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CALL OF THE DAY: accents, “black girls,” and aural stereotypes

The dispatcher rattled off his number and name, and then blurted it out fast, as if she knew it would squick me out: “He wants a black girl.” Maybe she did know. My dispatcher knows that I have … feelings about these kinds of things.

Let me be clear: interracial relationships do not upset me, but when someone calls up looking for a PSO of a specific race, they are not looking for mutual commitment and support. They are looking for whatever verbal stereotypes exist that fit their fuckability profile.

I have heard about getting requests for an Asian girl, and holy fuck, I can totally imagine what that would involve. (I don’t think Bilingual Papi counts here; he knows I’m white, he just likes to hear the words in Spanish sometimes.) On the rare—two?—prior occasions where I was supposed to be a black girl, the callers wanted to hear me perform a specific kind of black; they wanted a certain cadence, the kind of “sass” that makes videos go viral and, when white gay men imitate it, makes me want to scrape my eardrums out until the racist echoes are gone. African American Vernacular English is what the linguists call it. A lot of other people call it “sounding black.”

I knew what those two callers were after, and I just couldn’t make myself do it. The best I could muster was just me, but louder and more forceful even than my usual domme default. Afterward I thought, well, at least they didn’t use the N-word. Cold comfort.

This was my baggage, on this recent day, when the dispatcher said, “He wants a black girl.”

– What does that even mean? I asked, nearly shouting in frustration.

“I don’t know!” she shouted back.

– I don’t do accents.

“I know, I know. Just describe your skin, say it’s chocolatey or whatever.”

Fair enough, I thought, and sullenly gave the go-ahead. Okay, I’ll do that.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Go get ‘em.” She always sounds like a high-school football coach when she says that.

I braced myself for the worst-case scenario: white, entitled, subby-but-still-in-charge. But then the caller answered his phone, and my brain froze. His voice had that cadence that was not mine to claim; he was using AAVE. If he himself was not African-American, he was trying hard to pretend, which would be WEIRD, but not the weirdest thing that I’ve ever heard for the sake of a wank.

“What you look like, girl?” he asked. I am shit at lying, but I gave it my best shot, fed him the line about chocolatey skin, brown-black eyes, hips you can really hold onto. He told me about himself: caramel skin, big hands, long tongue. Oh, yes. That was the important bit in his self-description. He wanted me to sit on his face and ride him until I came, so I described my pussy, described the taste: nectar, honey, sweet sweet juice. That was it. I came a couple of times, he climaxed at the right moment, we said bye in a thoroughly friendly fashion, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I hung up the phone. He bought it, I thought. Whatever I said, and however I said it, he bought it.

And then I sat back and wondered yet again if all of my callers understand that they are not actually getting the girl that they describe to the dispatcher. Maybe they know it in an abstract sense, but think that they’re special, that they have preternaturally keen powers of discernment, that they could tell if I were lying about being 5’2 and petite, or 450 pounds with long auburn hair, or, you know, black.

What does a black girl sound like? No. The real question is what do white men who call phone sex lines want a black girl to sound like, and I know the answer to that question. A new question is, what do black men who call phone sex lines (a statistical rarity to begin with) want a black girl to sound like? After this call, I can confidently say that I have NO FUCKING IDEA, any more than I know what a chubby chaser wants a supersize BBW to sound like.

Our voices all sound the same, coming out of my mouth. I swear to you, I’m CRAP with accents, especially stereotypical ones; I don’t even try, and I don’t want to. So the experiences differ only in who is listening, and what stories are already in their heads.

*****

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