Swipe Left on Romance (with Sabrina Strings)

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Intro – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This episode includes brief discussion of explicit topics like sexual assault and pornography. Some of the explicit language is not beeped. Listener discretion is advised.

This is Relationscapes. We’re exploring the ever-changing terrain of human relationships. I'm Blair Hodges, introducing our guide in this episode. Sabrina Strings.

SABRINA STRINGS: I just went about trying to date various men to see if any of them would actually have me. And like everyone else, I've grown up in a white supremacist society. So I was just trying to figure out, “Okay, well, how do I get my hair to be more straight? How do I look as hot as possible to be able to attract someone?”

And so these were catastrophes, as you might imagine.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm not a citizen of the dating world myself. But my friends who are tell me there's all kinds of catastrophes waiting to happen. All the endless swiping and situationships and ghosting. But what if the struggle goes deeper than just bad apps? What if the very idea of romance itself has been working against us all along?

To help us untangle this, sociologist Sabrina Strings joins us. She'll take us on a journey through history showing how love has been shaped and warped by centuries of racism and sexism, and why some women—especially women who don't seem white enough—have often been left out of the fairy tale altogether. And she speaks from personal experience.

Can romance survive in our modern world? Is something better even possible? We're talking with Sabrina Strings about her latest book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance.

 

State of the Current Dating World – 02:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: Sabrina Strings, welcome to Relationscapes.

SABRINA STRINGS: Thank you so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book is an indictment of the dating world. It's like a state of the union speech. And the union isn't looking so bright right now. The quest for long-term partnerships is complicated for many people. I get the sense that your own experiences in these areas helped prompt the book.

So if you had to give a state of the union address on dating and marriage right now, what would your state of the union include?

SABRINA STRINGS: I would let people know that for a lot of folks, not only is marriage now off the table, but dating as well. I don't think people have seen it that way, but this is one of the problems that a lot of people, and especially young women who are single and are looking for a male partner, are experiencing. Not only can you not find a commitment frequently, you can't even get a full date going.

BLAIR HODGES: And the numbers are pretty stark. There's this 2020 survey where about 50% of adults said that dating had actually gotten a lot more difficult. And two-thirds of single women who were looking for partners say that they've been harassed on a date or assaulted on a date by a person they were dating. That's two-thirds of single women.  And a majority of single and searching women and men are expressing dissatisfaction with the past and with their present prospects.

You also point out the numbers seem most stark for Black women in particular.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yes. One of the things that I think is kind of illuminating about all of this is that we have been talking about the decline of marriage, especially within Black spaces and Black communities, for a very long time. And unfortunately, when we talk about this, usually we have no solutions and no explanation. It's just happening.

And usually there's a lot of pressure on women, and especially Black women, to just get it done, find someone, choose anybody, get that marriage going. But I think now we're starting to get a handle on some of the problems, some of the reasons why people either aren't able to have a marriage if they want one, or are choosing not to get involved with them.

One of the major issues is dating itself. People think dating is some type of benefit. Oh, you get to go out and meet new people, so you get to have a sense of who you're really compatible with. But unfortunately, in the age of apps, that's not typically how dating proceeds.

If dating proceeds at all. It's very much about looks, it's very much about status and money. So if you don't have an appearance that I call in my book “sufficiently white,” and if you don't have a lot of money, especially if you're a man, well, your prospects are pretty grim.

BLAIR HODGES: We're going to get into “insufficiently white” as we go. I wanted to add, you point out that this is a sea change. You go back sixty years ago and women were clamoring for the freedom to delay or even deny marriage. Like marriage culture was so strong that women were saying, “You know what? Let's actually hit the brakes a little bit here. Let's find a way that this doesn't have to be the be all, end all.” And now there's a lot of women that are scrambling to find a long-term relationship and being frustrated in that pursuit.

 

The Birth of the Romantic Ideal – 05:10

 

BLAIR HODGES: You trace this change further back in time. I want to take people back, your book takes us back to the roots of the romantic ideal.

This is where romance, which is sort of dying on the vine right now—you say, well, if we look at its roots, maybe we can see what's going on in this crop. Take us back in time to the birth of romance. You take us back to the 12th century in Europe—and this is relevant. I don't want people to tune out. This is really eye opening about what we think about romance today, if we look at its origins.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. I mean, rarely do we spend the time to actually try to figure out how we got here. Like, what was the genesis of this particular problem? And so I was like, well, how did romance get started in the first place?

And as you mentioned, Blair, it began in the 12th century. And it began, as many people argue, with a poem or sometimes a short story about Lancelot. Now, we've all heard of Lancelot. There was very recently a re-imagination of Lancelot that was on Broadway that was met with critical acclaim.

But what we don't know is that this was not a tale about marriage. This was a tale about infidelity, effectively. A knight named Lancelot who was one of the knights of the Round Table—and spoiler alert, as far as we know, this Round Table never actually existed. All of this was a fairy tale, right? So he was one of the knights under King Arthur, and he falls in love with his queen, Queen Guinevere. And so when Guinevere is captured by an evil king, Lancelot valiantly volunteers to go and rescue Guinevere, his secret love.

And on the way, he faces a number of travails that he has to overcome with bravery and courage to finally reach her and rescue her and deliver her safely back to his king. So even though he loved her, and we get the sense also that she loved him, and even though, you know, they might have got a couple of secret digs in, their romance is never supposed to end in marriage.

It's a tale about love and loss. And so we should not then be surprised that our current attachment to romance—because it involves so much excitement and the expectation that men are brave and valorous and that women should be rescued—is now under fire because gender roles have evolved significantly since the 12th century, as they should have done.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And it stands out to me that love wasn't the point of things. Like, love was a tragic thing in these stories. Marriage wasn't for love. Love was something besides the point.

SABRINA STRINGS: Absolutely. Marriage was an opportunity for two people, usually people who had land holding families, to come together to consolidate their land, their wealth, and their power. There are so many different examples of this throughout the Middle Ages in Western Europe.

And so during that time period, it was very exciting for people to imagine, okay, what if our marriage wasn't just about money and consolidating our power and our landholdings? What if there was a deep affection between us and someone else—not necessarily our marital partners, that seemed a little bit unrealistic for many of them in the beginning, but just the idea that they could experience joy and excitement despite the humdrum of the enforced married life for a lot of people who were elite.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. That elitism is really important to mention because you're pointing out there's a lot of class-based things tied up in romance and marriage here.

Also, you talk about beauty standards. There were these sort of proto-racist beauty standards that started to be developed around Guinevere. The description of her is blonde, very fair of skin, delicate of body, in need of being protected and this sort of thing. So beauty standards were also being elevated and changed at this time to highlight particular types of beauty, and that would have racist repercussions down the road.

SABRINA STRINGS: That's exactly it. And one of the interesting things is that there is a book out right now, I believe it's called The Once and Future Sex. It’s about the history of gender identities. The author explains that this beauty ideal we have right now found seedling maybe around the 11th century, maybe around the 12th century, much, much earlier than people have formerly thought.

Most of us, including myself up until very recently, believed that race science was the dawn of this particular idea about beauty. But it turns out, race science might have just been its recording and not its genesis. And so its genesis goes back, likely to the 11th or 12th century. And it seems to have something to do with Christian/Muslim wars that would have been taking place right around and sort of within the context of the Crusades, because there was a great concern about the appropriate types of partners, given the battle that was taking place between the two dominant Abrahamic religions during that epic.

 

Adding Love to the Economic Arrangement – 10:18

 

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, we'll dig more into how race plays into this story later. Your book shows how from the 12th to the 18th century, human relationships, marriage and romance, there's going to be a lot of evolution up to the 19th century.

Give us a brief overview of how human relationships and marriage sort of shifted from economic transactions more toward partnering, love, romance. Not that economics dropped completely out, but how important different things were shifted over that time.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, I'm glad you added that addendum, because I don't find any evidence that the concerns about money, power, and status have ever been removed from marriage. They might have receded from view a little bit as people started to focus more on concerns about romance.

But to get to your central question, how is it that all of a sudden, romance became part of the narrative surrounding how people were supposed to find a commitment and end up in a married situation?

Not a lot is actually known about that. So this is something I'm still researching, if you can imagine it. What we do know is that sometime in the 19th century—So talking about the context of the Industrial Revolution, where families are now leaving a lot of these massive land holdings that they would have had, and then their young people are funneling into cities, and in these cities is where they might be finding partners. Within this context, we find that the romantic ideal really starts to have power over people, as they're determining what kinds of committed relationships they want to form.

And there's a critical change that takes place, because in the early iteration of romance, under the Lancelot ideal, you might not have noticed, but the woman was the one with status, power, and money. She was the queen, he was the knight attempting to rescue her and explain his affection for her. Romance was always, in its earliest iterations, about a man with less power trying to get to a woman with more power and money.

We like to call women doing that, contemporarily, “gold diggers,” don't we?

BLAIR HODGES: [laughter] Gold diggers, yes. We'll come back to that.

SABRINA STRINGS: So what happened in the 19th century is, now that romance was being attached to marriage, there was the expectation that men would be the breadwinners. And so even though men were still supposed to be the aggressors, the pursuers, the brave and valorous ones, they were also supposed to be the protectors and the providers again.

But now, according to the romantic ideal, and not just the historical understandings of two families coming together, this actually creates a fair amount of confusion, as you might imagine, because now men are not only supposed to be protecting and providing, but also are supposed to be sweet and polite and chivalrous and all of these qualities to their wives, or potential wives, at the same time as they're also supposed to be head of the family, the patriarch, the one in charge.

And so what a lot of women were experiencing was that men were giving them the romantic treatment right up until they got that ring on the finger. And then they were giving them the more traditional patriarchal treatment because that's what women are supposed to do.

So there's still a lot of research that needs to be done here. But the evolution that turned men from the ones trying to get the money to the ones holding the money was one of the things that I believe that killed romance.

BLAIR HODGES: And people at the time could look back at the Lancelot story and say, well, they got the money situation backwards. But also the ending of the story stinks because (they'd say) there's no way they shouldn't have wound up together with him in charge.

SABRINA STRINGS: But how does that actually work in practice? Like if you just think about it, it's like, okay, we're expecting the individuals who are supposed to be in charge to also be the ones who are selfless and willing to do anything for their partner. That's not usually how a boss is normally, a boss or a partner.

Like if you're actually a person who is in charge, thinking about maybe more historical forms of marriage,  you're not usually the person who is self-effacing and in some way giving yourself over to the other person. If you're in charge, then you're in charge. But if you're supposed to be an equal partner—and this is one of the reasons I like to remind people that women are also implicated in the problem, perhaps we should not expect men to be buying us chocolate and flowers and expensive diamond rings—all of these things are within the expectation that men should be providers, not that they should be our equals.

 

Race and Beauty Standards – 14:48

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. I can't wait to dig more into that with you. We're still setting the table here.

Let's do a little bit more table setting when it comes to race. The 17th century—and you already mentioned race science—this is another new innovation into the relationship equation, or another time when it sort of shifted.

And this might be a new idea to some listeners. The idea that race as we think of it today also has a history, that it's not just this scientific based fact, but that race is a human invention.

So what was happening in the 17th century that set the table for today?

SABRINA STRINGS: One of the major things that was going on was the expansion of the slave trading enterprise. So many people are unaware of the fact that slavery actually began around the 14th century with the Portuguese. And over time, there were a number of debates surrounding the morality of slavery, as you might imagine. I mean, we're talking about Western Europe during an epic in which the vast majority of people would have identified as Christian.

And so what does it mean that people who identify as Christian and say that “God is love” are going to another continent and either stealing or purchasing human beings for a lifetime of bondage. There were a number of questions surrounding whether or not this should be done. And so the way in which a lot of people were trying to justify slavery—I mean, cause they weren't going to say it shouldn't happen if they were making money off of it—was to say that, well, hmmm. There's actually a group of individuals we believe to be natural slaves. Like in the Bible, there were natural slaves. And so we believe that the African people are actually the descendants of Ham. And this is the reason why we have a right to enslave them.

And so here we have in the 17th century, the growth of a number of salons where high class individuals who were also fond of waxing intellectual would come together and explain, you know what? It makes perfect sense that we would go over there and take people and enslave them, because not only is this just according to our religious beliefs, but we're also then going to be able to civilize them because they have no culture, they have no education. We need to be able to provide that for them. We're helping.

BLAIR HODGES: And they would tie it into scientific ideas about biology itself, like they would divide up the world. So they did religious stories, and they did cultural stories. They also created scientific stories to try to justify the inequalities they were perpetuating, which is to say, “oh, there are also scientific reasons that slavery is right and good.”

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. And you know, as a person who is a social scientist, I am increasingly concerned about the way in which the word “science” is thrown around for pseudoscientific purposes. And this is a fine example.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, science isn't apolitical.

SABRINA STRINGS: No, absolutely. Science is intimately tied to whatever cultural values we have in a given society. And so for people who quite honestly are able to furnish their appointments at various universities through slave trading, which happens in western Europe as well as in the Americas—because there have been a number of books that have described this in recent years—we should not be surprised that rather than undermining the idea that people should be in perpetual bondage, people were trying to figure out justifications for it.

And so science was one of the ways. And I'm glad you pointed out that there are many different ways in which slavery was in fact validated in the minds of western Europeans. Because in the beginning it was about religion, and then later it was about culture and still later, it was about science. Science came in around about the 18th century as a justification for enslavement.

BLAIR HODGES: That's right. People can read more about that in the book. We're talking about The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance with Sabrina Strings.

Okay, so to kind of sum up everything, what we're looking at in this book is how the romantic ideal continued to evolve into the 19th and 20th centuries. You're going to bring us into the present and talk about how all these roots are bearing fruit today.

What we're looking at is what people think marriage is for, what the qualities of desired partners in marriage are, and what roles people are expected to perform in those relationships. And then how power is distributed, in seeking a partner and being sought as a partner, to make those partnerships happen.

Okay. And all of that was just in your introduction! [laughs] I thought it was like, amazing, the way you set the table was like, really cool.

SABRINA STRINGS: Thank you.

 

Black Is the Commons – 19:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, so the next chapter talks about how “Black is the Commons.” That's the title of it. You argue that Black women in particular have been sidelined from being considered as long-term partners. And you say there's an obvious place to look when Black women and their bodies became seen more as property than as partners. And that's slavery.

Talk about how Black women today find it harder to meet folks on apps and how that's tied into to this history.

SABRINA STRINGS: Not a lot of people are aware of the fact that the first ever racial scientific treatise, which was penned in the 17th century by a Frenchman named Francois Bernier, was approximately three pages of him describing how women look in different parts of the world. Can you imagine a straight man getting up to that? [laughter]

He was like, oh, my gosh, if you go to China, you have the ladies with the lovely small feet. In Turkey, ooh, those women have lovely skin tones. You know what? They have the most exquisite figures in various parts of Africa.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I mean, the Beach Boys did this.

SABRINA STRINGS: I mean, you know, Captain Kirk did it too. He was like, in the universe trying to find our ladies. So, I mean, you know, this has a long history.

So part of what is happening here is that the dawn of race science was really a way of sorting women based on attractiveness. And there's a way in which he's describing attractive Black women in various parts of Africa based on their proximity to European ideals at the time.

And so within the context of slavery, Black women were not only dehumanized because of the fact that they were enslaved, but also because race science suggested they were usually inferior to white women. And to the extent that they were inferior to white women, they could not possibly be justifiable and committed partners to white men. No, white men were being encouraged to have partners who were of their same status and rank.

In fact, just to go back very quickly to the dawn of the romantic ideal, in the 12th century, there was a book written by a man named Andreas Capellanis who was describing that romance was never supposed to be between a man of a high status and a woman of a low status.

No, if you meet a woman of a low status, you simply take her by force. In other words, you assault her, you rape her. So then, once we land in slavery in the, let's say, 17th, 18th centuries, we have Black women who are considered physically inferior and also socially inferior to white women. And therefore they are not supposed to be treated as partners. No, their bodies are supposed to be accessible for rape, because this is part of the logic of romance.

So what I'm articulating here is that romance is rape culture.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, that's a really bold and really straightforward claim. I want to make sure we understand it. So you're talking about how white men tended to see Black women's bodies, that they were sexual objects for white men, and especially slaveholders.

They weren't saying Black women's bodies were undesirable or that people shouldn't, like, want to have sex with them. They were saying, go ahead and have sex with them. Just don't do it for a relationship. You can do it either because you want to or perhaps to impregnate them.

So they believed that it was their right as white people. Like, they had ownership. And from what you wrote, it also wasn't just white men who saw things that way. As I mentioned, this chapter says Black women's bodies were treated like the commons, basically like an object, a public resource men could use. Tell us more about that metaphor.

SABRINA STRINGS: I call Black women the commons because they were supposed to be a readily available source of pleasure and rejuvenation. So imagine that you are a white man, you're a slaveholder, and you have a wife. There are so many, many different demands on your time that can be stressful. How wonderful to have an easy, readily available sexual outlet for your discontent.

And this is how Black women were used. And the reason why I say that they're the commons is not just the fact that their particular owner could have assaulted them, raped them, used them for sex at any time, but because any white or Black man could have done so.

Now, the fact that Black men could have done so has long been obscured by various historical texts and writings. But in reality, if a Black man who was a slave on the plantation was interested in a Black woman and a fellow slave, all he had to do was let his massa know of his interest. And in general, the massa would make it happen.

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how the role of Black men has sort of been obscured in part because of racism against Black men, stereotypes about Black men being so lascivious and, you know, the idea that they're out to rape people in general. And so some of that history about Black men's involvement in assaults on Black women has been obscured.

I wondered how you felt about reckoning with that, because you take us into the  civil rights movement , pointing out that the  civil rights movement started out with women, Black women in particular, pushing back against assault. But then when men became the leaders of the movement, it became more about equality and access, including access to white women.

So coming from my, like, white background, my white perspective, this was the part where I was like, ah, this is gonna be trickier for me to bring up as a white guy, especially because I don't want to perpetuate any of the stereotypes about Black men, but also want to acknowledge the history you lay out.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, I can understand how this gives a lot of people pause. And so I'm glad you acknowledged that the problem with the stereotype of the Black male rapist is that it suggests that Black men are so hypersexual that they will rate anyone and especially white women, right? That's really the terror of the idea of the Black man as rapist. And we know that from the iconic film Birth of a Nation. So I'm sure that your listeners would have heard of Birth of a Nation, but this film—

BLAIR HODGES: Well, it was played on the White House lawn, so it must be good.

SABRINA STRINGS: Absolutely. Played on the White House lawn. Not a lot of people know that it was in theaters for approximately two years. Most films today aren't even in theaters for two months. Right?

BLAIR HODGES: No, it kicked off modern theater going experiences in some ways.

SABRINA STRINGS: Absolutely. And so imagine the tremendous draw of this idea of this Black man who's creeping around in white spaces just trying to get access to white women. And I think a lot of people don't realize, but if you take a look at Birth of a Nation, he's not inherently trying to rape the woman, he's trying to show his interest in her.

So, I mean, but the very idea of a Black man having access to a white woman was already coded as a form of rape. So of course that's wrong. Black men have not been out en masse to rape white women. There's absolutely no evidence of that. That's completely false.

However, Black men, like all men, have at times committed rape, especially within their communities. And so to the extent that Black women have been prodigiously raped in America, it's not just been white men who have been doing it, it has been Black men too.

And in fact, I find it interesting that I recently ran across a quote from Angela Davis, and I'll just paraphrase it, which says that Black women have never had any type of movement or reckoning for the rape and sexual assault that we have experienced in America.

And I thought it's so funny that a person who was one of the leaders of the  civil rights movement would have said that when in reality, that attempted reckoning was indeed one of the important, I want to say, nodes of genesis for the civil rights movement.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, some of the earliest protests and the earliest protest cries and demands surrounded how Black women were being assaulted, how they were being treated. And then it moved away from that quickly. It really did.

I didn't know that history. I've read a lot about the civil rights movement, but I learned a lot more just from this one chapter where you bring it in.

 

Beauty Standards and Insufficiently White Women – 27:03

 

BLAIR HODGES: This chapter also talks about the beauty standards that were being developed here, especially some beauty standards that were internalized by Black women themselves. You introduce the idea of “insufficiently white women,” a phrase you mentioned earlier, and how that connects into the beauty standards.

SABRINA STRINGS: As a result of race science and slavery, there was the expectation that white women were the most attractive and should be the most sought after. And I mean, quite obviously this is one of the ways in which whiteness reproduces itself, because men are supposed to be looking for women who are of a particular status and a particular appearance, and those are supposed to be connected the status and the appearance.

Now, I think it's been fairly obvious that this has been going on in white spaces, but this has also been going on within the Black community, overwhelmingly, with the beauty standard being attached to white women. Black women felt pressured and often, quite honestly, as you mentioned, internalized the idea that lighter skin was better, that straight hair was better.

And so there were a lot of things like, you know, hair straightening products being developed, that are still being developed, and skin bleaching products. And these were extremely popular in the United States amongst women across race. And what we find when we look into the archives is that overwhelmingly, since Black men have even been given the right to get married in this country, they have chosen women who are light skinned.

So there's been a number of different reports that have come out with marriage statistics. And we often like to celebrate interracial relationships. And I understand why we would do that in the wake of, of the Loving ruling.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

SABRINA STRINGS: But people don't realize that they should look more carefully into the types of interracial relationships or inter-ethnic relationships people choose. Because overwhelmingly, the women who are going to be chosen are going to be what I call sufficiently white. That is, their skin is light, their hair is straight, and they are of slender build.

Because these have been important within racial scientific theories. And the men who are going to choose women like this are going to be men across race, including Black men.

BLAIR HODGES: And what do you say when someone might respond and say, “well, I'm just attracted to what I'm attracted to? It just so happens that I'm attracted to lighter skin and that's just what it is. And I can't necessarily change what I'm physically attracted to.”

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, I mean, I would say that's a cop out. I mean, we have to acknowledge—I  mean, people always want to say this, right? People always want to be like, you know what? I don’t choose what I'm attracted to. And I have nothing to do with the existing contemporary standards.

So I'm like, okay, it's not impossible that you are the lone wolf who has entirely rejected the beauty ideal. But all we have to do is look at Instagram, you know, we just have to notice who are the celebrities who are feted, how do they look? We notice that the women who are at the top of the game in Hollywood are always white women. They're almost always blonde. Their hair is almost always straight and long. They're slender.

I mean, for years and years, women in Hollywood themselves condemned this. I have no doubt that they're still doing it. They were like, why do we have to look like we are 25? We're not ingenues. We are talented performers, you know, honor our expertise.

But, you know, that's not usually the way that women are evaluated in this society. The primary way that women are evaluated in this society is based on appearance.

 

The Blacker the Berry – 30:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, see, that reminds me of the next chapter. “The Blacker the Berry,” the less love-worthy they were. You show that Black women didn't just take this lying down. They pushed back. Black communities would push back against some of the racist beauty ideals and the racist devaluing of women, and this is particularly found in the “Black is beautiful” movement.

SABRINA STRINGS: The Black is beautiful movement actually kicked off in earnest in about 1956, and the person at the helm was actually a Black man. So his name is Kwame Brathwaite, and he was a photographer. And he noticed that within the Black community, there were a number of Black women who felt a certain amount of shame in their appearance, because, again, the standards in this country and really throughout the west circle around whiteness.

And so he wanted to give Black women, in the context of this building movement, a sense of pride and joy in their appearance. So he allied with two white women, which is, I think, a really interesting part of the story. Ann-Margret, who we do know, you know, “the” Ann-Margret, and Jean Shrimpton, who was a model, to create another group of models that would be entirely Black women, called Grandassa.

And this name was supposed to be a representation of a return to the motherland. So Kwame, along with Ann-Margret and Jean Shrimpton and the Grandassa models, were actually at a place in Harlem known as the African Jazz Art and Society Studios, which was founded in 1956. And this is one of the places where this idea that Blackness is beautiful was pioneered.

And so you can imagine how exciting it would have been to be a Black person in Harlem at that time to head to a space where everyone around you was feting Black looks and Black power, right? And this is even before the Black power movement really took off.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: So this was, I feel, an underappreciated but also powerful arm of the civil rights movement because this gave the aesthetic of empowerment. Because for so long, even those individuals who were saying, you know, we want dignity and rights still felt the need to try to appear lighter skinned, still felt the need to straighten their hair.

But now people were saying, no more. We are Black. Some of us have wide noses. We have kinky curly hair, and we love ourselves.

BLAIR HODGES: And this movement persists today. Obviously, there's a lot of proud Black folks that really love to lean into it. But you also, as you mentioned, see a lot of colorism in Black communities. Is this discussed a lot within Black communities? This kind of back and forth, this tension about assimilation to white norms versus pride in Black power?

SABRINA STRINGS: It's discussed in certain places, but I think not as much as it should be. I believe that the vast majority of people who are talking about this are Black women, because we are the ones normally who are expected to appear more white. I mean, there's even a film called Dark Girls, which takes this up.

I don't think that there's a whole lot of conversations happening across gender about this problem, because frequently when Black women try to have conversations with Black men about this, they may shut down or they may blame the Black women themselves for being considered undesirable.

I mean, there is a viral video of a Black man excoriating a Black woman. Actually, a group of Black women on D.L. Hughley’s platform, because he can't believe, he's trying to explain: “I like little white women because I feel like they appreciate me more. And it's too hard,” you know, like, all of these things. And so it's Black women's fault that Black men choose white women.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, man. I could just imagine how this can affect the dating scene. I mean, yeah, your book touches on it a lot, and you've personally encountered this as well. So not only are you giving the history about it, but this is really tied to some of your own deeply personal experiences with beauty standards and with dating and the pursuit of romance and partnership.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, and I tried not to write the book in a way that would make it seem like I was a victim or somehow separate from the problem. Like everyone else, I've grown up in a white supremacist society, and so I've had to try doggedly to break through all of that in order to find a sense of my own dignity.

And the funny thing about that is, not only was I denying my actual identity as a queer person—because, you know, in the 90s, when I was a teenager and in the early aughts, which is the main time in which I was dating men, to be a queer person in public was to be shamed in public.

And so I did not talk about this. I did not even acknowledge it within my own body, I just went about trying to date various men to see if any of them would actually have me. And so these were catastrophes, as you might imagine.

The vast majority of men who took an interest in me were white men. And sometimes they were interested in me as a partner, but frequently not, which I also describe in the book. And there were very few Black men who would ever look at me or talk to me.

And one person I don't describe in the book is a wonderful Black man who I dated very briefly, who was a great partner, introduced me to his friends, a multiracial group of people. I was accepted. And I broke up with him because I just couldn't believe it. Can you imagine, could you imagine the amount of self-loathing that goes into being in a healthy relationship and thinking that that's somehow phony?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Self-sabotage.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I want to get back to your queer identity as we move on here. We're talking with Sabrina Strings, a professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at the University of California—Santa Barbara. She's of a book called Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, which is another great book. But today we're talking about her newer book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

 

Golddiggers – 36:17

 

 BLAIR HODGES: Let's spend a second since we mentioned it earlier, on the gold digger thing. This is a recurring theme in rap and hip hop. And I haven't listened to a lot of rap and hip hop. My music's like pretty freaking white, with all apologies. [laughter] So, like, I mean, I listen to Bone Thugs.

SABRINA STRINGS: Oh, come on.

BLAIR HODGES: Stuff like that.

SABRINA STRINGS: Classics.

BLAIR HODGES: I feel like I learned a lot more about hip hop and rap in your book. And you point out that this recurring theme of like women being gold diggers is—It's ironic to see there because it's an idea that originated amongst white folks quite earlier.

So just take a minute to give us a little bit of that gold digger discourse.

SABRINA STRINGS: So the idea of the gold digger, as far as we can tell, started with white women. And that is a surprise because, you know, as I described in the book, how rare is it that a term that started in white communities is adopted by Black people?

BLAIR HODGES: It's like cultural appropriation, which is ironic, right?  [laughs]

SABRINA STRINGS: Right? Like if it were happening in the reverse, we would call it cultural appropriation. Right?

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

SABRINA STRINGS: So this is like one of those examples of Black people taking from white folks without attribution.

And so, yeah, there was a group of white women who would have been considered attractive. You know, these were the types of good-looking white women with a particular type of status, many of them, that white men were supposed to be pursuing as serious partners. And yet what many of them were doing was just sort of like, dating and trying to get nice gifts from guys, play around.

BLAIR HODGES: Players.

SABRINA STRINGS: I mean, they were players a little bit. Yeah. They were just like, going around, doing the thing. Like, this was their form of dating. So already, like.

BLAIR HODGES: And it was popular in movies and stuff, too. Right? Like, this was like pop culture was highlighting it.

SABRINA STRINGS: I mean, well, so first the women started doing it, and then pop culture found out about it and started representing it.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Okay.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. And so this is the rationale. And this is again, in the early part of the 20th century. Which, by the way, coincides with the dawn of dating. So it's not as if people were dating for a long time and then people figured this out. No, I mean, because the question of money is ever present in dating.

And so they were like, right around the time dating was taking off, they were like, okay, well, a man can take me out and buy me a bunch of gifts, and then you can kick rocks, you know? [laughter]

And there was a Hollywood producer who happened to hear a white woman say to one of her friends, another white woman, “Hello, gold digger.” And he was like, what is this?! And she was just like, you know what? Men expect to be able to get a woman based on their money, their power, their status. And, like, women, we have to use what we have. And we have our looks. And so that was the beginning of the gold digger.

BLAIR HODGES: So now it's taken up and, like, you're seeing it happen in Black communities where women are sort of perceived as just pursuing riches, like not interested in being partners, and then spoken really negatively of.

I'm surprised to see there's a lot of misogyny in some of the rap that you talk about in the book.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. You know, I've been thinking a lot about the many different ways to celebrate rap and also the reckonings of rap. I mean, it was a whole entire movement in hip hop in which all of the popular rappers were yelling out, “no homo,”right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: And I think people move past that a little too quick because for a very, very long time, there was this very damaging homophobic discourse in rap. And then finally there was a certain point in which queer people said, “No more. You will not dehumanize us. This is wrong.” Right? I mean there were, like, publications like Pitchfork taking it up.

So there was definitely a clear moment around about the mid aughts, maybe early 2010s, where queer people said, “No more.”

We need to have a rap reckoning for Black women, because far longer than rap has been homophobic, rap has been misogynoir. And so much of the lyrics of hip hop, almost since the dawn of hip hop, describe Black women as leeches. They're blood suckers trying to get your money, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Or "hoes."

SABRINA STRINGS:

Or hoes. Or hoes that you can just use and discard as the commons. So there are so many different misrepresentations of Black women in hip hop. And I think a lot of Black women have been afraid to take on rap because we love it too. [laughs] You know, it's like we want to listen to this music. We want to dance and joke and have fun.

But it's not just fun and games when Black women are being dehumanized again and again and again. Media is a powerful tool of conveying information. And so we should not forget that people listen to this and they believe that this is who Black women are.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. There's a whole chapter called “Big Pimpin’” where you do some great pop cultural analysis looking at how popular music talks about love and romance and how hip hop began in social protest, but then then kind of shifted into the more shallow stuff that's really problematic, the growth of the “playa” aesthetic, the pimp aesthetic.

And I don't want to spend a ton of time because most of our listeners here, I mean, I'm sure my audience is predominantly white, so there's a ton to learn from there. But at the same time, that's one that I'll leave to readers to check out.

There's a ton there, though. I especially appreciated you saying, like, oh, you know, a lot of this music was my music too.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: You were there for it. And then it's really hard to like—Do you still listen to some stuff that you, I guess have you personally canceled, to use that stupid word, any music that you're like, “I'm just not going to listen to that anymore”?

SABRINA STRINGS: You know, it's not been so much canceling, because I think that indexes a sense that I know better now, and this thing is awful. Which is sort of, I mean, it's sort of a little bit high and mighty.

Instead, I feel more like what I've experienced with rap is just a disinterest.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: Because I'm just like, you know what? This no longer represents who I am.

BLAIR HODGES: Like it doesn't hit you the same way.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. It doesn't give me the same joy. I mean, I'm sure many women across race also had that revelation about R. Kelly, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: We were in it! You know, I was the hugest Aaliyah fan, right? And I remember growing up and being like, oh, she's married to R. Kelly. That's weird. But I mean, Aaliyah is slightly older than me. Like, we're almost the exact same age. So, I mean, as a kid, it didn't seem that strange. And then as an adult, I'm like, hey, you know this is statutory, right? R. Kelly, you know, is clearly like a pedophile. So it's a certain way.

BLAIR HODGES: See Sabrina, that's also why I'm reluctant to bring it up too, is because I think a lot of white audiences can look at that and just pin that on Black culture and Black people and make it more representative than it needs to be and not do any sort of self-interrogation.

Like, it's easy for me to dump on R. Kelly. What's it to me? I don't have to self-interrogate as a white person when I do that. Does that make sense?

SABRINA STRINGS: It does. But I'll just issue a little reminder for folks who don't know. Rap is the number one form of music in America, and it has been for a while now. And that means the vast majority of people who are listening to it and purchasing it are white and mostly white men.

BLAIR HODGES: And I remember now, you do make that point in the book. You talk about how that can shift the message of rap too. I mean, you’d want to sell in a consumer culture. You're going to speak to your audiences too. So that's a good reminder.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. And in fact, I just posted something, or my social media manager on Instagram did, that a lot of popular rap is white supremacist, because that is what makes money.

 

Rise of the Pornographic Ideal – 43:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, well, people can check more about the music stuff in the book. It's called The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance.

Let's talk about the chapter on women as sex workers and men as fuckbois. This is the 1980s. This is the era I was born in. And around the country, there's this panic about how “all the men are gone.” There's this whole thing about the man shortage. There were articles in the New York Times and all this kind of stuff. What was happening in the 80s that made people think there was this huge man shortage?

SABRINA STRINGS: Well, in order to address this, I think we're going to go back a little bit to the 50s, because interestingly enough, as the civil rights movement was heating up and Black people across the country were saying “no more,” white men were also affecting their own movement. Very quietly. They were affecting an anti-feminist movement.

And it was largely happening through the vehicle of pornography that is Playboy. There were a number of white men who were so sick of all of this feminist agitation and they wanted something to be done about it. And so there were people like Robert Allen Arthur, who was the husband of comedy legend Bea Arthur, Mort Saul, the comedian Norman Mailer, who were like, “No more of this women encroaching into our spaces. We need to have rules for ourselves about the things we will and we won't accept. And when we run across these feminists, these gross career women, what we are going to do is not get involved with them romantically in any way.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, boycott, boycott.

SABRINA STRINGS: Boycott feminists. Boycott career women, and in a sense, boycott commitment and marriage.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that was the Hefner thing.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. And the funny thing is that so many people have written about Hugh Hefner as if he were a feminist because he said that he actually believed in some of the aims of feminism, but the aims that he believed in were only the ones that allied with the pornographic ideal.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, say more about that.

SABRINA STRINGS: So the pornographic ideal was something that was erected by Hugh Hefner and other people at Playboy who were saying, you know what? But the romantic ideal, they were very clear. In fact, they knew all about the history and legacy of the romantic ideal, which is also sort of blowing me away. But they're like, yeah, the romantic ideal was started in the 12th century, and, you know, here's what it involved.

And, you know, they were making a case as to why they no longer needed to do it. But guess what? These women don't need saving, they said. These are not the polite, sweet, delightful women of yore. These women are not the women that the romantic ideal is about. So instead, what we're going to do is have a new ideal, one in which we just get to explore our sexual interests and we might hang out with a woman for a while and maybe eventually we'll get married to one of the good ones.

But we're not under any pressure. We have no hurry about ourselves.

BLAIR HODGES: Playboy. Be a playboy. Like, play around.

SABRINA STRINGS: Play around. Yeah. It makes sense when we think about the idea of the playboy, which quite honestly has been nothing but celebrated in Hollywood, as far as I know, which bleeds quite seamlessly into the player.

So the player is the kind of guy who just sleeps around, right? And the difference, I would say, between a playboy and a player is a matter of class status. A playboy is rich, he's a gentleman, he's a Bond type. That's a playboy. A player usually doesn't have any money, and so his currency is usually trying to tell women that he's really into them. “Oh, my gosh. No, I'm really into you, girl. You know, I'm falling for you, I'm falling for you.”

And then to the next woman, “oh, my gosh, I'm really into you.” You know, “I'm falling for you, I'm falling for you.” And to the next woman. Right> It’s you and her and her and her.

BLAIR HODGES: That's where fuckboi culture comes into it.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: I don't know if a lot of people have heard that term, but it's basically player 2.0 or 3. I don't know what iteration we're on now, but that's what it is.

SABRINA STRINGS: I'm sure it's constantly changing, but actually the difference between a fuckboi and a player is how the emotions are used. The player was usually trying to convince a woman that he loved her. The fuckboi is usually trying to convince you that you're nothing. You're being negged, you're being ignored. You're ghosted. You're on read. There are all of these ways in which these men are trying to manipulate you. By withholding. They're withholding, well, obviously love, commitment.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: But in my personal experience, I've even had men withhold sex, you know, and so, I mean, the withholding is really the hallmark of the fuckboi.

BLAIR HODGES: Again, what we're getting at here are the power dynamics in how men and women and other folks, non-binary folks, whoever, how people are relating to each other. And we kind of see this line from Playboy that evolves into a fuckboi type of aesthetic.

Women were also doing things at this time, the idea of being a playmate. There was Helen Gurley Brown, someone that you talk about in the book. Sort of a Hugh Hefner for women. Less pornographic, but more into this idea of like, “Hey, let's play around. Let's be flirty and fun and cute. And also eventually, don't worry, a man will save you. Like, you're gonna be all right, but let's like play around.”

I didn't know much about this story, either.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. Helen Gurley Brown is a really interesting figure here because she too, much like Hugh Hefner in our culture, has been celebrated because she was trying to present women with an opportunity to have some type of sexual intrigue in their lives outside of anything having to do with the romantic contract.

So, again, the romantic contract is, you meet someone and you fall head over heels in love, and then, you know, you date and you get committed and then you get married. Right? That's that. And she's like, “No,” you know, instead of that, what if women, too, were able to sow a little bit of their wild oats, go out on a couple of dates, you know, have some kind of flirty fun with men, without the expectation that this man has to be someone you're going to hold on to for the long term.

So on the face of it, that sounds good, but I doubt very seriously that Helen Gurley Brown, who herself got married in her late 30s, would have expected that these women shouldn't get married at all. This was just what you were doing as you were trying to find a man who was going to be right at the end of the thing, right? Hopefully that would be while you were still young enough to get a man.

So she is one of these people who, rather than contesting the pornographic ideal, is actually working as its helpmeet, okay, where there's all these playboys and you can just be the flirty, fun girl that the playboy would want.

BLAIR HODGES: And so you have the romantic ideal and the pornographic ideal sort of happening at the same time. Just in case anyone sort of lost a grip on those terms, give us the simple definition of romantic ideal and pornographic ideal.

SABRINA STRINGS: The romantic ideal is the oldest. It originates in the 12th century.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's the one we've been talking about.

SABRINA STRINGS: That's the one we've been talking about. And that one says you should meet a woman who is polite and sweet and white hot and that you should expect to marry a woman like that.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: The romantic ideal stipulates those things. And as we've already talked about, in the early period, the men were supposed to be trying to shoot for the stars. But by the 19th century, the men were supposed to be the ones with the money.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: So that's the romantic ideal. Men pursuing women who look this particular way with the aim of marrying them.

The pornographic ideal says, okay, let's put marriage on the back burner. Maybe you'll do it, maybe you won't, but let's figure out a way to have as much fun with women as possible. Let's treat women as sex workers. They are here to provide us with a particular type of pleasure. And this way, we still have power in the battle of the sexes.

 

Masturbation Generation – 50:44

 

BLAIR HODGES: And the pornographic ideal can involve actual pornography, but it can also involve the way men relate to women. This gets us to chapter seven, which is called “Masturbation Generation.” And this surprised me a little bit. I find you agreeing with Josh Hawley, who's a Republican senator from Missouri. Didn't know that there would be some common cause here, but you found some. [laughs]

Not that you agree—I'm not saying you're a Josh Hawley fan. Just here's what I'm talking about. He's been sounding the alarm about the decline of America's men, right? He describes a generation of men who are just sitting around playing video games, watching pornography, instead of courting women and starting families.

And you're a queer, progressive Black woman. So again, readers might be surprised to see that you don't totally disagree with the senator. I think you at least see some of what he's describing as the problem, although your prescriptions for how to treat that problem are probably pretty different.

Give us a sense of where you're at compared to Josh Hawley and what could be described as the masturbation generation.

SABRINA STRINGS: That is so funny. “Sabrina, where are you at compared to Josh Hawley?” That's hilarious. I did not see that question coming. No doubt. [laughter]

So, yes, there's a number of strange bedfellows in this book, because what I'm trying to do is actually assess the merit of what people are saying and not just be sort of the knee jerk reactionary.

And so there is a way in, what he's articulating about young men today has been actually explored by sociologists, a number of whom have written think pieces or articles, even books, about this very issue. And there used to be a term, it was called “the boy crisis.”

“Oh my gosh, what's happening to boys in school?”

And now it's like, wait, what's happening to men? Like, where have they gone? What are they doing? And so, Josh Hawley would say, if women would return to the classic ideal of womanhood, if they would not be these feminist harpies, then we can get men returning to the classic ideal of manhood. He would want men and women to return to the gender roles as articulated in the romantic ideal.

I obviously don't want that to happen. I don't see any value in that. What I'm saying is that we can learn from Josh Hawley because of the fact that he too sees this as a problem, but the solutions are very different.

So part of what I'm articulating is that when men realize that a growing number of women who are becoming feminists or career women are simply rejecting the idea that they should to fall in line with these historical gender roles, men increasingly, rather than pursuing women—who by the way, have never been more ready to have sex outside of marriage, we have apps that simply enable women to find men to get it going on right—that a number of these men didn't really even want that, that what they were concerned about was the disconnection now between sex and power.

And so if they could not have power over these women, why would you have sex with them? So instead of choosing to go out and have sex with a woman, let's say on an app—but don't get me wrong, there are plenty of men who are choosing that, just not as many as we would think—that overwhelmingly, as the data does show, men are simply choosing to have masturbation as their primary form of sexual activity.

Now, in and of itself, that may not seem like a big deal because that seems like it's, you know, the business between one man and his hand.

BLAIR HODGES: And it can be healthy too, like masturbation can be a healthy practice.

SABRINA STRINGS: I mean, and I don't deny that especially. I mean, anything that can be done can be overdone. And so like—

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

SABRINA STRINGS: And this is sort of what I'm trying to get to in the book, which is the idea that for a lot of these men, it's not just, “I'm masturbating,” but “I am addicted to pornography that dehumanizes women, that allows me to see that I have power over women,” you know, they’re identifying with the men who are doing this. “And what I'm actually getting off on is women being violated.”

And so I call this type of sexual activity cis-hand fuckboi, [laughter].

BLAIR HODGES: They’re “cis-handed.”

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, like here you are, you're relying on ideas about how women should look and behave that are indebted to many, many, many generations of white guys. So they're always in your mind as you are turning on the pornography that they have authorized for you and jacking it, you know, nonstop.

And besides this disrupting men's sexual functioning, it also means that women might encounter, like I did, these kinds of cis-handed fuckbois who instead of using you for sex like a playboy, will use you for masturbation, which you also don't want. We don't need that either.

BLAIR HODGES: Basically, they don't want to like sexually, intimately connect with you? Is that it?

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, because an intimate sexual connection might require vulnerability. It might require letting go of the idea that a woman is to be violated. And so rather than letting go of that, what if I keep hold of that while also using this woman?

BLAIR HODGES: Right. I mean, you talk about the studies that show that pornography use can harm sexual interest between partners. It can also affect sexual capacity and sexual confidence for people that use it. And people can see what porn is consumed, like what's the popular porn, this is tracked. And a lot of it, as you said, depicts really harmful approaches to love and sex.

And for people that are introduced to sex through pornography, especially younger folks, this is setting things up to be pretty dangerous for women and for men and for everyone.

SABRINA STRINGS: For everyone, Yeah.

I mean, I'll say this. There is feminist porn, there are forms of queer porn. So it's not as if all pornography is a problem. But the vast majority of pornography is neither feminist nor queer. And so what people are consuming—and I'll remind you, this is at any age.

You know, we were talking about R. Kelly a moment ago, because pedophilia is a serious problem. We do not want our young people to be violated by adults, because that is horrific and should not happen. But consider the fact that as adults, we allow young people of any age to have access to pornography. How immoral, how gross is our society for doing that? And so, as you might imagine, a lot of young boys come across pornography from an early age. The average age at which boys access porn is 10.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: So imagine this happening since the dawn of the Internet, because so much of the Internet's development had to do with pornography. And now we have these men who are actually middle-aged millennials, literally reared on porn, and we're wondering why they don't want to have a romance.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Or even know how to.

SABRINA STRINGS: They don't really know how to. Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: So this is part of the pornographic ideal, actual pornography affecting how people view bodies, relationships, sex, and all of those things.

You did mention some kinds of pornography that you see as a little bit different. Maybe just take a second to say another word about that. Like what? Do you see any space for pornography in people's relationships or in people's lives?

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. I think that when pornography is represented as being consensual, when you can find that each partner, no matter how many partners there are [laughter], has experienced pleasure, has articulated what they like, and what they don't like is being respected. This is the kind of pornography that people might learn from, that couples might use as a sort of lubricant for their own relationships.

I mean, I can imagine that pornography can exist and that it can actually be an aid to a sexual experience rather than a hindrance. But that's not the way the vast majority of porn is structured contemporarily.

And many people do not want to talk about this. The most popular kinds of porn in America, and no other country, is incest porn.

BLAIR HODGES: Really?

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, no other country, just America.

BLAIR HODGES: People are just seeing that in the stats, basically?

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, it's the statistics. Yeah. So this tells you that we are living through a relationship crisis, and the return to romance will not solve that. We need to think about new ways of relating as individuals in this society that don't depend on historical gender roles and that do depend on consent and pleasure among all parties involved.

 

Embracing a New Sexual Identity – 59:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: Great, Sabrina. That's actually a perfect transition.

I want to remind people we're talking about the book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance with Sabrina Strings, professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Okay, so let's talk about how you have come to embrace a new sexual identity and about how you would suggest people learn to reject the romantic and pornographic ideal towards something better. You talk in the book about realizing your own sexual identity as queer.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, I mean, it was a long process, actually. I started to identify as queer sometime around 2010 or the early 2010s. And this was largely because I was sick of people seeing that I was single and thinking I was great and finding my singleness to be a problem that has to be solved.

So there was always someone like, I know a man for you. And I would be like, I don't want to know. But sometimes I would relent and date this guy, and it would be a hot mess, right? Because, you know, I'm not straight.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh. And some of the stories you tell in the book are like, oh, my. [laughter]

SABRINA STRINGS: God, they're so nuts. Right? I mean, their behavior is terrible. My behavior is terrible. Things are not going well. But this is what happens when you are living in a forcible heterosexual society. You know? Like, Adrienne Rich calls it compulsory heterosexuality. Like, this is what happens. And so finally, I just started telling people I'm queer.

Like, there was a way of me being like—I remember talking to one of my family friends, and she was like, Sabrina, why don't you date anybody? You're, like, 30? And I was like, I'm queer. And she was just like, what does that mean? And I was like, it means I'm not interested.

And she was like, so you're basically like, that means leave me alone. Like, yeah, it means leave me alone. And so I just—

BLAIR HODGES: Would they ask more? Like, would they be like, well, do you like girls? Do you like women? Is this about, like, ace? Like, are you ace? Like, did you have to identify where you sat in your queerness?

SABRINA STRINGS: There were people who tried to make me do that. I mean, we all have heard of bisexual erasure, and I experienced that, not even being bisexual. Like, I was trying to figure out what my identity was. And since I would tell people I was queer, they would assume I was gay.

But I was like—and I don't talk about this in the book because there'll be another book, but I did briefly date one woman. I want to tell you how horrible that was. [laughter] Ooh, we won't get into this today, but let's just know that was like, wait, I definitely am not gay.

That relationship didn't even last, like, more than six weeks. But again, it's almost like because of compulsory heterosexuality, people are like, “oh, if you're not straight, you must be gay.” And so I'm like, okay, maybe I'm gay. And I tried that out. And I was like, no.

And so it wasn't until there were a couple of things that happened when I was very—not very young, but I was like, maybe just finishing up my undergrad. I remember seeing the Rocky Horror Picture Show and being like, I want a person like that, like Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Like, where do I get that? And I just knew it was impossible. You know, it's like, I had heard of drag queens, but at that time, drag queens were—I mean, this was before RuPaul's Drag Race. So you didn't see drag queens everywhere.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

SABRINA STRINGS: You know, even though I was living in the Bay, so, you know, I was just like, oh, okay, well, this is impossible. I just repressed it for years and years. And then around about the same time, the TV show The Politician came out and the TV show Pose came out, and I would.

I just remember watching Pose and just crying and crying and crying. And, you know, Pose came out only like, less than 10 years ago. What was it, like, 2016? This is relatively recently. And I just remember talking to a gay white man who I knew and just being like, you know, I think that I was crying so much because it feels like a representation of the Black people I know who couldn't be out.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah.

SABRINA STRINGS: I mean like even then, like still the lack of self-awareness.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it was 2018.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, it was 2018. Yeah. So as recently as that, you know, I didn't know. It wasn't until I was like watching The Politician and I was super interested in one of the characters on the show, James. I kept being like, wow, James is so hot. What are people saying about James? Like, I was like.

And then I was like, oh, wait. And then I just sort of put it all together. Like the way I cried over Pose and like just watched all the episodes so many times, you know, like googling this person, how I felt about Dr. Frank-N-Furter. I was like, I am not what people have been telling me all this time.

I am a sexuality that actually doesn't even have a definition. There's no term for people who are mostly attracted to trans and gender non-conforming people. That term doesn't exist. And so the closest term is “pansexual,” which gives people the wrong impressions.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Because it suggests that you are basically would be attracted to men or like that it would just be anyone rather than, you know, you have a preference.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah. And don't get me wrong, I am attracted to men when they're Penny Hardaway or Bob Burnquist. But if it's not those two men have a nice day.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Cool, Penny.

SABRINA STRINGS: Yeah, I love Penny. I've always loved Penny. But no.

So I mean, I was just like, you know what? Overwhelmingly, I almost never am interested in anyone, and quite actually I live my life as an ace person. And I love it. And so it's not to say that I would never be in a relationship again, but it's not the thing that defines me.

And I feel like that was the revelation that I had. In a romantic culture, your romantic relationship is supposed to define you rather than any other love or success you might have.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. Or any interest you have. Like your partnership status is sort of your primary social status as a human. The human status.

SABRINA STRINGS: Absolutely. And so even now, I mean, I'm a successful queer person, but because I live as an ace person, there's always an amount of fear surrounding me in places, I can tell. Like people want to know if I don't have a partner, you know, because, “oh well, you could, you could,” you know, like they almost want to start going to the setup route again, but so there's this discomfort around people who choose to live their lives without partners.

And so even though gay marriage has been celebrated as a victory—and don't get me wrong, of course gay people should have the right to get married. But there is a way in which even that puts further pressure on queer people to conform to a couple-based society.

BLAIR HODGES: Because now you can.

SABRINA STRINGS: Because now you can. And so you must.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and that's kind of what you're asking at the end of the book. In fact, I was really surprised that the end of the book kind of ends with a note of hope, because there's a lot of real talk in your book. You're not one who blows a lot of smoke. You're reckoning with some, like, tough stuff and some hard history. And yet you end with this sort of hope.

What are you hoping for? And we've been touching on it already, but maybe this gives you a moment to encapsulate it all and really forcefully describe what you'd like to see happen for relationships going forward.

SABRINA STRINGS: I hope that more people will realize that they do not need to have a romance. That what romance has actually done is colonized our understanding of love. We are all love. We simply have to show that by being supportive and caring and generous to the people in our lives. That's what love is.

Love isn't trying to get a partner who looks a particular way or acts a particular way or, critically, has a certain amount of money. All of that is the way romance has colonized our lives and our desires.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:05:58

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, people can learn more about that in the book. The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance by Sabrina Strings, a professor and the North Hall Chair of Black Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She's also written a book called Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia.

Alright, Sabrina, before we go, there's one more segment we're going to do. It's called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is a moment when you can reflect on the process of making your book and researching it. And maybe we've already touched on some of this, but something that you would change about the book now that it's out. Any regrets? What was most challenging in putting this particular book together? Or if there were any big surprises or revelations to yourself as you did this project. And you can speak to any of those that you'd like.

SABRINA STRINGS: Let's see, you know what? The major challenge of this book was uncovering all the things that I uncovered in Playboy. Because I grew up with rap, I knew what hip hop was saying. I just didn't have a frame for it. So reading the articles in Playboy gave me a frame for what the rappers were doing.

And that was so tremendously painful to know that rather than simply showing love to women, that men have decided to withhold it to have power over us. I was actually coming to this realization while I was on a writing retreat in Belize, which kind of undercuts the sorrow that I'm trying to convey. [laughter]

But anyways, so I'm reading about these horrendous things in this paradise, and I'm walking out onto this pier, and I just collapse in tears and just like in racking sobs. And I was like, I can't believe they did that, you know? But then I thought, the only way for us as a society to heal is to acknowledge that it took place and then think about a new way to move forward.

How can we as people, regardless of our genders, show one another love and respect so that we can become a community again?

BLAIR HODGES: That's kind of everything.

SABRINA STRINGS: That's a lot of trying to figure out.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I love it, and I love the book, Sabrina. You did a really fantastic job. There's a lot of personal anecdote here. There's a lot of really strong research as well. You did a great job blending really intellectual and academic history while making it accessible.

And also making it relevant today. This isn't a disconnected book. This is a book that's about what people are facing in the dating world right now, especially Black women. But it's got things everybody can learn from, I think, as they read your book.

SABRINA STRINGS: Thank you so much for those comments. I'm hoping that people will receive it that way, even as I've already been told by so many women, especially Black women, that they love the book.

But it's so painful. Like the sorrow of having to let go of the idea of romance. It's a real challenge. But I mean, how are we going to evolve if we're all still stuck in the mid ages?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's just it. You're not just taking away romance. You're trying to replace it with love.

SABRINA STRINGS: Thank you so much for saying it exactly that way.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, thank you, Sabrina. This has been great.

SABRINA STRINGS: Thank you. I've had a great time, too.

 

Outro – 01:08:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's it for this episode of Relationscapes, a journey through the terrain of family, gender, and sexuality. We're mapping out the stories and ideas that shape how we connect with each other.

Like the ways I connect with my wife. [laughs] The other day I was talking to her about how most of my listeners don't rate or review the show, and she thought that was a good time to tell me that she hasn't rated or reviewed it yet.

Which, I mean, fair. But maybe you'll surprise me this week. Rate me. Go to Apple Podcasts, honey. Go. I'm pretty sure that's the app you use to listen. You can rate me there.

People can also rate the show on Spotify or PocketCasts, as my friend Sergei told me he was able to do. Now, Pocket Cast is another place you can rate it, but if you're an Apple Podcast, rate the show. Leave a review really means a lot.

I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.