Femininity Coaching & The Undermining of Black Womanhood
In recent years, the rise of “femininity coaching” and influencers promoting the “divine feminine” has positioned itself as a guide for women seeking empowerment, self-actualisation, and romantic success. Often framed as a method to attract a “high-value man” or to cultivate an idealised form of feminine energy, these practices claim to celebrate womanhood.
Yet, for Black women, this phenomenon is neither neutral nor benign. Femininity coaching can function as a subtle reinforcement of patriarchal and anti-Black ideals, performing gender in ways that erase historical and structural realities. The history of Western constructions of Black female bodies is essential to understanding why.
For centuries, the Black female form was imagined as deformed, hypersexual, and morally suspect—positioned as the inverse of white womanhood, which was idealised as pure, delicate, and virtuous. Under slavery, Black women were denied full personhood and stripped of gender distinction altogether. Hortense Spillers famously describes this process as one of “ungendering”—wherein Black women, treated as property and reproductive resources, were reduced to what she calls “female flesh ungendered.”
In this context, anti-Blackness operates as a system that removes Black women from the category of “woman” itself, collapsing gender differences and situating Blackness in a state of non-being. The legacy of this violence continues to shape the ways Black women are seen—and not seen—within modern ideals of femininity and beauty.
The prevailing standards of hegemonic femininity—softness, passivity, restraint—were constructed around white, middle-class, heteronormative ideals. These standards exclude Black women by definition. It is within this racialised framework that femininity coaching emerges as a particularly fraught practice.
Many social media influencers market femininity as a set of behaviours or attitudes designed to curtail “aggressiveness,” and embody “feminine energy”. For Black women, these programs often claim to “correct” the historical masculinisation imposed upon us, —yet they risk reinscribing the very hierarchies that excluded us in the first place. When femininity is presented as a universal ideal, it implicitly centres whiteness as the standard of beauty and womanhood.
Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it plainly: “Beauty is for white women.” For beauty to function as it should she writes,”…it can never be for black woman”. Beauty requires our exclusion to sustain its power. Cottom continues, “..It is actually blackness, as it has been created through the history of colonization, imperialism and domination, that excludes me from the forces of beauty…Big beauty definitionally excludes the kind of blackness I carry in my history and my bones…”
The lingering effects of our historical ungendering mean that modern femininity discourse often offers us only conditional acceptance. The supposed empowerment asks us to conform to ideals that were designed to deny our humanity.
Ultimately, femininity coaching cannot be disentangled from the legacies of anti-Blackness. It reproduces whiteness as the silent standard of womanhood while masquerading as liberation. For Black women, true empowerment does not lie in perfecting a performance scripted against us—but in dismantling the stage itself.
To reclaim our womanhood is not to seek entry into the narrow rooms of Eurocentric femininity, but to build new architectures of self-definition—ones that honour our complexity, our rage, our tenderness, and our history.