Dick Drunk

passing out from sex

CW: This story contains explicit descriptions of sexual experiences, including physical pain and anatomical detail. The language is intentionally direct and crass to restore honesty to a subject often silenced by shame. To understand how sex education fails, we must be willing to name what actually happens in real bodies and these words are part of that reclamation.

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I woke up in a hood minimalist walkup, on a bed with no top sheet or headboard, butt ass naked except the soft flannel blanket that barely covered me. I wasn’t really sure what happened, I remembered having sex, kinda. I remember starting the sex and even if I hadn’t remembered being penetrated my body was reminding me. I had cramps so bad I swiped my fingers on my vulva to check for blood. Everything was a blur, which was weird because I hadn’t had a sip of alcohol or any drugs.

A few months after my 18th birthday, I found myself in the company of a former friend’s boyfriend. Yes, I am erotically petty, but that is not this story. This story is about the time I had consensual, penetrative sex with a man I knew and everything went wrong really fast. Before you read any further I need you to know, this isn’t a size issue. He was big but was not gigantic. We can call it well-endowed, a good 7.5-8 inches and cut. He was the quiet type, and his big dick energy was rooted in a simple truth: he was girthy enough to stretch you out a bit.

We started out in missionary and everything was going great. He felt good and was feeling good until he flipped me over and entered me from behind, pinning my back so that my chest pressed into the bed and I couldn’t scoot away. I hated doggystyle, but here we were. Midway through him fucking me with his best Jodeci body rolls and me pretending like it felt good, my body went rigid. The room spun. Then I passed out.

I think of Ice Cube saying that he killed the punany because his dick “runs so deep” that he “put her ass to sleep” and wonder about all the girls who passed out from pain. Not only did no one ever tell me that this could happen, but pop culture had me believing that passing out either during or after sex was a normal part of the ritual.

That was the first time that I learned that sex could literally knock the consciousness out of you from excruciating pain. And still, after all that I did like damn near every young women who found themselves performing in a mans bed, I smiled when he came in his room later to check on me, kissed him softly and assured him I was fine.

It would be almost ten years later when I would hear my gynecologist casually say in an exam, ‘oh, you have a tilted cervix.’ Nothing wrong, it seemed but also no further explanation, no pamphlet telling me that it was completely normal, that many people have or that it makes certain positions, like doggy style, intensely painful.

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Pain during penetration has been so normalized that few have historically dared to question it. Even many of today’s poorly informed sex coaches and internet gurus will minimize it down to a matter of lubrication, “taking it slow” or “try more foreplay,” as if technique alone could fix biology. We got a male loneliness epidemic before we reached a women’s sexual health crisis even though it is estimated that one of three women report pain during intercourse.

In classrooms, the word pleasure is omitted entirely. Sex education, in the few places where it still exists, orbits around danger — preventing pregnancy, warding off disease, surviving abstinence. No one mentions a cervix or positions or anything that would prevent what happened to me from happening to others. Sure, everyone is not blacking out from pain, but no one should.

When I think back to my younger self, I wish someone had taught me what pleasure-based sex education could mean, that it was even possible.

Without it, I was left to pretend, to try to play the part of the eager, experienced girl woman who moans at the right moments, who knows what to do and can take the pain. Cosmo told me to “relax more,” with countless articles about ways to please my partner, while lovers praised my body’s tension, confusing it with tightness.

For the next decade, I phased a lot of penetrative sex out of my life because certain positions, especially doggy style, shot pain so deep it made my stomach turn. The following 20 years led me down a many rabbit holes to understand the sexual body, particularly my own, so that penetration could be enjoyable in more positions.

It has taken 30 years, but now there’s hope in what’s emerging now. I am a part of this wave. New education and sex tech is helping people map their arousal, track pelvic health, and explore their anatomy. There are startups designing personalized vibrators informed by medical data, apps mapping pelvic floor movement patterns, and online courses that decode sex and arousal with the same nuance we bring to mindfulness or emotional intelligence. We’re beginning to see the science of pleasure treated as worthy of research.

It’s still slow coming, though. And it is still being held just out of reach of those who need it most under the guise of morality. But it’s happening. And my inner eighteen year old knows better, now.

Amina is the director of The Amina Institute, and dedicates a good chunk of her life training somatic sexologists and sex educators so that the shape of a cervix is no longer a mystery to those who have one and pleasure is accessible with or without pain, player’s choice. Learn more at www.atltantra.org