“Please don’t call me sexy”-Body neutrality and being dark skin

"Siri play Sexy to Someone by Clairo.”

Age 7, before the great escape from girlhood

When I was eight, my dad brought skin-bleaching soap back from Nigeria.

“It’s to brighten your skin,” he said flatly.

My mom lost it. She screamed at him, her voice echoing with a mix of anger and desperation. Worry shimmered in her eyes, heavy and palpable, as she gripped my shoulders and repeated, “The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

I shrugged. I was used to it. I was used to uncles asking for the “pretty light one” at hall parties, to being compared to a monkey, and to people seeing my skin before they saw me. By eight years old, I had already decided I wasn’t going to think much about my body or my skin past its function to keep me alive. 

This habit of not thinking of my body in any particular way led me to become a tomboy as a pre-teen. I realised how boys seemed to go a little more unnoticed but were also taken more seriously than girls, and I decided I would be one. I kept my hair in single twists while my sister got extensions. I wore the boy's uniform at school and black air forces. I played football and any other sport offered, and for a few years, I forgot just for a bit that I was supposed to be thinking about looking good. You see, girls are supposed to look good. We’re supposed to be thinking about our next hairstyle while getting our current one. But the boys? Oh, the boys got to come back with scabbed knees and scruffy hair. The boys got to spill their juice boxes down their fronts and burp. I wanted that. Needed that even. There was a need to control my image, especially when I was subject to so many unwarranted comments.

When people assumed I was a boy, I did not correct them, to my mother’s dismay. I had never been spoken to like that before. They saw past what I looked like and actually wanted not just to hear my opinion but to listen to it. Boys got to be people. I wasn’t gonna give that up. This was how I would continue to live for the rest of my life! But 11-year-old me had forgotten a little process called puberty that was coming for me.

I started to grow boobs. 

I wish I were exaggerating, but growing boobs was probably the worst thing to happen to 12-year-old me. All of a sudden, all of the boys’ clothes I used to wear did not fit quite right; all of a sudden, the boys who used to be my friends started to look at me. I came to the harrowing realisation that I was no longer invisible. These two tennis balls on my chest now made me hyper-visible. Any shirt my mother bought me popped open. I couldn’t comfortably close my blazer; my back started to ache. This is shit! The androgynous essence that most children carry swiftly left my body. No matter what I dressed in or how short my hair was, it was painfully obvious I was a girl, which was the worst thing to be at the time. 

It's not that I wanted to necessarily be a boy, mind you. What you’ve read so far may seem like it. I just decided being a boy was more manageable than being a girl. It’s just that dark skin is so inextricably tied to masculinity. Why is there a need to run away from it? Just embrace it. Why must an eight-year-old child be so acutely aware that those around them believe their skin is tainted? Why must I be reminded to scrub my neck because it looks dirty? That’s just my skin. I do think something died in me when I started puberty. I could no longer exist within the limbos of this third gender I had created for myself, “tomboy.” I wish I had been brave enough back then to continue existing as I always had existed. I wish I were brave enough now. 

I won’t go into the barrage of colourist comments I got from boys at school, the comments about my body or all of the “light skin vs dark skin” memes I had to consume on Instagram; you’ve heard that before. I will, however, explain how I managed never to internalise all that went on around me.

I must first tackle the assertion that some of you may have that my escape from black girlhood was because I thought I was ugly. I did not believe this in any way, shape, or form. Instead, I wanted to minimise the number of comments I got while being a girl. No matter how confident you are, no one wants to hear how ugly they are day in and day out from their peers. One reason I have never felt ugly is because of my mother and her eccentric sisters. I love my mum; she has always been ahead of the trends and ahead of anyone around her. She’s been telling me for years not to rinse my mouth out after I brush my teeth long before any dentist told me (it’s to protect your teeth with fluoride, by the way.)  I got to exist in this beautiful black bubble when I was with my mum and her gaggle of sisters. Before it was trendy to “shop black-owned”,the books my aunts bought me had black protagonists, my dolls were black, and my mum told me every day how beautiful it was to be black as she bathed me and doused me in raw shea butter.

My mother who is considerably lighter than me had a plan. She was an intentional parent, something i’ve noticed as I’ve aged that not many parents are at all. She did not leave me to my own devices, she knew what the world was like for little black girls. She and her four sisters actively and fervently instilled into my little body with their actions and words what a wonder it was for me to simply exist. She let me dress how I wanted, she let me express myself how I wanted. What a magical experience I got to have and embody by being a darkskin black girl growing up under these women. “The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice.” Word to Tupac.

But like I said before, the outside world was not so kind. Even with all the positive input at home, it was only enough to have me think of myself neutrally, which isn’t such a bad thing. In contrast to body positivity and loving one's body, body neutrality is a different approach to body image. It recognises that a person can exist in their body without constantly worrying about how they look, and that their body is a vessel that carries them through life. This is a very useful idea when you’re a teenage girl. I’m not going to say I did not have some negative times (I had instagram for 2 years before uploading any pics of my face for example.) But for the most part I was free from any of the aestehic dilemmas that plagued my teenage counter parts. Thanks to my mother’s rearing, if I had a crush on someone and they made it apparent they didn’t like me because of my skin, my first thought wasn’t, I’m so ugly :( , It was, Well, that’s a dumb fucking reason, isn’t it? Thanks mum.

Body neutrality had served me well and kept my mental wellbeing in check right up until I started dating. The first time my ex-boyfriend called me beautiful I scoffed and said “Get a grip mate.” After spending so many years thinking of myself neutrally, positive comments were just as foreign to me as negative ones. Positive comments however carried a different weight. Increased perception. People aren’t looking and thinking about ugly people, but they are doing that to people they find attractive. Despite popular belief I actually hate being perceived. Ignore the Tiktok account, my weekly Instasgram uplaods and substack. I actually do hate it! I knew it was a problem when a hinge match would call me beautiful and I’d get the ick. Like ew, oh my gosh, you’re actually thinking about me. YUCK. Somehow, I managed to take body neutrality too far. I, of course, realise this is not a normal way to think, mind you you’re on a dating app, for God’s sake. “Beautiful” I can stomach on a good day, but “sexy’?! CALL THE POLICE. We’re doing too much now guys, lets be normal.

Me on Hinge

I am learning to take compliments though. Body neutrality has a time and place but so does body positivity. We cannot go through our entire lives practising just one or the other, especially when dating is as much about other people finding YOU attractive as it is you finding them attractive. We can also not spend every day of our lives contemplating how attractive we are. There is more to life. Although I am working on it, “sexy” and “beautiful” still have me saying “get a grip” under my breath. But there is one compliment that doesn’t make my stomach turn. Perhaps it’s the South-East London in me, but when I get called “leng”? Yeah, that’s the one!