“Pick-Me” Black women: tactical patriarchal femininity in the Black manosphere

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes anti-feminist ("Pick-Me") Black women content creators on YouTube who exist within the Black manosphere—online spaces populated by Black men who support Black patriarchal dominance. These "Pick-Me" content creators use what I term "tactical patriarchal femininity" to attract the financial provision of an economically stable Black man and to derive income from sympathetic viewers. Tactical patriarchal femininity is an elaborate, all-consuming embodied performance that is as much about emotion work as it is about exuding conventional attractiveness and behavior that is aligned with traditional femininity. Tactical patriarchal femininity exists to combat the matrices of oppression created by capitalism, white supremacy, and institutional patriarchy. Anti-feminist Black women work in reaction to the misogynoirist material realities that victimize Black women. Ultimately, the Black manosphere's explicit disavowal of Black women's worth, apart from what they may provide for men in their role as a patriarchalized wife, is dangerous to all Black women—including and especially those Black women who claim anti-feminism. Anti-feminism does not combat dehumanizing views that posit Black women as masculine, unmarriageable, and underserving of care and support. Rather, anti-feminist Black women work to make themselves exceptions to the rule in a bid for conditional respect and protection that rarely materializes long-term.KEYWORDS: Black feminismanti-feminist Black womentactical patriarchal femininityBlack womenBlack manosphere"pick-Me" Black women Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The Black manosphere is "an online, anti-feminist community that operates off the template of the (White) Manosphere. Focuses strictly on heterosexual black men" (Fountain, Aaron Citation2018).2. Throughout the article, I use the term "anti-manosphere" to describe Black women who do not actively align themselves with anti-feminist thought or the Black manosphere (unlike "Pick-Me's") but are not necessarily feminists.3. "Traditional femininity" (or "trad fem," for short) refers to following gender norms that are in alignment with "true womanhood." "True womanhood" refers to Barbara Welter's (Citation1966) term for the nineteenth-century gendered ideal given to white women that included "four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity." Interestingly, this feminine ideal still holds true amongst "Pick-Me" Black women in the twenty-first century.4. Catherine Rottenberg (Citation2018) defines neoliberal feminists as being "predominantly concerned" with "self-responsibility" and who "no longer demand anything from the state or the government, or even from men as a group." The neoliberal feminist "ideal," which has saturated popular culture, is "a high-powered woman who manages to balance a spectacularly successful career with a satisfying home life" (Rottenberg Citation2018).5. This term was created by Olivia Johnson, M.A. of Emory University.6. Alexandria C. Onuoha (Citation2022) argues that the Black manosphere contributes to the increased rates of Black femicide in the United States due to their dehumanizing views of Black women and girls.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDanielle Procope BellDanielle Procope Bell is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a Black feminist researcher who examines motherhood, paid and unpaid labor, and femininity from the late nineteenth-century to the twenty-first century. dprocopebell@utk.edu