Is Your Sex IQ Higher Than a 5th Grader | via NewsOne

As a teenager, I lived for conversations about sex. Primarily because I was a saint by force growing up in the late 1990s, and my folks wouldn’t have it any other way. Who needed a chastity belt when I lived in one?  My folks lived out in the country, never left the house for more than two hours, had bars on the windows, and blocked off the house’s bedrooms. I couldn’t get a dude in and out if I tried.

But I digress.

My discussions with my teenage friends mostly took cues from the great lovers of our time – Jodeci. Silk. Dru Hill. Ginuwine. Lil Kim. We swapped stories that often mimicked whatever R&B crooner was hot at the moment. Or whatever was on BET Uncut.

We often argued about the best ways of finally having sex or what we called “getting it in,” albeit safety and STDs often took a backseat to the actual deed.  Becoming or getting someone pregnant often ended the conversation.  Many of my male friends, however, often offered the tried and true technique that “their boy” used.

Intrigued, we’d ask them to reveal this secret.

“So what is it? A condom? Two?” I’d ask with a straight face.

“Naw, girl,” he’d say shaking his head with the wisdom of 1000 lovers past.

“It’s an unspoken rule. If you not carrying, you just pull out.”

Um, what?

Which is the same reaction I had when a friend of mine sent me a link to the song “She Said Don’t Cum in Me.” You’d think this joint was a spoof sketch from Dave Chappelle or The Boondocks.

A young woman soulfully croons the song’s title while the “rapper” spins a tale about “bottom bitches” and his bag of sexual tricks.  The video had bikinis, beaches, bass, and candles. Yup, this is a perfectly fine example of a safe sex public service announcement if I ever did see and hear one.

Here’s what I don’t understand, folks.  With all the scary shit surrounding sexual diseases and teenage pregnancy in the United States, is there really room for songs like this? Even scarier: these artists don’t need the radio to transmit this crap anymore. You got WorldStar, YouTube, and Twitter.  I would say MySpace but…well, okay. . . Myspace. More importantly, you have a technologically savvy generation of youth.

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Is Bank the New Black? | via NewsOne

In this moment of history, how are we defining blackness?

African Americans and whites alike tackle this question, often in attempts to cancel out each other’s interpretations. There have been documentaries about what it means to be black in America. Movies directed. Songs sung. Countless books written about it. One common recurrence in our ongoing contemplation of what it means to be black, however, is the reflection of the cultural moment at hand.

For past generations of blacks, kernels of racial identity were often embedded in Jim Crow and the struggle to be acknowledged as human.

Here are a few manifestations of blackness from the Black Identity family tree:
–Nigger Black existed during slavery.
–Reconstruction and Turn of the 20th Century Black lived when African American bodies were mercilessly lynched out of desperation to maintain a white supremacist social structure.
–Renaissance Black dominated the late teens up to the 1930s. African American and Afro-Caribbean people retaliated against Jim Crow through writing and music to shape an independent definition of blackness in America.
–Existential black was around in the 1940s and 1950s because authors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin questioned the invisibility of black bodies in a racially prejudiced world.
–Raise your fist in honor of Nationalist Black. He pummeled his way into the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s because activists like

Huey P. Newton, Charles Hamilton (not the rapper), and Stokely Carmichael chopped Jim Crow in the throat. Nationalist Black advocated that being Black in a White America that sees us as inferior can kick rocks.

Now that those visible obstacles of racial prejudice are dissolving, how do we as African Americans gauge an authentic black experience?

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What Nicki Minaj Means to Black Women| via NewsOne

I’m not a fan of Nicki Minaj. Yeah, I said it. Her voice and “characters” already took my last nerve. But with her much anticipated freshman release Pink Friday dropping November 22, Minaj is in the mouths of fans and haters alike.

I’m not concerned here, however, with Minaj’s lyricism or talent. I’m interested in what Minaj’s multiple identies suggest about women in hip-hop.

During the 2010 BET Hip Hop Awards, DJ Khaled introduced self-proclaimed entertainer Minaj as “Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj, and Nicki Minaj.” As Minaj began to speak, she significantly altered her voice five times to show her “multiple personas.” People cheered.

Whether in the capacity of video models or (f)emcees, women in hip-hop are so underrepresented that they are always fighting against the current. In the powerful (and long overdue) documentary My Mic Sounds Nice old school artists like Roxanne Shante, Salt-N-Pepa, MC Lyte, and Yo Yo talked about the need to lyrically keep their game up. Battling for them was a way to be acknowledged, heard, and visible.

Back in the day, women rappers’ worth was proved by their freestyle form instead of their physical one. Unfortunately, as time marched on, femcees rapping off the top of the dome dwindled to spitting about giving it. Hide your Sprite cans and two liters.