After meeting a much younger white man online, I began exploring what it would be like to have a submissive lover.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
It had been over four years since my last relationship, and I was tired of the long stretches without sex. I was worried I didn't know how to be in a relationship any more and that I'd lost my skills in the bedroom. I wasn't naïve to the hookup nature of online dating, but I also knew that black women have the lowest reply rate of anyone using these sites or apps. So when I finally activated an OkCupid account in the spring, I didn't expect so many white men to reach out to me or for them to move so quickly into revealing their fetish for black women. One guy even referred to me as an "ebony girl," as if I belonged in a tag on a porn site.
Nichole Perkins
I largely ignored the men asking me to dominate them, which happened as frequently as every third or fourth message, but they did make me wonder: Were these men simply casting out a large net in hopes of catching anyone, or was there something about me that served as a beacon to white male submissives? Or was it simply enough that I was a black woman that made them reach out?
