At first, the vibrator was enough. I developed a nighttime ritual of lifting my legs and moving across the vibrator. And then I found that if I rubbed the vibrator across my clitoris, I didn’t need to lift my legs. I moved from underneath my covers to my bedroom floor, pressing my foot up against the side of the bed and sliding up and down against the carpet until I developed rug burn. Initially, my imagination sufficed. I could re-create my dreams, dehydrated and sweaty in a minimalist room; a man who often resembled Bradley would approach me, and there would be a pause between each step, a deliberate hesitation on his part so that he could check my face to make sure I was comfortable with him proceeding. His performance stood in stark juxtaposition to his pursuit, and I would be contorting my body and uttering indecipherable words in a matter of minutes. But as I grew older, and bolder, and more sexually frustrated, I remembered that pornography was only a few remote buttons away. I turned to porn because I was too afraid to have sex with any guy after the trauma of repeated heartbreak. Sex, once again, seemed off-limits until marriage. But I could get pleasure without the risks. I’d even go as far as to say that watching porn kept me from compromising my desire to only have sex with someone with whom I felt comfortable; as long as the burning was alleviated, I was fine. I didn’t want any man to handle me like the men on my computer screen handled the women. But I did want to come just as hard.
Cinemax and Showtime had the best specials: The Best Sex Ever, Passion Cove, Hotel Erotica, Nightcap, Kama Sutra. What if I watched porn while masturbating? It couldn’t hurt. The sumptuous visuals and elegant soft-core scenes soon bored me. I wanted messy. Hearing two actors moan, watching their bodies gyrate on each other, was too much of a tease. If two people were going to fuck, then I needed to see everything, from the foreplay to the actual insertion. I needed to see the woman’s eyes expand as the man entered her for the first time, her hand on his abdomen when she felt like she couldn’t take any more, her yell noticeably higher than any of her previous moaning. The ejaculation I could do without.
For me to masturbate in peace to pornography, I first had to get it out of my mind that Jesus was watching me from a dark corner of my room, ready to emerge at the moment of climax. I had to forget that I was still living in my mother’s house and she could barge into my room at any moment. I had to ignore the fact that I was terribly lonely and broken by rejection and reimagine myself as some confident, brazen, hot-and-bothered woman. I had to train myself to believe that the actors had known each other for an extended period of time before they had sex; maybe they’d had coffee, or gone to a happy hour together. There had to be some familiarity before they could be so rough with one another. If I had all these pieces, I could be in my zone. I also had to allow myself to accept the immediate shame that came after orgasming from watching two, three, maybe even six people having sex.
Most of the porn clips I enjoyed featured only white people. White men and women in my mind were like chess pieces, figures that I could move wherever and however I wished, a privilege that I could never have in real life. Watching white women being worn out fueled my most intense orgasms. Especially if the women were blonde. Blonde women in any other context embody the female ideal. Their bright hair and alabaster skin represent their purity. The blonde woman is always the most sought after, the most loved, and the most protected. What better way to destroy her titanic influence on my conceptions of beauty and desire as a black woman than to watch a man splatter cum all over her face? The more painful her moans sounded, the better.
Watching a blonde woman have sex with one man was too gentle a scenario. I relished multiple men pulling on all her limbs, using them to pleasure their penises. I wanted them to take her all at once. I wanted her to be completely overwhelmed, pushed towards the precipice between ecstasy and death. As long as the men didn’t turn me off by calling her a bitch or a slut as they rammed inside of her, I was satisfied when they put their hands around her neck or slapped the side of her face. I wanted to hear and see the slaps, the red marks on her body, and the disheveled hair. The more force, the better. I am almost at a loss for words for how consuming these orgasms were. The ripples in my legs expanded to my pelvic region. I would climb and climb as the sensations pushed against me like a strong tide, until the ripples exploded into sparks while I strained to eject that final, strenuous moan. My clit would be so raw and sensitive that I wondered whether I’d burned it off with the vibrator’s incessant buzz. I was not at all interested in watching ebony porn. I did not wish to see black women get handled with the same violence. I did not want to see a black woman stuffed in every orifice, even if she was visibly and audibly satisfied by the filling. Each time I saw a penis jammed into her mouth, I wondered if it would block her airways and she would suffocate and none of the men would notice as they continued thrusting. Nothing was fine about watching men—either black or white—pull her panties to the side, jiggle her breasts in their hands, call her “bitch” as if they were calling her “honey.” The only times I orgasmed from watching ebony porn was through much effort because I felt obligated to do so. Black women were supposed to be sexual beings, wild and carefree. But I was fooling myself. Many of the titles that I came across described a black female porn star not as a “black woman,” but rather as an “ebony slut,” “ebony hooker,” or, the most reductive, “ebony pussy.” Although specific language is often part of the fantasy of satisfying primal urges, I could not allow this element to become a part of mine. As a black woman, I felt “ebony slut” or “ebony hooker” made my me-time all too real. I knew that even after I closed that tab, even after that black woman had put on her clothes and walked off the set and into the street, she could still be called an ebony slut. If I saw black people fucking on my screen, I thought about the millions of white people who might be jacking off while watching them and thinking of them not as humans, but as animals or objects. Then again, I was treating the actors in the hundreds of clips I watched in the same vein and with the same disregard.
But the more I watched, the more violent my fantasies became. I transitioned from watching blonde women being doubly penetrated to imagining myself being doubly penetrated as part of some bacchanal in the middle of a tropical rainforest. In a glass enclosure, scientists studied the frequencies of my moans. The men were always those who I knew very well. For a while I was infatuated with a white man ten years my senior, and I envisioned him laying me down underneath a moss-draped cypress tree near one of Louisiana’s bayous. It was night, and a strange, thick mist billowed nearby. Apart from the loud crickets in the background, we were alone, kissing underneath a crescent moon. But when I pushed a little deeper into this fantasy—while stimulating my clit, of course—I realized that our clothes were not modern. He wore a long, loose linen shirt, a jerkin, and breeches. I wore a Victorian-style dress and scarf. My God. Was I his concubine? Was I a maid? Was I even free? I tried to back out of the fantasy, but all of these oscillations led me spiraling into one of the most intense orgasms that I’ve ever had. When I lay back on the pillow afterwards, staring at the ceiling, I was disappointed by what my mind had produced. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t disassociate sex from social context. There were many other instances where I received the most pleasure from visualizing myself as being unequal to a man: a secretary to a high-powered attorney, a grad student to a professor, a patient to a doctor. I was never his equal. I was never someone he had to address with my rightful name. All of these fantasies ran opposite to my desire that I be loved fully and treated respectfully. But I suppose what made me orgasm revealed the darkest truth about myself: I couldn’t see how genuine, healthy love could be associated with sex because sex seemed all about power and I had none of it even without taking my clothes off. At the time, the word “sex” sounded too precious in my mouth. The vowel squeezed between two consonants was too easy to pronounce. It was violent, domineering fucking. I wanted to be crushed.