9 Times Amber Rose Made the World Think Twice About Vilifying Black Women's Sexuality
Amber Rose is not here for your slut shaming. She's made this known for a while, but in recent months she's aligned her no-holds-barred approach on social media with organized feminist calls to respect women's bodies in the form of the Amber Rose Slut Walk LA. What makes Rose so captivating is that she's completely unapologetic about her sexuality. "If [I] wanna have my titties out on a beach, that's exactly what I'm gonna do," she said on Power 105.1's Breakfast Club in an interview earlier this year.
Not only is she standing up for herself, she's standing up for women everywhere who want to express their sexuality on their own terms. Here's some of the most prevalent examples of Rose doing just that:
Her epic Walk of No Shame:
That time she wore people's hateful Instagram comments to the 2015 MTV Video music awards:
That time she dressed down people who slut-shamed her for her exes:
That time she kept it all the way real on the Breakfast Club:
When Rose's ex Kanye West slut-shamed her and took credit for her career, she responded with this:
When Khloe Kardashian brought up Amber Rose's stripper past to try to shame her into keeping quiet about the Kardashians on Twitter:
And Amber Rose responded matter-of-factly:
When she stopped caring what a mother is supposed to look like and flaunted her bod instead:
That time she enlisted 6,000 people to join her crusade against slut-shaming:
That time she didn't care what you call her, because she's just doing her (which is all the time):
Not your Jezebels. There's a long, tortured history of black women being shamed in America for their sexualities, dating all the way back to when they were known as so-called "jezebels" who were deemed more sexually promiscuous than white women. That's what makes Rose such an important figure, as Ashleigh Shackleford wrote earlier this year at The Feminist Wire.
Black women are not given the right to display, share or present our bodies how we please. Black women are not given the right to body autonomy or sexual freedom. And there's a loaded racist, misogynistic, capitalist history behind that, and that has marginalized Black women to an extreme in which we're always stuck between denying our sexuality to remain respectable or embracing our sexuality... and yes... being the hoes society tells us we already are.
Rose is embracing her body, her sexuality and herself without anyone's approval.
