"Over the years, time after time, woman after woman, I grew more accepting. The fact that they saw past my flaws and saw beauty in those same imperfections was the greatest lesson and gift in self-acceptance.

I once half-seriously joked to a friend that every woman should experience sleeping with another woman at least once in her life. Despite my personal views on sexual fluidity and belief that everyone (men and women) is bisexual to some degree (Kinsey scale, anyone?), there’s some truth I hold to in that declaration.

“Loving relationships among Black women do pose a tremendous threat to systems of intersecting oppressions,” Black warrior woman and scholar Patricia Hill Collins writes. “How dare these women love one another in a context that deems Black women as a collectivity so unlovable and devalued?”

While we all don’t necessarily have to be bedfellows, talking honestly with other women (black, white, straight and queer alike) about our deepest uncertainties about self is pretty radical. In a culture where sex and human sexuality is still largely taboo, that moment in front of my mirror — unshaven legs, chipped nail polish, nips and all, reminded me of the importance of not only loving (on) each other and ourselves but sharing openly about the parts we might not love so fully."

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Earlier this week, Mignon Clyburn became the first woman and first African-American to head the Federal Communications Commission. Although, Clyburn will head the Commission, which started in 1934, her position is temporary; Congress is currently approving Obama’s permanent choice for head of the commission, Tom Wheeler, which could take an unforeseen amount of time.

Mignon Clyburn overtook the position when former head Julius Genachowski resigned to join the Aspen Institute, a research institution, as a senior fellow. Although, Clyburn’s position is brief she will lead the organization through an important time, which includes regulating media ownership and a decision on the Softbank-Sprint deal.

Clyburn’s first act of business as acting chairwoman was addressing the staff of the FCC, acknowledging her plan for the organization. According to, “At FCC, Mignon Clyburn cracks the glass ceiling”, by Brooks Boliek for Politico, Clyburn, stated, “I see myself as a member of a relay team, running one of the middle legs. My job is to build on forward momentum, give the next teammate a running start, an improved position, and no matter what, my goal is not to drop the baton.”

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Black women are, it seems, damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Our collective singleness, independence, and unsanctioned mothering are an affront to mainstream womanhood. But a high-profile married black woman who uses her husband’s name (if only for purposes of showbiz) or admits the influence her male partner has had on her life is an affront to feminism.

Wilson says that in the context of pathologized black womanhood and black relationships, Beyoncé and the Knowles-Carter clan “counter a narrative about our families that has been defined by the media for too long about what our families must look like and how they’re comprised.” Black women’s sexuality and our roles as mothers and partners have been treated as public issues as far back as slavery, even as family life for most citizens has been viewed as a private matter. Our nation’s “peculiar institution” treated human beings—black human beings—as property. And so, black women’s partnering—when and whom we partnered with and the offspring of those unions—were at the very foundation of the American economy. According to Jackson, “People would talk about black women’s sexuality in polite company like they would talk about race horses foaling calves.”

Like critiques of her sexed-up performances, response to Beyoncé’s recent pregnancy illustrates that black female bodies remain fodder for public gossip. Even with the devotion of mainstream media (especially the entertainment and gossip genres) to monitoring female celebrities’ sexuality, “baby bumps,” and engagement rocks, the speculation about Beyoncé’s womb stands apart as truly bizarre. Almost as soon as the singer revealed her pregnancy at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, there was conjecture—amplified by a televised interview in which the singer’s dress folded “suspiciously” around her middle—that it was all a ruse to cover for the use of a surrogate.

The HBO documentary, which chronicled her pregnancy, failed to quiet the deliberation. Gawker writer Rich Juzwiak proclaimed, “Beyoncé has never been less convincing about the veracity of her pregnancy than she was in her own movie…. We never see a full, clear shot of Beyoncé’s pregnant, swanlike body. Instead it’s presented in pieces, owing to the limitations of her Mac webcam. When her body is shown in full, it’s in grainy, black-and-white footage in which her face is shadowed.” There is, in this assessment, a disturbing assumption of ownership over Beyoncé’s body. Why won’t this woman display her naked body on television to prove to the world that she carried a baby in her uterus?

The conversation surrounding Beyoncé feels like assessing a prize thoroughbred rather than observing a human woman, and it is dismaying when so-called feminist discourse contributes to that. Feminism is about challenging structural inequalities in society, but the criticism of Beyoncé as a feminist figure smacks of hating the player and ignoring the game, to twist an old phrase.

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It’s like Dracula who keeps rising from the grave, no matter how many times you drive a stake through his heart. But I’m not talking about Christopher Lee, instead it’s Sophia Stewart and her Matrix lawsuit victory.

Except that there wasn’t any victory and there won’t be one.

But don’t tell that to some people. Many still steadfastly believe that, according to a newspaper article - the same exact one that’s been circulating for years now - that Stewart, in October 2004, won a major multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Wachowskis, producer Joel Silver, Warner Bros, Village Roadshow Entertainment, James Cameron, and Gale Ann Hurd for copyright infringement and racketeering, claiming that they stole the concept of The Matrix and the Terminator films from her, resulting in “one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood”.

And the reason why, to this day, the public hasn’t heard about that case is because of the evil satanic media cabal including film studios, television and news publishers who have banded together to keep the public from knowing about the win.

It’s all the more strange, when you consider that Stewart has to be in the top ten of all-time most known people in the world, thanks to the internet, just behind Justin Bieber.

Except that it didn’t happen.

Her case was actually thrown out of court back in June 2005, almost 8 years ago, when Stewart failed to show up in court for a preliminary hearing of her case. And in a 53-page ruling, the judge dismissed her case, stating that Stewart and her lawyers failed to prove her case.

Despite Stewart claiming that she wasn’t going to quit and would try again, very little has been heard of her since, except for the little known news item that she, in turn, sued her lawyers for millions of dollars, claiming they purposely lost her case because they were in cahoots with that very same evil, satanic media cabal.

Yet the story that she won, still breathes. Just a month ago, I was being bombarded by people asking if I’d heard about Stewart winning her case. And then, in the past few days, I’ve been bombarded again, in e-mails and Facebook postings about that very same news article which was published in mid-February on an online news site called The African Globe.and which circulated from there.

For the longest time, I suspected that Stewart herself actually wrote a fake newspaper article and posted it on-line to bolster her claim. But it turns out that it was an actual newspaper article written by a Salt Lake Community College second year journalist student for the school‘s paper, about Stewart.

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A variety performance traditionally featuring striptease, burlesque has seen a resurgence in popularity over the last two decades. A bared shoulder or the shake of a hip can be sexy, sensual, and funny. But the art form is also a means of resistance. Undulating bodies can uncover histories, challenge biases and defy stereotypes. And when politicized bodies move this way–bodies still straining under the weight of racial stereotypes that stretch back to the era of slavery–it is even more insubordinate.

Essence Revealed is a member of the New York City troupe Brown Girls Burlesque, founded by performers Aurora BoobRealis and Maya Haynes-Warren in response to the absence of women of color on the city’s burlesque stages. A professional actor, Essence recalled auditioning for stereotypical roles in which she was judged against Hollywood’s view of blackness. “I’m a woman who has had two degrees since she was 24, but all I get called in [to audition] for is Gangster Girl Number 12.”

This is an experience that fellow Brown Girls Burlesque member Chicava Honeychild knows well. She too found burlesque as an antidote to being a frustrated “blacktress,” relying on stereotypes to book jobs. In burlesque, the disguises and the aesthetic vision are all her own. For many black burlesque performers, this art form is a pathway to reclaiming power over their identities and pushing back against stereotypes that poison portrayals in pop culture and media, as well as in everyday interactions.

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