Kyra Gaunt

While girls are twerking, feeling themselves, feeling empowered, arguably the oldest technology in our human evolution, music, is taking over.

Beyond our conscious thought, music lowers our threshold of pain while it rewards us with a feeling of social bonding and intimacy.

That's why we go to concerts.

That's why we crave that feeling, even when we're alone.

That's why music is self-soothing.

And it is.

It's a whole mood.

But that mood is grooming younger and younger girls to tolerate psychological violence in dating situations and in their own intimate bedroom musical play.

Girls repeatedly do what they're repeatedly exposed to.

Left to their own devices, music as technology gives patriarchy and anti-blackness a head start.

Faced with doubt about my own voice when I was 10, the tendency to think that the situation was about me, about feeling insecure, that was the tendency, not the situation.

The role technology plays gets lost.

Being best friends with my own voice could have been my first intimate relationship.

If very young girls were surrounded by the voices of black female voices, chances are they'd assign value to their own.

Bedroom musical play could be the first time a girl tunes in to her own internal signals, self-regulates it, and learns to say, yes, as well as, nope, not today.

But online, bedroom musical play, like listening to your gut or your stomach, well, it's not a solo act.

Stereotypes and stigmas fed by algorithms and audiences are silencing us.

But if black girls produce their own twerk songs and preferred female musicians, well, they could break the internet in music and tech.

But that revolution in sound can only begin if they learn to like the voice on their own Memorex tape.

Thank you.