The first time I learn about sex, I am eleven. My best friend, Emily, and I crowd around her parent’s computer, our hearts thundering in our chests as we listen for the sound of her parents’ car pulling back into the driveway.

We’re laughing, cracking jokes about sex. Just saying the word is a joke in and of itself. Something we’ve been taught is foul and dirty in our mouths. Something that ladies never speak about.

First, we click on Google images, and we are met with anatomical diagrams that look like they belong to aliens. There are a few scandalizing pictures of couples in their underwear, making out, or with their legs all tangled together, or someone’s lips on someone else’s neck. We laugh the most at these, making fake gagging noises.

Then we click over to Google videos. We click the first result. The thumbnail is a woman with the largest breasts I have ever seen. The look on her face is one that I’ve witnessed often in r&b and rap videos, and I have already been practicing for some time now in my dance routines. The mouth slightly open, lips pouted, head titled just ever so slightly to the left so the light could catch her good side, eyes doing what Tyra Banks would describe as the “smize.” In just four more years, I will have that look perfected, can look down and then back up with that exact look on my face. I’ll have a decade of practice by then.

When we click on the video, a pop-up jumps out at us first, asking us to prove that we are eighteen. We exchange looks. “What happens if I lie?” Emily asks, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. “Will they tell my parents?”

I mess with my hands. “I don’t know,” I whisper, as though the computer can hear us and call the cops.

After a moment, we close our eyes and she quickly clicks the “yes” button, the sound deafening in the silence. We bat our eyes open and pause for a moment, holding our breath, waiting for the cops to bust in or her mom to break down the door, shouting, “Aha!” Maybe with a film crew just to add to the misery. When we realize that nothing is happening, we click play on the video.

The video starts. It begins with a close-up of an ass, which isn’t exactly what I expected. I’d expected some images like the ones we’d just seen, the pretty man and pretty woman kissing in their underwear, soft lighting and mood music, like the Usher videos that I’d watched over andover again the year before. With the strangest—and worst—music I’ve ever heard in my life, the camera pans out from the ass to show a blemish-free woman with tanned skin glistening in the California sun and long blonde hair hanging to her perfectly tiny waist. Her breasts are shaped like two perky balloons, barely moving as she walks, and her butt and hips are wide but completely stretch mark free. Her green eyes are painted with kohl black eyeliner, and her lips glitter with fresh gloss, mouth pointed into a sexy pout. I remember thinking that this whole segment was weird because it immediately shifted to the woman inside some house with a man. The man wears a toolbelt and no shirt. He is all hulking muscles and abs. He is also bald and has an annoying, gravely voice. Significantly less attractive than the woman.

She doesn’t have money to pay him for the work he’s done around the house. There are other ways to pay him, though. She feigns ignorance and then outrage. She tells him no. He tips her head back and sticks his tongue down her throat anyway. She resists, and he slaps her, calls her a bitch. She relents, allowing herself to get lost in his embrace. His pants come off, and then her bikini, and then they are on the ground. He is not kissing her neck. He is choking her.

My friend and I have stopped laughing. Within minutes, the man is sweating all over her, grunting like a pig and repeatedly calling her “bitch.” That is what I remember most of all later. He keeps calling her “bitch” so often that I begin to wonder if it is her name. He keeps grunting, “You like that, bitch?”

She is writhing and contorting her body in ways that look incredibly uncomfortable. Her breasts are not moving, even as he grabs her waist so tight that it leaves red marks on her skin. “Yes,” she keeps saying, “Yes, I like that.” But those kohl-lined eyes are blank, empty, and bored as they look into the camera, peer directly at me. I want to look away, but I can’t. If not for the eyes, maybe I could believe that she did like it. Maybe I could buy the writhing body and exaggerated way that she calls him “baby.” He calls her “bitch”, and she calls him “baby.” I wonder what would happen if she called him a piece of shit, or a dick, or an asshole. If she did not smile and play the game. What would he do?

Before this video, I’d only had a brief sex talk with my mom in which she had told me to wait for marriage, or at least until I was in love. Was this what she meant by “making love”? The flowery language that made me cringe? Did she let men call her a bitch? Did she smile and tell them that she liked it while waiting for it to end? If that's what love looks like, I’m not sure I ever want any part of it.

For a long time, the room is silent except for the sound of skin slapping on skin. Emily doesn’t look away, and neither do I, playing a silent game of chicken.

“Do our parents do that?” I ask, feeling sick to my stomach.

Emily doesn’t answer.

We watch it through to the end. We watch the man’s incessant cursing grow louder, the way that his skin slaps against hers in a less controlled rhythm. Soon, the woman gets on her knees, begs and pleads for it to come. The woman’s empty green eyes gaze directly at us as she insists that she wants it, despite her earlier firm denial. We watch the grand finale explode across the woman’s perfectly made-up face. Watch the man curse and growl and call her a bitch one last time for good measure. “You’re a good bitch,” he says. We watch her flinch, then try to hide it, blinking rapidly, oohing and aahing with a theatrical flourish. It is not until I am thirteen and take health class that I realize that a man does not always have to finish on a woman’s face.

Emily blinks, then closes the computer tab, and all is silent. We go watch Hannah Montana in silence. We never speak of it again.

When I go home that night, I can’t sleep. I keep seeing the sweat pouring off the man and onto the woman’s skin, and her breasts stiff and lifeless in his rough hands. Most of all, I keep seeing that vacant look in her eyes, and I keep hearing him call her a bitch. Over and over again. You like that, bitch?

Finally, I go to the bathroom and slowly strip off my pajamas, looking myself in the eyes as I do it. I look at the stretch marks that my mom adoringly calls “zebra stripes” that spread across my thighs and hips after they expanded this summer. I turn around and look at the ones on my butt, then lift my barely existent breasts a little to see the ones forming on their undersides. My eyes also trace the birthmarks and scars from poison ivy, my freckles and moles, my too-thin arms, and my chest and face acne. I’ll never be perfect.

I’ll never look like the woman in that video. I can’t look like her, but I can sound like her. I think of all the floppy-haired boys with hands too big for their bodies. The ones that I daydream about. The ones that call Emily hot and ignore me. I know that they watch those videos. I’ve heard them talk about them. I put back on my pajamas and go to my room. I lock my door. I sit on the end of my bed and imagine a man calling me bitch until I stop being offended by it. This takes longer than expected. Then I practice my noises quietly under my breath. “Yes,” I say. “I like that.” I say it enough times that it becomes like a mantra.

Then I practice my “o-o-oh my god,” “baby,” and “fuck” a few times. I will know all the words to the script. I will be ready when the time comes. I will always say yes because apparently no leads to a slap in the face. I will let the man do what he wants with me. I will smile as he calls me bitch, as long as he tells me that I’m beautiful later. I will contort my body into shapes that he likes, no matter how uncomfortable they may be for me. I will writhe my hips and smile up at him. I will pretend to like it when I feel nothing. I will pretend that bitch is the name my mama gave me. At the age of eleven, I have already learned that this is how you keep him, and I have years of practice ahead of me.