Disclosures Vol. 6: Little Secrets and Sneaky Links
By: Urfavfilosopher/Polyamorous Black Girl
Summertime often signals the season for sundresses and sneaky links. (Owwww!) Although the language of a “sneaky link” is newly emerging among millennials and Gen Z-ers, Xscape been about that sneaky link life. Their 1998 song “My Little Secret” explores the sneaky link before the turn of the millennium. Xscape’s secret relationships highlight a non-monogamy that is, at best, far from ideally communiticative and, at worst, straightforwardly manipulative. Still, as we understand it, contemporary sneaky links have a little more to do with privacy and not necessarily unethicality. And while there are nuanced differences between secrecy, privacy, and confidentiality, it would take us too far off path to unpack these nuances here with any detail. So uh, here are some thoughts:
In “My Little Secret” Xscape’s chorus repeats “You’re my little secret/ And that’s how we should keep it/ It’s on everybody’s mind/ About you and I/ They think so, but they don’t really know or want to know.” If understood in a vacuum, we’d be able to gather only that there exists a confidential relationship between two people and perhaps that there is some kind of satisfaction derived from its confidentiality. It’s only from LaTocha’s refrain and from the opening line of Kandi’s verse that we learn that this confidential relationship might also be compromising the integrity of an additional, presumably monogamous relationship. Kandi opens verse three by saying that “Everybody cheats/ But you gotta know how, you gotta know when/ You gotta know why” LaTocha seductively articulates that she “likes being in the same room as you and your girlfriend/ The fact that she don’t know, that really turns [her] on.” Bragging on her ability to keep secrets, she continues, “She’ll never guess in a million years that we’ve got this thing going on.”
It serves us well to take stock of why the privacy of the sneaky links and private relationships are desirable in the first place. After all, Issa Rae broke the internet when she popped up married seemingly out of nowhere. Black women lauded and praised her ability to have kept her relationship private and away from the public gaze, despite her celebrity. Still, for many other black lovers relationship publicity and #relationshipgoals are still sought after goals. But what might be gained from conducting one’s intimate relationships privately; especially in the age of social media where intimate and romantic relationships have become a spectacle?
PBG points out that restricting the external gaze on one’s relationship offers the possibility of liberation. Sometimes friends, family, and even strangers offer unsolicited advice about romantic vitality — often without considering the success of their own track record. There is something about publicly acknowledging one’s romantic or sexual relationships that transforms those closest to us into renowned relationship and self-help columnists. Thus, the gaze of the other, introduces a layer of social accountability whether we like it or not. A desire for privacy might be derived, then, from a desire for relational freedom and autonomy. After all, people can’t tamper with relationships they do not know exist.
This sense of freedom and autonomy is Janus-faced. As many writers in the Black Feminist tradition have reminded us, clinging to the ideology that intimate relationships are a private matter has left many Black people (and black women, disproportionately) vulnerable to various forms of violence, often with little, or no recourse.
Privacy also signals both privilege and its absence thereof. The public sphere sanctions those relationships that adhere to the hegemonic norms of heteronormativity and mononormativity. Regarding the privilege of privacy, heterosexual dyads exist as the default relationship in the public imagination. Electing to exist privately in a romantic or sexual dyad, is in essence, a response to this default privileged state of affairs. On the other hand, relationships that have historically deviated from herero- and mononormativities have not as easily been able to occupy public space or recieve public recognition. For these lovers, privacy has long been a matter of safety and necessity — necessity also in response to the dominant hegemonic norms.
In You’re My Little Secret, we learn a little bit about how “sneaky links” have developed over time. Xscape’s sneaky link indexes unethical non-monogamy; an infidelity of sorts. We get a tutorial on how to keep relationships concealed not just from the public, but also and more importantly, we learn how to keep our extrarelational affairs clandestine and away from the gaze of our monogamous partner(s) (even in the face of public speculation). Xscape exercises agency in this kind of secret keeping; the secret is “mine”. Importantly, taking women’s agency seriously in extrarelational relationships queers social discourse around “side pieces”. Whereas “side pieces” are customarily gendered (i.e. women are usually the referent) in ways that stifle traces of agency, contemporary sneaky links are accessible and gender (and sexually) neutral. (Peep the latest tik tok trends if you don’t believe us.) For example, the fact that LaTocha never specifies whether she has other lovers, creates the question if she is simultaneously depicting herself as a monogamous woman. Who is who’s sneaky link?
Contemporary sneaky links sometimes exist among two (or more) people who are single, though. They are had, not only because one is currently in a romantic relationship that one is choosing not to honor, but also perhaps because the pairing of relata are ill-suited for one another. We love a toxic relationship. Sneaky links reveal that we sometimes love our toxic relationships in private, a little more. With a gazeless connection, we are freer not only to have our healthy relationships undisturbed, we are also freer to indulge in our unhealthy ones just the same.
There is something enticing about this. In relation to the default heteronormative ideal of romance, of which publicity is no small part, this kind of privacy becomes illicit — and forbidden fruit has always been juicier.
An unexpected twist is perhaps that the privacy around sneaky links reveals more about their value than it does their disposability. There is a thought that the privacy of sneaky links make them far easier to dispose of precisely because there is no public gaze accountability for “making it work”. While there might be some truth to this, more often we keep sneaky links “sneaky” because we find something about them worth preserving no matter how perverse the motives might be.
Finally, the consideration of perverse motives brings us to briefly consider exactly what kind of relationship ethic supervenes on the relationships described in the song. Sure, Kandi says that everybody cheats. But we maintain that not all private non-monogamous relationships are unethical on their face. For example, some non-monogamists utilize secret keeping as a part of their kinky play repertoire, and others have relationship ethics that include don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) policies in them. In this case, keeping one’s extrarelational relationship a “secret” so to speak is actually what is required in honoring one’s relationship. Among non-monogamists, true enough, some think DADT politics to be inherently unethical. However, we tend to favor a position that allows for more inclusivity and less space for shaming diverse non-monogamous practices. In doing so, we extend the landscape for understanding privacy among non-monogamists as being a part of relationship politics that are ethically permissible for monogamists and non-monogamists alike.
PBG Peace Sign Emoji, and Urfav looking philosophically into the distance.
