I received three pieces of mail last week. A US Weekly with Diddy on the cover, a book called The Game at Its Best, and a 2002 denim Baby Phat Jumpsuit that I bought on eBay. The jumpsuit is one I wore into the ground as a teenager in the early 2000s. Diddy’s US Weekly headline reads: “Diddy: His Life in Prison and Bid for Freedom.” The cover of The Game at Its Best features my first real “boyfriend,” and federally incarcerated sex trafficker Daquan Sawyer dressed in full pimp regalia, surrounded by girls. The “game” referenced in the title is pimping, and the author, P-Child, is Daquan Sawyer. He is currently serving a 50-year sentence for sex trafficking minors using psychological manipulation and physical force. He predominantly preyed on young girls, often teenage runaways like I was. At least the denim jumpsuit still looks great on me. It’s the one wayward piece of joy left in the flood of memories that consumed me when I started reading the book and discovered I am in it by name.
My discovery of Daquan’s book, the potential of Diddy being let out, the continual unearthing of Epstein and friends’ depravity, the justice department’s reckless unredacting of names, photos, and in some cases victim’s addresses, paints a picture of the general ambivalence towards the suffering of women and girls. Daquan’s prison memoir presents itself as fiction, but it reads as a braggadocious retelling of his life and crimes. He spared me the indignity of using my last name or a photo of me, but my identity is clear to anyone who knows where I am from, any details of my body, or the intensity with which I loved cigarettes—which he makes a point of several times. He did use more than a few images of other girls and women who are now easily identifiable and maybe even cross-referencable with the court transcripts of his 2011 Federal trial. The women in the photos, some of them still girls at the time of their subjugation and abuse, remain overlooked and unprotected. Revictimization is a popular pastime—look at the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp defamation trial and Cassie’s civil suit against Diddy. After all, who doesn’t love sticking it to a woman who is seen as ‘asking for it’ because what she was asking for was not to be abused and then humiliated publicly for not staying quiet about that abuse?
This has culminated in an immediate need for me to talk about how extreme examples of exploitation and violence are disseminated into every girl’s experience, or more aptly put, intrinsic to the experience of femaleness. Is it any wonder that the failures of feminism are based in the fact that femininity is so wildly hated and disrespected that the only path to power is code-switching to masculine ideals that hold up men as the authority, while women who play to the male gaze are called “women haters”? The current move towards a different brand of feminism, one that incorporates power that is traditionally seen as feminine—therefore bad, or simply a dismissible construct of the patriarchy—is making headway in the culture.
The strong movement towards sex positivity was made manifest in part as a result of the early 2000s’ whimsical embrace of pimp and hoe culture. Fashion-wise, we managed to turn booty shorts and stripper heels into required attire and a show of strength for hot girls. The hot girl trope started to carry more power and less unwilling degradation. How do you think we got incels and the male loneliness epidemic twenty-five years later? Which, I for one am very proud to have been a part of. Women who took back their power in a slutty way put men in their place in a consequential way. Still, this is possible because of the ubiquity of women’s disposability in our culture. What feels like a disconnect between Laguna Beach’s 2004 pimp and hoe party, Diddy’s freak offs, and the annual Pimps and Players Ball is actually a direct line to the public’s acceptance of women’s suffering.
But nothing involving sexism is simple, because “simple” can’t address the underlying hatred of women that drives the inequity to begin with. The rise in no-middle-man porn and sex work that is work, and not human trafficking, is an attempt to claim some of the profit, power, and ownership over our bodies that has been nearly absent throughout history because our power is so little that we don’t even get a say in our own use and abuse. The integration of niche culture into the mainstream has brought us Baby Phat jumpsuits and the now delightfully common elaborate manicures. Lovebombing has become common practice for nerds on internet forums and not just a tactic of the game pimps play on potential money-making teens.
I was 16 when I met Daquan. I was coming out of a nail salon, with gloriously long blue nails complete with dangling charms and rhinestone flourishes. He spotted me and followed me in a car for several blocks until I stopped and spoke to him. His retelling of this story in his book is almost sweet and exactly how I remember it. But outside of our agreement of the events of this predator-prey meet-cute, his version of me is riddled with glaring omissions, lies, and degrading descriptions of how easily he was able to fool and manipulate me. Reading him recount the moment he first suggested I turn tricks for him is devastating in more than a few ways.
He continues to recount my personal heartbreak, writing:
It’s interesting to hear a man who ruined countless girls’ lives and nearly beat me to death say he “felt bad” about anything. It also makes my stomach turn to be referred to as a “good woman.” Most of us know that being a “good woman” just means someone who is serving and protecting the patriarchy, to their own detriment. The bastardization of love as only useful or valued as a service to the system is a thought that devastates me. I have to admit that this line about never being loved the way I loved him is something that multiple partners have said at various times in my life. It doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me feel like I was not meant for this world and that perhaps love itself is too good for the men who inhabit it. There is also a quality of being validated and seen when I read through his mentions of me. I truly don’t have another witness to that time in my life. He isolated me from anyone that came before him and didn’t allow me to form new relationships.
When I left, I never looked back. The satisfaction of having a record of myself is quickly destroyed when he lays out infuriating, inaccurate lies that serve to build his lore as a pimp, including referring to me as his “rich” meal ticket. In reality, I had lived on the streets when I first left home and was taken in by a girlfriend’s mother when I met him. It was his way of making sense of my presence in his life, the girl he didn’t force to turn tricks but still kept around. The more reliable bridge back to my former self is built by the period’s cultural products. Those nails, that hair shine spray, the cheap and tight RAVE white pants, and that iconic Baby Phat jumpsuit.
The niche cultural ephemera from 2000 to 2003 has come to embody the part of me that was unbroken, uninjured, and free. It’s why I ordered that Baby Phat jumpsuit on eBay. I remember working at one of those kiosk-adjacent stores in the mall—with the metal gate and no window lighting across from the nameplate earring place that made my gold-plated Maddy hoop earrings, which I loved and wish I still had. But now I don’t let anyone call me Maddy. I bought that Baby Phat jumpsuit with my employee discount. I recall the long metal pole with the hook at the end that I used to get down similarly branded hot hood girl looks for customers.
Gang colors went like wildfire—blue and grey was a Gangster Disciples staple, and gold and black was a Latin Kings color concept. These regional and culturally specific details of my life as a teenage runaway in some of Chicago’s worst neighborhoods get lost in the overwhelming reality of Daquan’s crimes. I was so convinced of the sanctity of romantic love that I stayed with him even when he would leave me alone for days without food or cigarettes in a stash house-style apartment that I was too scared to leave. This was all out of the playbook of how to turn out your girlfriend. Back then and even now, it shocks me how he calculated his sword through my heart. I was broken early, permanently, and on purpose. These tactics only worked to eroticise mistreatment for my entire life.
The humiliation ritual that finally broke my spirit and served my soul up on a platter for the sake of a man’s pride was the Pimps and Players Ball. It functions as a meat market selling scantily clad young women and girls for the purpose of rewarding the ‘best’ pimp of the year. The men are dressed to the nines in furs and golden canes—we all know the stereotype, but it is very real. The women are in their best hoe attire, but this version of short skirts and glitter isn’t just trafficking accessories—it imagines a way out of the cage. The purpose of their looks is to display them as desirable property, but the theft of the joy of being self-decorated or free in expression is never fully achievable when you are literally not free..The soul dims, and hope sinks to the floor. Your eyes are required to be down, and you follow your daddy in a line. The day I officially left Daquan was the morning after he forced me to go to that year’s ball. My soul could no longer believe he loved me or that any man ever could. In a phrase, I grew up that night.
I want the girl I used to be before Daquan back. I try to coax her back with long drives on California highways wearing strappy neon heels. I think about women like Dolly Parton, Lil Kim, and Pamela Anderson, all of whom embraced the baubles that others saw only as symbols of their exploitation. But what those women are actually doing is embodying their own joy and rescuing their sense of wonder in a world that would rather see them devastated to the point of death. Even if the male gaze gets off on the aesthetics, it doesn’t really serve that purpose. The reality of the patriarchy we all live under makes not appealing to the male gaze an impossibly difficult task that narrows women’s pathways to joy and power further.
The visceral expression and wild bravery of long nails and a mini skirt can help you hold on to your heart regardless of where you are in the cycle of use and abuse that is a painfully real part of girlhood. Our status as property, not people, is in every piece of advice given to women about avoiding rape and staying safe in general. It’s why we are told to say we have a boyfriend to an interested man, rather than say we ourselves are not interested. The first one works; the latter doesn’t. It’s why screaming fire and not rape brings help. We have been property for so long that the idea of being cared for outside that modality is just a hope and a dream. We remain unsafe unless we belong to our husband, dad, or, in this case, daddy, and as I have outlined, all of those roles can be especially unsafe. It’s those personal decorations, the outrageous and outlandish looks that make us feel free while being captive. It points to freedom the way a literal highway alone does.
Some may be offended by the rich white kids of Laguna Beach playing out the fantasy of pimp and hoe culture in a Southern California McMansion. But the wildfire that is co-opting culture, specifically when it’s about gender, isn’t always offensive; it’s a necessary message that points out the realities for us all. That is, if Epstein, Diddy, Trump, and Weinstein didn’t already make the lay of the land clear. The lack of care and accountability should also illustrate the heart of the matter, which is that power is masculinized and hating women is baked into our experience. So what’s the use of knowing the truth and bearing it? It helps us stop blaming women for finding their power and joy where they can. It makes it abundantly clear that our survival is precious, our joy even more so. That feeling that touches freedom is captured through culture that can lead us back to ourselves. Sometimes that’s the ruby red slippers, sometimes it’s a skin-tight jumpsuit, but it’s always what those without heart call aesthetics. Open roads and nameplate hoop earrings are the only way I have ever found, and I know that I am not alone.
The Valentine’s Day following the Pimp’s and Player’s Ball, Daquan thought he could shore up the relationship with one of those impossibly cheap roadside baskets, complete with a teddy bear and bad chocolates. He pushed his way into my apartment and hit me so hard I thought I literally saw stars. I felt like a cartoon character; I felt like a small child—I was a child, and he had groomed me to think he was a man, not a monster. I remember trying to lock myself in the bathroom and him forcing his way in and kicking me while I was on the floor. My neighbor called the cops; they probably saved my life. I did not press charges, which was how domestic violence law worked at that time—the victim chose. Now both parties will be arrested and likely charged, keeping women from calling for help in moments where their life is at risk. I deeply regret not pressing charges. It adds to my survivor’s guilt substantially.
The cops escorted him out, and I spent that night packing everything I could fit into my grey Buick LeSabre with red velour interior. This was my first car; I bought it after Daquan taught me how to drive in a 1970s blue Bonneville that knocked when you turned left. It was raining, and it began to snow as I drove away. The feeling of being free felt better than anything I had experienced in my whole life. Running set me free over and over again. But at some point you can’t run anymore because your pimp ex-boyfriend writes a fucking book. It’s hard to argue with the lessons I have learned about the evil in the hearts of men, but they also created in me a sense that no one could be trusted or relied on to witness me or situate me in place and time. The larger culture; fashion, media, and the history of a physical place, became a replacement for family. I left him with bruises that matched my nails on the day we first met—that feels like the only sense to be made out of the situation.
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