuality, when one denies that their sexuality exists, it manifests itself in pathological behaviors?  It’s the genesis of down low men and women (and TRUST me that there are just as many women lying about their bisexuality as men), it’s the origin of people going out and having unprotected sex without thought for pregnancy or disease.  It’s the reason that my PR agent was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the public wasn’t ready to deal with beautiful, tasteful, sensual images on my website when everyone, absolutely everyone is a sexual being and is looking for sexual stimulation.  She couldn’t wrap her head around the concept that everyone was sexual and committed to hiding it.  She would rather believe, like society has masterfully convinced us, that people are asexual, that no one has sexual desires, that sex is shameful and bad and dirty and that I was somehow going against the grain with my bold declaration that sex is beautiful, natural, and that everyone is sexual.  She believes in her head that only a few deviant, fringe people like sex and that everyone else is offended by the mere mention of the word.  And that’s true to a certain extent.  People do pretend to be offended at the mere mention of the word.  They are also the same people who have bookmarks to some of the most degrading sex sites on the net on their computers.  That mental disconnect is how people who cheat on their spouses can write books on how to get a man or how to be a good spouse without any mental conflict.  They have shut off the part of their brain that allows them to have guilt or shame about their actions.  They have been able to compartmentalize so much so that they don’t even recognize their own detrimental behaviors. 

I am comfortable with my sexuality.  I’m not ashamed of my desires.  I don’t have a need or drive to cheat, to lie, to be with anyone’s husband.  I would rather end the relationship with someone if I’m not happy rather than get to a point where I’m motivated to cheat on them.  I don’t have a need to sell my body to the highest bidder.  I don’t think I’m more valuable if a man with money wants me.  I have unparalleled integrity and I’m not driven to go out and have casual, unprotected sex with strangers because I get horny and don’t know how to stop when things get heated.  I have either released or I have had the good fortune to never possess the dysfunction of the masses.    I never really understood how different I was. 

I sort of feel stupid for not recognizing the facts when the evidence was all around me.  You know who figured it out?  Zane, who writes about cheating and immorality and eroticizes it and people eat it up.  You know why?  Because they not only crave seeing characters act out in ways similar to how behave in private, it’s erotic to them, it adds a thrill for them to do things that are just outside of moral.  The more illicit their behavior behind closed doors, the better.  You know who else figured it out long before me and capitalized on it?  Shonda what’s her name.  It’s a turn on for women to feel like a man who shouldn’t want them openly does.  We’re told that when a couple gets married, that the desire to be with anyone else goes away.  So if a man who is married tells us he loves us, no matter how unhealthy, dysfunctional and morally wrong it is, that represents an extra special thrill to us.  It’s a dangerous metaphor.  Women who have been cheated on liking Scandal is equivalent to a woman who has been raped cheering for the rapist on Law & Order SVU.  But, I’m sure even that happens in the privacy of people’s homes because we are so sexually unhealthy as a nation that we don’t have a concept of what healthy sexuality is.  And, the truth of the matter is, we aren’t going to get healthy any time soon.  

Copyright 2013 Scottie Lowe

Seduction

All too often we use words without really knowing the definition of them.  Someone asked a question in my Facebook group that wanted people to share their definitions of what romance and seduction meant.  No one answered.  When I commented about that, what followed were responses that indicated that romance and seduction were foreign concepts to people.  It makes sense, we don’t teach, talk about, or provide a space for discussions of romance or seduction.  We either consume porn in private and in public decry that anything related to sex is taboo or forbidden.  We can’t even have healthy conversations about romance and seduction.  That’s tragic.  I asked a friend of mine what he would do to seduce me and he responded that he would take me to dinner at a jazz club.  That’s not seduction, that’s a date. 

According to the AfroerotiK Guide for Romantic Survival, romance can be defined as doing something special, going above and beyond to show your partner that you care for them, for their feelings, it’s taking the time to express your feelings for them in a way that would make them see how much you value them.  Several examples would be: writing a love poem for your partner and putting it on their car windshield while they are at work without them knowing it, planning a picnic with all their favorite foods and bringing it over on a rainy day, or making a planned public display or declaration of love that conveys that your feelings go beyond affection.  It doesn’t have to involve money.  It is not limited to one gender expressing romance to the other.  Romance is showing your partner that you have put effort into thinking about putting a smile on their face when you aren’t with them. 

Seduction is romance with the intent of stimulating the libido.  When I was in college, my boyfriend planned an erotic scavenger hunt for me.  He purchased wine glasses (which I still own) a night gown (that I kept until it fell apart), and some sexual aids for us to play with.  I spent the day finding all these items and getting more and more aroused as to what was going to happen when we got together.  Seduction is buying the candles, the massage oil, the erotic board game, the blindfold and the handcuff.  It’s not only buying dinner, it’s eating that dinner on the floor and feeding each other and licking and sucking each other’s fingers.  Seduction is running the bubble bath for two and massaging and caressing your partner to get their engine revved up.  Seduction is much more than just extended foreplay.  Seduction is making the bed with satin sheets before your partner comes home and having the Barry White queued up ready to go at the click of a button on the remote.  It’s telling your partner with your actions that you want and need to be intimate with them.  Intimate doesn’t mean it has to be soft and tender and gentle.  It simply means that you want to express your love in a very physical way. 

What romance/seduction is NOT.  It’s not lying to someone or pretending to be what they like in order to get them in bed, that’s manipulation.  It’s not getting along with someone more than others, that’s chemistry.  It’s not going out to the movies and holding hands, that’s affection.  It’s not saying, “I love you,” when you get off the phone or leave for work.  It’s not having extended foreplay or sex for a long time.  It’s not buying flowers on Valentine’s day because it’s expected or buying a card or gift after a fight to say that you’re sorry. 

The Jazz Alternative

More than thirty years ago, as a young 15 year old girl, I had the unique opportunity to work at a Black college radio station.  My mother, who was a graduate of Morgan State University, insisted that I had to get a job for the summer, that I couldn’t just sit at home and get into trouble or do nothing.  From the time I was a very little girl, I had volunteered at Morgan’s Radio Station for their fundraising drives, or more accurately, I’d sat silently watching and observing for many years while my mother answered phones, or, most often, I served cakes and desserts we had baked to help raise money for her beloved alma mater.  I loved interacting with the different on-air personalities, they were like celebrities to me, and they were always so gracious and welcoming to me over the years.  I eventually started answering phones myself during the fund drives and it dawned on me that working at W.E.A.A. for the summer would be an AWESOME idea.  Duh!  There would be boys!  College-aged boys.  What’s not to love about that idea? 

Well, jazz was the only problem with that equation.  It was 1980 and Rap was funky fresh, in the most literal sense of the word, and it was brand, spanking new.  It was just beginning to emerge on the scene and I was hooked.  The idea of having to listen to jazz all day was like a torture worse than hell to my little pubescent mind.  It was a torture I had to endure if I was going to work there, however, so I sucked it up.  I worked directly under Kweisi Mfume, former President of the NAACP.  He was the program director of the station.  He had political talk show in the evenings and I would be the first face many of the guests saw when they came in to the studio. (Yes, guests actually came into the studio to be interviewed, that’s how long ago it was.)  Back then, before the internet, Black radio was the only place to get the real news and opinions of that were relevant to Black people so his show was essential because it was left-leaning and unapologetically Black.  Al Stewart was the Station Manager.  I served as the assistant to his assistant for most of the day.  The DJs were free to choose whatever songs they wanted to play but I would type out the schedules for what public service announcements would be aired throughout the day.  The illustrious Larry Dean was the head of the news department and he was nothing less than an icon in journalism.  He took extraordinary measures to teach, coach, and guide me, to show me things that a kid my age really wouldn’t or shouldn’t have access to otherwise.  He treated me like an adult.  Lamont Brooks was a newscaster and a producer.  He let me record on-air PSAs where I repeated “WEAA, the Jazz Alternative,” the station’s tag line over and over again because he liked my voice.  He forced me get my license to be a radio broadcaster because he was convinced I had a talent for broadcasting . . . again, at 15 years old. 

But it was the on-air personalities that had the most influence over me that summer.  Isisara Bey was the morning personality.  She wore what were called dreadlocks at the time, my grandmother called them “worms in your head,” and they would flow all the way down her back.  Some days she would pile them on her head in intricate designs that seemed to defy gravity to my little mind.  All I’d ever been exposed to at that time in my life were press’n combs, relaxers, and wigs.  If a woman had natural hair back then, it was only because she was homeless or a drug addict and she couldn’t afford to get her hair done and she had better hide it under a headscarf lest she suffer the scorn and ridicule of every decent Black woman.  I’d never seen a woman in real life whom had chosen to wear her hair natural so Isisara seemed mysterious and magical to me; I was awed about how she wasn’t ashamed that her hair was -- nappy.  All my life I’d been told that nappy hair was an embarrassment and there she was, breathtakingly beautiful, and her hair wasn’t straight and blowing in wind like the shampoo commercials told me it was supposed to do.  She always smelled of different oils and fragrances that captivated me and she wore copper bracelets up and down her arm that made the most melodic, rhythmic sounds when she walked.  She would take off her shoes and light incense and she played this weird music intersperse with jazz called . . . reggae.  If you had told me at the time that it was from aliens, I might have believed you because I’d never heard anything like it in my life. 

The midday jock was Phillip Johnson.  He was, without question, the most beautiful man I’d ever laid eyes on in my life.  To say I had a crush on him is not even an understatement; it’s an egregious distortion of the very fabric of reality.  He didn’t just treat me like an adult, he treated me like a woman!  I would try to be the epitome of maturity when he was around him and I would listen to the music he played and try to learn the songs so I could impress him with my knowledge.  Of course, I’d grown up in a house where jazz was played all the time.  My grandparents played piano and were true jazz enthusiasts.  Phillip added a new element.  He wasn’t just playing jazz, he was playing innovative music, music beyond the big band of my grandparents and the contemporary jazz my mom played.  He exposed me to jazz that made me think, that made me feel something.  I didn’t want to like it but I did.  I loved it. I would rush home and listen to disco and rap and pop and New Edition (I was going to marry Ralph Tresvant) but I would actually look forward to going to work the next day for all the learning experiences but mostly to hear the new music. 

Record labels would send all sorts of music to the station and Phillip and I would go through the stacks of records together.  He would give me all the contemporary demos and I was the envy of all my friends because I had the extended remixes of all the popular songs.  (I had no idea what Grace Jones’ Pull Up to My Bumper was referring to at the time but I remember clearly that I had a 12” instrumental version of it long before it was on the radio and boy was I COOL.)   It wasn’t the music that he gave me that fascinated me the most, however.  I thought, if he gave it to me, he didn’t really value it, that it couldn’t be that good.  The music he kept is what intrigued me most.  They weren’t popular, well-known artists on major labels.  It was something in the records he kept that made them worthy of keeping.  Those records were, to me, truly, the jazz alternative.  

Unfortunately, I learned more about domestic abuse from the afternoon drive time DJ than I learned about jazz.  The young lady who would bring everyone home from their jobs was viscously battered by her boyfriend.  She would put on a “good face” for her listeners while hers was battered, swollen, and bruised in real life.  I heard very adult conversations, whispers behind her back about how she was a “victim” and that left a huge impression on me.  I knew that I never wanted to have a boyfriend who beat me up but I knew that what was worse was to have people scorn and ridicule you behind your back for not standing up for yourself.  I learned then that I would never be silent about the plight of women.  My mom would pick me up after work and we would go home and I would rush to listen to the rap songs and play them over and over on my cassette player to learn the words.  You see, back then, commercial radio stations didn’t play the same songs every hour.  You had to listen intently all day to hear the song you liked and have your tape player ready to record it so you could hear it until your mom drove you to the mall on a Saturday (NOT every Saturday) so you could buy the single for $.99. 

Clearly, that radio station had a huge impact on my life.  Today, I wear my hair natural.  Today, I’ve forsaken the music I once loved and grew up on, rap, because it’s become offensive to my every feminist sensibility.  Today, I can’t stand to listen to anything other jazz with some salsa, rare grooves and 70s music thrown in for good measure.  I live in a very remote area of Maryland but I make it a point, no matter how strapped I am in my budget to donate to my local NPR station because that is the tradition I was raised in.  As much as I despise, hate, abhor, and loathe Terry Gross on Fresh Air and her convoluted and absurd interviews, I respect that there must be alternative voices on the radio that speak to people beyond the corporate pabulum shoved down the throats of the masses so I give. 

I moved to Atlanta in 1997 and one of the first things I did was scan the dial to find the Black college radio station.  I was thrilled when I first heard Ken Batie’s Hot ICE in the Afternoons.  It spoke to me.  When I heard Jamal Ahmad’s The S.O.U.L. of Jazz, I knew I was listening to true jazzical genius.  As much as I love jazz, as much as jazz is a part of who I am, I’m always searching for new music to make me think and feel, just like when I was 15 years old, and Jamal has provided that and so much more.  He has not only entertained me, he has informed and educated me and provided me with exposure to artists I would have never heard otherwise.   I’ve traveled the world.  I’ve listened to jazz stations of every format from all over the country, the globe, and the World Wide Web.  There can be very little debate that Jamal Ahmad nurtured and developed the Atlanta music scene that has launched the careers of talented artists and in my humble but very informed opinion, there is no one better at what he does. 

WCLK is more than just Jamal Ahmad, I’m well aware.  I don’t want to diminish the contribution of the other on-air personalities in any way.  The collective of the entire station has been a bastion of sanity in a market that plays the same barely-literate, offensive, talentless five songs over and over and over again.  I was just in Atlanta for two weeks, returning back to Maryland the day before the station made their now infamous programming changes.  Driving around Atlanta for those two weeks, it felt like home to me in more ways than I can describe because I could hear the unique mix of jazz that formed my love for the art form.  I rolled down the windows of my truck and rejoiced in the music that made me the woman I am today, from morning until night, appreciating the artistry of all the DJs.  And what they do is truly the equivalent of sculpture or painting.  Music forms the soundtracks of our lives and they paint the pictures with sounds that create our memories. 

As I type this, Jamal Ahmad is playing some crappy, watered-down smooth jazz.  You see, WCLK decided that rather than have the original, cutting-edge, distinctive format that set them apart from all the rest, that they would conform and dictate what songs their DJs play and limit it to contemporary jazz.  Apparently, a study of 106 people, paid for by a donor to the tune of $60,000 revealed that WCLK needed to become more cookie cutter, more average, more bland, and average.  That’s how much it costs to buy the soul of the city.  Someone decided that being innovative and unique was a bad thing and that insipid was the way to go.  Now, no offense to Kenny G or anything, I’m sure he’s a very nice person, but his music gives me acid reflux.  All that saxaphonesque elevator music, redone songs from music that was mediocre in the first place, leaves a vile, bitter, unpalatable taste in my mouth.  What exactly is the point of smooth jazz?  As my grandmother used to say, “You gonna have to ask someone smarter than me cuz I don’t know.”  I’m profoundly ashamed that I never donated to WCLK while I lived in Atlanta because there is no question that it enriched my life.  I did attend Clark Atlanta for my graduate studies and I paid and exorbitant amount of money for an education that was would be generous to be described as substandard (that’s a whole ‘nutha story) so I do feel some, a teeny, tiny bit of comfort in that I indirectly contributed.  But I can’t, I vehemently refuse to contribute to an institution that makes the conscious decision to pander to the lowest common denominator and relinquish what made them exceptional in an effort to make a buck. 

I own my own company.  I create erotica for a living in fact.  I write erotica that shows the complexity and sensuality of Black people in a way that is not at all stereotypical, ghetto, or degrading.  I don’t use the N word in my erotica ever.  I’ve never once used the word bitch, freak, or ho to describe a Black woman in my erotica.  I’ve never written about adultery or women selling their bodies.  I’ve never made a story that centered on the size of a Black man’s penis or made reference to a Black woman being a nympho or even had my characters engaged in casual sex.  I don’t write soft-core, romantic erotica, I write explicit, unapologetically Black, political, socially relevant, conscious erotica.  I write the erotic equivalent of The S.O.U.L of Jazz.  I struggle to make a living because I write erotic that is outside the norm.  I could have long ago decided that I was going to write what sells, write about Summer, the beautiful, biracial Puerto Rican and Black light skinned super-model who lives in a penthouse who is struggling to get the attention of Derrick, the former football player/rapper turned investment banker who continues to have an affair with NiNi, his baby mama from back in the day . . . Oh God!  I can’t even go on, it’s the same story as every Black erotic tale on the shelves.  Hell, it’s every reality TV show on today, it’s every Black movie, it’s the foundation for every rap video.  When is enough, enough?    

I have scores of loyal, core followers and fans.  They love and appreciate my work, they support me and respect that I’m trying to give them a voice that no one else is doing.  Do they financially support me?  A few do.  Some can’t.  Most don’t.  My point is this.  I’m not going to change my brand, I’m not going to walk away from what I know is healthy and beautiful and right just to pander to the mediocre and crappy to make a buck.  The key to my success is in getting my message to the masses, lifting their standards for what constitutes quality erotica, NOT writing the same boring, offensive, bland erotica.  I’m not going to write the equivalent of smooth jazz erotica just because that’s what sells.  There is value in having standards that make you excellent.  There is no amount of money in the world, there is no dollar amount that would make me sell out just to be average. 

The key to WCLK’s future success is in better marketing, better PR, better outreach into the community.  They need to think of new, innovative ways to raise money.  They have destroyed the thing that made them stand out, that made them exceptional.  I hope it’s not too late for them.  I hope they see the error of their ways and correct it.  I need for them to go back the format that kept the loyal listeners tuned in.  It must be a terribly scary concept for the management to admit that they’ve made a mistake, to acknowledge that they had the perfect gourmet recipe and they sold it for the fast food option.  Maybe they need to start being forward thinking and come up with new ways to get their die-hard listeners to contribute more, to get more exposure.  Maybe I need to get in the kitchen and start baking cakes to sell like I did when I was a kid.  Whatever the solution, I’m 100% positive that it’s not to play ghastly versions of R&B re-done with a clarinet. 

WEAA shaped me.  It was the fact that they weren’t commercial, they didn’t play the same songs, they didn’t conform to mediocrity, which is precisely one of the reasons I am who I am today.  What WCLK has done has taken a mentor, a teacher, sage, and guide away from those who might be shaped and molded to greatness.  They have destroyed the last opportunity for children to learn about the jazz greats and to hear innovative, experimental music, to experience the world beyond the monotonous, life-draining music that’s called rap today.  We have to be a people who demand better for ourselves, not lower the bar.  The S.O.U.L. of our people resides in our ability to excel, not just exist. 

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Copyright 2013 Scottie Lowe All Rights Reserved

Erotic provocateur, humanist, relentless champion for the oppressed, and facilitator for social change, Scottie Lowe is the creative genius and driving force behind AfroerotiK.  Intended to be part academic, part educational, and part sensual, she, yes SHE gave birth to the website and the company to provide people of African descent a place to escape the narrow-mined, stereotypical, limiting and oft-times degrading beliefs that abound about Black sexuality.  No, not all Black men are driven by lust for white flesh.  No, not all Black women are promiscuous welfare queens willing to do sexual favors for money.  And no, not all gay Black men are feminine, down low, or HIV positive.  Scottie is putting everything on the table to discuss, debate, and dismantle stereotypes in a healthy exchange of ideas.  She hopes to provide a more holistic, informed, and enlightened discussion of Black sexuality so that people of color have alternatives to the one-dimensional caricatures the media force-feeds us and she dreams of helping couples become more open, honest, and adventurous in their relationships.