Em-URGE-ing Voices

Posts Tagged: people of color

What is Feminist Porn?

Can porn be feminist? A member of my family, who would be appalled if I mentioned her name on this website, worked for a while in a video store. While there, she took it upon herself to view all the softcore pornography offered in “the back” (such a phrase, such a phrase), arguing that in her day, “women wanted porn for the plot, men want it for everything else.” To her, there was porn for women, porn for men, and the stuff they can’t sell. The Internet has since leveled the digital playing field. Every sexual proclivity can be found and satisfied on the World Wide Web, from such innocuous kinks as threesomes and role-playing to highly illegal activities like child pornography and “crush porn”- where people crush animals for… Read more »

Beauty and the Beast: Kalief Browder, Mental Illness and the Black Community

Mental illness. Depression. Schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder. Anxiety. Whatever one suffers from, mental illness has always been the elephant in the room, especially in the African-American community. It’s taboo, something to be brushed off, kept quiet, a simple “storm or phase” that a person is going through. But the African-American community has been caught in a vicious storm for as long as I can remember. Slavery was the beginning of a long history of mental abuse, with slave masters raping, killing, beating, and verbally and physically abusing African-Americans, which gave many Black the mentality not to show weakness and survive this inhumanity. This long suffering abuse (something which America tells us to simply ‘get over’ in various ways through the media and government treatment) did not go away when slavery was… Read more »