Back in the day, I never bought drugs on a street corner. There were dealers in college, and they were mostly classmates or classmate-adjacent. One guy even delivered. I’ve never really thought about how gendered drug dealing really is – I don’t think I’ve ever really considered the idea that women probably aren’t “allowed” to stand on street corners, selling drugs. And of course it’s Amber Rose who makes me realize this. Amber chatted to the Red Pill podcast, and she got real about her “hood” past:

Amber Rose’s past wasn’t all glitz and glamour — she once “tried” to sell drugs.

“I usually don’t tell people this but I tried selling crack in my neighborhood,” Rose confessed on Van Lathan’s “The Red Pill” podcast. “They said I was gonna get robbed, I was a girl and I was too pretty, and it wasn’t going to happen.”

But Rose says she did not stay away from the drug business entirely, instead, she made money by weighing and bagging the drugs to make a cut of the dealers’ profits. Her decision to dabble in the drug scene for money was primarily due to the fact that she was “the queen of the house” and needed to do what “I had to do to feed my family.” But Rose explained that it took her awhile to publicly address her drug experiences because of the double standards in society pertaining to men and the pass they get for doing similar controversial activities in order to survive.

“When it comes to me, do I have to give you this story to understand? It’s been nine years since I been famous, I never told that to nobody,” she said of her past. “It was a hard time in the beginning, and I became a stripper very young. I made that decision, nobody in my family put that on me. I don’t really think people understand how ‘hood I grew up… the s— that I had to overcome, and even overcome after I became famous. My life has never been easy… [But] it did push me to that limit to go fend for my family.”

[From Page Six & People]

Amber is so tough. She really is. She made it out of a low-income family by her wits and her ability to do whatever it took, and look at her now – living in a nice house in LA, motherhood and tons of work as a model and feminist activist. I can see how she would be bad at selling drugs on a corner, but her prettiness would have given her a leg up for any smart drug cartel – they could have put her in nightclubs and bars and had her deal from there. Ah, well. Too late now.

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Photos courtesy of Backgrid and Getty.