Over the past twelve days, women of color have been on an emotional rollercoaster as the premier of Tyler Perry’s remake of Ntozake Shange’s play Four Colored Girls and BET’s Black Girls Rock Awards Show. These projects have explored the various dynamics that affects the livelihood of women of color and their spirit of resilience to overcome odds in extreme adversity. Watching Black women sojourn from brokenness to healing, wholeness, restoration and reconciliation of self has been at the forefront of kitchen and coffee table discussions.
However, outside of these projects depictions of women of color and Black women in particular on TV is not always so empowering or transformative. Tonight at 9pm, the airing of Oxygen’s Season 5 of the Bad Girls Club Reunion reached millions of homes and women and girls alike were glued to the TV set to view “Girls Behaving Badly”. I must be honest; I have become smitten by this debauchery of malicious, filthy mouthed, sexually explorative young women.
Let’s be clear, by no means am I advocating for women to mistreat and disrespect each other nor degradation of women’s bodies and images on TV. Nonetheless, I feel that these images of womanhood need to be explored and critiqued. When these images go, un-critiqued viewers may feel that behavior being illuminated is acceptable.
Thus, as a mentor of teenage and young women, I have become aware of whom they identity with in all forms of media and society. Many of these young women idolize these female caricatures portrayed on this show as well as the Housewives of Atlanta, Beverly Hills and Jersey, For the Love of Ray J etc. Reality TV is plaguing cable and satellite airwaves and captivating the attention of our younger women. There are a slew of young girls and women wanting to be the fashionista, socialite, and bad girl prototypes. The women portrayed behaving badly are not just your late teens and early twenties women, rather they are adult women in their late 30’s to early 50’s acting juvenile and reckless. To be quite honest it is rather disgusting to see wealthy adult businesswomen regressing to rebellious adolescent behavior.
As an avid supporter of fostering healthy relationships amongst women of color across generations, watching these reality shows make my task arduous. I strongly feel that these images are creating of sub-culture of women and girls disrespecting themselves and their fellow female counterparts. For those of us in the community fighting to foster healthy relationships between women may feel that this is a daunting task to accomplish especially amongst adolescent and young adult women. Girls behaving badly are glorified just as misogyny, violence and drug dealing is to hip-hop. This new sub-culture is shaping and cultivating personhood of girls and young women alike.
I am glad that BET attempted to counter-act negative images of girls and young women in Black Girls Rock. Black Girls Rock was a great starting point to bring black women in all spheres of life into awareness and conversation of honoring ones own authentic creative genius. The calling forth of Black girls and young women to be all that the divine created them to be despite systematic oppression is the message we need in our communities. It is vital that generations of women and girls take accountability over our relationships with each other with nurture and care. It is imperative that we sustain and maintain sisterhood beyond sororities and professional associations. Women of color have seen and encountered enough of self-hate projected onto each other due to a myriad of socio-cultural and historical factors. I hope this blog post will get young girls and women of color to begin self-exploration and to seek out positive images of womanhood.
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