Ten
I became interested in pornography after a younger man slapped my breast. Where, I wondered, do we learn what we learn? And how do we learn what we know?
My friend Ejiro was going on and on about younger men, saying, “You have to try a younger man, twenty-six and below; they really care about pleasing you.”
“Twenty-six is oddly specific,”
I said. “Why not twenty-five or thirty? Does something happen to them at twenty-six? Is it the cut-off age for woman-pleasing?”
Ejiro said, “I’ve told you.”
Her younger man had a friend with tattoos running down his arms. Ejiro organized a discreet double date and at some point, he leaned in and asked me, “Do you want to see my tattoos on my back?”
“No,”
I said. Was this a line he used? “You know tattoos look ugly as you age; they turn greenish gray and look like old algae in a lab.”
He stared at me in astonishment.
“Mine are good,”
he said finally.
“As you get older, as you age,” I said.
“Oh.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Why are you asking?” he asked.
His asking “Why are you asking?”
meant he wanted evidence of my interest first before we embarked on the potential obstacle of age.
I found it sweet.
He was twenty-six years old.
Just at Ejiro’s cutoff, luckily.
I was fourteen when he was born.
I could have been his babysitter.
I almost laughed, thinking this.
We drank a lot and he smoked shisha.
He and his friend were talking about some celebrities and their cars and watches, and I felt ancient in my boredom.
At some point he said, gesturing to the shisha bowl and hose, “The water cleans it, so it’s good for you.”
“No, shisha is ten times worse for you than normal cigarettes. We’re killing ourselves,” I said.
He was looking warily at me, as if wondering what he had gotten himself into.
“Don’t mind , she always talks like this,”
Ejiro said. “Behind that madness, she’s very nice.”
I saw him a few more times, to make sure he was not a psychopath, before I asked him to stay.
Ejiro had said, “They care about pleasing you, they care that you get there,”
and for this younger man it was certainly true, but it felt strange.
He was completely silent, he said no words, his fingers sweeping over my body in a way that made me think of the word “imitation.”
He was re-creating something seen.
Suddenly I didn’t want it and I didn’t want him in my bed.
What did I want? The imperfection of the real.
There were more practiced movements of fingers and tongue.
I felt that he was watching himself as his own enraptured audience.
I could not peak.
I wanted to, if only to make it all less of a colossal waste of time, and then I realized it would be his victory if I did. They do care about pleasing you, but only so they can say, “Wow, look what I did.”
An act of self-praise more than an act of giving.
A few dramatic moans, I decided, and then I would ask him to stop.
I would say I’m overstimulated rather than I’m bored.
I wanted to protect his ego because I liked him and he was sweet and he’d said the day before, “Look what’s happening to my fingers.
The skin is peeling back away from my nails.
Do you know what it means?”
Why did he think I would know why his skin was peeling away from his nails, for goodness’ sake? Still, it moved me that he asked.
It felt open and soft, as if we might be friends tenderly caring about what happened to each other.
I did the second moan and was about to say please stop when he slapped my breast.
I looked at him.
He slapped it again.
My left breast, and it wasn’t a soft slap, but even a soft slap would not have reduced my shock.
“Have you gone mad?”
I asked him.
“Stop it.”
He seemed uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure if I meant what I said.
After he left, I turned my TV on to a channel showing mixed martial arts; he must have changed the channel at some point.
“He was watching mixed martial arts,”
I said to Jide. “Is that what the children watch these days?”
“I watch it too,”
Jide said.
He was to me simply A Younger Man, an experiment, and because he was sweet, I felt a little guilty to think this way of him. But maybe it was an experiment for him too. While I was in my underwear, he said, “You look good,”
and he didn’t add “for your age”
but he must have thought it, because I sensed his fascination with and mild repulsion for women older than him.
“Why would he slap my breast? Not caress, slap. Actually slap,”
I told Jide.
“If you watched porn, it wouldn’t be so strange. That’s what they do in straight porn.”
Jide was laughing. “You’ve been with older men who watched porn when the actors still had pubic hair and when the women were treated a little less badly, so they don’t do any of the new craziness.”
“Goodness,”
I said, floored, and almost disappointed with myself that I didn’t know.
Long before this younger man slapped my breast, my cousin Mmiliaku, Aunty Jane’s daughter, told me a story about a belt.
Mmiliaku and her husband go to morning Mass on Sundays and then Emmanuel drops her and the children at home and returns to the church for Opus Dei.
He doesn’t eat meat on Fridays and believes contraception to be a terrible sin.
Shortly after they got married, Mmiliaku started saying, “It’s always best to marry someone from your side of the street,”
because Emmanuel had only a secondary-school education—and a very successful business.
Mmiliaku, drinking Bournvita at my dining table, the mug close to her lips, said, “Some people cannot reason.”
“What has Emmanuel done now?” I asked.
“He did his normal thing where he just climbs on top of me when I was sleeping.
I woke up in pain, and I started pushing him off me.
He got angry, so I let him finish.
When he came back that evening, I made myself look nice, and after we ate, I started kissing him, touching him, and he pushed me away and said I should stop behaving like a prostitute.
I just want us to have enjoyable sex and connect as man and wife.
It is terrible, always the same thing: he forces himself into my body when I am asleep.
Anyway, later I told him: ‘Let’s try and watch a blue film to see if we can learn.’ I didn’t say it was for him to learn, I said for us, so that he won’t say I’m insulting him.
He started shouting.
‘Is that what you do now, watch blue film? Is that how you have become rotten?’ Then he unbuckled his belt and raised it and whipped me, three times, a thick leather belt.”
She had been teary as she spoke but halfway through she began to laugh. “He has equipment he doesn’t know how to use and he doesn’t want to learn. Can you imagine? And he is saying I am rotten.”
“Rotten,”
that word, “rotten.”
In primary school they said you were rotten if you talked to boys. “Rotten”
was a word smeared in dirtiness and sex and unmentionables all related to sex. Girls were rotten. I never in primary school heard a boy called rotten.
“You think blue film is the way to learn?” I asked.
“Where else will he learn?”
she asked.
After Mmiliaku told me this story but before the younger man slapped my breast, there was another reason, and it was the man whose hair I pulled.
Arinze, the longest of my emotion-happenings.
We lasted eleven months, and I was beginning to think this might finally be the love they talked about.
He was clever but not creative; he read widely and brought insight to what others had written, and this for many people would have been enough.
But not for him, because what he really wanted to do was create, and so his life became a huffy reaction to this inability to create.
Most contemporary novels were trite, he said.
He wouldn’t read anything published after 1960 and he rolled his eyes at most contemporary music.
He worked in an advertising agency as a director and he mocked the commercials his own firm produced.
So basic, he said, no imagination.
He once gave me a stiff short story he had written and when I told him it was stiff, he said that was the whole point: the telling was supposed to be stiff, to reflect the character who was stiff.
When we first met, he could not cleanly crack an egg.
Tiny shell pieces would fall out and I would watch him try to fish them out of the bowl with a fork, looking hapless and focused, and I thought this so amusingly sweet.
His determination to make me an omelet in his barely used kitchen with the toaster’s tag still on.
By the time our relationship ended, I thought it self-indulgent and sloppy: how hard could it be to cleanly crack an egg? What had charmed me at first became what infuriated me at last.
Beware the early sources of charm.
Sometimes I know as soon as I meet a man what soon will irritate me, but with him I couldn’t tell; he was so different, a thrilling mystery I wanted to unmask.
I began to think it might be love when he jerked awake one morning screaming from a calf cramp. He punched at his leg, his face contorted, and I felt the agony of it in my heart. I panicked so much and worried so much. It had never happened before with a man, the sensation of vicarious pain.
“I’m taking you to hospital, we’re going to hospital now,”
I said, even when it had subsided.
“It’s just a muscle cramp,” he said.
For the rest of the day, I watched him, made him tea, asked if I should call my massage person. Maybe I was in love.
It was he who told me, “You’re such a man,”
because I wanted to be left alone afterwards, to fall asleep in peace. In the beginning, he attempted to hold me, and I would shrug him off, to his confused surprise. Until he understood, and left me alone, teasing me from time to time. You’re such a man.
And he who said, “I feel like I don’t know you and can’t know you. You’re unknowable.”
“Everybody in this world is unknowable. We cannot fully know others when we are sometimes strangers to ourselves,”
I said, and he scoffed and said could I please not quote poems, even though it was not of course a quote.
He said, also, “You don’t like men.”
“I don’t?”
I mocked, and suggestively looked at him from top to bottom.
“I mean men as a group, men as a class, you don’t like men who aren’t your relatives and friends.”
“So do you like random women?”
I asked, which was disingenuous, because I knew what he meant but chose deflection, it being easier at the time. “Anyway you said I’m like a man. So which one is it: I don’t like men or I’m like a man?”
“You’re dodging,” he said.
“I like you,” I said.
I could have said “I love you,”
but he had not yet had the muscle cramp and I still believed I was capable only of the phantom of the feeling and not the real feeling itself. For so long, I have known myself to feel emotions without being inside them, as if to feel it was merely to watch it, myself and the emotions separate things, eternally unable to coalesce.
He liked pornography. He wanted us to watch something together. It took him months to tell me.
“Okay,”
I said. I was indifferent; there had been some hastily watched blue films in my teenage years, but they didn’t much interest me.
“I thought you would judge me,” he said.
“Why?”
“With your worthy high-mindedness. I mean, look at that,”
he said, and pointed at the framed Thomas Sankara quote on my bedroom wall.
The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph.
“I’m not saying it’s sophomoric to have words on your wall,” he said.
“Blow too low to be felt,”
I said, and we laughed.
We watched it on his laptop, both of us lying on our bellies, our sides touching.
It was not the shadowy scenes with mustached men from the 1980s film I watched at a friend’s house in secondary school.
I didn’t expect it would be, yet I was struck by the good lighting, the tasteful production.
We watched in silence at first and then he wanted to know what in the scene I liked.
The fakeness of the woman’s moaning made me want to laugh, but I saw that he took it seriously and so I did not laugh.
“Why is he squeezing her throat and pulling her hair?” I asked.
He turned to me, looking amused. “It heightens pleasure,” he said.
“For whom?” I asked.
He turned to me. “Hey.”
I didn’t respond, and because he could tell I was not enthusiastic, he said, “Let’s watch something else.”
“Okay,”
I said, and I leaned away, creating a slice of space between his body and mine.
We decided to watch a documentary on television but my mind was still occupied by scenes from the film. “I remember this boy in primary school saying, ‘Acting in blue film is shameful but at least you’ll be a millionaire,’?” I said.
He laughed. “I was that boy.”
“I was actually a fully grown human when I read something about the industry and how terrible it is and my primary-school self was shocked.”
“Meaning you must have been unconsciously tempted by the millionaire part.”
“Idiot. No, really, it sounded horrible. They pay very little, they coerce women; it doesn’t sound worth it at all.”
“Yes, but it’s like sweatshops, a part of modern capitalism.”
“Only that sweatshops at least produce useful things.”
He was looking at me. “You don’t realize this industry is the largest global teacher of men? Who do you think teaches men stuff?”
I didn’t respond because I didn’t want to continue the conversation about porn, and his lopsided smile seemed suddenly unsavory, as if he had seamy sides to him that I did not know, but I thought of his words, Who do you think teaches men stuff?, and I began to feel sorry for men.
Can this be said, that I began to feel sorry for men? Some time passed before I set up an anonymous website and paid for analytics and advertising, and in weeks I had men sending messages to me, an anonymous woman who would tell it like it is, but was on their side.
—
One day I was angry with him.
Many months had passed and we had not watched any porn together since; he hadn’t asked and I didn’t think he would.
I was angry with him and my anger had no basis; it was his well-oiled arrogance that had begun to grate.
Arrogance in women has the possibility of excitement, because it is subversive, but in men it is always reactionary and therefore boring, especially arrogance of the chivalrous kind, that noblesse oblige of the stronger sex.
He had a demeanor that said, “I’m a gift to the world,”
and it grated.
On the day I was angry with him, we were in bed and I looked down at his head, his full head of hair.
I reached out and gathered a handful of that short soft Afro, and before I violently yanked at it, I briefly caressed his scalp.
I had never thought of pulling his hair in bed; my anger until then was a response to his hubris, but in that moment it sharpened to a singular beam while a handful of his hair was in my grasp.
He jumped, let out a small sound, of surprise and pain.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“To heighten pleasure,” I said.
He sat up, backing away from me, and in his eyes—incredulous, rimmed with distrust, angry—I saw myself as a crazy person.
“What the fuck?”
he said. “What is wrong with you? You’re looking for a reason. You don’t need to look for a reason.”
He was getting up, scrambling up, rushing to get dressed and leave.
What I missed after it ended: I missed wearing his shirt.
I missed those evenings filled with the speed of unfastening and licking and biting.
I missed the evenings of happy sexlessness, when we enjoyed being with each other talking, and I missed the laughter, so much laughter; we both once said that a life without laughter is an unlivable life.
He told me, “I will never forget you. I have never before met a woman who hates wet kisses in the morning before teeth have been brushed.”
When, in the early days, I first turned away from his just-awoken kiss, he asked if something was wrong.
“I dislike wet kisses in the morning before teeth have been brushed,”
I said.
It was something we laughed about, but it hurt me that he said that at the end.
It was deliberate and clever, like him, and he knew it would hurt me that he chose this inconsequential thing to remember me by.
I had hurt him, too, with my unfair anger. And so it ended and we took our hurts with us.