Nevertheless, these excuses led to an argument, and he turned away from me in the bed that we shared. He told me that because he was in the military, he received very little physical contact and that was his way to connect. All of this seemed quite plausible, but I still wouldn’t budge. I planned on remaining a virgin until marriage, but I was trying to convince myself to settle for a committed relationship—it would be a way to make him stay. I cried in that bed and I wiped my tears without him so much as touching my back. He told me that he didn’t want to see me cry and that was that. The next morning, I woke him up, asked him to get a condom, and then I went down on him. It was the most emotionless thing I’ve ever done. I performed fellatio not because I wanted to but because I thought I had to. He’d spent thousands of dollars on me. He was going to be successful and could have had any woman he wanted. I, who was so unsure of myself, had no job prospects after college and needed a reminder that something was not wrong with me, that I could be wanted. I wasn’t going to allow him to penetrate me, but I was going to allow him to be in my mouth for a short while. After all, I thought, it was my mouth that dissuaded men from dating me anyway. I talked too much and gave my opinions too freely. My silence through giving head was my kind of docility. It wasn’t supposed to be pleasurable. It was my duty, my debt.
When I returned to New Jersey, I was terrified that he would never reach out to me again. I’d already found a man who was willing to chase me; why couldn’t I have been more docile by losing my virginity to him? But then he texted, and in a matter of weeks we’d said we loved each other and were planning a future together. Separated by thousands of miles and state lines, we tried our best to maintain intimacy through frequent video conversations during which we would get naked, and I would watch him climax. I never did because I had no idea what to do to myself. I assumed that if I squeezed my breasts and he orgasmed, then somehow his pleasure would be transmitted through the computer screen and disperse across all my erogenous zones. One night, he asked me if I wanted to watch porn with him. It wasn’t like I had never seen it before. I had inadvertently watched a few minutes of porn when I was a child, at the Peninsula hotel in New York City. I remember a guy waving a fleshy wand in between his legs; I was too young to understand that was his penis. When I got older, I used to watch soft-core porn late at night if I was bored, but I never touched myself, figuring that the voyeurism was enough. So when Bradley was enough of a gentleman to ask me to pick a clip out of thousands (or millions), my pointer grazed over random ones: “Asian housemaid gets taught a lesson,” “Ebony double stuffed,” “Blonde slut gets manhandled.” But the one that most piqued my interest was double penetration. Bradley could not understand why any of that would excite me. I couldn’t articulate why. He didn’t get off while we watched, so I allowed him to switch to something else, but the memory of watching a woman getting filled in three orifices at once, wondering how that was at all possible, flickered behind my eyes. I did the responsible thing and got on birth control. The plan was for me to fly back out to Nevada during the Fourth of July weekend, where we’d have sex and, I guess, ride off into the proverbial sunset.
A week before I was supposed to leave, my mother texted me and asked if it was okay to talk. I was in the middle of my first MFA residency, which I began immediately after graduation, and I knew this had to be serious. When we finally connected, she told me that she had been praying for Bradley and me, and she wanted me to make sure that he really loved me before I decided to be intimate with him. At first I was upset, interpreting her concern as an intentional effort to thwart me on my road to true and everlasting love. But out of respect, I allowed her to finish, and then together we prayed that anything hidden would be revealed. That night, as always, Bradley and I talked for hours. I happened to mention how glad I was that we were finally in a relationship that made me feel secure enough to fly out to see him and have sex, but Bradley was caught off guard. He told me that although he loved me, he was not ready to be in an exclusive relationship. He then went on to say that he thought I was enough for him, but in order for him to be sure, he had to experience some things. He still wanted to travel the world and sleep with other women. When I told him that I had waited too long to lose my virginity in such a noncommittal way, we ultimately decided that for me to fly back out to Nevada would not be in my best interest, and we stopped speaking.
Calling what I experienced after our demise “heartbreak” would be an offense to the depth of my feelings. I didn’t just break. I shattered. I cried whenever someone uttered his name. I kept my cell phone by my face at night, hoping that I’d hear the buzz of a notification and it would be a message from him telling me how much he missed and loved me. Because I did not immediately get a job out of college, I had moved back home and my idleness worsened my suffering. When I wasn’t pitching articles, I was losing myself to grief. I went to two therapy sessions with two different professionals. I took ballroom dancing lessons. I wrote Bradley a letter where I confessed that I thought I was never good enough for him and he responded thanking me for my vulnerability, but sticking to his belief that he had made the right decision.
In retrospect, I know that losing my virginity to Bradley would have been excruciating because I would have felt coerced and judged myself for not feeling aroused. But back then, I hated myself for thinking that my pussy was any better than those of the billions of other women out there who have healthy and happy sex lives with imperfect yet good men like Bradley—with or without commitment.
It took me six months to go out on a date again after Bradley, a year to get over him, and two years to recover from the pain. Since I spent most of my time indoors, either at my mother’s house or in a dancing studio, I decided that the only way I would meet men was OkCupid. Within a few short weeks, I’d connected with a guy named Chris, a redheaded veterinary student at the University of Pennsylvania. On our first date we went to the Cheesecake Factory and then a bar, where we discussed our families, political views, and past dating experiences for two and a half hours. He tried to compliment me by saying that he would date any woman irrespective of race, and that when he saw my profile he didn’t see a black woman. I remembered how my outspokenness had perhaps ruined my dating life at college. It was already bad enough that I could not attract black men, and so I kept quiet, afraid to correct Chris about the impossibility of color blindness because he might have mistaken that for aggression. I didn’t want to be a black female stereotype, the Sapphire who emasculates men and usurps their dominant role.
Since the 1800s, one of the stereotypes that black women in popular culture fall into is that of the “sassy mammies.” Because they were accepted in white families, their presence gave the impression that their oppression was minimal. The name “Sapphire” came from Sapphire Stevens, an Amos ’n’ Andy character, who constantly mocked her husband, Kingfish, leader of a black fraternal lodge in Harlem, calling him a failure. Both black and nonblack men know the Sapphire very well. She’s Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, Tracy Jordan’s wife in 30 Rock, Omarosa Manigault on The Apprentice: any loud neck-and eye-rolling black woman who dares to challenge a man or voice her opinion. Black women aren’t presented as people to be loved, but rather as sources of entertainment, and black women’s mouths are always a spectacle.
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.