Through the Back Door

Anal sex has long been considered a taboo and forbidden sexual practice. It has supposedly led to the destruction of cities and has been looked upon as something unnatural. Yet for all of the moral admonishments, laws governing its behavior, and the movement to keep people from doing it, the practice of anal sex continues to exist and, in fact, flourish. Anal sex is growing in popularity as women learn that it can be a source of intense pleasure and not merely something painful that they must endure at the hands of an insensitive lover. Men are coming to accept that anal penetration can be a deeply satisfying experience whether it be from man, woman, or toy. There’s evidence that stimulation of a man’s prostate is healthy and there are even sources that assert that anal penetration stimulates chakras, or spiritual centers in the body. Rimming, or the practice of performing oral sex on your partner’s anus, is often seen as an extremely pleasurable, intimate and bonding experience for both parties.

What are your thoughts on anal sex? Is it something that you are adamantly against and will never try? Was it something that you once thought was disgusting but now you enjoy? If you are a man, are you down with doing it to your lady but your ass is exit only, or have you tried a tongue or finger back there and found that you enjoy it? Ladies, do you get aroused by penetrating your partner with a strapon? Do you like anal sex more than vaginal sex? Tell us what you think and share your experiences.

Phone Bone

I've come to accept that I might not ever share my bed with a true partner. A true partner is someone who appreciates me, accepts me, someone who loves me for all that I am. My bed might only ever provide temporary refuge for men who feel a connection but fear the connection. It's very possible my lovers will be men who leave me feeling insecure and ugly, questioning my value and worth as a woman, a lover, and a partner.

But I am a woman with needs and desires that go unfulfilled for months and even years at a time. I long to feel desired and loved just like any other human being. I don't have casual sex; I can't go out to the club on a Friday night and meet someone I'm attracted to. I've learned the hard way that I can't go on a dating site and find someone with whom I share chemistry and connection.

I find comfort, safety, and release occasionally in phone sex. In the familiarity of my own bed, practicing the safest possible sex, thanks to AT&T, I can experience the intimacy, love and connection I desire. The men need not be perfect. I can pretend there in the dark that he is my ideal lover. His voice can caress me, his words can satisfy my hungers. I can touch myself and pretend that my dream lover tenderly, sweetly, gently delivers each and every stroke.

Phone sex is my only outlet. It's the only form of sex I can seem to have and not have crippling guilt and remorse afterwards. The longer I'm alone the more I realize how essential physical connection is. Every time I have sex with someone undeserving of my body and my love, I feel like I have to punish myself. I feel like I need to revirginize myself and go without sex for painfully long periods of time in order to purge myself of my "sin" of weakness. It's my weakness to my urges that I know are human and normal and natural that haunt me. With phone sex, I have no such angst, that disappointment in myself. My phone lovers aren't real so I can let down my hair and be primal and feral and never feel an ounce of remorse. I feel lonely afterwards, that's for sure, but FAR less than I do when I have sex with and I know that when he leaves my bed, he may not return.

My phone lovers, too, are few and far between. To be honest, most men are not great at making love to a woman's mind so it stands to reason that the skills needed to seduce a woman over the phone are underdeveloped as well. I don't want to be called a bitch; I don't want to hear fake and contrived scenarios. I just want a man to tell me how much he desires me, my body, my personal brand of pleasure. I want to experience his private pleasure with his words and sounds. I want to dance to images in my head sung to a poetic sonata of sensual bliss. I want to cum together and cry out in the night and feel that bond.

Ideally, I would be able to find a man who wants me and who is a great communicator and we could supplement our amazing sex life with occasional phone sex to keep things spicy. Minus that, I will have to find satisfaction in cellular love.

Sensual evolution

When I was a child, I thought as a child, when I became a woman . . . the theory is supposed to be that my thoughts and perceptions shifted to that of an adult. I’m convinced that one’s orientation doesn’t shift, one’s primary programming doesn’t evolve, one just becomes older and more adept at justifying and validating the belief systems passed down to him or her generationally.

In an effort to define my sensual evolution, I’ve taken some serious time to assess where I was and where I am now and where I want to go in terms of my sexuality. I’m reluctant to use the term evolution because I’m not convinced that my shift in sexual desires has moved to a higher plane. Perhaps it has just shifted around like a box of tissues in the back window of a car on a bumpy ride.

When I was a developing teen with raging hormones and no one to help me navigate my sexual feelings other than my other pubescent friends, my sexuality was defined by my mother’s collection of pornography in her closet. I was thrilled with words more than pictures and obviously, given my career choice, a fact has carried over into my adult life. I learned about sexuality from overtly misogynist and sexist material that objectified women. Thusly, my sexual desires reflected that fact. I wanted to be seen as desirable and subsequently my fantasies were in relation to that. My earliest fantasies were of doing the things that would make men want me, to see me as the most beautiful, to be the most pleasing to men. I worked hard to perfect my skills at giving head; I would construct intricate and complex scenarios to seduce my boyfriends, all my fantasies revolved around giving pleasure to men. Rarely, if ever, did I fantasize about men giving me pleasure. Two rapes, a failed marriage, a decade of being single, and the conscious effort to become more comfortable with my sexuality have caused my fantasies to shift. I no longer have a desire to be seen as beautiful or desirable to men, in fact, my desires are just the opposite. I want to be seen as a human being and a woman and the person inside the package.

For many years now, I’ve been asexual. I’ve put up a wall around my sexuality intended to keep people out. For me, the concept of planning a seduction and performing outrageous feats of sexuality to please a man are totally foreign to me. My sexual fantasies now mostly revolve around me being seduced and pleasured. In my 43 years of life, I’ve only been seduced once. I’ve had plenty of men want to give me pleasure but that really had nothing to do with pleasing me as a human being, it had more to do with conquering me as some sort of trophy or possession. I do fantasize of once again planning intricate and detailed seductions for my mate but the concept of finding a mate that appreciates all of me are the details I can’t seem to fill in in my imagination.

I used to fantasize about being with women; it’s been years since I’ve had those sorts of thoughts. I used to fantasize about sucking dick; now I chant “Eat me” in my fantasies. In fact, for the first decade of my sexual life, I never asked a man to perform oral sex on me because I thought that was an indication of being selfish. I would REFUSE to sit on a man’s face, even if he insisted that I do it. In my mind, it was indicative of something exclusively for me I couldn’t relax enough to enjoy it. (I still don’t like doing it but that’s mostly because men tend to suck too hard on my clit when I’m on top and I like it SOFT) I still fake orgasms, almost pathologically, because I can’t let go of my conditioning that says that I have to make the man happy. Today, a large percentage of my fantasies unashamedly revolve around reciprocal anal play. Five years ago, the concept of two men together sexually triggered what I call the “knee-jerk talk show reaction.” That’s the standard, “That’s disgusting,” indignation that 99% of people have in the audiences of Jerry and Maury when the concept of male bisexuality is discussed that is blatantly absent when the issue is two women together. I realize now that my beliefs were part of conservative, Protestant-ethic, brainwashing that has no basis in really dissecting the causes, issues, and genesis of same sex couplings. Today, I find myself aroused by the concept of two men together and I also am aroused by the act of intimacy that a man extends to me in sharing his bisexual desires. Rarely do I fantasize about being penetrated and when I do, my fantasies are romantic more than sexual. In recent years, I was aroused by dominating men. Now, I no longer have a need to be sexually dominant I just accept that as a part of my sexuality. I don’t have a need to assert power over men, or to psychologically manipulate them, I simply long to be treated as a queen.

My ideal sexual fantasy at this stage in my life is to have a mate, lover, partner, boyfriend/husband that is committed to pampering me each night. I dream of a man that draws my bath every evening and pampers my body with oils and lotions and shea butter. Completely relaxed, he then takes painstaking efforts to bring me to orgasm based on the things that arouse me specifically, i.e. licking my asshole, fingering my magic spot, sucking my nipples gently, and eating me SOFTLY. Then and only then, when I’m completely satisfied, do I fantasize that I’m so wickedly pleasured that I have to have him inside me and we make love in a passionate and intense erotic experience. Upon awaking, he’s there behind me, to give me the morning wood that I love so much. I do fantasize that I take great efforts to keep him aroused and plan intricate seductions but it’s difficult to get a good picture of how I do that for the simple fact that I can’t see a man in my life.

I’ve tried to map out a roadmap of where I want to go in my sexual life from here but a lot of that is dependent upon finding a mate. Right now, I tend to think that I’m going to be primarily celibate for the rest of my life and that I’ll supplement my sex life with meaningless episodes once a year or so. That saddens me more than one can imagine but I’m extremely pessimistic about finding a mate. I would like to see myself evolving sensually with my mate, practicing tantric techniques and growing in love and communication. Where I go, how my fantasies will evolve is yet to be seen but I will be sure to monitor my motivations and desires in an effort to track my sensual evolution.

Have you assessed your sensual evolution? Have you asked yourself what things went into making up your sexual personality and how have you grown or changed? How are your desires different now than in years past and are they more healthy or have you just continued on without thinking about your sexual motivations? Share your thoughts and opinions.

Nigga What?

We embrace calling ourselves niggers, like that’s empowering, when in actuality, it’s disrespectful to our ancestors and just plain ignorant. To believe yourself to be a nigger, to behave like you are an ignorant sub human (the true implied meaning of the word) has no benefit or value. Defending the use of the word, trying to rationalize that it has been changed into something positive is insanity. Nine times out of ten, the usage of the word is meant to be disparaging and degrading, EXACTLY the way white people intended it to be used, and on the tenth time, it’s an empty a sign of self-hatred masquerading itself as a term of endearment.

White people expect us to behave like niggers, so calling ourselves that, ESPECIALLY in front of them, does nothing but reinforce to them that we are inferior. To carry yourself like royalty, to walk with dignity, to boldly declare that you are not only equal to but better than white people with your speech, your actions, and your intellect is FAR more threatening to white people than calling yourself a nigga. Want proof? Write a blog calling yourself a nigga and talking about cars, drugs, guns, rap, sex, sports, and how much you love living in the ghetto. You won’t get a private response or two from white people. Well that’s not entirely true. You might get a response or two asking you to fulfill their sexual fantasies. Then, write a blog, grammatically correct and spell checked, that talks about the greatness of black people, our strength, and our ability to excel despite racism, oppression, and bigotry. Write about how our true history of greatness has been distorted with white lies and deception. Discuss, academically articulated with footnoted and documented proof, advanced African civilizations and how white people re-wrote history to make themselves appear superior. White people will crawl out of the woodworks to tell you that Black people are ignorant and that you are nothing but a nigger.

You have to ask yourself, what would you rather be called, what benefit do you get from calling yourself a nigga? If calling yourself that makes you feel connected to other black people, consider yourself a slave on the plantation. If you do nothing else this year, decide to stop using the N word to describe yourself, to describe other black people you want to look down on, or as some sort of synonym supposedly meaning Black person. It’s negative, unenlightened, and stupid.

Copyright 2009 AfroerotiK All Rights Reserved

The Myth of the Magical, All-Powerful White Man

Or Debunking the Fallacy of White Supremacy

I’ve come to understand that there are certain Black people who believe that white men have super powers, supposedly genetically-inherited, superior intellectual mind-control techniques that they use to oppress people of color around the globe. If I understand their assertions correctly, they believe that white men are capable of controlling the minds of brown people universally and conversely no one is able to get into their minds, no one is able to control them because everyone else is under their spell, hypnotized by their . . . whiteness I guess. Their whiteness is theoretically impenetrable and renders mere people of color helpless to combat their evil machinations. It seems that this small faction of Black people believe that white men possess genetic predisposition to rule the world and, oddly enough and quite contradictorily, they believe that it is the secret mission of white men to become Black, or at least commandeer Blackness because they feel jealous of it. I’m led to believe that they accomplish their mission with their superior intellect, secret societies, and agendas passed down from white brethren to white brethren to intricately know the minds of Black folks and to beat us at our own game. I’m here to say that NOTHING could be further from the truth.

Dr. Frances Cress Welsing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Cress_Welsing is the preeminent black scholar of these types of assertions. If she is not the originator of them, she certainly is the benchmark Black people use to quote and or paraphrase their “white supermen” theories. I think it should also be noted here that the vast and overwhelming majority of Black people believe completely differently than the above-mentioned theories. Sadly, most Black people believe in the fallacy of white supremacy but they don’t have a clue that they do. Most Black people say color doesn’t matter and sign on hook, line, and sinker for any cliché that white people cast at them. Most Black people wouldn’t know how to question the status quo if you paid them. That’s not because we are inherently stupid, it’s a byproduct of our enslavement where we were taught not to question white people or anything they tell us. People of color have to believe in the fallacy of white supremacy, lest you get those pesky minorities who try to buck the system and talk about racism and the inherent privileges white people have simply by virtue of their skin color.

First, let’s break it down and establish some truths in these fallacious white supremacist concepts. There is UNQUESTIONABLY a fallacy of white supremacy that dictates, rules, and poisons the entire world. It seems that the smallest population of people have been able to order, control, dominate, oppress, and manipulate the earth’s resources so that they control and “own” damn near everything. I say the fallacy of white supremacy implicitly because it is nothing more than illusion. It’s a fallacy that they are superior, it’s not a fallacy that they have been able to take their inflated belief in self and transform that into global domination. Does average white Joe or Sally believe that they are better than people of color? Yes, that’s how the game is perpetuated. Average white Joe or Sally has to believe that history started with their arrival on the planet, that white people are the originators of the arts and sciences. They have to believe that whites made every technological advancement. If they don’t sign on for the belief that whites were smarter, stronger, more capable, more civilized, more refined, more god-like than any other people, then the whole house of cards starts to fall. Average Joe and Sally White has to believe that there is something inherent about them that makes them better, that makes them more deserving of peace, justice, and liberty than anyone else on the planet. God is a white man thus white men have to be given more insight, more leadership ability, more spiritual stuff, right? The air white people breathe has to be more sacred, the land they live on has to be more consecrated, more blessed, more protected than anyone else’s land. Greece has to be the birthplace of the humanities, Columbus has to be the greatest explorer, Shakespeare has to be the best composer, Rocky has to be the best fighter, Jesus has to have blue eyes and blonde hair, and white people have to believe that to be true from the time they are born in order for the fallacy of white supremacy to thrive. White has to be right or the entire fallacy of white supremacy crumbles like a crunchy taco shell on Cinco de Mayo at an all you can eat Mexican buffet.

Ever watch the news right after some white person has gone on a killing spree and killed everyone they could? The neighbors all say the same thing. “Oh, he was so nice. You just don’t think something like that can happen in this neighborhood.” That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is the fallacy of white supremacy at work. It is the belief that crime only happens in Black/Latino neighborhoods. It’s the belief that Psycho Joe, as everyone in the neighborhood calls him, is a good ole boy regardless of the fact that he kills the neighborhood cats and drinks their blood because he has white blood. You see, whiteness equals good in this society. It’s what children are taught in school, it’s what’s reflected in the media, it’s the thread that’s woven into the very fabric of how the perceptions of how the world is viewed. White men who get to decide what is and what isn’t racist comes purely from the fallacy of white supremacy. It’s the notion that they don’t have to consider anyone else’s experience or perspective because what they see, and think, and believe has to be right.

Are there secret societies that have been formed to keep people of color oppressed? Yes. Do those men have super abilities, do they have access to mind control techniques that keep people of color hypnotized in order to exact their plans of global domination? Not exactly. What those secret societies posses are members who are egotistical and greedy and intent on keeping their illegitimate power. Their ego is born from this belief that white men are special, that they have rights and privileges no one else is deserving of. Their ego is what drives them to steal, rape, kill, and oppress. Their ego makes them narcissistic bastards who sit around and try to figure out ways to control the money and power so that it doesn’t get into the hands of brown, yellow, or (what’s left of) red people. It is nothing more than their ego that makes white men think that they have more inherent value than anyone else that has created this false sense of superiority. Their ego is greater than most white men but it’s certainly not genetic and it’s not indication that they want to be Black or have a need to oppress people because they feel insecure because they lack melanin.

From where did this warped sense of self originate? How did white people first come to believe that they had dominion over the colored people of the planet? I have no earthly idea. I can’t even begin to speculate. I do know that it has infected every country, every place white people have been for thousands of years. What I can do, however, is tell you how the fallacy of white supremacy has been able to flourish and metastasize in this country over the last 400 years. There’s no magic to it, there’s no genetics involved, there’s no secret societal agenda, it’s pure psychology. Understanding the mind and how it works holds the key to understanding how and why white people in this country have been able to dictate and dominate the minds of people of color for over four centuries.

Europeans saw the beautiful brown bodies of the indigenous people of the land that is now known as Africa and believed that they were inferior savages. They assumed they themselves were inherently superior and that is was their right to capture, kill, kidnap, enslave, and own those people. That belief, what they thought was truth and knowledge and undisputable fact, is what created the system of racial slavery in the US that has been unequaled in the world before or since. They believed that their skin was better, their hair was better, their features were more attractive; they believed that their language, arts, customs, religion, and practices had more validity than anything Africans could contribute. They had a deep-seated need to control and subjugate and veritably crush the wills of those people of color.

Africans who were enslaved, those who survived the middle passage were and transportation to the United States were emotionally, psychologically, spiritually healthy people. They were capable of making choices and decisions on their own, forming their own opinions, knowing what it was to be a human being outside of their enslavement. Slaves born in this country, those who never knew freedom, were never privileged enough to know anything other than what the system of slavery taught them. Slaves born into they system believed from birth that whites were superior, that Blacks were inferior, and that anything and everything that was good was white. Every black child born into slavery learned the same lessons, that white was right and that black was equivalent to evil.

Conversely, every white child born in this country was the beneficiary of being born in a system that told them that every thing about their life, their world, their entire existence that they were superior to anyone with color. (Rather, anything, because they didn’t see slaves as humans) The prevalence of racism and the systems, laws, and beliefs enacted during slavery set the stage for every white child to not only believe they were superior but it was validated (at least in their minds) because anything and everything of accomplishment was achieved by white people.

Fast forward and the beliefs held by the children of slave owners and the children of white people in general, whether they owned slaves or not, have been passed down from generation to generation. The key instruments in building a child’s self esteem are to shower them with praise and reinforce to them that they have an inherent worth. Having books, and TV shows and movies that show children people that look like them builds a sense of self. Reading children stories where all the heroes are white perpetuates the fallacy of white supremacy. Teaching children that God in heaven looks like them validates that white is the baseline, the standard by which everything else has to be measured. White children, never having read a book about Black people, never having heard a story of African accomplishment, never conceiving that anyone other than white people contributed anything to society will grow up with an inherited and false sense of superiority. White children never have to wait until the one night of the week when the “white shows” are on, they never have to wait for the white movie to come out. They have access to centuries of images of themselves that show them in a positive and healthy light. So while Blacks have inherited and passed down a slave mentality (even though we don’t acknowledge or admit it) whites have passed down a slave master mentality.

Slave master mentality is the mindset of white people who have never once had to question that people like them have been the masters of finance, industry, medicine and the arts. Slave master mentality is the mindset of people who have never once in their lives felt that their skin color was a liability, something that they had to denounce in order to be accepted. Slave master mentality is the belief systems passed down from generation to generation that allows white people to accept that the final authority, the last word, the law from on high is going to come from a person who looks like them. It’s that diseased sense of self, that inflated super ego that has created Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. It’s what lead Pat Buchanan to say, and moreover BELIEVE, that this country was built by white men. It’s that isolation from a world where people of color are equal, that inocular vision which creates the ego of white people who think that it’s okay to be racist, that they can say whatever they want, to whomever they want, without repercussion, without censure because they have a birthright to do so. The fallacy of white supremacy is perpetuated on the beliefs of white men who think that they have more right to money, power, and control than anyone else.

While I recognize and acknowledge that the pervasive and overwhelming mindset of white people in this society, EVEN those who claim to not have a racist bone in their body, is based on the fallacy of white supremacy, it is just that . . . a fallacy. White people are not truly superior, they have no super ability to understand the minds of people of color and mastermind techniques to keep us oppressed. What keeps us oppressed is our inability to understand and comprehend our history, our inability to be introspective and examine our dysfunctions and their origins, and our fear of admitting that we might be flawed (through no fault of our own mind you). It is far easier for us to worship a blonde haired, blue eyed Jesus than to change the belief that we’ve learned from childhood, passed down to us from our parents, and their parents and their parents before them that black is ugly and bad. What keeps them in power is their belief that they are superior. They believe it so they behave in ways that reflect their beliefs. They start wars, they dictate and manipulate, they work diligently to keep people of color from taking their power or from becoming equal because what’s been taught to them by their parents, what their great grandparents taught their grandparents is that white people have more value. Even if the message isn’t overt, even if the message doesn’t come from behind the percale softness of a poly-cotton white sheet, the result is the same. Any white child born in this society has been the beneficiary of an educational, medical, judicial, legal, and social system that has placed whiteness on a pedestal, as an entity deserving of worship and praise. When white people try to silence any discussion of racism, it’s because they believe that they have a right to say what’s valid, what’s true, what’s right in the world, that no other experience other than their own has weight. They see the world through white colored glasses. In that world, everything comes back to the fact that they have been validated, reinforced, and reminded every single solitary day of their lives that white people are great. They’ve never once had to live in a time or place where white people are not seen as the origin of everything good in the world.

So in order for white people, the few elites who do have global power and control, to remain in power, for them to maintain the status quo, people of color have to be complicit in their agenda. There has to be a population of Black people who believe that there are white men who possess super-human, secret Echelon infrastructure powers to control and dominate people of color. Once we accept that the fallacy of white supremacy is based on nothing more than the narcissistic, self-centered and childlike behaviors of men with inflated egos who have the same flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities as everyone else, then and only then can we start restructuring a world where everyone is equal. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney can no longer be secret society masterminds but they are little boys who were told over and over that the Lone Ranger was good and that the injuns were bad. They cease to be keepers of keys to sacred texts that were created in ancient times to mesmerize the people of color around the globe to goose step to their tune of supremacy. It is in truth and understanding that we see them as individuals who were told that God was a white man and that they were literally created in his image and likeness. Left unchecked, the ego can be a dangerous tool. Understanding that illusion is the key to our liberation. The fallacy of white supremacy can be dismantled and destroyed with knowledge of self, re-writing our stories to include people of color, and dismantling the notion that white men are somehow in possession of tools that will allow them to control us. Every human being has the ability within them to crush the inflated ego of self and shine the light of truth, justice, and peace on the shadows of injustice that have plagued the world.

Copyright 2009 Scottie Lowe of AfroerotiK

Is it a Question of LOVE?

I was asked to answer the following questions on love because, supposedly, I’m a thinker. Here are the questions and my responses.

1. What is love (to you)?
Love is a feeling, an emotion, a state of being where you care for someone else’s well-being, you care about their feelings, you want to make them happy, see them happy, you don’t mind sacrificing for them.

2. What is IN love (to you)? I don’t differentiate the terms love and in love simply because I don’t think there’s any quantifiable way to define how much one loves another person. We use the words love for family and friends and people we don’t want to have sex with and we use the words in love for someone to whom we are romantically attracted. I don’t love the little boy I baby-sit for any more or less than I once loved his father. Most people would get upset if I were to say that I was in love with a child but my level of emotion, concern, and the depth of my feelings is on par with the love I’ve felt for grown men. I want to see him smile, I look forward to seeing him, I miss him when he’s not here, I think of things to do for him that will make him happy. Those are the exact same things I once felt for his father. Because I have no sexual feelings for him, society says I’m not “in love” with him. I say society needs to separate romantic love from “other” love because we are so sexually repressed, because we don’t teach people how to love, only what it is to be loved. I LOVE my sister and I don’t think I’ve seen her more than a half a dozen times in my life. I still remember the first time I laid eyes on her, she was a grown woman . The feeling of wanting her to be happy and healthy, of wanting to protect her . . . it still brings tears to my eyes. I’m in love with her. My love for her is active and growing and alive.

3. Have you or anyone you know, mistaken LOVE for IN LOVE? If the assumption is that being “in love” is somehow real and true and that to only “love” someone means that the love is superficial or doesn’t have as much substance or validity as being “in love” then I reject the terms. I have fallen in love with men who I’ve later been repulsed by. I’ve loved men who have not deserved my love. I’ve loved men who have fooled me into thinking they were someone that they were not. I love men whom I once cared for deeply but have no romantic feelings for currently. Love can grow and evolve, the depth of one’s feelings can change and transform. Love is real. The baggage we apply to it is what makes it appear false.

4. Is conditional love natural or can it be inherited? I think conditional love is a manifestation of selfishness. Conditional love is only loving someone if they love you a certain way, if they only fulfill your needs in a way that is pleasing to you. That is a creation of a society that teaches people to love themselves, to only look out for number one. I think we teach our children conditional love by beating them, by withholding love from them when they misbehave, by not showing them healthy examples of love. I think conditional love is a sickness we’ve inherited from a society that is spiritually bereft.

5. Why is love so complicated when it suppose to be the most simplest of all acts and feelings? We live in a society of fear. We fear that if we love someone and we don’t get that love returned, that we have to hurt them back. We live in a society that teaches us how to be loved, to enjoy the feelings of someone treating us special but we don’t learn how to make someone else feel special. Love is complicated because we are taught models of love from our mothers and fathers, who most often were not together, who fought, who didn’t love each other, and who brought a whole host of other emotional issues to the table when they did. Love is difficult because it leaves us vulnerable and that is scary. Love is difficult because it takes work. Love is difficult because we fall in love with money and looks and superficial things that have nothing to do with true emotion and feeling. It’s hard to find love because first we need to love ourselves, and to do that, we have to take the bandage off our emotional wounds and really heal them and that hurts.

6. Is 'material' love a bad thing? If yes, then how can we 'de-love' it? If by material love, you mean love of things, I think that is purely a manifestation of Eurocentrism. Almost all indigenous, brown people loved the land, they loved their people, and they loved the Creator more than they loved things before the influence of Europeans. The importance of things, outside trinkets, stuff, money, belongings that give people a false sense of worth seems to stem from the people who think that they can take land, kidnap and kill people, steal possessions as their god-given right. The only way I can imagine to de-love material things is to see ourselves as truly spiritual beings, the way God intended us to be. If God is love, then all we are is love. If love is truth, then material things are the lie.

7. Is there really such a thing as self-love? (take your time on this one) I have to wonder why this question was posed as such. It seems to indicate that self-love is perhaps fictional or delusional. Self-love is not needing validation from someone or something else, it is holding yourself to a higher standard than others around you would. Self-love is making sure you don’t put yourself in harmful, dysfunctional situations. Self-love is very real. It is knowing yourself, your triggers, your weaknesses, it’s knowing everything about yourself, the good and the bad, and being comfortable in your own skin.

Untreated Wounds

Haunted Past and Untreated Wounds

There’s a man. He has a terrible secret. His shame and pain haunt him. His secret eats at his very soul; it has shaped his consciousness and the way he views life and he’s formed his identity around his unhealed wounds. When he was a young man, someone stole his innocence. He was sexually violated. He has hidden his secret and he’s denied it. He’s tried to suppress his memories and he’s even convinced himself after all these years that it didn’t happen. He says to himself, “I should have fought harder, it couldn’t have happened. In fact, it didn’t happen at all.” However, the pain is still deep inside. The thoughts plague him and everyone one of his relationships has been affected. He lashes out, he tries to hurt people, he keeps himself closed off, he lies. He refuses to address his past and he can’t figure out why his life isn’t happy, why he can’t seem to cope like other people can.

There’s a woman. She suffered so much abuse, so much daily terror, she internalized it as natural. Her sexuality is wrapped up in feeling like an object, in feeling used and abused. She’s never known her body to be hers, since she was a toddler. She’s never experienced autonomy nor pleasure unless it was at the hands of others molesting her body and raping her of her dignity and self-respect. She is so numb inside she doesn’t even know what pain feels like. Pain and abuse have become her pleasure. She can’t even perceive of a healthy relationship and is drawn to relationships that reflect her painful life as validation that everyone is meant to hurt her. She has no reason to deny her past, however, because it’s all she knows, it’s all she can conceive of so she has no point of reference for anything else. She gets outraged and lashes out at individuals who try to suggest to her that she needs to deal with the pain and the abuse. To her, everyone else is fucked up for not seeing things through her lens of hate, pain, and abuse.

She’s different that the other woman that was sexually assaulted as a child. This young lady only had it happen once or twice. She doesn’t think about it, she only has vague memories that come once in a while. She tells herself it was no big deal because it wasn’t like it was a stranger, it was someone she knew, maybe even someone she was attracted to. Every man that she’s had to fight off, that wouldn’t take no for an answer she justified it by saying it was her fault for sending out the wrong signals. Her relationships with men have been cyclical; she tries to form healthy relationships but she ends up with men that only want her for sex or who don’t take the time to really get to know her as a person. Her identity is wrapped up in being attractive to men; she needs to feel beautiful to feel whole. Tired of having men use her for sex, she decides that she’s going to beat them at their own game. She decides that she’s going to be the sexual aggressor, that she’s going to get hers and fuck anybody else, literally and figuratively, that stands in between her and her pleasure. She tries desperately to use men, but only ends up used again because her feelings get in the way.

Is there any wonder we can’t heal our relationships? We have been violated, abused, used, raped, and we never discuss it. We don’t heal from the sexual devastation that has shaped our personalities. We can’t heal unless we talk about it, and sometimes, that’s not even enough. Our subconscious mind, the mind that exists beyond our waking thoughts, is so used to the pain, that it’s made adjustments in our personalities where the pain becomes normal. The deep, oozing, weeping, puss-filled emotional sores from our sexual past haunt us and the cycle can’t end. The violated are going on to violate, the abused are become abusers, of themselves and the people in their spheres. What, short of a miracle, will heal these haunted pasts and untreated wounds?

Black "Maled"

This was, yet again, a very difficult story for me to write. My writing process is unique in that I see pictures in my head and I use words to describe what I see and the plot of the story evolves and unwinds, literally, at my fingertips. In my head, I didn't see Kamal having sex with either Ron or Tricia. I thought he was going to control a gangbang, direct it, quite possibly a gangbang of men who were NOT Black, just to torture Ron. I wanted him to be above having sex with them, to not only be physically superior but morally superior as well. I wanted him to maybe even stay faithful to a girlfriend or dominate the couple with his girlfriend.

Obviously, the story turned out much differently than I expected and as the images came to me, I realized that Kamal was human and that making him asexual or "too good" to have sex with Ron or Tricia would be to make him a myth, so as the pictures came to me, he was able to fuck Tricia well, deliver his message, and still be able to masterfully control the situation.

For me, Ron's description was key because white people assume that when I say that I write interracial erotic stories that show Black people in a positive light, that automatically assumes that I HAVE TO show white people in a positive light as well. It's not my job to show white people in a positive light, but to expose their core racist beliefs and hold them up to the light so that they might be able to see Black people more holistically. Ron Waterman exists in every city, hamlet, town, village, and province across these United States. He might not be AS rich, but his mindset is identical. Ron and Tricia are more real than Kamal. While there are brothas like Kamal who do exist, who are conscious, intelligent, and not swayed by the lure of white pussy, they are few and far between. Ron and Tricia, on the other hand, are so typical, they almost seem cliché. Go outside, close your eyes, throw a stick, and you'll accidentally hit 10 white men who are obsessed with masturbation and who objectify Black men.

Question

The book that I've been trying to get published for the past three years is still nothing more than a bunch of word documents on my computer. IMHO, it's some of the very best writing I've ever done. I've been pretty stubborn about the fact that I MUST include the chapters that show gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered sex in the same book as the straight stories because I want ALL people of color to feel validation, to see themselves in a postive sexual light. Would you buy a book of erotic stories and photography if it included 10 chapters of images you found arousing and one or two chapters that you weren't aroused by? I'd love to know your opinion.

Who's got Jungle Fever?

This was perhaps, the most difficult story I’ve ever written. No, this was, by far, without a doubt, the hardest story I’ve ever written. It challenged me in ways that no other story has even come close to doing.

I got the idea to write a story about a black man and a white woman because my repertoire is dangerously light on that theme. I have a ton of stories about white men with Black women, mostly driven by the fact that white men request interracial stories, NOT because that’s a preference of mine. In each of those stories, whether it be romantic or about domination, I make sure I show Black women in a healthy, positive, empowered light. They are never ghetto whores, or blinded by the mystical allure of interracial lust, they are in charge, intelligent, articulate women of color who are autonomous and, in some cases, dangerously efficient at manipulating the desires of white men. In most cases, people aren’t even aware enough to notice the social commentary; they just fast forward to the sex or they only absorb the story on a very superficial level.

Because I don’t have many stories about black men and white women, I decided to tackle it head on. My first inclination was to make it a romantic story and I almost wish I had. That would have been easier for me I’m sure. I could have written a story where the characters would just happen to be different colors and I could have made their choice to date interracially not one driven by stereotypes and racist beliefs but of two people with common interests who felt an attraction for one another. What do they say, always go with your first instinct?

When I sat down to write this particular story, I was overwhelmed with the need to address the large portion of Black men who date interracially and address some of the reasons they do so. They are the least culturally conscious so they are the last group of people to understand their motivations or be able to articulate them. They are also the demographic least likely to read a story of mine. So starting off, I was writing a story about a segment of the population who wasn’t even going to read it. That’s difficult for me because of the customized nature of my work. My goal in writing usually is to arouse the reader of my story and I knew from the beginning that if Black men who did date and fuck white women were to read the story, the things I wrote about in the story would offend them.

Then, I had to take into consideration that the demographic who WAS going to be reading the story the most was white men. They seek out erotic stories about Black men and white women more than any other audience. The vast majority of white men are oblivious to any reality other than their own so I had to choose every single word carefully. I had to put myself in the mindset of a white man who was going to be reading the story and try my best to educate them but also remember that most of what I was saying was going to go WAY over their heads. They weren’t going to be reading the story and taking away from it the more important messages of how dysfunctional most interracial sex really is. All they were going to be doing would be masturbating to the story, more than likely just skipping ahead to the sex parts. Still, I wanted to write a story that would give the few that were cognizant enough to pick up on the underlying themes something to think about.

Black people in general, unfortunately, in many instances, don’t look deeper than the superficial when reading my stories. So again, I’m faced with trying to educate people who were only going to take away from the story the concept that a Black man was saying he hated Black women, and that he was only attracted to white women, and not get the how’s and why’s of how that mindset was really formed in a lot of Black men. More importantly, I knew the vast majority of Black readers were going to see that behavior as merely self-hatred, not a manifestation of slave mentality that has gone un-addressed and unchecked for generations. For all of our flaws and shortcomings, being a victim to mindsets we learned in slavery that have been passed down for generations is not our fault. That doesn’t mean they are acceptable or excusable, it just means they need to be examined and healed.

This very well could be a true story. The characters were not atypical or unique in the fact that they did anything extraordinary; they were average. If you go into a racially mixed club in any town in America, you could see the characters of this story in real life. The things they said were things that have been repeated time and time again by real people, in similar situations. The numbers of Black men who date and/or fuck white women exclusively continues to grow by leaps and bounds, fueled by white America’s lust for the black male body (including the perpetuation of the Mandingo myth), a social climate where any discussion of race other than, “Color doesn’t matter,” is silenced, and racism that eats at the self-esteem of Black men whereby they feel as Darren felt.

Jenny wasn’t bright. One can only assume her attractiveness was the kind that can be found in any Hooter’s restaurant or a Girls Gone Wild video. Her commentary on race was cliché. Her need to be degraded and treated like a slut is symptomatic of a society that has raised a generation of girls to believe that their attractiveness is their only value in life.

Darren’s perceptions on race were formed by racism. For a child, being in an environment where your peers aren’t sensitive to race, where there is no racial tolerance, where Black children are in the minority, and being raised by parents who are trying to instill in them to deny their blackness, it becomes easy to see how self hatred could fester and grow in the mind of a young child. We live in a society that doesn’t show Black women as attractive and then we expect Black men to see them as such when ALL they’ve been shown are images of white women and told how beautiful they are. Black boys see countless images of white women. The first sexual images they see are more than likely going to be in Playboy or Penthouse and be of white women, so logically, their arousal is going to be tied to white women. Yes, Darren was self-hating, but I tried my best to show how he came to be. Well, I did the best I could in a story that was supposed to be erotic.

The entire first half of the story was dedicated to the examination of race in this society. Then, I transition by saying, “An intelligent person might want to contemplate what made this privileged, twenty-something white girl, who had never had a responsibility in her life, crave being used like a fucking rag doll by black men while spewing the most vile racist epithets . . . but who has time for such cerebral musings?” That creates the shift. Then the story becomes hardcore. The sex is visceral and raw, abusive even. It speaks to the way racist white men want to see white women treated by black men and, I can only assume, the ways in which interracial couples who are driven by racist fantasies might interact sexually. I had difficulty writing the sex portion, which is usually the easiest part for me, so I took the sex from another story and just changed the names. I was literally drained by writing the first half of the story to the point where constructing the sex scene was beyond my capabilities.

I’m proud of the finished product in a way that I’d love to see the story examined in a college class on race or debated and discussed in an academic setting. For now, I’ll have to be satisfied knowing that somewhere, someone might read it and walk away with a better understanding of the intricacies of race and sexuality.