This incident took place in late June, soon after we were allowed to leave our house for sex. Or maybe we weren’t by this point? I, like many of you, have struggled to keep up with the incomprehensible rules set out by our fuckwit government. However, I really did spend the lockdown not going out much and definitely not having sex face-to-face with a second party. By the time we were allowed a glimmer of freedom, I was thirsty AF, which may explain why I lowered my usual standards and slept with this guy – which is not to say I believe I deserved to be treated the way I was by this piece of shit. He’s still the bad guy in this story.

I think I got wokefished

I was on a park date earlier with a guy but I could tell neither of us were into it. I had already been talking to this other guy; we’ll call him Richard, or Dick for short. Dick and I had been messaging the night before and he told me he wrote a book about masculinity and ran empathy workshops for men. Great! A man who isn’t toxic! I thought. So I arranged for us to meet up at 10pm in the park behind my flat to screen him for an old school hook up. Anyway, he was NOT woke in even the slightest sense of the word. I now realised I got WOKEFISHED.

There were so many red flags

I actually wasn’t that attracted to him when we met IRL but having showered and shaved my vulva for the first time in months, I thought I could just drink my way through it. The sex was fun and he got me off. I just closed my eyes and thought of someone else. And honestly, I don’t have any regrets about that bit – I can easily detach sex from emotions. The only reason I regret this whole thing is because he turned out to be an utter prick. But the warning signs were there…

1. When we first met, I was hesitant about hugging and physical touch, but he strongly insisted and walked up to me with open arms so it felt rude not to go along with it.
   
2. At one point, he was talking a lot, so I told him I couldn’t match his energy right now at this time of night, but he simply said, “well, I can talk forever, I’m a white man.” He then proceeded to continue talking forever.
   
3. When I took him back to mine and we started making out, after telling him my kinks, I told him I wanted a safe word and he replied, as if insulted, “I don’t need a safe word, I know how to read people.”
   
4. He asked me about three times, “do you trust me?” when we were making out. I said no the first two times and then gave up and said yes on the third time. Upon reflection, I think this was a mixture of being worn down and not wanting to go through the awkwardness of kicking him out, wanting sex really badly, and forgetting what a sexual attraction actually felt like – it had been a LONG time.

Things got heated after the sex was over – not in a good way

This always happens after sex. I should really learn to kick men out after I cum, but silly me! I had a conversation with him instead. It started with a discussion of the phrase “men are trash” (side note: If you’re reading this and you feel the need to cry, “but not all men!!” then read this and then do more research or alternatively just fuck off.)

Dick says, "yeah, but it doesn't help the narrative."

"Yeah, but it's just a phrase, you know... men are trash" I reply, not thinking much of it.

"But it lowers the bar for men," says Dick, his tone changing from sexy bedroom voice to something more serious.

"Oh okay, I get what you mean, but at the same time, I don't think women should be told they need to be polite to their oppressors, it's like if I say the phrase, 'white people are shit'."

"Yeah but it still doesn't help the narrative," Dick replies, with even less patience in his voice. We're both lying there naked in bed. I had moved away from our cuddling position by this point.

I remained resolute and responded, "yes, but it's still not my job as a brown woman to be polite about my oppression, do you see how this is tone policing?"

He continues, "I guess I'm triggered because I used to start my empathy workshops back in the day by telling men they were rubbish and needed to change but it didn't help - they just switched off."

I’ll admit I’m taking some artistic license here with the order and exact wording of the quotes for dramatic effect. But the main points are there. Yes, he did try to argue against the phrase “men are trash” and did call himself “triggered”. Perhaps people in his workshops really were offended by the phrase “men are trash” …or perhaps he was just shit at running his workshops.

And yes, I did say “white people are shit”, which my brown friends later laughed at because they said it wasn’t an actual phrase – and they’re right. But I guess that’s what talking to him made me feel at the time. But if you are a white person getting really upset about this, then you need to educate yourself more because you really wouldn’t care about someone saying this if you really understood racism.

Then a strange (bad) thing happened

After this back and forth, I could see that the he was not going to get it, so I said dismissively, “wow, privilege must be nice.”

And then he says, “yeah, privilege is great,” in the same tone you might use to state something obvious, like yeah, it’s wrong to murder people, obviously.

I give him a look, and then he just keeps repeating “privilege IS great.”

It was so weird, he just KEPT REPEATING IT, “privilege is great.” I gave him an eyebrow raise and an “okaaaayyyy…” but he didn’t get my hints that I thought he was being weird.

I then outright said, “but can you see how that feels to hear as a brown woman from the white man she’s just slept with?”

“But it’s true,” Dick maintains, “privilege is great.”

My face must have looked repulsed because he tried to defend himself more. “That’s not what I meant — I think I get why — I understand why you don’t like it — actually no — I will never understand — I mean that — but it IS nice to be priviliged — I didn’t mean it like that — you don’t get it — I get why you might — no, I mean I will never understand…”

I interrupted this tedium to tell him that intention is not the same thing as impact. (Remember this bit for later.)

I ask him to leave. And then I cry a little in front of him and then do the stupid thing that women do when hurt by a man: I minimised my feelings and tried to write it off. I mumbled something about how I’ve just been stressed since BLM had taken off over the summer and the conversations I’ve had to have in light of that. But it wasn’t just that – I was RIGHTLY ANGRY that he was being an insensitive shithead and I had just let him put his penis inside me.

“I think you should go now,” I say. I go to the bathroom to pee because I don’t want this cunt to also give me a UTI. When I get back he’s up and thankfully getting dressed.

“I don’t know what to say,” he says earnestly.

“You could apologise.”

“I DID APOLOGISE!” he says irately, then continues, “I said that white people are privileged and we have a duty to do something about it.” Yes everyone, he went for racial gaslighting.

I am uncertain about some of the things that happened that night, but I am unquestionably certain that 1) he had NOT said anything even close to making a critical analysis of privilege, and 2) he had NOT apologised for making me cry by being an insensitive tone-policing twatface.

And then he says, “I didn’t mean it in a bad way, but I know your rebuttal is going to be ‘intention is not the same thing as impact’.”

Rebuttal? REBUTTAL?! WHAT THE FUCK?! We are not in a fucking debate! Racism is not a casual debate topic! He acted as if we were just refuting each others’ points in a civil argument between two friends. THERE WAS NO ARGUMENT. A white person got told that the thing they were doing was upsetting by a person of colour and instead of accepting that and apologising, they tried to defend their shitty racist actions. White people need to stop feeling more offended at being called out for racism than people who actually experience racism.

The non-apology

I told him he made me feel unsafe and he apologised for that and said he didn’t want to make me feel that way. I told him it was too late because I’ve already fucked him. I held the door open for him to hurry up and leave. A few minutes later I get this non-apology from him:

Let’s dissect this.

“Everything happened so quickly” – No it didn’t.

“I really wasn’t boasting about my privilege” – weird because you repeated yourself enough times saying “privilege is great” even after I told you I didn’t like it.

“I would never do that” – He’s taking this as a personal attack on his character, as most white people do when you tell them that something they’re doing is racist. I’ve had rare interactions where a white person has apologised for the hurt they’ve caused, or thanked the person for taking on the emotional burden of confronting them, or used it as an opportunity to reflect. This is why it’s so hard to talk to white people about racism. We have this simplistic idea that racists = bad people therefore not-racist = good people, and one cannot be racist if they consider themselves a good person (which most people do). But racist is an adjective, not a noun, and we are all prone to being racist because we have been shaped by our white supremacist society. But fuck explaining all this to him post-orgasm.

“I get how it could come across that way” – Oh, so you’re saying that intention is not the same thing as impact? WOW what a revelation. Who would have thought?

“It was great to meet you and I had fun with you” – OF COURSE YOU DID YOU PRICK, I’M HOT AND PHENOMENAL IN BED. YOU DON’T DESERVE ME.

Afterwards

There are many things that this boy did wrong. Firstly, there were the general consent issues that we already know men need to be better at. The second was the complete and utter white fragility which ultimately ended up with me having to take on the emotional toll of his insensitive behaviour. It was how he made me feel irrational and policed my tone and denied any wrong doing instead of just apologising and moving on. I just kept giving him a chance throughout the evening because he was a self-proclaimed feminist who is doing the work to educate men through writing books and running workshops, so I hoped he would prove himself to be better, but I just got wokefished.

My friend managed to find him on Twitter so I gave him a little stalk before writing this. I saw quotes from him saying shit like, “men need to learn to stop being offended when called out and be better.” THE IRONY. What really gets me is the cognitive dissonance that sits comfortably in his brain.

It’s only now that I realised how threatened I felt in that situation, so regardless of whether you think he’s done anything wrong in this story, I still had a tall, large man in my house when I was alone and also drunk (he saw me almost finish a bottle of wine in front of him) aggressively arguing with me and making me cry – instead of realising he’s fucked up, he just doubled down. He’s is not the exception though, I’ve had so many interactions throughout my life where anger and denial is the normal reaction from people like him. And this is why I have trouble trusting men, especially white men.

Stay safe and I hope you don’t accidentally fuck a racist.

BGD x