Caro || Issue 1

are almost never acknowledged to be these women. And poor
(fat) black woman doing any of these adorable twee hipster
things are pretty much never seen as adorable or twee or
hipsters by the general media-consuming public. On some
level, this seems like a compliment; at least we aren't being
reduced to super-feminine stereotypes and being infantilized,
right? And I would agree until I realized what
this means is that as a Black woman, I was not seen as capable
of being feminine and pretty and dreamy or, or, or...
impossibly twee. A black girl dyes her hair unnatural iridescent
colors and she ends up on the Ratchet Mess tumbr. A
white girl does the same and she ends up on trending the
same media platform and pinned to Pinterest boards worldwide.
And not only that, but Black female children weren’t
allowed to be children, even in this context. They are labeled
as hypersexual even before puberty, where white woman
can and do embody the idea of sacred childlike-(non) sexuality
aka virginity. And while both of these are oppressive...
I'm not gonna lie, the grass looks greener.
This is a problem in the Black community, as well, though
the class, color, and body restrictions are slightly different
than in the white community. However, there is still
so much absorption of the white beauty ideal and the white
feminine ideal, even among Black women. It's been remixed
and refit to reflect the more of the African American aesthetic,
but it is not removed... I remember going to a
sleepover and apparently plenty of the girl had gas, we had
all had barbecue food earlier so yeah beans, you've all
been there. So the girls, the other girls, the thinner,
lighter-skinned, looser-curled, socially-accepted-asadorable
girls, fart and laugh at each other and think it's
so funny. They have none of the fear that I have, that if I
joined in, people (they) would look at me with reproach and
disgust. And they never wonder why it is they are allowed
to talk about their bodies and their bodily functions and I
am not. Not without losing all desirability and any credibility
as a “lady”. They burp the alphabet in front of
their boyfriends and everyone think "Oh she's so down to
earth and approachable, a cute girl who’s not stuck up at
all!" I accidentally burp as quietly as possible with my
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