My Revolution Was Televised: Black Women, Sex and Representation On Screen

As part of their FeelScene campaign, Brook’s 20-24 Participation Advisory Group (PAG) are reflecting on the ways that media has shaped our perceptions of sex and relationships. In this blog, Yeleena explores the representation of Black women in film and television, especially when it comes to sex.

As a dark-skinned girl, it’s basically impossible to talk about sexual politics without folding racial politics into the sentence. They’re as much part of me as planning the day I’ll wash my hair, dodging eye contact with aunties the morning after (when my mascara’s still on), or only drinking Coke if it comes in a glass bottle. That tension extends to watching TV and interrogating the TV I watch. When I came to write this piece, I wrestled with wanting to write something neat and cosy and knowing the real story of representation on TV is political, messy and sometimes infuriating.

That realisation is exactly what pulled me into Michaela Coel’s and Issa Rae’s worlds. Coel’s Chewing Gum (2015-2017) is one of the funniest, most unapologetic takes on being new to sex and relationships I’ve seen. It plays with all the awkward rituals and language we use around desire, shame and dating. The Jonathan Bailey moment is a classic: he starts off looking like Mr Respectable and then there’s this quick descent into role-play/fetish territory that’s equal parts what-is-even-happening-right-now and laughter. Then there’s Tracey spilling red wine on his white couch and just leaving to see another day with her “Peckham princess”, Candice. The show lets the ridiculousness do the talking and, in the process, says a lot about how Black women navigate dating and desire while being both hypervisible and misunderstood. It’s comedy doing the heavy lifting: exposing how absurd (and harmful) some dating dynamics are, without lecturing you. It made me realise that humour can be political in both a gentle and disarming way. 

Coel’s later I May Destroy You (2020) sits at the other end of a spectrum: trauma, consent, sexual assault and identity are handled with brutal nuance. Arabella is not a “perfect survivor”; she missteps, muddles through grief, anger and confusion, and she gets things wrong. The show refuses tidy redemption arcs. The series layers a world-on-fire feeling throughout  (news banners and political chaos slide through scenes like static) and that collision is exactly the show’s energy: intimate chaos sitting in the same room as global chaos. Even in the bleakness, Coel finds tiny human moments that are oddly funny. That general sense, that sex, identity and relationships are messy, politicised and power is the show’s central lesson. 

On the other side of the pond, Issa Rae’s Insecure (2016-2021) grew out of The Mis-Adventures of an Awkward Black Girl (2011-2013), and it kept that spirit: awkward, nerdy, lyrical, and always honest. It normalises therapy, being called out, career wobbles and the small humiliations of dating, all while staying hilarious. The episode where Molly finds out her parents stayed together despite her dad’s cheating is a perfect example: it gently interrogates long-standing assumptions about family expectations while showing the messy, generational negotiations that shape intimacies. Issa’s lyricism, paired with soundtracks that doubled as pep talks, gave me tiny, daily lessons in self-acceptance. The show made me laugh and ache in equal measure and handed me language for my own messy feelings about love, friendship and identity. 

Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (the series, 2017-2019) adds another vital thread: Black queerness, different relationship models and unapologetic conversations about desire. It’s not the same tone as Coel or Rae, but it expands the imagery by showing more ways to be, love, mess up and grow on-screen. That variety matters: seeing queerness and non-normative relationship models normalised on a platform like Netflix helps nuance conversations in mainstream portrayals and performance of Black femininities. 

Looking back on all these shows while writing this really highlighted something for me about format and pressure. Writing about identity, queerness and sex always feels loaded: there’s this expectation to adopt an anthropological voice, to package one story so it can stand in for a thousand. That pressure comes from everywhere: editors, algorithms, audiences. Both Issa and Michaela put themselves on screen as creators and performers and play out their characters’ risks, embodying the messiness instead of curating it into a neat package. If I’ve felt that weight on a (relatively) small scale, I can only imagine the pressure on another Black woman asked to translate her womanhood for “big industry” platforms demanding legibility, producers pushing for clean arcs, and audiences wanting the “other” voice to be flawless. That tension makes authentic work rarer and, when it appears, more precious. 

It sometimes feels ridiculous and exposing to spell out how much Issa’s lyricism or Coel’s scenes gave me: a language for identity, self-acceptance, the conviction that I deserved desire, and to desire and be loved. That joy sits beside anger when unspeakable acts are committed, broadcasted and normalised every single day. Those contradictions shape how I watch. Insecure, I May Destroy You and the legacies they exist in taught me about necropolitics in big and small ways (how power decides whose bodies are valued and whose suffering is treated as background noise); they gave me words for grief and joy, and for the strange ways public violence magnifies private pain. And yet, they also offered vicarious joy, heartache and tiny survival tools for loving and living in messy times. Culturally, they pried open space for conversations about sex, consent, intimacy, race and friendship that had little mainstream room before. They refused the old boxes of Jezebel, virgin, vixen, and allowed dark-skinned girls to be messy, desirable, angry and tender. 

These shows ask us to look harder at what we’re watching. They don’t reduce characters into tidy lessons; they let Black women be ridiculous, brilliant, tired, funny, messy, political and raw all at once. For our age bracket, the arrival of these multilayered portrayals of femininities, Blackness and queerness has shifted what I expect from representations of sex, love and friendship. We’re still short on quantity, but the progress is meaningful, and something is happening, slowly but surely. 

Representation shouldn’t mean being under a microscope, performing perfection. It should mean being allowed to be human. If #FeelScene is about interrogating what we watch, then Michaela Coel, Issa Rae and others are the perfect starting points to ask sharper questions, share a laugh, and demand richer stories.