Dec

Yes! The last of the holidays! I mean, Happy New Year!

Best holiday ever! Except most of my New Year’s Eves have been sort of odd. Like, the kind of odd that makes me feel like I should try to sleep through them all.

There was this one time when I was still a teenager that was kind of cool. My boyfriend and I were with a group of other rowdy New Yorkers on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, staring down at what looked like a street filled with moving confetti but was really just millions of people partying to welcome in the New Year.The security guard made us leave after the ball dropped in Times Square, the party pooper.

But that’s one night/early morning in three decades of weird New Year’s Eve stories. I have ushered in the New Year with my homegirl in Long Island as we trailed a Suge Knight look alike from his Watch Night visit at his grandma’s church (we met him at a tattoo parlor earlier that day and he invited us out. She looked at me like, “Abort mission!” and I couldn’t say no, and I’m pretty sure she almost stopped being my friend after that) to a really ridiculous house party that we left 10 minutes after we arrived. I think that was Y2K year, and we thought the world might end and we were both kind of sad there wasn’t more excitement either way.

The mid-twenties and thirties were not much better. There were lots of lonely texting streams and Dick Clark Rockin’ Eves. I’m pretty sure I slept through midnight at least three years in a row. Certainly, I was drunk at a New Year’s Eve shenanigans fest at my house before I made my way to a neighbor’s house to drink more before I had to get up and go to work three hours later.

Once, I let one of my favorite people drag me to the house of a couple in Brenham where we brought in the New Year with Scrabble. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we had been watching Dick Clark or Ryan Seacrest, but as it was, we ended up watching fireworks from around the world, wondering if the New Year had arrived in our part of the world yet or not and trying to avoid the gaze of their chihuahua, who had just had eye surgery.

In my relentless quest to have the Most Fun New Year’s Eve Ever, I dragged my bestie with me to the Driskill hotel for a champagne toast and pigs in a blanket, basically, for more than $40 a pop. We ended up at the Ginger Man, a local bar that I love, where we were serenaded by drunk men who could not, for the life of them, sing a lick. One of these guys was with his girlfriend at the time. But that was closer to what I envisioned for my New Year’s Eve fantasy.

Last year was even closer – I had a perfect date that included a little serenading and I ushered in the New Year listening to soul music, eating good food, surrounded by friends like family.

I mention this to you because that means that this New Year’s Eve is going to be amazing by comparison…but also because as much as I love being festive and all that, hallelujah, the celebrating will pause for most of us. (My birthday is approaching, so I’m just getting warmed up. Plus, there’s this book launch situation that’s coming in two weeks.)

I’ve mentioned before I think the holiday season can be alienating, especially for single folks. But just because you’re not with someone on New Year’s Eve doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time.

I hope that you have a safe, joyous Happy New Year. See if you can’t get a little dancing in like this. Even if you have to pull a Billy Idol. I’ll be toasting to y’all at midnight.

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Oct

Single Lady Music: Beyoncé

File this under #GuiltyPleasures.

I became totally enamored of Destiny’s Child back when Wyclef was closer to relevance and I halfway believed a singing career a la Mariah Carey or Lauryn Hill was in my future. I could sing a little bit, despite awful stage fright, so the yearning, sticky-sweet ballads of my generation were right up my alley. I was as likely to jam to Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin as I was to try to reach all of the high notes of Whitney Houston or Rachelle Ferrell.

As much as I love soul, R&B and gospel, there’s something about pop music from the 1990s, particularly, that inspires a deep nostalgia that I’m not yet comfortable with entirely. I don’t want to say that Beyoncé is the Diana Ross of my generation, but the glamour, the talent and the iconography are all there. It’s likely that “Single Ladies” tipped her into the pop artist stratosphere, but maybe she was going to be that famous anyway because she’s just that talented.

Nineteen-ninety-something.

Why is she always so naked? Why is she telling girls that we run the world when, clearly, there’s still so much misogyny in the world? What kind of message does our love for Beyoncé send to little girls who can’t live up to the standard of beauty that Beyoncé seems to set?

I don’t have answers for any of those questions. And I have written defenses of Beyoncé in the past, so I won’t go back into it. But the reason she’s become so popular is that there aren’t many singular black female figures in popular culture (not just those who are unmarried, since Mr. Carter put a ring on it a while ago) who seem to “have it all” – beauty, brains, a loving partnership and a sense of self outside of that partnership. For me, Beyoncé’s confidence and self-possession counterbalances the hypersexual sultry stuff.

There isn’t anywhere in our culture where women don’t get mixed messages about women, independence and relationships. I don’t think it’s fair that Beyoncé is the symbol of our angst about not committed to chastity or promiscuity. I love that she uses what she has to get what she wants; that’s what I aspire to do.

Here are some of my favorites.

Upgrade U: I know the feminists among us will pretend that we didn’t like this song, but I’ll just come out and admit that I loved it. I love it still.

Diva: I was inspired to write an essay about my short, failed attempt at being a rapper for an anthology when I heard this one.

Independent Women Part 1: Wow, it makes me feel old that this was 12 years ago. But whatever. I like the remix better, though.

Irreplaceable: Every woman who has had to, um, put someone out loves this song. It’s just a given.

Best Thing I Never Had: Honestly, I hated this song when I first heard it. But it resonated with me for a dozen reasons when I started listening to Beyonce 4 again recently.

What’s your favorite Single Lady music? I’m a Keri Hilson fan, too. We’ll get to her in a minute.

Oct

The historical context of (some) black families & marriage, a brief overview

I just wanted to mention that posting will be a little lighter than usual as I finish editing the book, which I plan to publish before February 2013. This is my first book, so I’ve been losing sleep over it, but I do hope it will be worth the wait.

From the book:

My mom, like the women I grew up around, knew Jesus and loved God. For God-fearing Christians, marriage has been deemed a badge of honor for centuries.

But she wasn’t actively avoiding marriage. She had tried. It just didn’t work for her.

While she never seemed interested in trying again, she was far from bitter. She continued to date more actively than even I was comfortable with into her late 60s.

Part of why she was able to be single and happy had to do with the cultural sentiment around us, which was You don’t need a piece of paper to certify your love. This is how people of color and women who are not interested in the politics of respectability (or assimilating as much as possible to mainstream culture) find space for their own models of self-worth and self-love: by appropriating for themselves what they need to feel affirmed, often outside of the gaze and judgment of popular culture.

This cultural self-approval was popular during slavery by necessity even though some of the bravest women who are depicted and often written about as single or singular black women – Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, for example – were married. In Tubman’s case, she married a few times, including one marriage that her biographer Catherine Clinton notes in Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom happened when she was likely well over 50 years old. Back then, marriages between free blacks and slaves were considered informal arrangements, not legally or biblically binding enough to trump the commerce of slavery. Clinton wrote:

“Free blacks were faced with the prospect of choosing liberty in exile or a return to enslavement by remaining with their families…A slave’s master could choose to honor or ignore the couple’s commitment, rendering such unions inherently unstable. The sale of the slave spouse might throw the entire relationship into limbo. Thus, slaves who chose a life partner, whether a free black or another slave, constantly confronted fears not only that their marriage might be shattered through salve, but that they might lose contact with their children as well.”

Any book that purports to be geared toward black unmarried women and/or instruct them on getting a mate that doesn’t acknowledge this historical context is irresponsible. That history, along with reports like Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family (known best as The Moynihan Report) offers a more detailed explanation of black women’s perceived powerlessness in matters of intimacy and love in the United States. While it is easier to just point to statistics and talk in witty sound bites, the truth is that black unmarried women have always been required to do much more than their white counterparts in every sphere of life.

Matters of the heart, then as now, are apparently no different.

Sep

Single Lady Books: Single, Arguments for the Uncoupled by Michael Cobb

The review’s not available online, but you can find it in the latest issue of Bitch Magazine, the Elemental Issue, #56

I really loved Michael Cobb’s book, Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, even though there were parts that I felt were a little over my head. Here’s part of what I wrote in my review for Bitch:

It’s hard to beat Michael Cobb’s description of single people as “avatars of the lonely crowd.” While Cobb’s last book had a catchier title (2006’s God Hates Fags: The Rhetoric of Religious Violence), I’m guessing readers will appreciate that he takes a lighter touch with the expansive possibilities of single life.

The central message of this concise treatise is that freedom, potential, and possibility all exist within the life of a single person in a way that is impossible in the context of coupledom. Essentially, one is not the loneliest number. In a chapter about couples, families and the law entitled “The Probated Couple,” Cobb writes that couples join “the grip of loneliness’s totalitarianism” by creating the “special residue which marks their endurance in time: children, relatives, and all sorts of relations…”

If you want to read the rest and you hate paper or you want to read the rest of the brilliance in Bitch on your gadget, you can even by a digital copy here. Bella DePaulo adds that it’s the beginning of National Singles Week and she adds more quotes from Cobb’s book here.

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Sep

NY Times: When all the single guys live together

This Sunday NY Times story about four single guys sharing an apartment together caught my eye because the single male experience is rarely highlighted.

Even if it’s not always particularly diverse when it comes to sourcing, the Times does a good job of at least attempting to illustrate cultural trends. I am not at all surprised, by the way, that Mayor Bloomberg would try to cram single people into small spaces:

Sociologically, the men represent the apotheosis of two trends in American life. While Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg may be promoting the idea of tiny apartments for singles, the most recent census figures suggest that many people do not want to live alone; they prefer or need the company: The number of roommates in nonfamily households in New York City increased by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. At the same time, Americans, especially men, have been pushing back the age at which they first marry — for men, it climbed to 28.2 years in 2010, up from 26.8 a decade earlier.

Indeed, though the men might resist putting so much weight upon their living arrangement, they are part of an ongoing redefinition of family life in the 21st century, in which traditional structures are replaced by fluid networks and bonds not dependent on blood ties.

“Now there are so many variations on how to live,” said Bella DePaulo, a social scientist and author of the book “Singled Out.” Many adults in middle age and beyond, she said, are choosing the “friendship model” for their living needs, opting for roommate arrangements similar to what they had in college or in their 20s, “except now they’re so much more thoughtful about it.”

It’s really rare to see mainstream outlets write about single men in a way that isn’t about chasing tail or being overgrown frat dudes, so this was refreshing. It made me think about the section of Kate Bolick’s article in the Atlantic where she writes about The Begijnhof, an single-sex community for women founded in the mid-12th century with 106 apartments for applicants who commit to living alone (but in community with one another) between the ages of 30 and 65. Sounds like something the U.S. might need for all the single ladies.

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Jul

Single Lady Quotes: bell hooks

From Goodreads

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.

As a young writer, I aspired to be a poet like Ntozake Shange, who distilled so much of the black girl’s experience in her poetry and a warrior like Alice Walker. Intellectually, I yearned for the freedom, clarity and possession that marked bell hooks’ work.
bell hooks was the first black woman intellectual I admired. I read Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life – a conversation between bell hooks and Cornel West, when I was 13, and never stopped admiring her work. It also allowed me to envision myself as an intellectual in my own right. hooks has written over 30 books.

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”

“One of the major tasks black women face as we work for emotional healing is to understand more fully what love is so that we do not imagine that love and abuse can be simultaneously present in our lives. Most abuse is life-threatening, whether it wounds our bodies or our psyches. Understanding love as a life-force that urges us to move against death enables us to see clearly that, where love is, there can be no disenabling, disempowering, or life-destroying abuse.”

“It is the absence of love that has made it so difficult for us to stay alive or, if alive, to live fully. When we love ourselves, we want to live fully…When we love ourselves, we know that we much do more than survive. We must have the means to live fully.”

“Exclusion and isolation, whether they occur through overt or covert acts, have always been useful tactics of terrorism, a powerful way to coerce individuals to conform, to change. No insurgent intellectual, no dissenting critical voice in this society escapes the pressure to conform….We can all be had, co-opted, bought. There is no special grace that rescues any of us. There is only a constant struggle to keep the faith, to relentlessly rejoice in an engagement with critical ideas that is itself liberatory, a practice of freedom.”

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Jul

Single Lady Quotes: Ann Friedman

Ann Friedman says what we are all thinking. As usual. (Source: The Hairpin)

If you haven’t heard of Ann Friedman, Happy Friday! As you can see from the lovely pie chart above, she’s witty and like me, she pretends not to know what OKCupid is when her married friends ask.

Also, she’s hilarious. Did I say that already? Here’s her fantastic blog, and a post on International Slutty Women’s Day: A Story in GIFs, which I adore. Continue reading →

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