This Will Be My Undoing Read online

  I thought that I would only be seen as desirable, as a real woman, if I kept quiet. Within a span of a few seconds, from the time Chris lifted his drink to when he sipped it, I tried to teach myself how to be silent and allow a man to speak even if what he said was wrong. No person, especially not a woman, should do this because it’s impossible, and demeaning to try. But what was I supposed to do: Ruin a good evening by defending myself? Perhaps I was overthinking it.

  In retrospect, I know that I was thinking just the right amount. Chris didn’t see me as a “black woman” because he didn’t want to see me as one. It was easy for him to make this judgment when I was just a 400×600 image online, unmoving and unspeaking. But it could’ve been worse, I thought. He could have called me a nigger or exoticized me, which only demonstrates how low my standards were for white men at the time. He concluded the night by kissing me on the cheek and asking to schedule our next date, so I assumed that my silence had worked to my advantage. The next time we met, we went to an Indian restaurant and then another bar, and we kissed on the lips before parting ways. Then I didn’t hear anything from him, and I grew anxious. At first I thought it might be because his twelve-hour workday was taking a toll on him, but the timing was too convenient; it was about a week before Valentine’s Day, and my mother told me that men always get weird around Valentine’s Day if they are not in a relationship with the woman they’re dating.

  After two weeks, I’d had enough. I texted him saying that if he wasn’t interested in me, he could have at least let me know. Less than a minute later, I received a seven-screen text from him saying that I was a nice girl but that I was right, he had lost interest. I didn’t respond. And then I thought: Why didn’t I correct him? That was when I realized that, as a black woman, silence would never save me. It wouldn’t make me more desirable, only more susceptible to whatever a man wanted to give to me, even if it was a pittance.

  Before I moved to New York, I imagined the male gaze to be like Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, which watch over all of Long Island in The Great Gatsby. You can never be out of the line of sight. I perused tweets and essays by women whom I admired, in which they proclaimed that they didn’t need men to feel beautiful, let alone desired. I envied their confidence. Most of these women were in long-term relationships, whereas I had never been in one of any length and I wasn’t quite sure what men wanted. I viewed men as potentially scary, but I still wanted to be desired by them.

  After Chris’s rejection, I had redirected all my energy into realizing my dream of living in New York City as quickly as possible. Although I moved without a job, I didn’t have any college loans, and I saved up thousands while working at a test-prep company for months prior to my move. Now that I was here, I began to think it was normal to live under the male gaze. The first time I walked down the street in central Harlem and I saw a man’s head turn as I walked by, I felt an electric current inside of me. I felt human. I realized that I still had a body, that there was more to me than books and literature. So I invested more time in my appearance. I decided to wear MAC Satin lipstick instead of Frost, because its deep purple hue dramatizes my face. I favored wedges over flats so that my five-foot body could be more easily seen. It became normal for me to walk out my front door and have a man call me “beautiful” or “sexy.” They were attracted to me, and that attention was addictive. I wasn’t attracted to them—but was it okay that I was flattered? Could I admit that I felt like a child tasting something sweet for the first time?

  I began to expect these responses—the head swiveling and the compliments—and if I didn’t get them, I thought that I was doing something wrong. Being seen as beautiful mitigated the truth that I was in a massive city where few people knew my name, and even fewer cared if I was doing well. The only people with whom I shared substantial conversations were my two roommates. Most days I wouldn’t receive a text message from anyone besides my mother. If, just for a moment, I could matter to the gender that I was trying to attract, that momentarily erased my invisibility. But when the moment ended, I’d search for my next fix. It is the conundrum of being doubly subjugated: You are both invisible and hypervisible, stripped of humanity. And if you are not acknowledged at all, even in the most vulgar of ways, then do you still have a body? Are you still a woman without men watching you? Whenever a man asked for my number, I would either give it or lie and say that I was in a relationship. Even now I can never say “no” outright, because I’m afraid of hurting his feelings at best, being attacked at worst. And always—always—I ice my rejection with a smile. My smile is what catches men’s eyes the most. I once sat on the uptown 2 train as a group of men discussed how beautiful my smile was; I pretended I didn’t hear them.

  Because of my smile, a man attempted to woo me in a subway station after we’d made brief conversation about a crazy person yelling obscenities on the other side of the track. He asked me if I had a man, and of course I lied and said yes.

  He smirked and replied, “I’m still gonna get you anyhow.”

  When I learned that he was a native Harlemite, I told him I was unsure how friendly to be to strangers.

  “If you don’t want to be spoken to, then move to Minnesota or Oregon or somewhere. I don’t get why some women have to be a bitch about it,” he replied in his strong New York accent.

  My smile weakened.

  I realized that no amount of smiling or lying to most men can thwart their intentions. If they want me, and there is no other man by my side, then they feel as if they have a right to make advances towards me as soon as I come into their sight. That I don’t want them is irrelevant. When men pursue black women, the women are always considered culpable, as if their presence alone is an excuse for a male to act unlawfully. If I am a child on the playground, I am a part of the game to be slapped on the ass; if I am not worthy enough to be assaulted by a black or brown boy, then I am undesirable.

  If a black woman in Louisiana did not cover her hair with a scarf, then she could cause a white man to lose restraint. During slavery, the idea of a “Jezebel,” or the black woman who has an insatiable libido, was used to justify relations between the slave master and his slaves. This expectation that all we want to do is fuck is reflected in how society does any and everything to suppress and spit on what comes naturally to us, like the hairs that grow out of our scalp, our dance moves, our language. Something must’ve happened during the first rape of a black female slave by a white captor, when the black man witnessed and could do nothing. She was humiliated, her body splayed open, and we as her descendants have yet to be given our clothes back. Every part of our body is a sex organ. We are present, and therefore we have to be theirs.

  When I was a high school freshman, there was a twenty-year-old student who had been held back a couple years, and he always sat at the back of the bus. He would watch me, his eyes circling the circumference of my well-endowed chest before scaling my body. I considered his obvious attraction a compliment, because even more exciting for a teenage girl than captivating a guy is captivating an older guy. We exchanged numbers, and during one of our phone conversations my stepfather picked up the phone and was beside himself when he heard a grown man’s voice on the line. Before calling me down to the kitchen table, my stepfather called the guy, and as soon as he answered the phone, my stepfather boomed that he should never call the house again or else he would be reported to the police. I don’t think the guy got a word in before my stepfather cut him off by hanging up the phone.

  When I was summoned downstairs, my mother and stepfather were silent.

  “Did you know that that was a grown man on the phone?” my stepfather finally asked.

  I shrugged. “He goes to my school.”

  “Morgan,” my stepfather calmly replied, “that was a grown man on the phone. Do you know what he could have done to you?”

  And that’s when my mother chimed in because engaging in hypotheticals is a strength of hers, a fear tactic that works very well. “He could’ve kidnapped you,
tied you up somewhere, and got you addicted to heroin. That’s how stuff like that happens.” All I did was have a conversation, and my parents thought that was the gateway to a man being unable to control himself around me. For the rest of the conversation, all I could think about was me in a dark basement with disheveled hair and sullen eyes, the guy coming down there regularly to inject me with heroin, and each time finding a vein on my arm with more difficulty. My parents avoided calling me a “fast-tailed girl,” but they could have. I was lucky.

  Black girls are not just under the surveillance of men, both black and white, but also of their mothers and the elders within their community. The notion of the “fast-tailed girl” reinforces the idea that black girls should privilege the incalculable eyes on their body rather than focusing on their own conceptions of themselves. Mothers scare black girls into believing that their power is already lost, and that whatever goodness there is in sex and attraction is found only within marriage. If they can scare their black daughters, make them afraid of going back out into the world, then these black mothers will seize some kind of power that they might not have had while they were growing up. When those fearful black daughters become mothers themselves, they will try to reclaim power by instilling the same fear in their daughters. If a black mother can shame a black girl by warning her what she could become, that warning can serve as a vaccine, a small dosage of poison, so that when she goes into another environment, she is already protected. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way.

  Consent is a language spoken among white feminists in their spaces. This is not to say that Harlem is some lawless place; I believe that it is one of the greatest neighborhoods in the world. And this is not to say that all men do not know boundaries. I have walked past plenty of men who have simply said “God bless you” or “Have a good day, beautiful,” and left it at that. But many a woman’s “no” may as well be spoken in a different language. Her pulling away from the man may as well as be the opposite because it only builds his excitement and urges him to try harder. If she responds in a way that he likes, she’s a woman. If she doesn’t, then she’s “being a bitch about it,” reduced to an animal for not understanding that in this human world of logic and reason, this kind of interaction between men and women is normal.

  I have never talked to a black woman about the loss of her virginity and heard her describe it as anything other than traumatic. There is the undressing, the kisses here and there, maybe a little fondling, and then: an absolute struggle. Some could not even relax their bodies enough for the man to enter them without multiple attempts. In these stories that I’ve heard, there is barely a mention of adequate foreplay and pleasure is hardly, if ever, discussed. I wonder what is cursing black girls and women with an inability to relax? Are black women also nervous because of how much we have been warned about being “fast-tailed”? Because even if we are in love, we have been taught that lovemaking is not a consummation but a shameful act? If a black girl has grown up fearful of wanting male attention of any kind, how can she release her inhibitions?

  I was seventeen years old, and for several weeks straight I’d been having dreams about sex; dreams in which I could count the number of sweat beads on a man’s chest, recall our mingling scents, and name any accoutrements in the room. Seconds before waking, my pelvic muscles would spasm and my face would contort. I would wake up with beads of my own sweat decorating my forehead like a diadem and my legs spread. The dreams were so real that I thought that I was in fact being penetrated, that my skin was breaking and something was trying to break through me. After months had gone by, I finally told my mother during a car ride about what was happening in order to make sense of my body. My mother told me that this was an orgasm, but the sensation seemed frightening and not as pleasurable as I’d thought it would be. They left me disoriented, and it took a concentrated effort to refamiliarize myself with my usual surroundings. I was twenty-two when she bought me a small pink vibrator to break the fever, and I kept it in my top drawer hidden underneath loose-leaf paper and jewelry. It looked like an alien; I had no idea how a mechanical object would help.

  I pointed the tip at my vulva and winced at the buzzing sensation. After a few minutes, I gave up. I felt embarrassed. Not too long afterwards, I awoke in the middle of night, burning. I was shaking and my heart was racing; I thought that I was on the verge of a panic attack. I thought I would be burned alive from the inside out if I didn’t do something quickly. I grabbed the vibrator from my top drawer again, hid underneath the covers, lifted my legs, and rested it on my clitoris. Soon, I was rocking back and forth. I don’t know where or how I was able to find a rhythm, but I did and my movements became frenetic, then jerky. Suddenly, my mouth gaped open and my eyelids flickered, my eyes momentarily rolling into the back of my head. I came to splayed across my bed as stars shot across my pitch-black ceiling. And all the while the vibrator, which had fallen out of my right hand, rolled across my blankets, still buzzing.

  Around this same time, I remember spending the night at my father’s house in Atlantic City, sharing a bedroom with one of my older sisters. She lay sound asleep while I twisted and turned underneath the sheets. Although our twin beds were not the most comfortable, I was acclimated to their feel, and so I knew that my insomnia had to be coming from someplace else. Like I did most nights when I had trouble falling asleep, I peeked through the shutters and stared at the adjacent streetlights and, as I focused, the undulating waves of the inlet. But these tactics were to no avail. My body was on fire. I didn’t know whether to strip naked or fill the bathtub with ice to cool down. Yet this heat was different. I was not sweating. My tongue was not dry. I was not out of breath. I did not feel physically exhausted. I thought that I was losing my mind. The only associative feeling I had with this heat was the craving for sex. This craving was so immense that I grabbed my cell phone and texted my mother to tell her that something needed to be done. I was too turned on, and there was not a man in sight who could turn me off by getting me off.

  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 m
oaning. 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.