Is Pussy Not Enough?

Dating as a 34-year-old heterosexual Black man with a full head of hair, no children, no herpes, a law degree, a relatively successful career in stand up comedy, an absolute hog on him, and a heart full of gold, has its advantages.

I do well for myself. I know my limitations. I am 5’9, relatively short to some people. I can also be incredibly annoying when I’m unmedicated. I have ADHD and you don’t grow out of it. For example, I like to bake and you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve assembled some dough, placed it in the oven, set an alarm, gone upstairs, started playing a video game, heard the alarm go off, forgotten what it was for, ignored it, then continued playing Skyrim until I smelled something burning.

Nevertheless, I generally find dating to be enjoyable. I love talking with guys about relationships and the sex they’re having and the sex and relationships they’d like to be having. I think we spend so much time talking about love in the abstract we often fail to discuss the intricacies of what love is on a micro level.

However, and as previously mentioned, I do not enjoy discussing relationships with men who have difficulty talking to women. They bum me out. There is something profoundly upsetting about men reaching their thirties without getting any pussy whatsoever. I prefer not to know that people like this exist. Like a liberal confronted with an ongoing genocide, I prefer to remain blind to such depressing details of the human condition. Yet, because of my ADHD, I could talk to a literal brick wall and enjoy myself. So these conversations keep happening.

I speak with men, women, single men, single women, married men, women in polycules, asexual men, women who have never masturbated, and men who cannot stop masturbating. It is a beautiful cross-section of perverts. Since moving to New York, I have noticed that the sex people describe having is… wild. They are butt fucking and dildo sucking, eating ass, spitting into mouths, arranging orgies, having foursomes, slapping, choking, role-playing, wearing leather, being vacuum sealed into vestibules, and constructing elaborate erotic scenarios that, quite honestly, have never appealed to me. I consider myself sex-positive, but I am, in practice, a fairly vanilla person. I have no desire to yuck anyone’s yum. But after hearing enough of these accounts, I have found myself returning to one question: is pussy not enough?

It seems that everywhere sex is represented in modern media, it’s a bit... extreme, isn’t it? There is rough sex, extramarital affairs, incest pornography, and peculiar power dynamics. Every week I learn of some new sexual terrain I’ve never explored. But isn’t the original model sufficient? Isn’t simply placing the penis into the vagina and moving it around a lil bit already one of the great pleasures afforded to mankind? I recently had this conversation with an acquaintance who was determined to convince me about the purported joys of ass fucking. I, of course, listened politely, but for the life of me, I have never found myself in the pussy and thought, there has to be more to life than this. God, for lack of a better term, cooked when He made hole.

But is it even fair to ask this question of only one gender? Why do I feel so comfortable criticizing men who have become too freaked out? Perhaps that instinct says more about me than it does about them.

Perhaps, dear reader, I am merely reproducing the very heteronormative script that feminism has spent the last half-century attempting to dismantle. Under patriarchy, masculinity is often performed through sex, where the purpose of sex is framed not as mutual pleasure but as the domination of the female partner. She is bent over, conquered, degraded, made to service his desires, gargling his balls, and ultimately treated as a prop in the performance of his masculinity rather than an equal participant in intimacy. Within that framework, the rejection of performative backshots is itself a quietly subversive act, is it not?

To be clear, I still do not wish to socialize with people who eat ass. Nor would I ever knowingly allow them to use my utensils. However, maybe I have mistaken my own tastes for universal truths.

Bell Hooks argues:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” - The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004), pg. 66.

If sex and pleasure are emotions, have men simply killed off that part of themselves too? And is this recent wave of increased freaktivity an attempt to resurrect the emotional self by being bent over and being pegged by their beloved? What if the strap-on dildo is not just a sexual instrument but a tool of masculine liberation? Is eating a girl’s ass on the first link an act of resistance? And if so, am I now the patriarchal man bell hooks warned us about? When my friend visits, I make him use disposable plastic utensils because I know he puts his tongue inside of strange, recently introduced butts. By refusing to let him touch my personal forks, am I enforcing a ritual of shame and power designed to assault his self-esteem?Is my silverware policy emotionally crippling him? Am I perpetuating patriarchy through an exclusionary cutlery policy he’s completely unaware of? Perhaps the first step toward dismantling toxic masculinity is allowing an ass eater to use your good spoons.

But who is to say?

Moreover, could we, and should we, ask women the same question? If hole is not enough, is pole not enough either?

It sure doesn’t appear so. Whenever women discuss sex, they seem far less interested in the physical mechanics of intercourse rather than everything else surrounding it: the chemistry, the anticipation, the emotional connection, the foreplay, the aftercare, the brownies I made beforehand. Male sex toys are almost universally faithful reproductions of the human vagina. Female sex toys, meanwhile, are made in a way that Michael J. Fox couldn’t replicate even if he was sitting on top of a washing machine.

Of course, sexual neuroticism is rampant amongst women. Many women have a complicated relationship with sex, not because they dislike pleasure, but because sexuality has so often been experienced as something done to them instead of mutually engaged in, and demanded of them rather than freely chosen. They participate in the social order while remaining understandably suspicious of one of its central institutions. And who could blame them? By the time many women reach adulthood, they have spent years navigating unwanted attention, unsolicited commentary, unsolicited dick picks, and the persistent sense that somehow, somewhere, somebody is trying to fuck them. And possibly even up the butt! It should not surprise us then, that many of them yearn for a romance stripped of overt sexuality.

I think this is part of Taylor Swift’s appeal. Taylor represents sexlessness better than any pop star I can think of. Even Phoebe Bridges be fucking. Even Olivia Dean be fucking. But Taylor Swift’s music is a reprieve from thinking about sex. Nobody in their right mind believes Taylor is throwing neck and receiving cataclysmic backshots, do they? Do you think Taylor Swift even knows what the grapefruit technique is? Do you think Taylor Swift has any idea who Wesley Pipes is?

At university, I had a roommate named David. Every time he slept with a new woman, he would wait until she made it home safely before sending her a text that read, simply: “Not the best.” and would not explain himself even after she sent a barrage of text messages asking what he meant. And yet, those girls would always come back to fuck him a second and third time. Some would even come back a fourth before they realized how deeply tism’d up this man was. When I asked him why he would do this he would just say “the pussy is mental bro” and even when I pressed he would continue to say “the pussy is all mental bro.”

David was (and, for all I know, still is) an insane person who I’m almost positive was placed on this earth to commit every conceivable method of grey area sexual assault imaginable. But perhaps, in this one particular instance, he was right.

Jerrod Carmichael’s 2025 comedy special, Don’t Be Gay contains a joke I personally find to be one of his best and it’s done in a completely throwaway line. I got to see Jerrod run his hour in Austin, Texas and he delivered the joke differently by saying: “Repressing your sexual desires is a lie only straight people have to constantly live by.” And I do agree with this. Heterosexual sex often feels more ritualized than romanticized. How many of us as men have just accepted that our girlfriends will never be able to throw it back like that one girl? How many women have accepted that the man they love may simply never make their legs shake with an orgasm so powerful he has essentially fucked them to sleep? Disappointing sex is an almost exclusively heterosexual institution. Gay people fought too hard for the right to have sex to tolerate mediocrity once they got there. But by this logic, if a man claims to be heterosexual, is being too freaky a homosexual act? Is living your truth sexually something that feels inherently gay? Does it feel queer to ask to be strapped to a chair and jerked to completion by a woman wearing a clown costume? But, more importantly, is there anything wrong with being a little gay for the pussy? Folks?1

When I think of my own life, it would appear that I may be (inadvertently) living by a philosophy of pussy not being enough. My mother, god bless her, is constantly pestering me about getting married and having children. I don’t know how to explain to her that it’s not that I don’t find marriage and a family appealing, I just don’t think achieving those things is particularly difficult or challenging. I’m creating art that I love, I’m succeeding professionally and creatively, I have a wonderful life, I’m very happy. To my mother, and to many of our parents however, none of our personal achievements mean anything until we have decided to become monogamous and pop out some kids. My mother wants me to find someone, anyone, and knock them up, and stay inside. Every time she asks me “why aren’t you married?” She is essentially asking me “is pussy not enough?”

My mother would be so happy if I dedicated my life to a suburb in Texas and went to PTA conferences and quit pursuing stand up. The girls my mother tries to introduce me to, good lord. They are so chopped and so busted. “She’s nice enough!” She says. But nobody is ever nice enough to overcome the hurdle of being ugly. I understand her fears on some level. Nobody wants to end up alone or see people they deem worthy of love alone, and to some people, being a wife or a husband is their crowning achievement. I mean, why else spend $50,000 dollars on a wedding? Couldv’e bought a Camry.

I don’t think it would be particularly challenging for me to match with a girl on hinge, love bomb her, and get married within 14 months. 32 year old women are insanely desperate for love. With the right mixture of attention, urgency, and emotional fraud, I could probably pull it off with relative ease. But why would I do that for the sake of doing that? Being married is not an accomplishment to me. Being happily married is. Having children is not an accomplishment either; hispanic teenagers do it every day. Raising the family you genuinely wanted, with the person you deliberately chose, strikes me as a real accomplishment. And one of life’s nastier little secrets of getting older is learning that this accomplishment is much rarer than we pretend.

Perhaps what we celebrate too often is not fulfillment but compliance. We congratulate people for reaching prescribed milestones without ever asking whether they enjoyed the journey or even wanted to take it in the first place. Society has a remarkable ability to confuse arriving with choosing. By that same logic, pussy should not be enough. Who cares if you are getting laid? Are you enjoying yourself? Is the fuckee enjoying the actions of the fucker, and is the fucker enjoying the response of the fuckee? Or are you simply poking away to prove that you are not gay, not strange, and, above all else, completely normal?

My favorite movie of all time is Pulp Fiction. Actually my favorite movie is Wedding Crashers, followed by Pulp Fiction, but admitting that has too many follow up questions and judgment from niggas I don’t even want to talk to in the first place so when people ask, I surrender to social pressure and say Pulp Fiction.

I love this movie because Quentin Tarantino spends nearly three hours asking the same question a dozen different ways: what do people value, and how much of themselves are they willing to sacrifice for it?

The film is stuffed with objects made sacred by human obsession: a briefcase, a gold watch, a wallet, a milkshake, and a Bible verse that is not real, by the way. None of these objects, however, possesses any fixed or objective importance. Yet each character behaves as though they would die for them. The clearest example is Butch’s gold watch. Just to recap, Butch is supposed to take a dive in a fixed boxing match but refuses to do so, which ends up costing a notorious gangster, Marcellus Wallace, a lot of money. Butch wins the fight and escapes to a nearby shitty motel, where his love, Fabienne, is waiting for him, packed and ready to flee the country and start a new life. By the time he reaches the motel, he appears to have everything he was fighting for. He has money, freedom, a motorcycle, a French baddie who would give him sloppy top even if he had a pot belly, and the promise of a new life. Fabienne lies beside him talking about pancakes, blueberries, babies, and all sorts of shit. But does Bruce Willis care? No. He flips out, goes into full white-boy rage, and starts punching drywall because she forgot his watch. Crazy to see, really… scaring the hoes like that. And you all know how I feel about scaring the hoes. Shit really was pissing me off fr.

Moreover, the watch is objectively meaningless. Christopher Walken appears midway through the film to explain that generations of men carried it through wars, prison camps, and even inside booty holes. But Tarantino never dismisses Butch’s attachment to it. At face value we see Butch risk his own life for something that was deep in another man’s ass. But actually, Butch is risking all of this for his father, his father’s father, his masculinity, and the story he tells himself about who he is. The watch has absorbed all of these things. Probably some doo-doo too if we being honest. But nevertheless, the watch represented a small, golden container for everything he believes cannot be replaced and to abandon it would feel like abandoning himself.

This is one of the stranger habits of being human. We take finite things, objects, relationships, accomplishments, getting sucked off, and ask them to bear infinite meaning. We define ourselves by what we own, who we love, what we achieve, and the particular manner in which we fuck. The danger is not that we desire these things too much. It is that we confuse the thing itself with whatever we hope it will finally give us: identity, validation, permanence, proof that our lives matter. That, I think, is the real question of Pulp Fiction: not what something is worth, but why we need it to be worth anything at all. It’s easy to judge Butch, I would have said fuck that watch and went straight to Costa Rica with Fabienne. But I don’t value that watch, I value having sex with baddies in tropical countries. We all have different goals in life.

I’m not really sure how to end this essay. I was trying to make some grand point connecting a movie I like with that guy who would not stop telling me why I should fuck a girl in the butt. It did make me think about Butch and how he’s laying in bed with an absolute baddie and can’t stop thinking about a watch that was in a man’s ass. Maybe the boo-boo on the golden watch made me think of my friend getting boo-boo on himself during his anal endeavors. I don’t know. Again, I have ADHD, and my mind literally goes wherever it wants. Maybe the simple art of fucking isn’t enough for you. Who cares? You get to decide what’s important to you. In the same way I wouldn’t be happy if I had to live in Frisco, Texas, with an obese wife, you probably would feel the same way about a life in which you can’t be hung upside down like a bat and beaten by a small battalion of trans women with sticks until you came.

Both of those feelings are valid. They’re valid because we get to decide what we value in this life. So what do you value? What’s enough for you?