I remember my first time touching a computer like it was yesterday. My mother, a tech genius, had built it from the ground up, piece by piece. I would watch her work, her arms bent in a bowl to avoid disturbing my sisters who were strapped to her chest. She would hum along to Bunny Wailer as she connected the power connector to its corresponding socket. Once it was built and functional, she would caress the enamel of the shell and pray over it, honoring its capabilities. Then, she would install the games I wanted to play—Math Blaster!, You Can Be a Woman Engineer—so that I could sit level with the great pixelated sky of the monitor.
I was supposed to have a four-hour-a-day limit on the computer, but sometimes I would sneak back into my room after my mother had gone to sleep. I’d be mesmerized by the confidence of the millennium, exploring Egypt with Carmen Sandiego and her red wings whipping in the pixeled sand. I began to think in the computer’s language, its pointer shaping the contours of my dreams.
It was also around this time that I discovered porn. I was only ten or eleven, but I had already lost the silent right to my girlhood. As I uncovered each corner of the cloaked web, I discovered kink and realized there was something in all of us that craved the shadow side of abject humiliation.
I remember one day in second grade when I was distracted and floating high above the room, noticing everything—the way the clock ticked, how the dust on the board settled, the way the corners of the carpet frayed, how the room itself smelled. Suddenly, I said out loud that it smelled like sex and the room gasped. I was red with humiliation and whisked out of the classroom and into the front office.
Fiona Apple sings “It’s such a fuckin’ old pain that, you know, there’s nothing poetic about it” and that couldn’t be more true. That smell of musky vigor will always be a memory for me, a reminder of how I discovered my own sexuality and kink at such a young age. It’s a reminder of how powerful computers can be—not just for playing games but for exploring our own identities and understanding our own desires.
