The Erotics of Collapse

On Being Everyone’s Strong Woman

They call me strong like it’s a compliment.
Like it’s lingerie. Like it’s the kind of thing you want whispered in your ear while someone unhooks your bra with their teeth.

But “strong” isn’t lace. It’s scaffolding. It’s unpaid emotional labor dressed up as virtue. It’s everyone’s favorite excuse not to check on me, not to notice I’m cracking. “You’re strong,” they say, and what they mean is: you’re disposable. You can handle it. You don’t need softness. You don’t need rest. You don’t need me.

I was raised on the liturgy of resilience. A gospel of bite-your-tongue, cross-your-legs, and if you must weep, do it behind closed doors with your eyeliner intact. My mother cried like she was being audited—only in private, only once everything was accounted for. I inherited that mask. The smile that is more prison uniform than expression. The quick fix-your-face before anybody notices you’re not invincible.

The world doesn’t allow strong women to be merely human. We’re archetypes. Symbols. Statues carved from fatigue. Black women know this best: our very flesh has been politicized into a myth. The Strong Black Woman. The Superwoman. The mule who never gets tired. The shield who never breaks. We were told to stand taller because history was stacked against us. And we did. We still do. But nobody talks about how the spine splinters.

Sometimes I wonder if my “strength” is just another fetish. Society’s kink for stoicism. My hyper-independence, my exhaustion, my refusal to ask for help—it all gets read as sexy competence. Men love to fuck the strong woman. They love the illusion that their orgasm is the one thing that can undo her armor. (It never is. I’ve faked whole civilizations of orgasms just to let them think they conquered me.)

But here’s the perversity: I bought into it too. There’s a sick comfort in believing I am most valuable when I am unbreakable. When my body is a voting booth and everyone casts their needs on me, and I keep swallowing the ballots. Strong, strong, strong. It rings like a death sentence dressed in applause.

Do you know what being the strong one feels like? Like being the designated driver at the apocalypse. Everyone’s drunk on their own chaos, and you’re the one holding the keys, sobering up in silence, pretending you’re not jealous of their freedom to fall apart.

It’s lonely. It’s heavy. I hate it. And yet—like an addict—I return to it. Because if I stop being strong, who am I? Who catches the things I’ve been trained to catch? Who picks up the mess? Who mothers the mother?

And here’s where the erotic creeps in. Collapse becomes fantasy. To be weak in someone’s arms feels pornographic. To be the girl crying on the bathroom floor with no mascara left—obscene. To have someone stroke my hair and whisper, “You don’t have to hold it all” —that’s filthier than any porn I’ve watched.

Because desire is about permission. And no one ever gave me permission to be soft. To be tended to. To be fragile and still loved. So I script it myself, in the margins of my relationships, in the moans I smother. I fantasize not about dick appointments or romantic dinners, but about a lover who takes the scaffolding off me and says: you’re allowed to be undone.

The strong woman stereotype doesn’t just live in the workplace or the family unit—it lives in the bedroom too. I’ve been the one to do the caretaking, even in sex. His pleasure first. His release as proof of my competence. Even on my knees, I was still performing strength. A blowjob as emotional labor. My body is not a temple but a service industry.

I laugh about it now, because otherwise I’d scream. But honestly, theory didn’t prepare me for this. Objectification theory says being reduced to a body corrodes the self like acid. True. But it doesn’t capture the sting of realizing you’ve been reduced to a strong body. A utility. A thing admired not for its curves, but for its ability to endure, absorb, persist.

And yet—I want to confess the heresy—I am done being strong. I want to crash out. Not gracefully, not in the Instagram-aesthetic way with candles and a face mask. No. I want to ugly-sob in someone’s lap. I want to fail publicly. I want to be selfish and tender and disgusting. I want to stop being the cautionary tale of fortitude and become the erotics of collapse.

Because collapse is erotic. It’s where the body finally speaks its truth. Muscles trembling. Voice breaking. The refusal to keep holding everything in. My lover isn’t a savior—he’s a sentence I can’t stop rereading, underlining, moaning in the margins because for once, the text isn’t about resilience. It’s about rupture. And rupture is holy.

So no, I am not your “strong woman” anymore. I am not your pillar. I am not your free therapist, your emotional sponge, your superhero. I am a woman on strike from resilience. And if you want me—really want me—you’ll have to want all of me. The cracked parts. The soft belly. The mascara-streaked surrender.

Strength is not my erotic. Collapse is.
And I’m finally ready to let it seduce me.