Fass.
For decades and even now, for black America that single misspelled and oft-mispronounced word conjures a litany of vicious stereotypes. Strip away the ill-formed enunciation and the word becomes “fast.” The connotation and the stigma, however, remain.
Fass, you see, is a gender-specific pejorative term meaning a girl is intentionally demonstrating the carnal behaviors reserved for a woman beyond her years. The issue is further exacerbated if a child experiences early signs of puberty and develops physically.
Pre-pubescent girls are not immune. A child, even as young as 8 or 9, can be accused of dressing “provocatively” or “switching” her hips in order to attract the sexual attention of grown men.
Fass is nothing more than a synonym for whore. Nothing more than a polite calling card, a proverbial welcome mat plastered on a child’s reputation that invites public scorn, objectification or, worse, tacit approval for the physical sexual exploitation of minors. The gentler sounding “fass” allows the person using it to cloak him or herself in innocence while engaging in one of the most vile forms of victim shaming imaginable.
In the most horrific incidences, this intra-cultural “red-lining” has been historically used to malign and silence victims of molestation and rape. Its usage is designed to assuage any notion of guilt for the man who commits these vile acts, reassigning the blame to the young girl that he has victimized. Sadly, fass is an epithet most frequently weaponized and hurled by older women—women who have an emotional and/or physical stake in the outcome.
Tragically, the necessity of protecting children from abuse is sometimes overwhelmed by the desire to protect a husband or boyfriend and, by extension, the relationship. In those instances, whatever financial, emotional or physical benefit she enjoys effectively trumps any responsibility she might feel to her child. Blaming the child can be written off to the fates– a curse from the heavens above– while blaming your significant other is an immediate indictment of your own failed choices.
To be clear, this is not a new phenomenon, nor is this confined to the immediacy of family. There is no more prominent example of this than the case of Robert Kelly. Otherwise known as chart-topping R&B recording artist R. Kelly, when he stood accused of engaging in sex with minors it was his fans—many of them women– (and a jury) that came running to his rescue.
In recent weeks, I was aghast to see that Kelly has been on a bit of a comeback tour and has been featured on at least two national television broadcasts—Saturday Night Live and the American Music Awards—alongside Lady Gaga. Kelly and Gaga simulated sexual acts on stage, during a live rendition of “Do What U Want” on both shows.
However, it was the AMA performance that left me with the most stridently offensive imagery. Moments after “President Kelly” exits the stage, childhood photographs of Gaga playing the piano danced across the video screen behind her.
Enter #FastTailedGirls.
A Twitter chat, launched by feminist bloggers Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden of @HoodFeminism and who post individually as @Karnythia and @thewayoftheid, laid bare some of the most disturbing pathologies and their ruinous impacts. @FeministaJones, a New-York-based writer who often contributes to Salon.com and other digital publications, lifted the veil on her own life to fuel the discourse with some of the most compelling and personally painful posts.
One look under the hashtag #FastTailedGirls reveals a minefield of agonizing personal stories, as well as vestiges of the misogynistic victim shaming that continues to fan the flames of devastation reeking havoc on so many of our communities.
Our collective torment was matched with defiant calls for solidarity. “If we don’t stick up for our girls, and stop blaming them for the actions of grown men, who will? SMH. #FastTailedGirls,” actress and voice-over artist Reagan Gomez tweeted.
Then there were those who voiced their ire at being “excluded” from the conversation, those who found the discussion too narrow. For white women who joined the thread, the proverbial tent was deemed too small to account for tragedies unfolding in the broader populace. It was as if we needed a 140-character permission slip to speak frankly about a culturally relevant term that is indicative of a larger set of dynamics at work– a term they had never heard, one unique to our history.
Certainly, the black community does not own a monopoly on child exploitation and victim shaming. Girls of every walk of life, every ethnicity and socio-economic background are targeted. And all too often, when these children seek safe harbor with a female caregiver— whether a mother, an aunt, or a grandmother — they find scorn rather than solace.
For us, the roots stretch back as far and flow as deep as the Atlantic Ocean when the first African women and girls were brought ashore, enslaved and re-imaged as hyper-sexualized creatures. Those stereotypes were planted and flourished through the ages, resulting in a plethora of pathologies still at work—including earlier incidences of sexual activity. Then too, I believe, it feeds human trafficking and child sexual exploitation. However, in addition to the inherent and life-altering mental health issues, the implications on early teenage pregnancy rates are more than clear.
Thanks, in part, to a more aggressive public health policy that includes the proliferation of sex education and more pervasive use of birth control, pregnancy among teenagers in the U.S. have been quietly dropping over the last 20 years. “The short answer is that it is a combination of less sex and more contraception,” Bill Albert, the chief program officer of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told TIME magazine.
That’s the good news.
But the statistics among younger teens girls are damning. Pregnancy rates, while declining for most teens, are rising sharply among younger teens. Sexual activity among teens age 10 to 14 is increasing at alarming rates. And for black girls those numbers are even higher. It is no coincidence that, given the lower rate of contraception usage among younger teens– especially in impoverished communities where cost and limited sex education are factors—unintended pregnancy is also more prevalent.
More damning still is that nearly 40 percent of all children born to mothers who are 15 and younger are fathered by men between the ages of 20 and 29. According to Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing reproductive and sexual health among adolescents, the age gap is usually 5 to 10 years.
The social and financial costs are extraordinary. Those young mothers and their children are more likely to become dependent on welfare, drop out of high school and engage in illicit drug use. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 50 percent of teen mothers earn a high school diploma by age 22. Their children are more likely to struggle academically, have more health problems, be incarcerated at some time during adolescence, give birth as a teenager, and face unemployment as young adults.
“It takes one trifling “man” to impregnate a child, then abandon her to raise the baby on her own. But she gets shamed? #FastTailedGirls,” I tweeted.
In a study reported by Advocates for Youth, “nearly 66 percent reported non-voluntary sexual activity; 44 percent reported having been raped. The average age of first rape was 13.3, with the rapist’s average age being 22.6.”
“About 74 percent of women who had sexual intercourse before age 14 and 60 percent of those who had sex before age 15 report having had sex involuntarily at some point in their lives.”
It is time to break this cycle, time to break the silence. It is time that we stop shaming children and stop celebrating those who deliver that harm. It is time to put the onus where it belongs—on the men who perpetrate these crimes and the people who protect them.
Editor’s Note: This has been a #breakingBLACK column. Goldie Taylor is a featured Grio columnist and her #breakingBlack columns will regularly appear every Monday. Follow Goldie Taylor on Twitter at @GoldieTaylor, and join the discussion at @theGrio with the hashtag#BreakingBlack.