Well, I just have to say: I was offended. When someone says something negative about me, it hurts my feelings. It always has, and it probably always will. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did when I was younger, but it still hurts. I’ll never feel glad that someone says something awful about me. I’ll never bask in the negative attention. It’s ridiculous that I’m asked to do so. I’m a fucking human being! I’m not weak. But I am human.
I don’t think it’s funny when people stuff pillows in their clothing to look like me. I don’t think it’s funny when people paint their faces to look like me. I don’t think it’s funny when a stranger calls me a fat bitch no matter what they’re offering to do for me. I don’t think it’s funny that I’m not allowed to say that my feelings are hurt. Feelings aren’t an absence of strength. I know this for sure. So why should I pretend to have a sense of humor just to allow someone else to take a shot at me?
People have their opinions about me. For now, their opinions are basically about my body. It seems as though if I cured cancer and won a Nobel Prize someone would say, “Sure, cancer sucks and I’m glad there’s a cure, but her body is just disgusting. She needs to spend less time in the science lab and more time in the gym!” Even people who want to put me on the covers of magazines will wonder how much I eat or how I fit through a door. The best thing to do with those opinions is to ignore them and listen to my own. I could lose weight. That is a fact. But I am dope at any and every size. I am smart. I am funny. I am talented. I am gorgeous. I am black. I am fat. Sometimes I’m a bitch. At all times, I am a bad bitch. (The word bitch is pretty confusing, right?)
I have yet to grace the cover of Vogue. I guess they couldn’t find a claw-foot tub big enough for me and my mermaid tail. I had to settle for being in the pages of Vogue in a CoverGirl feature instead. I still consider it a win for fat black bitches everywhere. André Leon Talley included.
2
Virgin fo’ Life
Dude just DM’d me an unsolicited dick pic, but his profile says, “Through God, all things are possible” . . . I am very confused.
—my Twitter
MY MOM AND I ARE always discussing how we’d deal with attempted rape. Sometimes we decide that we’d fight tooth and nail. We’d bite our attacker in the dick; in our minds, the rapist is insistent on foreplay and surely wants to be pleasured orally. We bite his dick, he goes down in pain, and we run out of the house or down the alley screaming, blood dripping down the sides of our mouths. Other times we go along with all of our attacker’s requests. We lull him into a false sense of security, and when he least expects it, we claw at his face and genitals, and then run out of the house or down the alley screaming, blood dripping from our fingernails. We are never together in the scenarios we envision. We can’t imagine that an attacker would look at the two of us together and think gangbang. No. We are always alone, at home or getting on the subway very late at night.
I admit, my mom and I don’t take into account the scenarios in which our strategies could get us killed. Nor do we ever consider being paralyzed by fear. But we are genuinely discussing how we envision ourselves fighting off an attack. Really, it’s something that all mothers and daughters should discuss. The same way that all fathers and sons should discuss why no one should ever be raped in the first place. It’s my theory that not enough fathers and sons discuss rape, and so my mother and I have to discuss it just about every time I go see her.
When I was twenty-seven, I went to visit my mom, who was still living in the apartment in Harlem I grew up in. I sat while she ran around the kitchen cooking food for me, getting a glass of tea for me, asking if there was something else she could do for me. She waits on me now because I’m a guest. My mother always makes such a huge fuss over me, and it makes me feel like an adult and a child at the same time. When I first moved out, I thought the apartment would feel like home as long as my family still lived there. Not the case. It’s actually a huge disappointment to go back and feel like a visitor instead of like a daughter to my mother and a little sister to my brother. Everything feels smaller. The doorways are shorter, the toilet is closer to the ground, and I no longer know how to turn on the TV. I’m grown now.
So we were in the kitchen discussing rape, as usual, when my mother said, “You’d better really fight. It would be so hard on you because you’re still a virgin, and that’s not how you want to lose your virginity.”
???
It was a total record-scratch moment! She called me a virgin, and she said it with sincerity and a touch of pity. Here I was, twenty-seven years old, having lived on my own for two years, and she just knew for a fact that I was a virgin. I even had a boyfriend at the time, and she still felt confident in her belief that I was a virgin—confident enough to bring it up as obvious in a conversation about a completely different subject. Well, she was wrong. I wasn’t a virgin. I’m still not a virgin. That’s right. I’ve gone all the way.
However, I am fascinated by virginity. Losing it, keeping it, only doing hand and mouth stuff because you regard your vag as a delicate little prize for your husband on your wedding night. Sacrificing your butt hole to save your porcelain-baby vagina from being smushed and crushed by some dude who barely knows what he’s doing. Hey, girl, I get it! Kind of. Wait . . . no. I don’t really get it, but I’m not here to judge you. Everyone has his or her reasons for holding on to it—until they don’t. Frankly, that’s the way it should be. Letting some dude put his stuff in you is actually pretty heavy. It’s serious. But I didn’t think about my virginity that way before I lost it. I didn’t see it as a treasure or a precious jewel. I had felt the burden of my virginity ever since my friend, a guy, told me when I was sixteen that if I was still a virgin at twenty-one he’d do me a favor and take it from me. He said it out of nowhere! Like he was so sure that I was so undesirable that he’d have to go ahead and lie on the cross and take my virginity from me as an act of charity. Bless him. I couldn’t think of anything sadder than being a pity fuck. That’s not normal. I couldn’t let it happen. I saw it as a burden that I had to get rid of so that I could be normal like my friends. A few years later, I looked around and I was the only virgin left and I basically panicked.