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This transcript represents 11 minutes from the beginning of a 40-minute chat I had with ‘K’, a heterosexual, Black British Caribbean woman, (cis), who, at the time of interview in July 2021 was 31, single and living in London.

In this extract, we discuss how much of an impact the sexualised lyrics in pop songs can have on our conception of sexual behaviour, and how peer pressure can impact the desire to begin engaging in partnered sex.

Almaz – 02:39mins
So, I really liked your answer for “anything that you can remember that sparked your desires”.

‘K’ – 02:46mins
[Chuckles]

Almaz – 02:47mins
So, if we can just talk about the music element of it. So you wrote: “the music I listened to was very much sexual and maybe at the time I wasn’t aware of what all the sexual innuendos meant, but I knew listening made me and my body feel different”. So if you’d just like to go a bit more in-depth about that.

‘K’ – 03:08mins
It’s really interesting. The journey now with some of the things I’m going back to, particularly thinking about how Black women are sexually socialised. And there was something I was reading the other day that spoke about how, predominantly hip hop and R&B videos were more sexual than other videos…

Almaz – 03:28mins
Yeah.

‘K’ – 03:28mins
…what can I say, like, rock or pop. Like, obviously there was, kind of, like, the mainstream sexualisation, but predominantly music made by Black creatives seemed to be more sexually explicit…

Almaz – 03:39mins
Mmmm.

‘K’ – 03:39mins
…the videos and music were very sexual. Very charged. Topless. Naked. All of it. You know, we saw it on TV and become so used to the sexualised content. And I think that really changes what you see and receive as a young person. So yeah,  definitely felt, like, you know, I think about things like… Let me think. I’m tryna think of a song. I think ‘Backstreet’, they’ve got a song. I can’t remember. How does it go now?

Almaz – 04:02mins
As in ‘Blackstreet’?

‘K’ – 04:05min
‘Blackstreet’, yeah, one of their songs about… I need to find it [laughs] It’s in my head, but I can’t remember how it goes! But, basically, it’s just talking about having sex at the club. And I was singing that, as a young thirteen-year-old. But I had no idea what I was talking about.

Probably my friends didn’t know either. But only as an adult, you sit back and reflect, like “Whoa, what was going on here?!” I was talking about grinding in the club. Like “Pretty Ricky, grind on me.” But we do these, like, different things that are really adult things. Not even adult things, but I think it’s older than what I am. And I think there’s also something about the adultification of young Black children, which really impacts how we see and receive information.

We’re looking at these elders, and the music is not for us because we’re not of age to officially consent, but we’re engaging in it because we are attracted to them [the boys making music] and we’re attracted to the music and it makes us feel good. But yeah, it’s not actually for our age, we shouldn’t really be engaging in it.

[laughs]

Almaz – 05:04mins
So, it’s very interesting that you should say that because I’ve just been… I just wrote some stuff for this chapter just a couple of weeks ago about the Mis-Teeq song ‘One Night Stand’…

‘K’  – 05:18mins
Yeah!

Almaz – 05:18mins
…and that came out when I was 12. However, me and my friends used to discuss the meaning of that song, and we knew what it meant. So you know how you say the songs you were listening to that you engaging with you didn’t know what they meant. I think maybe we don’t have a full capacity to grasp some of the things because we’ve not experienced them, but we do intrinsically know what it means.

‘K’– 05:51mins
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think, to an extent you know that is something… It reminds me of, you know, being in primary school, and somebody in my class would write ‘s’, ‘e’, ‘x’ on a piece of paper. And everybody would be “Ooh, you’re bad! You’ve wrote ‘s’, ‘e’, ‘x’”. We don’t even know what it means. We just know that it’s a bad word. Or it’s not a bad word, like, for a younger group you shouldn’t… yeah.

So, I think, yeah, we kind of have an understanding that it means something that we’re not allowed to explore. We know that much.

Almaz – 06:20mins
Mmm.

‘K’– 06:20mins
I think what you mentioned about ‘One Night Stand’, that’s very interesting, because I love that song. I love loads of songs. Even in Craig David’s ‘Seven Days’ he talks about meeting a girl and having sex with her within seven days. On the first night, they went out. The second night, they had dinner or whatever.

Almaz – 06:36mins
Mmmm.

‘K’– 06:36mins
But, you know, telling us stories about adult things that they’re doing.

Almaz – 06:42mins
Yeah.

‘K’– 06:42mins
But for us as young children, it’s just fun and it seems harmless. And it’s interesting because I think, even a lot of my music that I actually like is Dancehall. 

Almaz – 06:55mins
Yeah.

‘K’– 06:55mins
And I never understood why Mum didn’t want me to listen to that in my house.

Almaz – 06:57mins
Yeah.

‘K’– 06:57mins
I just thought, “Oh in Jamaica, this is the music that we listened to”. But a lot of it is sexually charged and has a lot of [scoffs] indecent exposure and raw words, like, you know, ‘pussy’, ‘vagina’.

It’s just talking really raw about sex. But when I go to Jamaica you hear kids as young as, like, 11, saying these words aloud. I understand there’s an older generation who feel dancehall music today is rude and slack. Whereas the older stuff like reggae was quite political and resistant. So there is a generational divide.

Almaz – 07:35mins
Mmmm.

‘K’– 07:35mins
I think there’s something powerful when people use language to reclaim parts of their body and identity. They call it something like ‘radical rudeness’, it’s a concept where you use your body, or words and phrases related to the body to address the taboo nature of sex and reclaim those spaces. It links to ideas and thoughts about sex, genitalia and the politics of it all. So, yeah, I think there’s so much to be said about music and everything. Yeah.

Almaz – 08:03mins
Yeah. Okay, so, when you first had sex with someone else did you feel ready? Or did you feel pressure from society; not necessarily pressured in the moment?

‘K’ – 08:25mins
Hmmm. I’m not sure. I think I was 18 or 19 when I first had sex.

Almaz – 08:30mins
Yeah.

‘K’ – 08:30mins
A lot older than a lot of my friends. And they were all saying to me. “Oh, what are you waiting for?” [laughs]

“Come on, just get it done”, “Hurry up.” That kind of thing [chuckles].

It was really stupid. So yeah, kind of the pressure of feeling like this is something everyone is doing and I’m supposedly missing out… I never wanted to ‘fit in’. But they wanted me to ‘fit in’ and talk to me about the things that they would do in the bedroom, which I couldn’t care less about. Of course, I was attracted to boys and I, thought they were very attractive, but I just didn’t really want to have sex with them. I didn’t really think about that, like, yeah. But yeah, from society for sure.

I think there’s an expectation, and even sometimes the boys that you see there’s, like, expectation based on the body that I have. I think they see a big woman with big breasts and a bum and they think, “How you not using this to do stuff?!”

Almaz – 09:20mins
Yeah.

‘K’ – 09:20mins
“What do you mean you’re a virgin?!” So, the current expectations of me as a Black woman, is that I’m naturally going to be sexually promiscuous, just because of the body that I have. And that was so far from the truth. And not that it’s a bad thing or a good thing it’s just a reality, and I think, you know, there’s not really much space and time given to people to really develop their own sexual confidence and self-esteem, and, you know, make the choices, absent of society’s pressures.

Almaz – 09:46mins
Mmm.

‘K’ – 09:46mins
Whether it’s like your family circle. Not particularly for me, but I’ve heard that other boys… I remember meeting a boy when I was on this, like, music course in school, and he was a lot younger than me. And he… I think he was in… we was in Year 9. So, he must have been in, like, Year 7 or Year 8. But he just mentioned there was so much pressure on him as the youngest boy in his family, just to have sex.

Almaz – 10:06mins
Eurgh. You’re 12!

‘K’ – 10:07mins
Like, what are you talking about. You haven’t even got public hair yet, I’m sure! Like…

[both laugh]

‘K’ – 10:13mins
But there was just like, this camaraderie of, like, “Oh boys are gonna be boys and they’re gonna to have sex”, and “it’s better to get it done younger, so you’re better when you’re older.”

Where for girls, it’s not the same, like, we get so much stick if we have sex. Any time. You know, like, if you have sex young, you’re a problem. If you have sex with too many people you’re a problem. If you have sex… you know, all these different, like, variations of discrimination, depending. So, yeah.

Almaz – 10:38mins
Ah yeah, so relating to that. You mentioned your body shape, and body type. At what stage…  I mean, did you notice that at the time? And at what stage… Sorry, that’s come out incoherently. Right.

‘K’ – 11:00mins
[chuckles] Don’t worry.

Almaz – 11:02mins
Let me just go back to what you said.

‘K’ – 11:05mins
[chuckles]

Almaz – 11:09mins
Okay. So you said: “and there’s an expectation based on the body that I have”. And at what age did you notice that expectation?

‘K’ – 11:19mins
Erm, I remember a girl in my year, who was quite popular. And she was with another popular boy in our area, and he said to her, “[REDACTED]’s thick! Like, wow!” As a 15-year-old, you don’t really… 13, even 13 to 15, I didn’t really… I knew what he was saying, but also felt like I’m not even looking at you to like you but you have an expectation of the body, like, I’m not even thinking about my body in that way, but I think then I realised that boys see me differently, and so do girls.

Almaz – 11:58mins
Mmmm.

‘K’ – 11:58mins
And it was almost a thing where she was telling me to, like, maybe celebrate me, but also kind of think, “Ah, he’s looking at you. Like, he’s my man.”

Almaz – 12:07mins
Mmmm.

‘K’ – 12:07mins
“Why is he looking at your body?” Kinda thing, like [scoffs]. So at the same time, same place, it’s like, almost like a double-edged sword. Like, he’s saying that you have a great body, but I’m also jealous of this great body that you have because I’m really slim; I don’t have a big bum, big breasts. So it’s a really weird place to be. And also on top of that, I wasn’t even thinking about boys in that way. Like, I wasn’t even thinking about being sexual, I was just happy to see attractive boys that was it.

Almaz – 12:55mins
Yeah.

‘K’ – 11:20mins
I wasn’t thinking about anything further than that.

[laughs]

I was probably too immature or too silly to really think about, “Oh, we should be in a bed together,” Or, you know… That was not on my mind. Yeah.

Almaz – 12:44mins
Yes. In fact, I’m really glad that you brought that up because it’s something that I had meant to be thinking about, but I got side-tracked. But this fact that children and teens have a very… you can, and do, project your desires, onto people.

‘K’ – 13:06mins
Mmm.

Almaz – 13:06mins
But I think sometimes wider society assumes that you want to act on them. And maybe you think you do. But actually, you don't really.

‘K’ – 13:18mins
Yeah. I think you’re right, exactly.

[CONVERSATION CONTINUES FOR ANOTHER 25 MINUTES]

[Image description: White speech box with black border shadows. Black text ‘As part of my research for my book, I’m running an anonymous online sexuality survey’. Dark orange text ‘bit.ly/ao_sexsurvey’. Black text ‘Anyone over 18 can fill it in, wherever you are in the world.’ Picture of coloured rectangles placed at angles with black border shadows. White text ‘Do you have guilt or shame around desire, sex or pleasure? Why/why not? Do you support compulsory sex and relationships education?’ on top rectangle]

The sexuality survey is still open, so in the meantime please do fill in/share it as all of the responses are helping me make connections between the ways in which we’ve been socialised and our relationship to sexuality.

Take Survey

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The ‘POSTSCRIPT’ segment for paid subscribers will drop on Wednesday 12 October. To receive this extra mailout, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription.

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I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.
Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. 

Recent work:
– For Vice, I chatted to tattoo artist Tanya Buxton about the technique she uses to ink realistic nipples for trans people and mastectomy survivors.
– I was brought in to edit the latest publication from the UK’s leading race equality think tank, Runnymede Trust: ‘Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency’, created in collaboration with Greenpeace UK.

Available for commissions. Info via almazohene.com/contact-faqs.

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