She Makes Me Want to Get Naked
She Makes Me Want to Get Naked
(April and September, 2019)
“If you fight like a girl, cry like a girl… feel like a girl…”
Claims that I somehow acted “like a girl” seeded decades of shame. In the early 90s, little boys who started to dance at the age of 6 often learned that they were lesser than other boys, in no uncertain terms. That’s a pattern of assumptions we can still easily slip into if we’re not careful. No specific taunts stand out to me anymore, at least not from my childhood. But the general feeling of less-than that emerged early in elementary school sticks. And despite deep and unwavering love and appreciation from my family and friends, the feeling evolved into spirals of self-hatred I can still slip into if I’m not careful.
My family’s love helped me push off the heaviness of late-2016 and early-2017, a time of mounting dread and remembering just how many Americans could still lift themselves up by taunting those like me. Laughter helped a lot, too. And music. For as long as I can remember, I’ve turned to female vocalists to give voice to emotions I didn’t understand or understanding I didn’t yet possess.
“Patiently, quietly, thankfully/ Worship me,” were the first five words I associated with Lizzo. A repeated phrase from the first track off her 6-song LP, Coconut Oil, so quoted a snippet written by NPR to bring attention to its video of her early 2017 SXSW set. I listened. And I obeyed. And eventually, I learned.
Coconut Oil, I came to believe, is a short meditation on self-love. And I repeated it like a mantra. Lizzo is ecstatically big. A black woman with zero apologies left for how she feels or how she looks. “Feelin’ like a stripper when I’m lookin’ in the mirror / Slappin’ on that ass gettin’ thicker and thicker … Scuse me while I feel myself,” I repeated. And learned. The love this woman felt for herself — and referenced so frequently in just 20 minutes of music — was both physical and metaphysical. Felt on the inside and the outside (and the inside).
After just over two years of those 6 songs and precious few others on repeat, Lizzo gave me and us (and me) Cuz I Love You. Confronting us unapologetically with her nakedness, stripped down and bent over herself on the album cover, she left me breathless before I even heard that single, pained, crackling gut-punch-of-a-note that kicks off the title track. New lessons waited, I knew.
The week Lizzo was everywhere for the first time led up to the wedding of my dearest and oldest friend, an unapologetically, ecstatically big woman who had also already repeated Lizzo’s mantras of self-love for years. While “Truth Hurts” hit number one — almost 2 years after I first wrapped my lips around the soon-to-be-viral “I just took a DNA test turns out I’m 100% that bitch,” walking my daily walk to the office the day the song dropped — I asked my friend and her beloved to marry themselves before they married each other. “I’m my own soulmate. I know how to love me...look up in the mirror like ‘damn, she the one,’” I’d already learned. “I’mma marry me one day.” I do. We did.
I could have cried the morning after Lizzo’s VMA performance, watching the rest of the world catch up to this icon, transfixed by that enormous great ass. Yet my friend and I felt a tinge of regret that the rest of the world didn’t seem to be ready to be their own soulmates yet. “Truth Hurts” comes from “100% that bitch,” an unapologetically, ecstatically big voice with no time to waste on anyone who doesn’t love themselves enough to love her. But it doesn’t announce that requirement or instruct us how to love ourselves in the same way that “Worship” or “Scuse Me,” “Soulmate” or “Like a Girl” do. But Lizzo, finally a rising superstar, knew we’d all get there, I think. She stood in front of audience after audience in her versions of wedding attire, announcing herself as “100% that bitch” and marrying her-twerking-while-flute-playing-self over and over, some kind of pied piper of self-love.
Thank you all for joining us today on the Lizzo Express. Step all the way into the train please: the doors will not be closing but we will keep moving. We understand that many of you are new passengers and while we’re glad you’re all on board all of a sudden, please step forward to prevent overcrowding: there are plenty of open seats in our newest cars at the front of the train. Again, the “Truth Hurts” car is incredibly crowded at the moment, so step forward, please to find similar accommodations in “Juice,” “Exactly How I Feel” and for all that is good and holy, “Tempo.”
“Baby, baby, come eat some of this cake…” Rather than somehow inviting us to consume her, Lizzo seems to tell us that we couldn’t possibly. There is cake for all, she explains. Have some of mine and then eat some of your own.
White gay men have a history of gobbling up black female bodies and using them as their own. I get it. I too feel the urge to lip-sync, to take on the voice of someone else because we feel like we don’t have one of our own. To take that voice inside of ourselves and let it speak for us. And voices that originate from doubly-othered black female bodies feel that-much more in-sync with my gay male struggle with my own otheredness. Because I grew up around so many people of color (and so many people of so many different colors), I always felt like I was particularly sensitive, that my appreciation of black culture never crossed into appropriation. As I grew older, I grew uncomfortable with a set of choices that were perhaps not as sensitive as I had thought, grew troubled by memories and by my own appreciation for cultures that didn’t feel like they were mine to love. Am I allowed to love this?
I am, Lizzo assures me, but only if I can love myself first. Only if I can remember that love isn’t ownership and it sure isn’t consumption. Love is freedom. My skinny white-lady singer-songwriters taught me that long ago — the first voices that gave language to an emotional inner life I didn’t understand and certainly didn’t want to express.
So I go on loving this ecstatically-big black woman: loving her voice, her lessons and, unequivocally, her nakedness. Her unabashed nakedness announces her self-love, dismissing generations of others who triply-othered bodies like hers and in so doing she makes me want to get naked too. To invite others to love me while making it blatantly clear that I don’t need them too. She at once adores her body’s sexual potential and pulls apart the fallacy that the only way to love it is sexually. So I love her for showing me how to love my body not through the lens of someone else’s desire, but as its own beautiful and unique personhood. And I love her for teaching me that by seeing myself and my own body that way, I can also see others that way, too.
Self-love is a moment-by-moment practice. Embracing all of oneself means embracing oneself when self-hate bubbles up, when unwanted memories of long-ago taunts or of micro-expressed racism surface and when new conflicts arise. It means acknowledging those moments, but letting them pass, forgiving others and ourselves for giving in to our shame and our fear.
As I strengthen the muscles that push back against my inclination to view the world solely through my own lens and believe only in my own self-importance, as I work to obsess less frequently over my own body and how others view it, ironically, my self-love replenishes more easily and more quickly, which allows me to, in turn, give more of myself.
I’ve hidden this work and password-protected myself for years, side-tracked by other “work.” Took a DNA test, turns out that work was also getting me here; I just thought I was ready before I was ready. And I still have work to do establishing these patterns of self-love, replacing old patterns of fear and forgiving myself when I slip out of them, opening myself to feel the love and appreciation of others. I’ve also learned that this writing — writing and sharing — is an act of self-love in itself.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you taught me to say. I’m crying cuz I love you, yes, but also cuz I love me, now. And you did that. Well, I did that. But you taught me how.