Sex: As Natural as Eating

Let’s imagine a world where all the world’s religious leaders decree tomorrow that eating is bad, sinful, and wrong, and moreover, that if you absolutely MUST eat, it can’t be enjoyable, it has to be bland, without taste, and you have to eat in secret and in shame, and if you enjoy eating that you are a bad person.  Almost immediately, your normal, healthy mind would scream at you to enjoy that lobster, that juicy mango or summer peach, that hot apple pie with ice cream at all costs.  Everyone would know in their hearts that eating is essential for life, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating, eating is essential for survival, even that eating a good meal with family and friends is one of the few joys in life that has no compare.  But the pressure from society telling you that eating is bad and wrong would set up a mental conflict, a dichotomy where you feel you would need to lie, cheat, and manipulate in order to eat, where you were shamed into feeling bad for enjoying a good meal.  Advertisers would use images of all sorts of delicious food to sell their products but they would make sure no one was eating in their commercials.  Eventually, after enough time, everyone would co-sign the concept that eating was sinful and wrong and they would publicly adopt a position of looking down their noses at anyone who said that they enjoyed eating while you nearly everyone was reading cookbooks, watching cooking shows in private, and people would be left trying to reconcile why something that they enjoy so much, something so positive and beneficial, is considered bad. 

Imagine for a moment, if you would, how eating would become this huge underground phenomenon.  If you tell people something that is natural and healthy is wrong, if you tell someone that their natural urges and desires are something they should be ashamed of and is bad, they will find a way to revel in it behind closed doors.  People would have secret food orgies, they would develop food fetishes, like they can’t eat unless it’s on a paper plate or they only eat donuts or they would only eat in the dark.  No one would have a concept of what a healthy meal even consisted of because there would be no honest discussion of nutrition or portion size, because the simple act of even talking about eating would be considered bad, and misinformation about eating would be rampant.  Children naturally would experience hunger and want to taste different things but adults would shame them into believing that eating was wrong and that they couldn’t enjoy it.  On message boards and forums all over the internet people would have a united voice of feigned moral indignation and outrage at anyone who said they loved to eat food but in the privacy of their own homes, they would be installing gourmet kitchens. 

After enough time, the government would step in and enact laws reinforcing that eating was bad and convincing the masses that bread and water was more than sufficient for survival and that anyone who liked anything more than that was a social leper and a freak. The politicians and loudest opponents of eating would secretly have private chefs making meals fit for a king while they were out proselytizing about how sinful eating is and the perils of food.  People wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to cook or feed themselves and using condiments and spices would bring down the wrath of the folks who insist that eating is only valid if it’s for survival.   

So, eventually, you would have a world where everyone believed that something beautiful, natural, and healthy was commonly and openly considered bad, wrong, and sinful.  People’s psyches would be at war within themselves.  The belief that eating was bad would seep into every aspect of life and culture to where eventually, no one even questioned that eating was wrong and anyone who said that eating was natural and healthy and could even be positive would be shunned.  Eating disorders would be the norm and no one would acknowledge it or seek help for their conditions because they would be ashamed of admitting that they liked eating.  The human mind can’t function in a healthy way under such turmoil so it shuts down in the face of such a conflict, it compensates with dysfunction.  Your inner being inherently knows that eating is right and good but it’s been convinced by society that it’s wrong so the human mind struggles.  It starts craving eating things that are barely edible, things that are toxic, things that aren’t even food in an effort to wage a war against what society tells them is wrong.  People would start eating rotted, moldy food in private, eating stuff that will hurt them; they start feeling entitled to violently take other people’s food by any means necessary.  Meanwhile EVERYONE would be eating.  A few people would conform and eat only the bare minimum to survive and society would INSIST that they are the normal ones and that anyone who enjoyed eating was a deviant.  MOST people would be eating and enjoying food in private and this entire underground eating frenzy would be taking place, in plain sight and under the radar, because no one is willing or brave enough to challenge the belief that eating is wrong. 

Now, substitute the word eating with fucking.

It is precisely this millennia-old belief that sex is taboo, the repression and compartmentalization of sex, it is the very false belief that sex is naughty, dirty, bad, and wrong that creates rapists, child molesters, sex addicts, sexual deviants, and a culture of casual, unsafe sex because the mind and spirit are at war with what is supposed to be positive and absolutely life-affirming.  Religious leaders convinced us long, long ago that sex was bad, dirty, shameful and wrong.  They needed the world to believe that if one were to have sex, that it was only to be missionary sex for procreation inside of marriage.  They were wrong.  They lied.  Sex is normal, healthy, We have been convinced that sex is bad, shameful, sinful, and wrong when it’s healthy, beautiful, and right.  No one, not one of us comes into this world except through sex.  Pleasure is our birthright.  Ecstatic orgasm is a form of meditation, a form of prayer.  There is such a thing as healthy sexuality and it consists of far more than missionary position on a Friday night with the lights out between two married, white, mildly unattractive and boring, financially stable heterosexuals.  But humanity is so cut off from what should be healthy sexuality that we can’t even have a conversation about it.  People assume that healthy sexuality is boring and bland and that’s simply not the case.  Sex should be a beautiful buffet of different sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and experiences that stimulate us on different levels but it’s become something we do that we think is nasty and wrong and we need to get off on degradation and humiliation and pain and whatever else they feel is bad and wrong to compensate for feeling ashamed about their own natural desires. 

“But, that’s crazy,” you say, “That’s a silly comparison.  Everyone HAS to eat, you need it to live.  Sex isn’t a necessity.”  Oh, but you are so very wrong.  Sex is essential for our healthy existence.  We can live without it but we are damaged without it as well.  Touch is essential for life, intimacy is essential, hot, sweaty orgasms with another human being are essential for our survival.  I’m not just talking about the fact that sex for procreation is essential, obviously, civilization dies if we don’t have babies.  I’m not talking about sex for recreation when people go on craigslist and they screw the first person who sends a face picture.  People have been CONVINCED that everyone else in the world is sexually conservative, that no one else could possibly have different, complex, or even unhealthy fantasies.  Society tells us that the only acceptable way to have sex is with soft music playing in the background and candles lit and three minutes of vigorous humping.  In reality, people are doing things sexually that are extreme, dangerous, and even hurtful and there’s evidence everywhere you turn that people are into all sorts of extreme sexual behaviors in every corner of this not so great nation.  Think of a sexual fetish, no matter how obscure, and there are hundreds of websites catered to exactly that.  Yet for centuries, society has implied that everyone on the planet is having sex only for procreation and anyone doing anything more than that is a degenerate.  So, the mind, unsure of how to deal with these contradictory messages, copes by compartmentalizing sex, shutting it off until it becomes an urge and a drive that have dire consequences when approached from an emotionally and sexually immature vantage point. 

Your subconscious minds tells you that it’s perfectly natural to enjoy oral and anal sex because it feels delicious and yummy but since childhood, you’ve been told that anything you feel “down there” is rooted in evil.  Your subconscious minds knows that sex with the same gender doesn’t define you, make you evil, or make you a freak, it’s simply another way to experience pleasure.  But thousands of years of denial and lies tells you that if you experience pleasure with someone of the same gender, you are in the minority, a freak of nature, that you are weird.  You aren’t weird.  Everyone else is a freak for actually believing the lie that gender has anything to do with how you experience pleasure.  Experiencing pleasure with someone of the same gender doesn’t alter your identity, it doesn’t make you less of a person, you aren’t even in the minority.  That’s just another lie society has told us.  EVERYONE can experience pleasure with someone of the same gender it’s just that they have been socialized to believe it’s wrong.  Nothing more. 

Every sexual dysfunction can be traced back to this belief that sex is bad.  People molest children because they have been brainwashed to believe in this erroneous concept that people are sexless, so being sexual with a child becomes the ultimate arousal.  Their innocence, or the act of taking it, making children into something dirty and naughty, becomes a point of arousal for individuals who can’t reconcile the fact that sex is natural and that they shouldn’t be trying to coerce or manipulate children into being sexual.  Sex with children is taboo and anything that is wrong, taboo, kinky, different, or unspoken becomes more arousing sexually for people who don’t have a healthy concept of what intimacy, passion,  love, connection, or what it takes to maintain an adult relationship.  If we taught people that sex was natural, and had discussions about the psychological, social, physical, mental, and emotional ramifications of having sex, if we taught people how to be sexually mature rather than convince them that they are the only people in the world who have sexual desires beyond missionary sex, we could eliminate childhood sexual abuse in one generation.  Men rape because they have been socialized in a society that tells them that sex is wrong and bad but they have urges that tells them that sex is natural.  They rationalize the use of violence and force to rape in order to feel like they are taking back what is their right, because rape becomes synonymous with pleasure.  People have sex with animals rather than humans because animals don’t judge, they don’t tell secrets, they don’t have to emotionally connect to a dog or a horse the same way they need to invest in a relationship with another person.  A human being has the ability to judge and shame, an animal will only love you more and more unconditionally and satisfy their sexual desires without complaint.  Every sexual fetish, the act having one’s sexual aroused tied to a non-sexual object or situation, stems from someone being shamed for a normal expression of their sexuality when they were in a heightened state of arousal.  They were told that sex was shameful and bad, the feelings that they experienced were normal and natural, and then they made a subconscious connection with that object and sex and shame, BAM, their sexuality is intricately tied to that thing. 

Porn addiction is at pandemic proportions.  Men in their 20s need Viagra because they suffer from erectile dysfunction.  I have no clue why HIV isn’t more rampant in this country because people are having unprotected sex and they are not getting tested or having their partners tested in numbers that are staggering.  I strongly believe that the molestation of children, both boys and girls, is so widespread and commonplace, I dare not think about it too much or it will make me sick to my stomach.  All of these things are to be expected when sex is deemed taboo and dirty by the powers that be.  If you tell people that something that is inherent to their nature, a drive as natural as eating is wrong and bad, their psyches rebel.

I think that when children, especially girls, who have sex before the age of puberty, (meaning who are touched, molested and raped in childhood) they grow up to be more sexually addicted than those who have sex at a more "normal" age, like mid teens. I'm not condemning anyone with my comment, I'm simply looking at the origins of the behaviors. I've found that the women who had sexual experiences with adults in early childhood become hardwired for sexual addiction and crave more experiences like slapping, choking, humiliation, degradation, etc. when they become adults, they need sex for validation, they need abuse for validation. I've found the same for men as well, they simply tend to be hardwired to subjugate and oppress when they become adults if the sexual abuse was from a female. They tend, and the key word is tend, to be sexually submissive and masochistic if the abuser was male but they display the same level of sexual need and addiction as women. Again, I'm not judging anyone. I'm simply trying to figure out the origins of our sexuality in an effort to create a healthier dialogue about sex. So, while I am not putting anyone down for what they like sexually, I really am suggesting that the need to be humiliated and degraded is one not a natural one that comes from an healthy place. I acknowledge that some people want and need to be degraded and made to feel humiliated during sex to experience arousal and that is a very valid desire but I'm going to say that in an alternate, parallel world, sex would not be about degradation and shame but merely pleasure and connection. I think it would be a wonderful world if people were to experience exaltation, celebration, and validation while getting the bejesus fucked out of them.  If we eliminate this entire belief that sex is bad and sinful, we eliminate the sexual compulsion and dysfunction that surrounds it, we heal ourselves. 

Schools teach that sex is bad.  The church teaches that sex is bad.  Our parents spank, shame, and punish us for our normal childhood expressions of sexuality.  Politicians try to regulate our sexuality so that we are criminalized for our own natural desires.  The entire world is convinced that we need to be ashamed of our sexuality and it’s created more pain and dysfunction that can be imagined.  Sex is as natural as eating and we need to restore a sense of beauty and reverence to our sexuality in order for us to collectively heal from the abuses that have left us fragmented and dysfunctional. 

Copyright 2013 AfroerotiK All Rights Reserved

Faking It

I was socialized to fake orgasms. I don't know how. No one ever said to me, “When you are having sex with a man, you need to cater to his ego and make him feel like he’s the best lover in the world,” but I swear that’s the thought going through my mind every time I do it.  . It's something in the way we socialize girls/women. I don't know what the something is, but it's prevalent. I swear I'm NEVER going to fake an orgasm again, and then, I always do it to boost their egos. I can't even stop myself sometimes. If, me, Miss Healthy Black Sexuality, can't help but fake it, it's an epidemic for sure because most women aren't self aware enough to know that they are faking it. 

Most women don't know the difference between getting wet and having an orgasm. I hear it all day, every day. "Oh, I came from him just kissing me." That's not an orgasm, that's arousal.  And I dare say that most men have never even been given a basic primer course on women's bodies to know how to make them orgasm. I met a male escort, a man who made his living having sex with women, and he had NO CLUE where a woman's clitoris was. He was pointing to the hood and calling that her clit. How can a man give a woman an orgasm if he thinks her hood is her magic button? Thus, a whole lot of faking is going on. 

I faked every orgasm until I was in my twenties and I didn't even know it because I had never had an orgasm before. And this was LONG before the advent of porn at your fingertips. Today, children are seeing porn on average at 10 years old, some even younger. They are being socialized to yell and scream and call out to God before they come close to having sex.  Plenty of girls can masturbate and do not know how to give themselves an orgasm. I sure as hell did something up until the age of 24 or 25 and I thought I was having great sex. I remember the first time I had an orgasm and I was like, "Are you serious? That's what I should have been feeling all along?"

If a dude tells me he has given a woman five orgasms in one night, I run the other direction because 9 times out of 10, she was faking and he has NO CLUE how to truly please her.  And with men addicted to porn these days, they think that pounding away is what gives a woman an orgasm. They have NO concept of what real foreplay is or how to do anything other than "hit it". When most women tell them that they are doing a great job and yelling and screaming how great it is, they will never learn either. 

In my last relationship, I think I faked it 50% of the time. The sex felt good but I didn't cum and I just yelled and pretended I was out of habit. He wasn’t a bad lover at all.  He certainly wasn’t a great love either.  He was a one trick pony in that he knew how to fuck like a rabbit and he thought that was his calling card.  He had a little dick and he was plagued with low self-esteem so he needed to call (other) women names and slap them and degrade them to feel more like a man.  Was he sensual, tactile, erotic, spontaneous, creative, tender, or anything that would make him a truly great lover.  Not even close.  His techniques were what he learned when he was 14 and pounding away at whatever little girl got hot and bothered and he didn’t mature past that stage.  I’m guilty of letting him think he was a much better lover than her really is.  For whatever reason, I just go into “faking mode” and start screaming that I’m cumming and I’m really just feeling the pleasure of penetration, not a real orgasm.  It's a hard habit to break. 

I have had numerous women, too many to count women, tell me, "I can't have an orgasm with a man unless he's 10 inches or bigger." First and foremost, the number of men who have 10 inch penises is so small that they it's virtually impossible to meet more than one man with an appendage that large, let alone a succession of them. What most men call their 10 inch penis is really about 7 inches, which is larger than average but significantly smaller than almost a foot. Second, a woman's G-spot is located about 2 inches inside her vagina. You don't need a foot of dick to reach that. What women feel as the pleasure/pain of having their cervix hit by a large penis is what they are calling an orgasm. Again, knowledge of women's bodies . . . none. And 3. brothas with very average and sufficient penises at around 5 or 6 inches are feeling inadequate and ashamed when they are perfectly capable of providing a woman pleasure but they try to overcompensate by hitting it and stabbing it and killing it and all the things men with larger endowments do in porn. I can't handle the myths, lies, and dysfunction anymore and we need to talk about the issues that are debilitating to us as a community and in almost every instance, it comes back to our views on sexuality.  We have to start having more empowered, enlightened, and informed conversations. 

Ms Bisexual 2013

Trust me when I say that sistas are more scheming, lying, and down low than brothas when it comes to being bisexual.  I’m bisexual and I wear my label proudly.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard women say to me, almost verbatim, "Well, yes, I am attracted to both men and women but am I really bisexual, who knows?"  Goddamn!  I know.  If you are attracted to both men and women, YOUR AZZ IS BISEXUAL.   The rejection of the term bisexual by women is annoying to me when CLEARLY so many women are-- they are just afraid to admit it.  This whole, "I'm not going to say I'm bisexual because it has a negative connotation," bullshit is a cop out.  There's nothing negative about saying you are bisexual except that people would rather continue to perpetuate homophobia than admit the truth.  

I don't drink a lot.  I might have a drink once in two or three months, maybe once or twice a month if I'm being particularly social.  Can I claim that I'm not a drinker?  No.  Frequency doesn't dictate my "label."  I feel no need to make up another term to describe my drinking habits because I drink so infrequently.  No, I'm not an alcoholic; yes, I am a drinker.  See?  No shame in that.  I am a non-smoker.  I don't smoke, have never smoked, and have no desire to smoke.  I can wear my non-smoker label proudly.  People who smoke socially, or who only smoke when they are stressed out can't claim that they are non-smokers.  They give up that right when they take a puff.  Women who have sex with other women can't claim that they aren't bisexual because they only let women go down on them, they don't go down on other women.  It just can't work that way.  That's delusional rationalization and unhealthy.  No, that's insanity. 

I’ve heard the ever-popular, “I don’t like labels,” but women NEVER seem to mind the label of heterosexual, they only have problems with that bisexual label.  I always hear, “I am not bisexual because I’m not attracted to women emotionally, just sexually.”  That would be great if we were defining the word bi-emotional.  This sista told me once that she wasn’t bisexual because she didn’t like the reaction people gave her when she told them she was bisexual.  Read that again.  She wasn’t bisexual because she didn’t like the reaction people gave her when she told them she was.  How is that logical?  Okay, I’m not Black because I don’t like the way white people treat me.  There isn’t a planet in the universe where that shit makes sense.  You can’t define who you are by how other people treat you.  

The most popular excuse for why women don’t consider themselves bisexual, by far, is, “I PREFER sex with men.”  Well, of course, if you have sex with a woman and you don’t really enjoy it as much as you do when you are having sex with a man, that means you earned the right to be called a heterosexual.  RIGHT!  The definition of bisexual in the dictionary is of, relating to, or having a sexual orientation to persons of either sex.  Nowhere does it say, “only if you initiate sex with persons of the same sex.”

Men I can understand.  Black men are demonized for being bisexual.  Bisexual women are exalted in this society, men’s ultimate objectification fantasy.  We do ourselves a disservice by denying who we are.  It’s untruthful and damaging. 

Anal Ramblings

I am to be counted among the women that love anal sex. I remember when I was a teen and I found my mom's collection of porn, I was fascinated with the pictures of anal sex. I don't know if that influenced my desire or was a premonition of my proclivities. When I got to college I was preoccupied with trying to make sense of my bisexuality so anal sex got put on the back burner for a while. When the urge hit me, it hit strong. I thought about it all the time and didn't really know what to do about it. I would try to wiggle and moan more when my boyfriend's fingers got close to that area but I never asked him to do anything. I don't even think I was bright enough to finger myself there at the time.

I asked my boyfriend at the time to try it. He wasn't interested; he kept saying, "that's gay, I don't want to try it." (It was the 80s, anal sex wasn’t popular back then) The very first time we tried it, I was on top and in control of everything. I went slowly, I think the curiosity kept me going more than anything. I was fascinated with wanting to feel it. It was uncomfortable, not painful. The discomfort didn't last long and it soon became a sensation like I'd never felt before. The only way I can describe it was it was like not being able to take a deep breath. It was pleasure in every pore of my body. The very first time I did it, it felt orgasmic. I didn't cum, I didn't even know how to cum at that point in my life. I got scared and stopped and my poor boyfriend at the time thought he had hurt me. We didn't do it for more than a year after that because he said he didn't like it but I wanted to feel it again. I started masturbating by myself at the time with something I'm sure was unsafe. If I remember correctly, it was some sort of arts and crafts glue stick.

After about a year, my boyfriend and I tried it again. I loved it even more. We would save it for special occasions and he took his time every time so by the time we got to it, I was like a crazy woman. When we broke up, he made me promise and swear that I wouldn't do it with anyone else ever again in life and I kept that promise for many, many years. Many years later, during what was the beginning of my life of sporadic celibacy, I would masturbate every day and stimulate myself anally. I couldn't cum without it. For a year I think I did it once a day. Then I went into my phase of not masturbating at all. Went through that for almost three years. Now, on the rare occasion that I have sex, I try to get my partner to finger or lick me there, but its so rare that I am with someone at all, and even then it's not someone that I can let down my guard with.

Few years back, if I wanted to masturbate, I would have fantasies about anal sex. I wouldn't penetrate or stimulate myself there, just think about it. I would watch anal sex porn almost exclusively. Now, I rarely masturbate at all, three or four times a year. I think about what it would be like but the sensation is so distant in my memory that it doesn't motivate me at all anymore. I love to fantasize about what it would be like when I find my twin flame and experiencing it with him, but the fantasy is more about seducing him, teasing him with the idea of it, making him crave my ass, more than about anal sex in particular.

I have used a strapon on men and I love it. It's not about power; it's about giving pleasure. There is something intensely erotic and intimate about seeing a lover in the throes of ecstasy. Hearing him moan and beg for more . . . that is SUCH a turn on for me. I'm not into giving pain so if there is even any indication of discomfort on his part, my hypothetical dick goes down. For me, it's about him sharing a part of himself with me that is secret and private. It's our little secret. When I'm hitting that Gspot and he's working his ass on my "dick", it's like no other sensation in the world. It's not about domination for me.

Sometimes, I occasionally fantasize about making love to my partner in the same way that he would make love to me, slow and tender and gentle, as an act of us showing our love for one another. Ever since I first tried it almost 18 years ago, I have never thought anal sex had anything to do with being gay. The physical anatomy of a man and a woman is the same anally; if a woman is able to enjoy it then a man has the same thing. In fact, a man has a prostate gland, which makes it more enjoyable for him than a woman. (I suspect that I have something similar to a prostate however because I even like to have my pussy fingered towards the back, not the front where my g spot is supposed to be) Sexual preference is sexual preference, either you are attracted to men or you aren't. If you are attracted to women, then a woman should be able to help you experience that level of intimacy and pleasure.

Two interesting notes. One, I can't tell you how many brothas have expressed to me that they want to be penetrated by their wives but they are afraid to ask. Women, talk to your men because their desire to experience it and their fear of talking about it might drive them to engage in unsafe sex in shame and desperation. These aren't feminine men, submissive men, or confused men. I get brothas every day tell me that they would like me to write a strapon fantasy but and that they can’t find a sista to do it to them. When I ask them how many sistas they have asked, they usually say. none

Two, I suspect that the need to experience the sensation of anal penetration has a lot to do with opening up channels for kundalini to flow up the chakras. I'm completely convinced that those dastardly Europeans were made aware of the spiritual potential anal sex held and made it a sin so that the masses would not be able to tap into it's power. I'm not at all suggesting that everyone that has anal sex is more spiritually aware. Sex has become so crass and base that it's spiritual elements have been dormant for centuries.

What is Healthy Black Sexuality?

For all too long Black sexuality has been defined by extremes. We have been defined as hypersexual, untamed savages who are ruled by our lust and far too many of us have embraced that misrepresentation without the presence of a healthier alterative example to model. Others of us have adopted a role of sexual conservatism in order to conform to a standard that tells us that the only sex that isn’t dirty . . . is boring. Somewhere between the freak and the frigid lies AfroerotiK sexuality.

Where do intelligent, middle class Black people turn to find sexual expression? What outlets do we have to be aroused without offensive, degrading, vulgar pornographic images? My work is providing such an outlet yet I'm continually and repeatedly told that my work is offensive. What's offensive is a nation of Black people who can't form healthy relationships because they don't know how to be open and honest with their partners about their needs, desires, and fantasies. What's offensive is that as an educated successful Black woman, I'm told that I'm a freak if I even make reference to sex, however academic the discussion. If my work glorified sex in exchange for money, cheating, or manipulation, that would be a perversion of sex. My work glorifies couples being intimate, communicating, sharing their secrets with one another and validating that adults, and young adults should be having sex based on LOVE first and foremost.

The African American community is diseased in our perceptions of sexuality. The middle class can't even have a conversation about sex; we can't even have a discussion about the subject of sex before someone is trying to censor it. The rest of us are out having unprotected, irresponsible sex like it's recreation. There's a vast difference between saying, "I'm a big booty ho looking to swallow seven loads of cum," and "I long to feel the sensation of your tongue licking me until I explode in your mouth." Until we as a people can discern the difference, until we as a people can stop relegating anything to do with sex as being dirty and unmentionable, we are doomed to be dysfunctional and sexually immature. We should be able to have discussions about sex in all forums, with relative boundaries in mind, and not be so quick to feign false indignation as if sex is dirty and unmentionable.

African-Centered Sexuality

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