danielmichael:
Black skin is thick and lush, sensuous to the touch,
like satin and velvet made flesh. There's only one
patch of skin on a white man's body that remotely
compares to nearly every inch of a black man's
skin. The first time I caressed black skin, it felt like
a luxury I shouldn't be able to afford. I craved it
more strongly than Carrie Bradshaw craved Manolo
Blahnik shoes. That phrase, "Once you go black, you
never go back" is all about the feeling of the skin.
And I had the socially acceptable explanation for
my craving. I used that paucity-of-available-white-
partners rationale to explain my relationships with
black men for several years. A white woman past
forty is often passed over by her white-male
contemporaries. She goes younger or ethnic or
foreign-born or down the socioeconomic scale or
darker or she spends lonely nights at home with
her cats. Black men are happy to get the babe they
couldn't have when she was twentysomething and
fertile. The laws of the marketplace do prevail. It's
not me, it's them being the white guys who weren't
after me anymore, or so I claimed. That's a lie. The
truth is, I attract about the same percentage of
available white men my age (and far younger!) now
as I did when I was thirty and that's not including
the unavailable white men who want to play around
anyway. Enough white men want me that I was
hardly facing enforced celibacy, but I don't want
them. I want black men. They want me. We look at
one another and exchange a visible frisson of
sexual energy in the lingering glances. And our
attraction is based first on race. We are not those
couples who "happen to fall in love" with someone
of a different race or more purposefully come
together but out of some greater sense of
interracial understanding and respect. Not as
politically-correct men and women do we seek one
another out. The Internet has made it a lot easier
for us to find each other now. Men advertise:
ebony seeks ivory. Women write: seeking tall, dark,
and handsome. Very dark. We are not the same
people who say: Race is not important. It is
important to us. We have race-specific desires.
Even in a time when nearly 40 percent of single
Americans have dated outside their race, that
deliberate seeking of the specific other makes
some people, especially black women, damned
mad.
We are what they denigrate and castigate: white
women and black men who choose one another
because of our racial differences. They resent our
taking their men. Black men are two and a half
times more likely to marry a white woman than a
black woman is to marry a white man. Black women
can point to that statistic in justifying their wrath.
But in truth, black sisters, we're after the sex, not
the ringand these guys aren't the marrying kind
anyway. Yes, the sex! The woman who goes after
black men is a variant of sex journalist Susie
Bright's "white bitch in heat," a woman who puts
sex first even though women aren't supposed to do
that. According to one school of thought, white
women turn to black men when their sex drives
kick into higher gear and their social inhibitions
recede into the rearview mirror. It's a "yes, baby,
now I'm ready for you" reaction. When we get to
the "yes, baby" place, they know it, and they are
ready and waiting for us. Black men have more
energy, style and edge than white men. They know
how to flirt, a nearly lost art among the rest of us.
A black man is so damned sexy because he knows
how to make a woman feel sexy.
Black men have something white guys don't have
anymore: confidence in their masculinity, their
sexuality. They clearly know they're men. White
men appear to be waiting for the latest sociological
research study to let them know if they are men or
not. Yet black men are gentlemen, something else
white men no longer are. They make me feel like a
woman, both respected and desired. I can let go of
my inhibitions, my need to control, when I am with
them. How many white men can treat a woman like
a lady and ravish her too?
I often felt in my White Period that only during
heated sex does that little layer of air bubbles
between me and the world pop and disappear,
leaving me open to intimate connection. It takes a
lot of friction for two white people to get that
close. These black men, so alive with erotic
electricity, cut through the bubbles with a touch, a
caress, a kiss and the freedom means I can truly
touch them. I am like a pampered passenger in a
Porsche with an expert driver at the wheel. I know
I could suggest a route change, but I never really
want to do that. On the other hand, the last time I
had sex with a white man, we slogged along a
bumpy road in a really old VW, the driver like the
typical bumbling tv husband who would neither ask
for nor accept the directions he badly needed.
My current lover, a handsome businessman,
seduced me via eye contact at a neighborhood bar
while I was eating burgers with a friend. Without
saying a word, he paid the compliments, asked the
questions with his expressive eyes. He didn't move
over to sit beside me and ask if he could buy me a
drink until he knew the time was right. Both soft-
spoken and assertive, he has impeccable manners
and charm. I was kissing him in a cab 30 minutes
after that drink.
On another night in that same bar, a different black
man, an artist, knelt and kissed my knees.
I am sure there must be some black men who
aren't good in bed. Personally, I have not
experienced one who isn't. (True, I am not dating
down the socioeconomic ladder, but I didn't do that
when I dated white either, so the racial
comparisons seem valid and fair.) They look better
than white men, they touch and kiss and make love
better than white men. Statistically, their joysticks
are only a fraction of an inch bigger on average, but
they seem bigger and harder.
White men over 40 have lost their waistlines and
their zest for life if they ever had it. They carry
resentments, grudges and extra pounds in their
basketball bellies. Perhaps a good part of that bloat
is unhappiness. Even the thin ones look flabby
somehow and deeply aggrieved. They nurse the
smallest perceived slight longer than their double
shots of Scotch. Surely our culture as much as
biology turns them into softer, spongier, less-
interesting versions of their youthful selves just at
the point where women and black men and other
minorities are emerging strong. Society overvalues
the white man, leaving him angry and bitter when
he realizes, around age 40, that he's not all that.
With the exception of some Italians, white men
don't turn me on anymore. That admission puts me
in the same category as the older man only
interested primarily or exclusively in young
women. While women my age scowl and frown at
these aging, Upper West Side Boomers pushing
strollers as the hand of the thin, blonde wife 20
years their junior rests lightly on their arm, I feel a
kinship with the old goats. We are the same, me
and that bald white guy, drawn to the exotic other,
not caring that the object of our desire has no
childhood memory of a Kennedy assassination or a
typical WASP Sunday dinner of over-roasted beef,
lumpy mashed potatoes and soggy vegetables.
Analyze the roots of attractions all you want like
scientists have done and you won't come up with a
perfect explanation for why we crave what we do.
Desire rises from our depths and is gloriously
oblivious to the good opinion of others. Yet until
recently, I pretended that my lust was an equal-
opportunity craving, because that seemed like the
right thing to do. Halfway through the first glass of
wine in my last date with a white man, I realized
that little clouds of sadness and self-pity were
regularly fluffing off his psyche like the dust clouds
kicked up by that dirt-smudged "Peanuts" character
as he walks through Charlie Brown's life. This guy
was at least mildly depressed, and I wanted to tell
him to exercise, lose weight, trim the combover
and get interested in something outside yourself. I
would have walked out on him immediately, but he
seemed to expect that. I couldn't deliver the blow
to his ego proffered like the naked neck of a
martyr to the ax. My Southern cousins would
describe his general demeanor as a "hangdog air."
Into the second glass of wine and glancing longingly
at the exit, I wanted to hang that dog myself when
he mentioned that his face was flushed, I hadn't
noticed, because he'd taken a Viagra "just in case."
What did he think would entice me more: That he
assumed sex was probable because I'm a sex
journalist or that he would need chemical help if
sex did occur? I cannot even imagine a black man
bungling an attempted seduction in such a sad way.
That was my last token white guy. I recently came
out of my racial-preference closet and told my
friends, "I love black men. I'm not attracted to
white men over 40, and I'm not dating them
anymore. Really, it's not them, it's me. Nobody was
surprised.