Lipstick Prophesy

on Miss Angelou, mistressy and refusing absolution

The women in my family are known for prophesy. Call it God, or the universe, the essence or the source— no matter the word it’s an undeniable truth that our matriarchs are given foresight. This, gift, as it’s often framed, is credited to God (the Southern Baptist one to be exact) and is something I largely felt for years had skipped me.

All the qualities He liked in our women: humility, selflessness, motherliness, piousness, etc., couldn’t find a home in me so after some time, I assumed that meant “His gifts” hadn't either. As I aged, I divested from the church and reunited with my ancestral practices only to find out that I hadn't been skipped, I was just looking for proof in all the wrong places.

When I was in high school, for my AP Lit class, I had to write a paper analyzing a poem. I could pick any poem I wanted, which was exciting because I was voraciously writing poetry and in love with a teen slam poet at the time-the most sapphic thing right? Everyone in my class was looking through the classics (read: European) and I wanted to honor Blackness and womanhood. I’d decided that I’d pick a poet, and the first poem in whatever book of theirs I owned would be the one I’d base my paper off of. That book, that poem, would prove my gift of prophesy.

On August 12, 1971, Maya Angelou published her debut, “Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie”—it was gifted to me by my librarian, and in the first act was this—

At only 16, I couldn’t possibly know all of what that poem was speaking to, how vulnerable it was under the conveniently aloof tone. I even remember having a conversation about it with the teachers who ran my Yearbook club, they couldn't understand why I needed to write about this poem, what I could have to say about infidelity for 6 pages at 16 years old. To be frank, I didn’t have a good answer then either. Still, something in me, large and consuming, divine even just needed to examine this theme.

I spent hours marking up pages on what 63 words could mean in 1971 and what they meant in 2014 and why those words were important for Black women to say at a time when they were being told to only say perfect things, if they must be heard at all. I wish I still had that paper so I could feel that passion again, see how viciously I protected the honor of a woman relegated to a label I would become apt at assuming.

For me, it all happened under the cover of a balmy summer night. There was a chance meeting, then a coffee shop date, then a tryst in a bank parking lot followed by years of history unfolding in letters commonly read as: Mistress. The irony of it all feels cosmic. In the turn of a couple years, I’d go from defending mistresses on paper, to becoming one.

After such a confession, we’re used to disclaimers and specificities. The “I didn’t know he was married!” or “He told me he was leaving her and we’re in love” stories acting as cushions, excuses for the inexcusable. I have no such tale. I wasn't hoodwinked or lovestruck before a bomb was dropped on me- I was just 18, thousands of miles away from home and feeling entitled to my desires. The truth is simple really, I wanted this married man, so I had him, and I was so good at having him, I had more married men after him, for years to come.

I was what I jokingly referred to myself as, “a professional mistress”- a title I would later assume fully through Pro-Domme work. This is no secret of mine, rather a portion of my past I confront publicly and often. On every media form I have, it comes up eventually that I was in various relationships with married or monogamously committed men, sometimes with overlap, and loved it. In hindsight, I don’t think I actually loved them being married or in monogamously committed relationships per se, but I did love the freedom the relationship structure(s) gave me, how for all intents and purposes, I could still move as a single, autonomous being. I suspect the polyamory was begging to leap out at that point.

Jokes and spiritual prophesy aside, there’s a real reason telling these stories are important. It’s not because we’d drop dead without the salacious bits of stranger’s past or that these experiences are novel, but rather, I haven’t seen anyone talk about infidelity with no goal of forgiveness in mind. When most discuss their past as a mistress, it’s to seek social absolution, get the clean slate this transgression has been denying them and that’s just not my intention. Odd as it may seem, I believe we lose a huge opportunity not exploring the discomfort folks like me, disagreeable mistresses if you will, bring up. I’m vocal about my stories because I want to force us into more fruitful conversations about sexual immorality and the role we allow it to play in our lives.

There are a lot of ways we can discuss what my affair(s) were, why they happened, and the lessons I gained from it, but I’m rather confident that’s not what people care about. We’re taught that’s the least interesting part of the story. And though I’ve tried to tackle this in the past, (I’ll link an old blog post here), I want to expound on it further because there’s so much depth to infidelity, sexual immorality and how it relates to crime and punishment.

Historically speaking, some of the first laws we know existed were about how to manage infidelity, rape and unapproved marriages (spoiler alert: all the options were shit). From murdering your spouse and their lover, to taking the extra marital partner as a second wife against her will (I wish I were lying), we feel uniquely entitled to punish offenses against our sexual sensibilities.¹ We yearn for opportunities to be punitive, it’s baked into our culture, especially in the imperial core— the right to punish is ours, and sex has been, for a long time, an easily punishable offense. Putting it simply, there’s never been a time it was okay to be a mistress. And by no means am I attempting to normalize infidelity, let me be clear, but rather, I acknowledge how limited the conversations we have about this kind of “bad sex” are.

And the breadth required to have these difficult chats is narrowing as the world flies into more deeply seated conservative moral panics about… well everything, but namely sex, and all folks can fit under its umbrella. The reason we say sex is the canary in the coal mine is because it naturally converges with most (if not all) issues and illuminates the values society holds dearly—it’s a map for what we should be actively challenging. These large systems that run the world, like neoliberal Capitalism, White Supremacy, (also White) Cisheteropatriarchy etc. obstruct our natural propensity for interconnectedness with material based metrics that thrive in isolation and hyper independence. Much of our culture asserts that we are what we own (people included) which means we don’t have to honor what hasn’t been possessed. It’s one of the many reasons we have such active scarcity mindsets.² If all you can do is own or be owned, you’re constantly afraid of losing.

This fear becomes a silver bullet in conversations about infidelity. The insults “whore, home wrecker, slut, hussy” exist for reasons beyond misogyny and whorephobia, they’re social signifiers. Fixed identities you’ve been given permission to not just disdain, but project onto with impunity. In a world of viciously guarded binaries, knowing who is safe to hate is as valuable as knowing who’s safe to love. And one learns quickly it’s very easy to hate people who cheat. The conversations about infidelity remain reductive because people who have been unfaithful are never being spoken with, but rather, spoken at. And this is a phenomenon I’ve experienced and observed personally. Any curiosity that I was met with never centered my personhood or acknowledged I had a complete human experience that prompted my decisions just as everyone else, but rather hyper fixated on what was assumed to be my innate moral deficits. The questions sounded something like this: what made you do it? how could you do that to someone? what if it happens to you? aren’t you worried about karma? did you get caught? does sisterhood mean nothing to you? would you ever tell the wife/wives? no seriously, how could you?!

After a few years of answering these questions in earnest, I took a step back. I realized not only were the questions endless, but they reinforced a stringent understanding of human connection and intentions. Placed “mistress” (and broadly speaking, men) on one half of the scales, and wives (and broadly speaking womanhood) on the other. The transgressions left the interpersonal and became communal slights and thus made all mistresses fair game. If you never got to interrogate or berate the mistress in your story, I would do. I wasn’t the “other woman” to just these men in my story, I was the “other woman” to all of them, and as such, I was being made to answer for every mistresses’ “crimes”. As if the root of our motivations stemmed from the same place, inherently. Or we had a club that met every week to discuss the new reason we’d use when asked: what made you do it?

It’s a strange space to occupy. One where you can never apologize enough to people you hadn’t personally harmed. And even if you exhibit an acceptable amount of remorse, you are forever regarded as a morally corrupt individual incapable of shedding your past. When the options for discussing infidelity are laid out as one being a girl’s girl or a guy’s girl, the underlying message is simple: good girls can go bad, but bad girls can never be good. It reminded me a lot of The Crucible, y’know that scene with Governor Danforth discussing the trials and he says…

You must understand, sir, that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time—we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it.

TLDR; You’re either with God or with the Devil, and once you’ve been with the Devil, you can never be with God.

It’s an impossible place to be, especially if you’ve considered yourself all this time, a girl’s girl! For some unknown reason [white christian nationalism], we’ve assigned so much value to sexual immorality that we’ve effectively removed a path to recovery for prior “offenders”. Yet, if we take into account the history of infidelity as a criminal offense, the ways we’ve used law to regulate sexually anti-social behavior³ and in what ways we’re comfortable with people being imperfect, seeing how we got here isn’t difficult. Despite individuals like Esther Perel making careers of examining the complexities of infidelity and the general populous allegedly unpacking their relationship to carcerality and punition in the last few years, there’s a dark underbelly when cheating has been exposed. One that permits people to suspend their principles when an intimate affront against them has occurred.

If I were better read and smarter, I could make an astute observation about how most can’t conceptualize seeing the end to Capitalism or the PIC (Prison Industrial Complex) because they actively apply the values of these systems willingly in their personal relationships. Folks get a boo and become HUGE cops & capitalist! I’ve made paltry attempts at discussing this in the past (in a roundabout way), see below.

But I tend to fall short. Truthfully, it’s difficult to explain things exclusively in the theoretical or abstract that you know manifest in the physical world. As opposed to seeing infidelity as proof of the irreparably selfish spirit of humanity, I reckon a shift is required, one that encourages us to hold people accountable for harms committed while acknowledging no one is above them. The conversation of abolition does not start or stop at police and prisons but rather must include the ways we’re eager to punish each other outside of the overtly carceral systems available. That cannot be done if we’re unable to have earnest conversations with people who betray our trust.

I readily acknowledge my view on this topic and related matters have been altered by life experience and organizing in various spaces but there seems to be an acute issue that the internet exacerbates related to social snafu’s such as infidelity. One where the aims of building communities have been sanitized to mean only being in community with people you like or enjoy the company of which is profoundly untrue and impossible when enacting sizable changes. This is not to say it’s necessary to accommodate folks who’ve remorselessly abused you or actively wish to harm you, but recognizes that everyone you may come to rely on or exist alongside of don’t have to be your friend. Like it’s real easy to cast people to the wayside on the web but IRL, it’s not a great idea.

And that’s my foundational concern, that the visceral reaction a lot of us have towards sexually anti-social behavior will (and has) prevented organizing and community building efforts from flourishing. That people see infidelity and other forms of sexually subversive behavior as overarching indictments on people’s character and capacity to both repair relationships (or reconcile harms) as well as exist in society healthily. There’s no path forward if the belief that humanity and thus people are mutable doesn’t extend towards folks who’ve cheated and those who aid and abet them.

The reason I’m rejecting social absolution is because it implies that harms caused are universal and must be answered for eternally, even if reconciliation and repair has occurred with the actual harmed parties! These days, anyone asking me to apologize for my adulterous past have no connection to the men in question I was a mistress for but instead, need a stand-in for their own betrayals, feel empowered to make me (or any mistress) villains by proxy which doesn’t promote much healing if you ask me. What it does though is strip people down to these identifiers (mistress, cheater, liar, etc.) and ask us to abandon their fullness entirely in favor of dehumanizing them with ardor.

What Maya Angelou (who similarly was a sex worker prior to her writing career) and I experienced as mistresses were complex, and morally dubious, but human nonetheless. Though, it will rarely be remembered that way. I suppose that’s why I wrote that paper arguing in favor of her humanity, for my teacher (who was not getting paid nearly enough for that shit) to see that Miss Angelou was simply an imperfect woman dealing with men who could love her here and the ability to be loved in fragments of time made her no less deserving of subsequent dignity, respect or adoration than the next person. I asserted that it’s possible to hold people’s feet to the fire without burning them off completely. All sentiments I still carry today.

When I told one of my current partners about the mistressy⁴, there was a pause. I’d prepared this speech in my head, one that felt accountable and grounded without groveling. After relaying it, I could feel the sweat bead down my back and hands, worried incessantly that I couldn’t ever move past my past. That it was a dormant virus that I could only contain, never be cured of. And though they took it well and chose to pursue a connection with me regardless, I know that concern of mine will continue to be confronted.

In every conversation and confession is the possibility that I’ll be charged off as a lost cause, damned to hell for my sins and to some degree, I’ve made peace with that. If I (and Miss Angelou) represent the incurable ails of society, then so be it—there’s worse company to have. My only hope is that those after us have more access to restorative practices so when they inevitably screw up something, they won’t spend their whole social life (or dating history) answering for it. That day is on the horizon folks, trust me— I hold the gift of prophesy, remember?

1. Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz//

https://bookshop.org/p/books/sex-and-punishment-four-thousand-years-of-judging-desire-eric-berkowitz/17282198?ean=9781619021556

2. Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Calcida Jethà//

https://bookshop.org/p/books/sex-at-dawn-how-we-mate-why-we-stray-and-what-it-means-for-modern-relationships-cacilda-jetha/7323913?ean=9780061707810

3. I personally define anti-social behavior to be activity or behavior in opposition of the values of the dominant culture. In this case sexually anti-social behavior is defined as sexually rites, activity or orientations that defy the values of the hegemonic sexual culture.

4. An unofficial term I use to describe being a mistress in the “other woman” context.