A Word That Made Me Stop and Think
Not long ago, I heard a young Black brother talking about his years of training in an old Southern Chinese martial arts tradition, and something he said stayed with me. He explained that when he began training as a child, his teachers did more than show him how to use his fists and feet. They also taught him about discipline, character, self-control, and how a man should carry himself in the world. Among those lessons were what he called five restrictions and seven detriments, principles meant to guide the person as much as the fighter. One restriction caught my attention because it used a word we do not hear much in everyday conversation: lascivious. I had to look it up myself and learned that it generally refers to excessive or inappropriate sexual desire or behavior. I cannot speak for every Chinese martial arts school, teacher, or tradition because this was his personal experience. Still, what he said made me think about my own upbringing and the lessons many of us received as Black boys. We were taught right from wrong, and many of our parents, grandparents, churches, and communities worked hard to give us some good home training. But I could not remember anyone sitting us down at seven or eight years old and teaching sexual self-restraint as a clear principle for how we should live. That realization left me wondering what happens when we do not give our children the language and discipline to control desires that the larger culture constantly encourages them to satisfy.
What Filled the Empty Space
Once I started thinking about that missing language, my mind traveled through some of the music and images that surrounded Black popular culture during different periods of my life. I thought about Luke, Miami bass, and those records with hooks designed to get a crowded dance floor moving while pushing sexual language right out into the open. I remembered the video-vixen era, when entire music videos could revolve around women’s bodies and grown men’s careers could benefit from selling that image. I thought about school dances where girls danced one way and boys came up behind them as though everybody already understood the arrangement. Nobody needed to explain it because the culture had already done the explaining for us. What once might have caused embarrassment gradually became ordinary, and what became ordinary eventually started looking like tradition. Of course, Black people did not invent sexual advertising, provocative entertainment, or the old business principle that sex sells. America had been selling desire long before hip-hop ever had a microphone, and corporations learned how to turn sexuality into money across nearly every racial and cultural line. Still, we have to be mature enough to examine what we accepted, repeated, celebrated, and sometimes handed down inside our own communities. There is a difference between blaming ourselves for everything that happened to us and taking responsibility for what we can change ourselves. Somewhere along that road, I believe too many of us became comfortable consuming messages that taught desire loudly while teaching restraint in a whisper.
When Culture Meets Consequences
This subject becomes more serious when I look beyond entertainment and consider what family instability, poverty, sexual health, and unequal access to medical care have meant in Black communities. Statistics over the years have repeatedly shown that Black children are disproportionately likely to live in single-parent households compared with the nation overall. Marriage among Black adults has also declined substantially from the levels recorded during the middle of the twentieth century. Those numbers deserve our attention, but they do not prove that sexual behavior alone caused the changes we see in Black family life. Employment, incarceration, housing discrimination, economic inequality, changing social expectations, education, health, and public policy have all shaped the conditions under which families form and survive. Research has also consistently shown that households with two available incomes often have greater protection against poverty than households depending on one parent, although family structure by itself does not explain every economic outcome. The same kind of care is necessary when discussing sexually transmitted infections and HIV, where Black Americans have experienced disproportionately high rates in national health statistics. Those disparities are serious, but health authorities have also pointed to poverty, health-care access, testing patterns, treatment availability, sexual networks, stigma, and other structural conditions that influence those numbers. In other words, statistics can tell us where trouble is showing up without giving us permission to reduce the people behind those statistics to stereotypes. I do not want to use numbers as a weapon against Black men, Black women, single mothers, or anybody else trying to make a life under difficult circumstances. I want to use them as a reason to ask whether stronger lessons about responsibility, commitment, sexual health, self-respect, and restraint could become another part of the solution.
Restraint Is Not Shame
The more I thought about lascivious, the more I realized that the important lesson was not really the word itself but the discipline hiding behind it. I am not interested in teaching children that their bodies are dirty, that sexuality is shameful, or that natural desire makes somebody immoral. Shame has damaged enough people already, particularly when churches, families, and communities have used silence instead of honest education. What interests me is the old-fashioned understanding that every desire does not deserve immediate satisfaction. A man can feel something without acting on it, and that simple truth is part of becoming a responsible adult. The same principle applies to women because self-control is not supposed to be a burden assigned to one gender while everybody else gets excused. We ought to be able to teach young people about consent, protection, commitment, consequences, respect, and emotional responsibility without pretending sex does not exist. We also ought to teach our boys that another person’s body is never something they are automatically entitled to touch because a song, dance, movie, or crowd makes it seem acceptable. Our girls deserve that protection, and our boys deserve to grow up understanding that restraint is strength rather than weakness. That kind of teaching does not require us to become frightened of sexuality or return to some imaginary past when everybody behaved properly. It simply requires us to restore balance between freedom and responsibility, because freedom without discipline can eventually become another form of bondage.
What Our Elders Gave Us
I also have to be fair to the people who raised generations before us because our grandmothers and grandfathers did give us language for character. They told us to keep our hands to ourselves, respect women, mind our manners, watch the company we kept, and remember that somebody was always watching how we represented the family. In many Black households, home training carried about as much authority as any written rule could carry. Church gave us another vocabulary built around temptation, patience, faithfulness, modesty, marriage, and accountability. Some of those lessons were wise, while others were wrapped so tightly in shame that young people became afraid to ask honest questions. That silence sometimes left the streets, television, music, friends, and later the internet to provide the education adults were too uncomfortable to provide. The problem, then, may not be that Black people had no moral tradition around sexual conduct. The problem may be that some of our strongest traditions lost their authority while the commercial culture became louder, faster, richer, and available around the clock. A grandmother could tell a child one thing at breakfast while a phone could tell that same child something entirely different all day long. That is a competition our elders never had to face in quite the same way. If we want their wisdom to survive, we may have to translate it into language young people can understand without stripping away the seriousness behind it.
Writing Our Own Restrictions
That young man’s story made me wonder what would happen if we deliberately created our own set of principles and handed them to children before the world handed them something else. I am not talking about copying another culture or pretending that one Chinese martial arts tradition contains the answer to Black America’s problems. I am talking about recognizing the power of naming the behaviors that can either strengthen or weaken a human life. Maybe our restrictions would include refusing to use another person’s body for our own pleasure without respect, consent, responsibility, and care. Maybe we would teach that fatherhood and motherhood begin with decisions made long before a child enters the world. Maybe we would tell boys that manhood is measured less by how many women they can attract than by how well they can govern themselves. Maybe we would tell girls that their value is not determined by how much attention their bodies can command. We could teach both that pleasure carries consequences and that bringing another human being into the world creates responsibilities that do not disappear when a relationship ends. None of these lessons would eliminate poverty, racism, unequal health care, broken relationships, or every other force affecting Black families. But cultural discipline does not have to solve every problem before it becomes worth teaching. Sometimes a community begins changing its future simply by deciding what it will no longer treat as normal.
Miseducation and the Values We Inherit
My thoughts eventually carried me back to Carter G. Woodson and his 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro. Woodson was concerned with what happens when Black people are educated through systems that teach them to see themselves through somebody else’s assumptions and interests. His argument reached far beyond sexuality, but the principle still speaks to what I am wrestling with here. A people who do not consciously examine their values can easily absorb whatever values the surrounding culture sells most aggressively. Sometimes what is being sold looks like freedom when it is really another product somebody has learned how to monetize. Sometimes rebellion itself becomes merchandise, packaged and handed back to us with a price tag attached. That does not mean every modern song, dance, fashion, or expression of sexuality represents miseducation. It means we ought to possess enough cultural confidence to decide what deserves to be celebrated and what deserves to be questioned. Woodson challenged Black people to think about who was doing the teaching, what was being taught, and whose interests that education served. Nearly a century later, those remain powerful questions when entertainment companies, advertisers, social-media platforms, influencers, and algorithms compete every minute for the minds of our children. Before we condemn the younger generation for what they have learned, we ought to ask ourselves who has been doing most of the teaching.
Summary
One unfamiliar word sent me down a road much larger than vocabulary. Lascivious made me think about desire, discipline, family, culture, health, entertainment, and the lessons we deliberately give our children. I do not believe one missing word caused the problems facing Black families, and the history is far too complicated for an explanation that simple. I also refuse to place the whole burden on Black women, Black men, single parents, music, or young people. Social conditions matter, economic conditions matter, racism matters, health-care access matters, and personal choices matter too. We can hold all those truths in our hands at the same time. What concerns me most is whether we have become hesitant to speak plainly about self-control because we are afraid somebody will mistake discipline for judgment. There is nothing backward about teaching a child that every urge does not require action. There is nothing shameful about teaching respect for the body while also teaching respect for sexuality. Our ancestors understood that freedom demanded responsibility even when they did not use the same words another culture used. Maybe our task now is not to recover one foreign word but to recover the seriousness behind the lesson.
Conclusion
At this stage of my life, I keep coming back to the belief that what we teach children early becomes part of the voice they hear when nobody else is around. That voice can tell them to stop, think, respect themselves, respect somebody else, and consider what tomorrow may demand from a decision made tonight. We cannot protect young people from every temptation, mistake, disappointment, or consequence waiting for them in the world. We can give them language strong enough to help them recognize those moments when they arrive. We can talk about sex without shame and responsibility without condemnation. We can teach boys that self-control belongs inside manhood and teach girls that dignity never depends upon somebody else’s desire. Most important, we can stop expecting popular culture to teach values that families and communities have been unwilling to explain for themselves. The world will always have something ready to hand our children, and much of it will arrive before we think they are old enough to understand it. That means our teaching has to get there first. Maybe we do need our own five restrictions and seven detriments, written in language that belongs to this generation while carrying wisdom older than all of us. And maybe the first commandment ought to be simple enough to remember for a lifetime: learn to govern yourself before somebody else learns how to profit from your desires.