Black men need space to talk about their own sexual pleasure outside of domination
via Pxhere
For us, sex has to mean more than just fucking, cumming and post-coital peacocking.
Editor’s Note: This Sexual Health and Awareness month, we will be exploring related issues at BYP, and we are interested in publishing works that address these topics. What does sexual health look like outside of cishetero norms? Where does the #MeToo movement go from here? What can we do to better support survivors, including survivors of childhood sexual violence?
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By Donnie Moreland
I adore Anthony Hamilton. He’s an unjustifiably underrated songwriter, with a voice that takes a hammer to emotions you rarely knew existed. He also makes unashamedly Black, unabashed Southern Soul music. One of his most noted album cuts is “Sista Big Bones”, for crying out loud.
Anthony Hamilton stayed on repeat following my folk’s discovering his raspy down home tenor, in 2007. My parents were, and are, Southern Soul hounds, and anyone who was raised by Soul hounds will know the lyrical tropes concerning love, heartbreak and sex. If you’ve heard Terry Huff’s “The Lonely Ones”, you’ve also heard The Dells’ “The Love We Had Stays on My Mind”. If you’ve heard The O’jays’ “Let Me Make Love to You”, then you’ve heard The Emotions’ “Show Me How”.
I bring this up not as an indictment of the craftsmanship of the genre’s lyrical arrangements, but to explain why it isn’t often for me to perk up for lyrics as much as impressive harmony or vocal range. This is why when I heard Anthony Hamilton’s masturbatory reference in “Float”, for the first time, I was beside myself.
Sex and Soul go hand and hand, but if you learn anything from male Soul artists, it is that sex is about making a woman orgasm and not much else. A person’s needs and proclivities are rarely given attention—a problem deeply rooted in Black male sexual politics.
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I’d never heard anything related to self-pleasure on a record, what to speak of from the perspective of a man—a Black man—before. We were all in the car, my folks and I, listening to “Lucille” off of Hamilton’s Comin From Where I’m From LP. “Float” began when that track ended. The first verse goes: “Could it be your nice silky tone/ Oh that makes me want you girl/ Distant nights spent love on the phone/ As I touch myself, how I want you more/ The mood evokes, incense smoke/ And I’m burning up in temperature, ready to explode/ Come take a toke, let’s float, baby on higher ground.”
By the time Hamilton arrived at “ready to explode,” my father forwarded to the next track. There was this boisterous reaction between my folks around the phrase, “I touch myself,” and I couldn’t understand why.
My father had spoken to me about masturbation before. I remember how humorous his tone seemed, much like how he reacted in the car. I remember him saying something in the vein of how I’d break “it” if I was too careless, and something about going blind. As I’ve come of age, I recognize why my father was so bemused in wrestling with how to address masturbation.
My father wasn’t equipped for a conversation about anything more than the shame of masturbation—a shame which I’m sure he associated with the act just as I came to do.
Cis-heterosexual Black men need to explore how we come to understand what pleasure means, how we discuss pleasure associated with our bodies, how we’ve separated pleasure and sex so much so that conversations about pleasure inconveniences our informal sexual education. If we do not begin to incorporate pleasure into our social curriculum, then we abstain from fully realizing an awareness of our bodies’ needs. We make it easier to remain dependent on patriarchal presumptions regarding an ethos of Black male sexuality.
Sex becomes just us throwing our bodies around, almost obligatorily, contributing to a sexual nihilism and dysfunction which plague our histories of sexual health.
I would suggest that the problem of pleasure is a problem of American Civic Religion, and isn’t specific to Black men. However, Black men are complicit in the unchallenged cultural transmissions of American ethics related to sex, and sexuality. Dominance is the game played by white men and we’re using their playbook. We assume social positions, especially in relation to white men, by how hard we fuck. The toughest cat in the room is the cat who everyone believes penetrates with the most aggression. Sex is less an act of reciprocation and more an act of oppression.
Somewhere along the line, Black men, in our quest for White male validation, adopted various modes of gender oriented behavior via the authority of white social paternity. This, in tandem with how phallocentric representations of our sexual lives, such as the acronym BBC (Big Black Cock) becoming an identifying signifier for any Black male pornographic performer, warped our vision of our body in the act of sex. What you have is a cultural paradigm where in cis-hetero Black men have adopted the sexual lens of White men. We see sex as an engagement of our desire for social, and class, position. In private, we exist as historical evidence of the robbery of our potential to endorse anything more than penetration as our contribution to sex—not just for our partners but for ourselves.
Pleasure, here, is not about what feels good. That which feels good may not elicit that which is germane to health, psycho-sexually or physiologically. Pleasure, here, requires an understanding of the body’s needs. For us, sex has to mean more than just fucking, cumming and post-coital peacocking.
A history of racialized sexual violence, the presence of neglected patterns of child abuse, sexual addictions and cultural musings relating to the sexualization of Black boys have made it so how we understand what our body wants is smothered in micro and macro traumas. This creates distance between ourselves and our bodies, making it easier to put our bodies in harms way, sometimes fatally so. And our sexual partners and their protections are inconsequential to the objective of ejaculation, leading to a disregard of consent.
All of this is why we deserve to know, and acknowledge, sexual discomfort, where in our bodies we associate certain memories during sex and how we can discover joy related to self-pleasure, aside from our relationship with pornography. Arriving at an understanding of pleasure related to need, absent infantile gratifications, allows us to say and receive, “no, I don’t want to engage in a certain sexual act,” or, “no, I don’t want to be touched in a particular way,” acquiring stake in how our sexuality is culturally imagined.
Arriving at this understanding of pleasure allows us to find a language in brotherhood, about sex, that is predicated on male-to-male intimacies and not male-to-male hostilities or cock sizes in competition. Arriving at this understanding of pleasure allows my father to pause that song and explain to me, not why the words “touch myself” are forbidden, but what the sexual vulnerability of that entire verse means as a Black man in that position of intimacy. Because my father deserved that lesson, just as much as I did.
Donnie Denkins Moreland Jr is a Minnesota based mental health advocate and writer. Donnie holds a Master’s Degree, in Film Studies, from National University and a Bachelor’s Degree, in Sociology, from Prairie View A&M University. Donnie has contributed to Black Youth Project, A Gathering of the Tribes and Sage Group Publishing.