Open Forum Friday: The Race Thing

To say that my sexual history has tended to be a bit checkered is something of an understatement. It’s seedier than a Burpee’s catalog, and I’m generally fine with that. Case in point: when before my move I was in the city of Toronto, browsing through one of the multiple sex toy stores there, when one of our party happened upon a glass display case showcasing a lovely set of gleaming narrow surgical-steel implements, with a box of tuning forks in a velvet-lined box to the side. “What could these strange implements be?” asked the party as one. The Greek Chorus of Mutual Naiveté crouched and peered at the glittering objects like a Stone Age tribe encountering their first iPhone. “Are they for the musically inclined?”

“Oh, those,” I said, rolling my eyes slightly. “Sounds.” I gave a brief description of how they’re used, accompanied by a mime show that I'm happy is never going to hit YouTube. Then I explained that once the sound has been inserted into the urethra, the tuning fork could be struck and applied to it in order to produce vibrations at different frequencies. It was an entirely accurate description in my been-there-done-that voice, which I quickly followed up with a hasty, “Not that I know anything about it at all whatsoever,” once I saw the round little Os of their mouths.

No one believed me, of course. They thought I was making it up. So they asked the clerk, a cute Little Nell clone, to clear up the matter of the mysterious implements. She told them exactly the same thing I had. After that, I got a little more respect. Even if it was the kind of respect that meant I had to endure people approaching me and asking me, “What’s this, exactly?” while they carried an atypically-shaped dildo known as “The Clifford.”

Every once in a while, however, I run across something that gives me pause. I'm reminded of another incident I encountered on that same trip.

Now, I have to confess that in my now thirty-five years of sexual activity, I’ve run across quite a few men into verbal abuse. Quite a lot of men, actually. A certain, non-insignificant subset of these have been black guys who crave, shall we say, racial verbal abuse and roleplay. I get it from educated, well-off men; I get it from guys without much in the way of advantages. It’s certainly not universal, but it’s really not uncommon, either.

Dirty talk isn’t usually a problem for me. Telling a guy I’m going to fuck that hungry little bitch ass of his is not a problem. Informing a guy that his black ass is going to get plugged by my big white cock isn’t too much of a stretch. I’m just using color adjectives. The vocabulary some men want, I've incorporated into my playtime vocabulary. I’ve used the rationale that it’s just an aspect of play, always consensual, and that it’s not something that’s going to linger any longer than one of us has an erection. So if, in these cases, I’ve sprinkled my foul-mouthedness with an extremely judicious and sparing use of the n-word, I and my partners desiring that kind of verbal abuse have made our peace with it.

During that Toronto trip, though, I chatted online to a guy who was desperate to meet. He was cute, younger, a bottom, and fairly straightforward about the fact that he wanted me to dirty-talk him when we met. “You can call me anything,” he typed. “The nastier the better.”

Mentally I was beginning to dust off some of my least-used phrases culled from raunchy old porn when he added, “You know what really turns me on? When you call me a piece-of-shit Jew. Just put your boots in my face and tell me I’m a nasty kike that needs to be put down. That’s what I like.” It was at that moment that I made the mental connection between what he was saying and his screen name, which was something along the should've-seen-it-coming lines of ‘filthy_juden1980’.

The whole thing felt like stumbling onto something I wasn’t supposed to see, like my parents having full-out sex next to the Thanksgiving turkey or something. I took a couple of minutes, though, to parse out my reaction. Because what’s the difference, really, between the kind of racial domination guys have asked for in the past, and a Jewish guy begging me to work his hymie-hole? (His phrase, not mine.)

I’m not at all convinced there is one.

I agreed to meet the guy, but for one reason or another, he never followed through. The fantasy might've been one of those things that seemed hot online for him, but which he couldn't do in person, or he might have found more enthusiastic takers.

When I've written before of racially-charged sex, I've had readers make comments about how psychologically twisted the men must be who crave it, or how low-class or even sick anyone must become to indulge. Yet it's not that uncommon a form of play, trust me, and really no more serious than any of the things we do in bed. Because we've been trained from childhood that the words involved are taboo, we have an instinctive tendency to flinch from it—it's not the kind of thing that we refer to, in polite society.

I'm curious. How many of you have either indulged in such play, or been asked to do it? Did you do so willingly and with a clean conscience, or did you feel dirty after? I'd prefer that we treat each other with respect in the comments, because I know it's a divisive issue. But I'm interested in finding out our thoughts on this form of sexual fetish, and how it's worked for you in the past—or in your present.