#472: SZA, ‘Ctrl’

RCA, 2017

I hate the word pu**y but I love Sza. I hate the word so much and I love Sza so much. This album was a great practice of dialectical thinking for me. 

I think I hate that word because it feels juvenile and hearkens back to cute little fairy tale animals who wear boots and that makes me feel gross. I think that it immediately turns my body into a sexual object mirroring porn-like experiences for whatever connoisseur of female anatomy is partaking. I hate that. 

The third track of the album, “Doves In The Wind (feat. Kendrick Lamar)” is littered with that word. I get it. Sza is reclaiming the mystique, beauty and power of female sexuality. V important. I love that reclamation but I still hate that word. 

Us women have found power in appropriating the words about our genitalia and gender from men and male-produced pornography into our own communication styles. 

But, me as Nicolle, still hates the words. I refuse to call any of my friend “b*tch” or “c*nt.” I can’t even spell them out, I am so annoyed. 

It’s not naivety. I have a physical reaction when someone calls me “b*tch.” I cringe when I am compared to a dog. In terms of the other words, I cringe when the euphemisms noting my body parts are used as offensive terms to dehumanize another person. 

It’s disturbing that people would rather talk about my vagina without using the word, “vagina,” as if acknowledging that it has a purpose more central to my overall health and ability to function outside of sexual pleasure is ugly. 

Using the word, “vagina” forces people to think about my whole body. My whole person. Using the word, “vagina” pushes my OBGYN, my hormones, my thyroid, my stress, the compassion in my loins that I am constantly girding into the periphery of those who want to take and lay claim on the lower half of my body.

As a survivor of multiple sexual assaults, I know what it feels like to have my body be the only thing someone wants from me. I know what it feels like to have the word “pu**y” tattooed on an experience. I will never reclaim that word. I don’t want anything to do with it. 

I did love this album though. I loved how Sza told every story she wanted. She is not a bubblegum human. She is not a manic pixie dream girl. She is not ugly and she is not beautiful. She is a person living and moving through life feeling all of it. This is what music should be even if the lyrics made me physically uncomfortable. 

That’s good though. It allowed me to think about why I was so uncomfortable. 

Now here we sit, you and me, talking about words that have the power to cut a person’s legs off along with her belly, leaving her reproductive organs alone on a bed waiting for people to decide what their most important purpose is. 

If women had coined the euphemisms for our own genitalia, what would they be? But also, why do we need euphemisms? Why do I feel crass spelling out, “vagina?” What has society done to me to get me to this place of repulsion from the miracle that is my body when it is outside the context of sexual pleasure? 

Top tracks: 

Go Gina, Garden (Say It Like Dat), Broken Clocks, Normal Girl, 20 Something