Zorine Truly’s favorite era of “hoochie-ism” is the late 80s and 90s. It was the era of Gangsta Boo, Lil Kim, and La Chat. Black women who owned their sexuality in mainstream places, and became archetypes of sexual freedom, while also giving power to hoochie mamas.
“We knew that the hoochies were the muse for the music, but I think that rappers like that gave power to hoochies,” says Truly, a self-certified “hoochie historian,” known for her history lessons on TikTok and Instagram. “They made us the main character instead of supporting characters.”
Truly explains that as a child growing up in that era, she wasn’t old enough to wear certain styles. As she got older, however, she leaned more towards acrylic nails and intricate and meticulously sculpted hairstyles. She began researching more into the subculture’s history, which helped her move more towards a lifestyle as opposed to a costume. For her, being hoochie is a way for her to claim her power. Mainstream culture has long villainized hoochies as promiscuous offenders, but now, Black women are reclaiming the term and making it their own.
On TikTok, you’ll find Truly delivering bite-sized lectures about how most of our favorite fashion and beauty trends originated from Black women , or highlighting the importance of a hoochie lifestyle as opposed to a costume, all with the goal of celebrating and adding nuance to the subculture. She is also the creator and curator of HoochieCon, “a group exhibit that celebrates the sexual liberation of Black women through their undeniable influence in music, beauty, art, fashion, and culture,” at Junior High in Glendale, California.
Truly explains that the true pioneers and trailblazers of the hoochie movement often go unnoticed: “A lot of the women who were the trailblazers and trendsetters of that culture go unnamed, because they’re the girls in the neighborhood. They’re our aunts, our cousins, our grandmothers.” However, she notes that we can date the makings of the archetype back to the 1970s with artists like Millie Jackson and Betty Wright, both of whom set the stage for the rappers of the late ‘80s and ‘90s.
While these women were real life personifications of the hoochie subculture, they were also inspiring pop culture representations that ranged from imitation to parody. Black media in the 90s and early 2000s was filled with several iterations of this archetype, such as Nisi and Mickey from 1997’s B.A.P.S. and Peaches from A Low Down Dirty Shame. While Truly believes that the actresses that played them gave dimension and personality to the hoochie archetype, this didn’t mean that their presences in these films were always positive.
Daelena Tinnin-Gadson, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Black film studies and African American literature, says that her first introduction to the term “hoochie mama” was actually through a song of the same name by 2 Live Crew, which infamously played in the 1995 film Friday as something of a theme song for Craig’s (Ice Cube) girlfriend, Joi. The song’s lyrics paint a picture of a woman who is “full of drama” and nothing more than a sexual object. She’s often portrayed in the media in the same way, usually as a stark comparison to the “ideal woman.” They're usually given no redemption arc, and are meant to exist as a “trifling” thorn in the side of a man.
“A lot of times you saw it as a setting apart of the ‘right’ kind of Black woman, and the type of Black woman that you didn’t want to end up with,” Tinnin-Gadson says. “That exists in probably any Black film or Black TV show that anyone would name, Martin and Living Single to Moesha.”
These characters were not always given the exact title of “hoochie” or “hoochie mama,” but Briana Barner, assistant professor at the University of Maryland in the department of communication, explains that it was often implied by their style of dress or mannerisms.
“Even if they didn’t directly say that, it was obvious who they were talking about based on what she was wearing,” says Barner. “Sometimes it could be long braids, long nails, big hoop earrings like I have on, daisy dukes, talking loud. Just, to me, sounding and looking like the Black women I knew.”
Seeing this type of representation was confusing for Barner growing up. She didn’t necessarily know what to make of it, as she didn’t look at these women as “bad,” but she was aware that many people held it as a negative stereotype. “Because [these portrayals] reflected women that I knew, women that I loved, women that I respected, I didn’t view [hoochie mamas] in a negative way," Barner says, “but I definitely heard the disdain in people’s voices when they would talk about [real women]. I feel like it was questioning the intelligence level of women who kind of had that aesthetic.”
These negative depictions aren’t only found in Black media though. Those who grew up during the mid 2000s and early 2010s may recall the Freeform (then ABC Family) hit show, Make It Or Break It, which follows four aspiring gymnastic stars on their way to the Olympics. Lauren Tanner, played by Cassie Scerbo, is the show’s resident mean girl, and known for her snarky quips and often offensive comments. Her performance in the season two episode “Battle of the Flexes” is no different, as she uses the term “hoochie mama,” in a derogatory way to describe her fellow gymnast’s mother, Chloe Kmetko (played by Susan Ward).
The Kmetkos are a poor white family, and Chloe is characterized by her flirty smile, sex appeal, and love for animal prints and bold colors. Among the rich, white, conservatively-dressed people who send their kids to be Olympic gymnasts, she stands out in a way the show presents as negative. Lauren’s insulting tone uses “hoochie mama” as a shorthand for trashy, promiscuous, and lower class. With the show being a product of its time, it’s easy to infer that Lauren’s description relied solely on what she saw in music videos and popular culture at the time, which was everything but celebratory.
It’s interesting to look at this scene now, more than 10 years later, since there has been a celebration of this style in mainstream culture, even though Black women have championed the archetype for decades. Take the criticism that Hailey Bieber received for what she claimed were her “brownie glazed lips,” which consisted of a brown lip liner, topped with gloss — a trend that Black women and women of color have sported for ages.
Another example of this double-standard is the use of bonnets. Several businesses have gone under fire for prohibiting bonnets from being worn in their establishments. Children (and their parents) have been dress-coded or mocked for wearing bonnets to school. Truly notes that a lot of the popular “hoochie hairstyles” were intricate and delicate, which required a lot of maintenance, causing Black women to wear bonnets to preserve their hairstyles.
“Wearing a bonnet in public was less about being lazy and not wanting to do your hair, and more about protecting the hairstyle you have,” says Truly. “That has been frowned upon by so many people, and then you look around and Jack Harlow is wearing a bonnet in the airport, and it’s popular.”
These aesthetics are often shunned on Black women, but seen as trendy on their white counterparts. It can be disheartening, but also weird — these “trends” have constantly played into the vilification of Black women. “It’s so weird seeing it on random white women,” explains Barner. “This is something that I saw in the nineties, growing up in the hood. These are things that I saw all the time that was reflective of like, ‘This is not something that you want to aspire to.’”
It all circles back to respectability politics, which Barner explains were not actually intended to be a negative, when the term was created. In fact, she says that they were meant to help Black people to rise to the middle class. “The thought process behind it was that if you dress a certain way, if you talk a certain way, all these different markers, this will help you rise to the middle class. We all know that doesn’t always happen.”
The problem with that concept is that it places the blame on the individual, rather than addressing a systemic inequity. Many of us can pinpoint moments where we’ve been asked to change out our clothes at young ages, for other people’s “comfort,” or to not be sexualized. For so long Black women have been taught to exist in a way that significantly contrasts the image that characters like Lauren Tanner conjured in our head, even if that means sacrificing our freedom and individuality.
Zorine Truly explains that hoochie culture belongs to Black women, and that there is power in Black women reclaiming the “hoochie” title. “There’s freedom in being able to call yourself something that many people on the outside of the culture might have considered a negative,” Truly says. “Being able to be sexually free and liberated is so important to our culture.”
