FIELD NOTE | 002

Anonymity

Black femmes are not for your entertainment.

Something has shifted. Privacy is a fluency—a strategy of consensuality. In the field, your social location is your badge: the landscape upon which the world navigates your personhood.

Race
Ethnicity
Nationality
Age
Ability
Education
Social status
Economic status

The list goes on. Yet anonymity feels more like home in a nation that wants access to Black femmes without collateral—without offering, without risk, without reciprocity. Alignment is reciprocity.

I resist this through Sensual Systems. It curates a nuance through which I’ve learned my worth—and who is worthy of proximity to me.

Surveillance is anti-Black in nature. We have long been at the mercy of others’ desires.

Respect for personal space signals alignment. Yet in the field, entitlement remains a normative source code, a fleeting response to self neglect. An obsession, an overindulgence in external stimuli. While warm directness in relationship-building is treated as an unnecessary risk. People remain too comfortable with those they know, with an intrusive disposition with those they don’t—or have to establish a new connection which would require mutual interest.

Negotiation is the first pillar of care: what we have the capacity for and how we show up enthusiastically. Desire alone isn’t consent.

I am not property. My silhouette is a galaxy—like the Milky Way, containing billions of stars, most unseen at once—present, but not fully accessible.

But there is more socially to the story:

There are two pathways to engagement I’ve become increasingly aware of over the years:

• Event-based connection (intentional, scheduled, mutual)
• Ambient, proximity-based connection (ongoing, informal, assumed)

Consent, at its most basic level, is freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific (FRIES)—a concept that is still very new for many people.

People move through the world with different levels of shyness and different communication styles.
There are many ways to be direct: a note, an introduction, a message, an email, a text
Communication can take many forms—avoidance is not one of them.

Entitlement looks like:

• Hovering around a person or the spaces they frequent to gain passive access instead of being direct about intentions—to do your emotional labor to create or initiate a connection
• Gaining access to non-public information through invasive means
• Assuming proximity guarantees access
• Reacting negatively when interest is not reciprocated
• Engaging in stalking, both digitally and in person

Proximity is not permission.
Observation is not intimacy.
Desire is not consent.
Alignment is the only pathway forward.

Real-life relationships are not parasocial simulations.

If you cannot approach with clarity, consent, and reciprocity,
you are not in relationship—
you are in extraction.