Your Sexual Power Was Never About Who Wants You

What "heaux season" is actually pointing at, and why it matters more than the aesthetic

Every summer, the phrase "heaux season" makes its rounds. It shows up in captions, group chats, on TikTok. And for a lot of women, it lands with this mixture of excitement and something quieter underneath — a feeling like you're watching someone else's party through a window.
You want in. But you're not entirely sure you're allowed.
That ambivalence is worth looking at more closely, because it's pointing at something real.

What Is Actually Being Talked About

When the conversation around heaux season stays on the surface — outfits, situationships, summer bodies — it flattens something that deserves more. Because what Jazmine Sullivan was actually describing on Heaux Tales, and what the best version of this conversation is really about, is a woman deciding who she is on her own terms. Without performing for love, approval, or the male gaze. Without needing to be chosen first.

That's a much bigger idea. And it has nothing to do with how many people you're seeing.

How We Were Taught to Disappear From Our Own Desire

Research on sexual socialization is consistent on this point: girls are taught to understand their bodies primarily through a surveillance lens. Not "what do I feel?" but "how do I look? what will this mean? who is watching?" Boys are culturally encouraged to explore their desire as something belonging to them. Girls are taught to manage their desire in relation to everyone else. The clinical term for this is self-objectification.

The result is not a difference in how much women want. It's a difference in whether women feel entitled to want at all.

This conditioning doesn't disappear when you understand it. It lives in the body. It becomes automatic. You find yourself referencing your own experience through imagined observers before you've even registered what you actually feel. That's not a personal failing. That's the system working exactly as designed.

The system benefits from you not knowing yourself. A woman who knows what she wants is harder to manage, harder to deceive, harder to keep.

What a Real Heaux Season Requires

The version of heaux season worth having isn't about accumulation. It's about orientation.

It starts with asking: do I actually know what I like? Not what I've learned to like. Not what works given what's available. What I want when no one else's preferences are in the room.

It means starting to treat your body as a place you live, not a thing you present. Noticing what feels good independent of whether it reads as attractive to someone else. Building a relationship with your own anatomy, your own desire, your own pleasure that doesn't depend on someone else to activate it.

It is, at its core, a power question. The same question that runs through every other place in your life where you've had to choose between what's safe and what's true.

There Is No Expiration Date

One of the things I hear most often — in conversations, in sessions, in the DMs after I post about this — is some version of "I should have had my heaux phase by now."

As if this was something that happens in your twenties or it doesn't happen at all.

It is not. Your desire does not expire. Your capacity for curiosity about yourself does not expire. The version of you that wants to feel free in your body is still there, still waiting, and she is not behind schedule.

What she might need is permission. Not from anyone else. From you.

A Place to Start

If this is landing for you, I want you to have something concrete. I put together a free guide — How to Have a Happy and Healthy Heaux Season — that is built around exactly this. Not tips for dating. Not a formula for being more attractive. A companion for getting honest with yourself about what you actually want, what has been getting in the way, and how to start this season from a different position.

It's free. It's practical. And it asks you some questions worth sitting with.

Download the guide here.