Behind the Bedroom Door: Sex Geek to Sex Goddess

Confessions of a Former Sex Geek

by Abiola Abrams

To say that until a couple of years ago my life was devoid of sexual experience is like saying that the United States and Iraq are in a tiff. It’s not that I never had sex. I just never had any fun. I’ve always been an overachiever and I made a decision early on that I would be the nicest of nice girls. As a teenager, I was one of the so-called lonely onlies—the nickname for the black kids in my mostly white school and I took it upon myself to become something of an ambassador for my race. Other than the domestics in their Park Avenue homes, I was one of the only black people visible to my classmates on a regular basis. I knew they’d be bound to make some rudimentary assumptions about African Americans based on my behavior. Like their parents, most kids believed that black people were loud and lascivious, the bearers of trouble and good times. I wanted to prove we were more than that, as if, by being chaste and good, I could somehow elevate the general opinion of my race.

If this seems like a tremendous burden for a teen, trust me, it was. But when you visit friends’ apartments and are routinely directed to the service entrance because a doorman—black or white—assumes you are a babysitter or housekeeper’s daughter, can’t help but want to make adjustments to people’s thinking.

Still, I envied the bad girls. They seemed to have more fun, seemed somehow freer in their skin. I was anything but free in mine. When my parents decided to send me at age 11 to an elite all-girls private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, kooky things were happening with my body—the lumps and hair and smells, oh my!—that no amount of showering could get rid of. In my less-than-tony New York City neighborhood, the old men who used to watch over me protectively now leered as I walked by, their eyes pricking my changing shape with laser-like precision. The young men were more forward, jabbing at my flesh with their words. Juicy ass. Sweetness. My body was betraying me, developing before I was ready for the attention, and I hunched to hide my budding breasts, covering my butt with my slack backpack as I rushed to the bus stop.

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My mother is a nice Catholic girl from Guyana, the British Caribbean colony where Jim Jones and 900 or so of his followers drank the Kool-Aid and died of cyanide poisoning. Growing up, she never once uttered the three letter word, s-e-x, in my presence. We never had “the talk.” Instead, as I turned 14 and entered high school, I scoured the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves and began to realize that my sex education had been sadly limited. There were lessons in school, bestowed by a wacky volunteer waving a condom-covered banana and screaming about AIDS; it was the late 80s after all. There were also the informal kind—like the afternoon my friend Emma and I procured a badly hidden skin flick from her parents’ bedroom or, another time, spent a few hours poring over her brother’s dirty magazines. I was most shocked by the women—bouncing, blow-up Barbies with flaxen hair, voluminous breasts and flat butts that looked nothing like mine.

One day in ninth-grade homeroom, Mollie Ann Kaplan announced that we girls were finally going to get a life and stop whining about being sex geeks. Her idea, she told us, was to create a dating club with a neighboring boys’ school, similar to something she’d watched on MTV. We quickly came up with forms and dashed off profiles describing our looks, likes and dislikes. I remember being unsure whether to indicate that I was black, then deciding to write that I had ebony skin and straightened hair. The other girls described their ideal mate’s using Madonna’s lyrics; I wrote about Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, my favorite play, and Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess, my favorite poem, which was about a Duke whose wife “had a smile too easily made glad.” One girl told me to be sure to include that I had dimples “since this was my greatest asset,” and we were not including photos.

At fencing practice the next day, Mollie Ann handed the forms to the boys’ team, who, photos or not, knew who we all were anyway—New York City’s eight posh prep schools are a very small community. Up to this point, I hadn’t exactly been popular with the opposite sex. Back in grade school, my hair a colorful configuration of barrettes and bows, I was serenaded in the cafeteria one afternoon by Michael Jackson’s pop song Pretty Young Thing, only it was Ugly Young Thing, and there were back-up singers. I wanted to crawl under the table and barricade myself from the laughter with my Hello Kitty lunch box.

When I latch-keyed myself home that afternoon, I had a new image to consider: me as ugly, or, not just ugly, but gross, undesirable, one who deserved to be publicly scorned. How could I not have realized this before? With our odd names, colorful clothing, exotic foods, bare feet, ebony complexions and sharp accents, my family had never fit into our surroundings. But I’d always been able to brush off that sense of not belonging, of being out of step; after all, though my parents were Guyanese, I was technically American, or desperately wanted to be. Having an entire cafeteria sing about my ugliness was a different kind of humiliation altogether.

After that, I accepted that I was ugly to boys and moved forward, careful never to draw attention to myself. I begged my parents to call me Abby instead of Abiola; invisibility, I decided, would be my shield. Yet by 9^th grade, I still stuck out in the rarified environment of my private high school. Compared to my classmates, I was underprivileged, even with a father who’d attended an Ivy League university and was a renowned expert in precious metals. I lived in a lesser zip code (anywhere other than the Upper East Side was considered a lesser zip code).

Nonetheless, I excitedly tore open the large manila envelope containing our profiles along with Mollie Ann and the others, eager to see what the boys had written. “Lemme see yours, Abby,” Mollie Ann called out. This is great, I remember thinking. I’m finally in!

When I found my rumpled loose-leaf page, the comments on the front were sweet. “I like dimples,” one boy wrote. “Smart is for geeks” another had scrawled, making me smile. Then we discovered more writing on the back; the boys’ final assessment of me: “Big hips, lips and ass. Nobody wants to see brown nipples.” Brown nipples? No one at school had ever overtly mentioned my race, much less my breasts. At first, I was confused, but as the words registered, I crossed my arms over my uniform and rushed from the room.

Technically, I knew I was different from my mostly white classmates but in those superficially politically correct times, I’d never once considered that my blackness might be distasteful to some of the boys. If they’d written that brown skin was ugly, I could have had a good cry and moved on. After all, the media and most African Americans themselves concurred that blackness was ugly. My mother’s Ebony and Essence magazines were filled with ads for skin bleaches and hair-relaxers, the only way to be both dark and lovely. But I had to admit that the boys were right about my “big hips, lips and ass.” They must, I decided, be right about my nipples, too. Speaking too white for the black kids or dressing too black for the white kids could be improved upon. Brown nipples could not.

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The girls dropped me from the dating club, Mollie Ann declaring semi-apologetically, “Since none of the boys really like you, Abby, there’s no point in your staying on.” I understood. I was a liability. Boys were new to them, too. Adolescence was hard enough without having someone with the wrong color nipples in our midst.

So when cinnamon-skinned Mark Rose asked me out on my first date at 16, I was shocked—and thrilled. Mark had a summer job on the Good Humor truck that rolled past my parents’ house and he introduced himself one afternoon as I purchased a fudge bar. When he asked me to the movies, I said yes, with my parents’ approval, and just like that we were a couple. Looking back, I don’t think I much considered if we had anything in common or if I even liked him. None of that mattered. Mark liked me and I was grateful. With him as my boyfriend, I could avoid school dances, the rough and tumble of high school dating, further taunts about brown nipples.

I remember once after I’d been with Mark for six months, my mother said, “I hope there isn’t anything going on I wouldn’t approve of.” I told her, truthfully, that we had not had even a first kiss. “Good, keep it that way,” she said. She needn’t have worried. Sex, when I thought about it, seemed scary and forbidden. My friends and I weren’t like the popular girls, the ones my mother considered to be fast. The thought of disappointing my mother, disappointing both my parents, was somehow terrifying. They had left their families and their continent to make a better life for me. I didn’t want to screw that up.

So I held onto my identity as the annoying kid that other parents always used as a good example. I made Mark wait almost two years to see my brown nipples. As we finally, awkwardly fondled each other in my mother’s Volvo, I told myself I was in love, but honestly, the most thrilling thing about our make out sessions was their clandestine nature. Nothing is more fun for a good girl than sneaking around.

I did eventually gift Mark with my virginity on an utterly forgettable and unspectacular afternoon a few weeks before I left for college. I don’t remember much about it except that we were fully clothed and in his grandmother’s house. That was as bad as I was willing to get. I was more concerned with avoiding pregnancy than pursuing pleasure, which was a good thing since it was pretty much over before it started.

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Soon after, I went off to Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college where the majority of students were women. Of my six African American male classmates, only three were straight. Of those three, none had any interest in women of color. But I wasn’t too worried. I’d pledged to love my ice cream sweetheart Mark forever. Except now that I was free from the confines of my parents’ curfews, there was no reason to sneak around simply to have boring, fast sex. To make matters worse, once Mark went to trade school to learn how to fix air conditioners and I began to meet more people like me—smart, artistic, oddballs from around the world—it became clear we had nothing in common. So I dumped Mark and, in a flash of unexpected coolness, discovered that I loved clubs, dancing and music. I was known as the drug free girl who, weirdly, didn’t even spark up a doobie, but I sure enjoyed a party. Dancing felt reckless, reckless felt fun and fun felt like freedom. Finally.

One night, while out with some friends, a man approached me and asked for my number. I took it. He was, it turned out, 10 years older, and lived three hours from my college. That was inconvenient, but his family was in the music business, which thrilled me. Here was a man of the world—and he wanted me! I never thought to question why he still lived with his mother. I was 18. He seemed decent and was keen on me—that was enough.

My girlfriends told me to brace myself for sexual lessons from an older guy. None were forthcoming. Our sex life was almost non-existent but I didn’t know enough to want or demand more. Besides, with 20-page papers due every week, who had time? So I kept on dirty dancing with guys at clubs, always countering any requests for more with the fact that I had a boyfriend. I was there to have fun with my friends, I insisted, nothing more. It was as if I was putting on drag, masquerading as a bad girl on the weekends. As for my so called boyfriend, the mere fact that someone so much older liked me gave me a shot of self confidence. That is, until he left me for someone even younger.

At 20, I already felt old and ugly. Friends tried to soothe me by sharing rumors that my ex was gay, but that only made my feel worse; no wonder he never wanted to touch me. So when I moved to New York City after graduation and connected with an African American guy who’d gone to a neighboring private school, I was so relieved that he was paying me attention that I had sex with him on our second date. So soon! Later, I tried to explain that “I never did that sort of thing” as he nodded knowingly and dropped me back on campus with a wink. This was awful. I liked him but now he thought I was a slut. What if he told our mutual friends? So I kept on dating him until he became my boyfriend. I didn’t want to be a bad girl.

We stayed together during my 20s, dating for 10 years until I convinced him we should be married. Or, rather, until everyone around me insisted that his not proposing after all this time was humiliating and disrespectful. No one thought to ask me if I wanted to be married; I didn’t think of that myself. It was assumed that I did, that my job was to snare this man. Besides, we had a good sex life; we’d even done it on a balcony once. And I was determined to establish myself as an actress, an unstable career proposition at best. Marriage seemed like a necessary anchor. Around our 30^th birthdays, we jumped the broom and tied the knot in a lavish island ceremony.

Less than three months later, I discovered my new husband was cheating; when I confronted him, he confessed that he could be happy only if we had an open relationship. Devastated, I moved out faster than a Hollywood starlet can say DUI, then cried for weeks, blaming myself for not being smarter, stronger and more appealing. But no one was coming to rescue me.

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So I picked myself up and began to learn things about men, women, dating and sex that might seem obvious to the average post-millennial 14-year- old:

1. Showing your new, gorgeous underwear to a group of women on your way to your first lesbian club might be a bad idea unless you’re interested in said women.

2. If you invite a man who likes you to your apartment at 2AM, he most likely expects sex.

3. Men sometimes lie. This is considered “game.”

4. Inappropriate men are completely appropriate for some things.

My ex got custody of our married friends and I connected with a group of single girlfriends who filled my head with delightful, yet scary, stories of trysts and illicit affairs. I loved going out with them and dancing on tables; it made me feel like a wild child though at heart I was still naïve. I quickly learned, for instance, that my whole way of operating gave people the wrong idea. I am a huggy, touchy-feely, girly-girl, the kind who runs her hand up your arm unconsciously while talking to you. I was used to hanging out with other couples and no one overtly reacted to my behavior; when I was single, I discovered that men expected some kind of sexual pay-off from a woman who comported herself this way. I was on the market and apparently everything, including me, was up for grabs.

One night, I ran into a crush at a swanky bar at 1 AM. After talking for two hours on a velvet sofa, he mentioned that he’d like to come back to my apartment “to hang out.” I invited my best girlfriend along for security because he made me giggly and nervous. As we settled in and I browsed through my movie collection and popped corn, the disgruntled suitor revealed that he expected a threesome, or, at the very least, sex. Highly offended, I kicked him to the curb.

Another night, I met a man at a business event, who, after a brief conversation, looked intently into my eyes and said, “I never thought I could love again after my last relationship, but speaking to you makes me feel open.” My heart soared and I wanted to love him until I caught up with a friend in the bathroom, and learned that he’d said the same thing to her an hour ago “So what?” she said, laughing. “That’s the game. Men lie.”

Friends advised me to “get out there and date. Re-lose your virginity,” said one. “Get your numbers up and then you can judge who’s worth it and who’s not.” But the misunderstandings and snafus continued, guys I considered platonic friends confessing that they were dying to kiss me, then sulking if I didn’t comply. From the age of 11, I had gone to school with mostly women; I had never been single as an adult. I didn’t know what I was doing, felt as vulnerable and awkward as any teenage boy.

But I had also never felt so free. Freeeeee! And desirable.

One night, at a party, I fell into an unexpected sexual encounter with a man I’d once worked with. His skin was a delicious dark chocolate, even darker than mine and his body was ripped. This time, there were no mixed signals because I knew what I wanted; I wanted him. Okay—perhaps it was a little ninth grade to have a friend go and check on his level of interest, but once that was out of the way, I liked feeling as if I was on the prowl, doing the choosing rather.

We sealed the deal at my place, devouring each other’s body in spectacular fashion. Bad boys, I’ve since discovered, are fun to play with, especially now that I know I don’t have to settle down with one simply because we’ve had sex. I love that this man is not “the one”; he has too many kids for my comfort and an on again off again fiancée. Yet I enjoy his desire even as I know I don’t need it, that there will be others who desire me. So I please myself—no more pleasing others—flying to meet my bad boy on business trips for 48-hour trysts. I have un-stunted my growth! Whoo hoo!

I am still the same me who felt she had to settle. Big hips, lips, ass, and, yes, brown nipples.

I do not want a relationship. Yet.

Recently, my bad boy fell asleep in my bed and I realized that I did not want him to spend the night; that I had to wake up early. So I woke him up and he left, then I called and left a spicy message on his cell phone about how many ways I would let him have me when we saw each other next.

As a recovering good girl, it feels so good to be bad.