How to Cum in Spite of–

by Brionne Janae

How to Cum in Spite of–

“For finally this body is open. And this
body it is mine.”

excerpt Malcolm Tariq’s Fucking a Proclamation

 

I once had a partner who made what I thought was the saddest face when she came. I didn’t understand it—and I suppose would have worried something was wrong if she wasn’t grinding her clit so ecstatically against my fingers while I fucked her. She came like that often. Sobbing almost. I had heard or read somewhere that some people have emotional orgasms, whatever that meant, so I just sort of chalked it up to that.

I’m a survivor of sexual violence. It took me a long time to acknowledge my assaults in my conscious mind. For a long time, it was simply something I turned away from, or in some instances, actively buried so deep it was forgotten. When I was assaulted as a college student at a party and a friend opened the door and asked if I was ok. His eyes searching me; letting me know it was ok if I wasn’t, that he would help. I said I was ok. It was a lie both to him and myself. I remember seeing the cops blue and red circling outside, and the noisy house party quieting as lights were turned on and everyone started to leave. I was afraid. If I said something was wrong, there would be a fuss, consequences may or may not be meted out, lives would be changed. Somehow I felt that this would all be my fault, my stain, and it was easier to just not acknowledge it.

I believed that too. Like a kid who has fallen and scraped a knee and been told immediately by adults that “its ok” “it doesn’t really hurt.” I thought if I said it didn’t hurt then it wouldn’t. But again, mostly I was afraid of what happened if I acknowledged that I had been hurt.

It took me a long time to learn to orgasm in front of a partner and even individually my orgasms had always been something I worked hard for. Keeping my mind focused enough and present enough to feel my body had always felt difficult. I figured that was normal and did what I had to do to get where I wanted to go. A few partners, a lot of alone time, and I began to learn my pussy.

Once, I was fucking in a safe loving relationship with a partner who liked to have background noise, music usually but for this particular instance we had turned on a documentary about the history of African American food, called High on the Hog. This was a wild choice considering we both knew there was a high possibility we’d be fucking, but ya know, choices were made and fucking ensued. When we started, they were going on about southern food culture and eventually they progressed to talking about its links to West Africa, which you guessed it, led us into the history of chattel slavery—which talk about a fucking buzz kill.

My partner was facing my pussy and I was facing the television, and I remember having to make a choice. I could let the documentary ruin the moment or I could keep going and try to get my pleasure anyway. I decided that it was sad enough that my ancestors had to experience the horrors of enslavement: ruining my own orgasm wasn’t going to do anything to undo their trauma and pain, and despite everything my ancestors endured I was here in this splendid body that is mine and mine alone and shouldn’t I enjoy it? I enjoyed my body in that moment and I remember how amazed I was that I had been able to, that I had encountered something so soul crushing and been able to have joy as well.

I’m not the first to learn that PTSD can turn your body into a haunted house. At different times I’ve had to pause my sexual relationships when the house felt a little too crowded for sex with another person. Sometimes, I even avoided or lost interest in sexual stimulation all together and refused to masturbate. Those moments are usually my lowest, when the shame of my sexual trauma sours any possibility of self-pleasure. I had heard from someone at some point in my adolescence though, that orgasms were good for the mind and body (thank you to whoever you were), and so I’ve always been a little suspicious of these moments when I was too afraid or hurt to enjoy my own body.

Eventually, in one such moment of grief, I remembered that partner and their sobbing orgasms and decided to let myself moan and whine and sob while I masturbated. It felt so good and sad. I knew I needed to cry but hadn’t been able to access my tears and somehow this was allowing for a similar release. It shouldn’t have been so surprising to me that it would feel good to whine while I masturbated. I’ve never been particularly able to keep quiet during sex, which is ironic considering how I’d tried for so much of my life to live like a mouse; keeping my pain and trauma secreted away and silent.

Like many of us I learned to keep my silence in childhood; good children were seen not heard and so on. And because I was generally terrified of my mother when she was angry I did everything I could to stay out of trouble: to be the quietest when it was time for quiet, to look myself in the mirror and stop the tears from spilling from my eyes and literally fix my face so that all trace of sadness, or evidence that I had had even a moment of feeling would be erased. In some ways then, the fact that I’m a moaner as an adult makes sense. What better way to reclaim myself than to make noise.   

Masturbating through my grief turned out to be quite the way to reclaim my sadness as well. My body can’t lie when I’m fucking, even when I want to be quiet sound escapes me. If this were a tik tok I could hear someone saying that crying and masturbating allowed me to shift some negative energy around and out of the body. But really it was less about negative energy and more about remembering that all of this energy was mine. All of it, and I had to learn what to do with it. How to move and shape it into something that served instead of haunted me.

About six months after discovering this new use for my pussy, I read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” for the first time. Reading it again and thinking about the pleasure in that sad moaning release I feel like I finally understand what Lorde was saying about eroticism as a source of power and what we potentially lose when we turn away from ourselves when seeking pleasure. As she says “To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience…” I had spent so much of my life in denial of what I had experienced and what I was experiencing. And yes, that denial might have kept me emotionally safe (or so I thought), but it was cutting me off from my truth and my power.

And there is a power in choosing to look at yourself, and not just superficially but deeply and entirely. How else, can you know what wounds need tending if you aren’t willing to look at them first. Lately, when I cum, especially when I’m alone, it can be like a moment of intense internal sorting. What do I keep what do I push out through my throat as my I moan my release.

The first time I came like this I had been scouring the internet for articles about tantric sex after a new lover suggested we learn to cum using just our brains.  The articles had talked about solo masturbation as a type of meditation, where you just had to see where your brain took you and accept it all. Now, even with Lorde’s encouragement to stop turning away from myself, as someone who lives in a haunted house of a body, accepting it all felt like a bit of a stretch. But I had oodles of free time and a deep commitment to my pussy so for the first time in years I gave masturbating without porn and just my brain a try. As I predicted my brain pretty quickly took its turn down trauma alley. But instead of giving up and abandoning the project I talked to myself about it. “I’m sorry that happened,” I told myself, “but we’re safe now and I can protect you,” I doubled down repeating “I can protect us,” and came. Big, but gentle and building. A start to a journey not the singular pop at the end of a long struggle like I was used to. I kept cumming and roaming through my haunted house and talking down my trauma’s and cumming some more. It was a revolution, a house reclaimed, a pussy gloriously opened.

    

    

Author Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the author of Because You Were Mine (2023), Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021) which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017). Brionne is a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, a Hedgebrook Alum and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Their poetry has been published in Best American Poetry 2022, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Sun Magazine, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Off the page they go by Breezy.

Artist Ana Prundaru was born in Romania and presently lives in Switzerland. Alongside her legal career, she writes and illustrates for publications like Fugue, the Pinch, Third Coast and New England Review.