Written By: Jackson Biko
This week on my blog, I published a story about a medical student in her sixth year. She talked about her dark skin and how being a light-skinned woman in college puts you in a privileged position.
Being brown, or is it yellow, makes you better than the girls with dark skin, even though your brain is the size of a peanut. If you are the right skin colour, you get to have more sex than anyone else. The same applies to girls with big bums.
So in college, the big-bummed light-skinned girls are perched on top of the food chain and the rest fight for space below. How fast things change! Back in my day, big breasts put you on top. Anyway, reading this made me feel ashamed. I was ashamed because we, men, are at the forefront of this nonsense. I may not care much about brown skin, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m guilty, given that I have written about the female posterior in a way that glorifies it. And as much as it’s my personal preference, I should know better because of my responsibility as a writer with platforms that might shape thoughts, especially those of younger minds.
As men we continue to “like” and share pictures of women with big buttocks on Instagram. We glorify this madness. What we don’t know is that it shapes the attitudes of younger women who grow up convinced that they are less beautiful because they are dark-skinned or because they don’t have the kind of buttocks we like. For someone who has a daughter (and she isn’t exactly light-skinned and doesn’t exactly have buttocks worth talking about at eight years), I really should know better. And so here is a letter to all the girls out there, wondering what beauty is.
Dear Young’uns,
Beauty isn’t determined by how big your buttocks are. They are indeed beautiful, but they aren’t the yardstick of beauty. May I, for the sake of this article, call it “booty” as the language you are accustomed to? Right. Most of us, men, who go online talking about big booty have dated women who didn’t have big booty because some of them were the wittiest, funniest, most intelligent women we were ever with. Unfortunately, big booty grows old quickly if that’s all you are dragging to the table.
Your booty won’t be as perky in five years as it is now. Age and gravity will ensure that. So if you have nothing else on the table you are standing on quicksand. And in any case, there is always a bigger and better buttock than yours around the corner.
You aren’t less beautiful because your buttocks aren’t shaped like Toni Braxton’s. Nobody sits down to talk to booty during a date, we talk to a human being. We don’t call booty when we need an insight. Nobody ever sat around a table at dinner and later said, “wow, conversation was great tonight, that was a great group of ladies with big booty. Please invite them again.”
So stimulate a man’s mind rather than his crotch, you will find the longevity of it all rewarding. It will last longer because we are men, we will always find the next big booty if we look, but we will hardly ever find the next sexy mind that stimulates us intellectually. And if by any chance you find yourself with a man who only sees you for your buttocks, then there is a problem if there ever was any. You are more than just booty. Refuse to allow yourself to be defined by your booty, don’t allow us to reduce you to such lows.
So you aren’t “light-skinned enough” for us? So you aren’t in “team lightskin”? We like light because it distracts the world from our inadequacies, so don’t let yourself be dragged into our self-esteem struggles. I know many lovely dark-skins, so don’t let us pigeonhole you based on our frivolous classifications. You aren’t just a colour. You are more than brown or yellow, I want to imagine. Surely, there is a shade somewhere.
We are men, we will treat you how you view and treat yourself. If you see yourself as nothing but booty, that’s how we will treat you. If you see yourself as a light-skin, that’s how we will see you. If you see yourself as a smart woman, that’s exactly how we will see you. You basically define how you want us to see you.
So if you give these qualities strength, that’s how that cookie will crumble.
Don’t kill yourself bleaching your face or trying to get big booty. I’m not saying let yourself go and look like a scarecrow in the rain, no. I’m saying that you are who you are, but you are much better building your mind, because that’s long-term.
Look good, yes, but also build yourself. Read a book. Pick a newspaper sometimes. Surround yourself with people who build you, not people who see you as yellow or black or big booty. Define your narrative. And the next time we say we only do light-skinned girls with big booty, tell us, “You will find a ton of them when you walk through that door. And please lock it behind you!”
Written By: Jackson Biko
Culled From nationfmPhoto Credit, beautyworldnews
