The Secret Lives of Wives.

“"It is easy to tell right from wrong, but the hard part is choosing the wrong that is right." Sawaad Amen Ra


Shem Hotep ("I go in peace").



The Secret Lives of Wives and Why they stray:

With the work place and the Internet, overscheduled lives and inattentive husbands--it’s no wonder more African American women are looking for comfort in the arms of another man. When groups of women get together, especially if they’re mothers and have been married for more than six or seven years, and especially if there’s alcohol involved, the conversation is usually the same. They talk about the kids and work-how stressed they are, how busy and bone tired. They gripe about their husbands and, if they’re being perfectly honest and the wine kicks in, they talk about the disappointments in their marriages.


They do it for love. They do it for sex. They do it to feel beautiful and boost their self-esteem. No, we’re not talking about why women get married, but why women cheat on the men they have married. Female infidelity is not a new phenomenon, but it is a fact of life that many people, including women, don’t want to acknowledge. While the cheating man has long been the subject of boasts, jokes, novels and movies, the unfaithful woman is now getting more attention and scrutiny. And justifiably so.

Where as decades ago, the unfaithful wife was a rarity, an abnormality, today’s missus is more likely to cheat than her predecessors. The first reliable estimate concerning infidelity was made in 1953 by renowned sex researcher Alfred Quinsy, who in his landmark study found that 50 percent of husbands and 26 percent of wives surveyed had cheated by age 40. However, in recent years, women have been catching up to men. A 1997 Ball State University study suggests that young women, those under age 40, are just as likely to commit adultery as men are their age. Among older couples, the stereotype of men being more likely to stray holds true. Sex researchers agree that today more women are committing adultery. At the same time, more and more women are working outside the home alongside men, oftentimes in office environments that are charged with sexual electricity. In addition, some studies show that the more sexual partners a person has before marriage, the more likely she or he is to cheat on a spouse. The reasons women cheat vary considerably.

Some get involved in extramarital affairs because they are lonely, others because they want to escape the monotony of marriage. Still others are motivated to cheat due to revenge after they find lipstick or other telltale signs of their husbands` infidelity. Then there are the selfish, character-flawed women who marry good men who love and take care of them but continue to consort with other men for sexual excitement or for the money and other material goods the men can provide. Where do married women find their boyfriends? At work, mostly. Nearly 60 percent of American women work outside the home, up from about 40 percent in 1964. Quite simply, women intersect with more people during the day than they used to. They go to more meetings, take more business trips and, presumably, participate more in flirtatious water-cooler chatter. If infidelity is an odd game, and then the odds are better now than they used to be that a woman would accidentally bump into someone during the workday that, at least momentarily, interests her more than her husband does. There’s a more subtle point embedded in here as well: women and men bring their best selves to work, leaving their bad behavior and marital resentments at home with their dirty sweatpants. At work, "we dress nicely.

We think before we speak. We’re poised," says Elana Katz, a therapist in private practice and a divorce mediator at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York City. "And many people spend more time out in the world than with their families. I think sometimes people have the idea that [an affair] will protect the marriage." They get a self-esteem boost during work hours and don’t rock the boat at home. "In some paradoxical sense this may be a respite, a little break from the marriage.

Black Fathers.

“"It is easy to tell right from wrong, but the hard part is choosing the wrong that is right." Sawaad Amen Ra


Shem Hotep ("I go in peace").


Shem Hotep ("I go in peace").

“An African proverb is that the flower grows in the ground and does so because of the seed. Men are the seed. The ground is the woman’s body. The flower belongs to the seed, not to the ground.”





Blame the Law and not some Black Fathers.

How could we fail to notice the institutional racism in the treatment of black men within social security? In the present climate of rising gun and drug crime and increasing exclusion rates of black boys from secondary schools, black fathers are often castigated for being poor role models and absentee parents.

Researchers keep telling us that even when the relationship between the two parents has broken down, the father will still be a very big part of the child’s life and his absence or presence will affect how they view themselves. However, for black men who are also welfare claimants, the application of social security law actively undermines their relationships with their children. Why is this?

The law governing divorce courts contains no statutory ban on shared care after parental separation or divorce. Yet when shared care is ordered by the courts on the grounds of welfare needs of the child, or when parents agree to share the care of children, the law relating to Social Security law states: "Only one parent can be treated as responsible for a child".

The Official Nelly Apple Bottoms Model

“"It is easy to tell right from wrong, but the hard part is choosing the wrong that is right." Sawaad Amen Ra


Shem Hotep ("I go in peace").



Ignorance:
(Lat. in, not, and gnarus, knowing)
Ignorance is lack of knowledge about a thing in a being capable of knowing. Fundamentally speaking and with regard to a given object ignorance is the outcome of the limitations of our intellect or of the obscurity of the matter itself. Ignorance also means Nelly.


The Official Nelly Apple Bottoms Model Search kicked off in New York City in July of 2004. The slogan is to liberate and celebrate the natural curves of a woman’s Body. That seems very propitious but it is hard to divorce the Apple Bottom efforts from the public legacy of its creator Cornell Haynes a.k.a. Nelly. Nelly has become a poster boy for misogyny in rap music. Pimping is misogynist and so are Nelly’s videos. It’s an image he worked hard to create by fashioning himself as a "pimp". On his resume he sports a Pimp Energy Drink.

Nelly launched Apple Bottoms, a female clothing line to go with his male label, Vokal. Nelly launched a six-city tour to find "the" Apple Bottoms Girl. It appears that finding this young lady between 20-26 was going to be a yearly adventure. Leslie Ungar, president of the line, said the clothing line is "about the correct fit, in combination with being fashionable. The clothing is designed to fit the woman, rather than the woman trying to fit the clothes." The entire line made its debut in August 2004, and Apple Bottoms jeans sold out in the first two weeks of sales. The idea of jeans designed to hoist the curves of women of color was very appealing considering that most jeans had been designed to hoist a smaller Caucasian frame. Nelly’s national search and road tour, for a 19 -26 year old "big-butt" woman is basically the same type of exploitation that happened with another lesser known 20 year old Black woman named Sara Baartman, who was literally exploited to death. Sara was nicknamed Hottenot Venus. I doubt that Nelly knows her story since he does not even realize the meaning of his own name.

Sara Baartman 1789-1816

Sara Baartman, "the Hottentot Venus", was born in 1789. She was working as a servant in Cape Town when she was noticed by British ship’s doctor William Dunlop, who persuaded her to travel with him to England. We’ll never know what she had in mind when she stepped on board of her own free will a ship for London. But it’s clear what Dunlop had in mind to display her as a "freak", a "scientific curiosity", and make money from these shows, some of which he promised to give to her. No one knows if Dunlop was true to his word and paid Baartman for her "services", but if he did pay her, it wasn’t sufficient to buy herself out of the life she was living. When 20-year-old Sara Baartman got on a boat that was to take her from Cape Town to London in 1810, she could not have known that she would never see her home again. Nor, as she stood on the deck and saw her homeland disappear behind her, could she have known that she would become the icon of racial inferiority and black female sexuality for the next 175 years.


She was put on display in a building in Piccadilly Circus, exciting crowds of working-class white men who viewed her with a mixture of morbid curiosity and malice. Baartman had unusually large buttocks and genitalia, and in the early 1800s Europeans were arrogantly obsessed with their own superiority, and with proving that others, particularly blacks, were inferior and oversexed. Promoters described Baartman`s genitalia as resembling the skin that hangs from a turkey’s throat.


Contemporary descriptions of her shows at 225 Piccadilly, Bartholomew Fair and Haymarket in London say Baartman was made to parade naked along a "stage two feet high, along which she was led by "her keeper" and exhibited like a wild beast, being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he ordered". In 1814 she was taken to France, and became the object of scientific and medical research that formed the bedrock of European ideas about black female sexuality. Once the French got tired of the Baartman show, she was forced to turn to prostitution. She didn’t last the ravages of a foreign culture and climate, or the further abuse of her body. She died in 1816 at the age of 26. The cause of death was given as "inflammatory and eruptive sickness", possibly syphilis. Others suggest she was an alcoholic. Whatever the cause, she lived and died thousands of miles from home and family, in a hostile city, with no means of getting herself home again. But even after her death, Sara Baartman remained an object of imperialist scientific investigation. In the name of Science, her sexual organs and brain were displayed in the Musee de l`Homme in Paris until as recently as 1985.

Several prints dating from the early nineteenth century illustrate the sensation generated by the spectacle of "The Hottentot Venus." A French print entitled "La Belle Hottentot," for example, depicts the South African woman standing with her buttocks exposed on a box-like pedestal. Several figures bend straining for a better look, while a male figure at the far right of the image even holds his seeing-eye glass up to better behold the woman’s body. The European observers remark on the woman`s body: "Oh! God Damn what roast beef!" and "Ah! how comical is nature." The Apple Bottom search has turned Nelly into a modern day William Dunlop. Not because he does not pay these women, but because his only actual motive is to exploit. Reading the Apple Bottom Rules and Regulations, there is a clause stating: "Participants understand and agree that Participants may be required to pose and be photographed or videotaped while clothed, partially clothed, or nude for any campaign associated with the Producers." The winners get "prizes", a modeling contract and a chance to star with Nelly in a music video!