internet ho

am i a bad feminist?

It’s 11:19 a.m. on a Saturday, and I’m lying on my bed, asking a Yoruba man, “So… can I ride your face like that guy in that Twitter video?”

I can hear his heavy breathing. “Yes, baby,” his husky voice filters through the phone on my pillow.
Something between my legs tenses, and I stop mid-bite of the orange I was about to put into my mouth.

“You’ve made me hard now,” he grumbles.

“Very good. That’s what you deserve.”

What am I going to do now?

“Mmmhhh… what are you going to do now?” I tease.

I’ve always liked this position of power. Weak and barely useful power it may be but power still. I liked the thick lust in his voice. The raw desire that would have been hot to attempt to resist in person. How his eyes would cloud all over when he came for me.

But we’re stuck behind a phone. I picture his dark face and perfect lips, the top part deep brown, the lower part totally covered with soft pink. He was so beautiful I stopped swiping Bumble for a full minute when I saw him. His skin was tar black, perfectly sunburned. His lips sat perfectly under his nose as he gazed back at the camera, as if he were daring the person behind it.

Henry, 25.

I scrolled through his profile, eager for more. There was nothing else. I swiped right, and we matched.

I slide into his DMs.

“Mystery man, why is there nothing on your profile?”

He texts back immediately.

“😂😂😂 Nothing. That one picture is enough.”

I smile. Does this man know his worth or what?

“Intimacy without commitment, huh?” he asks. “Let me have your number. I’m not on this app a lot.”

I text it to him.

“Check your WhatsApp. I just texted you.”

---

The first thing you should know about me is that I am horny. I entered 2026 with the most insane amount of horniness known to man. It was eating me alive so badly that it was physically manifesting as frustration. I recently moved into a new neighborhood closer to my school, and nobody warned me about the loneliness that hits out of nowhere. All my friends were far away. My social anxiety and need for alone time is a two-headed monster that both torments my life and helps keep it in check.

My friends advise me to talk to the people on my street, but about what? What if I don’t like them? (I don’t.) So I keep my eyes averted when I walk past them. Some of them say I’m a bitch. They may be right. All I had to distract me was work and school which was more work. I tried meditation. I tried yoga. They bored me. None of them could solve my problems.

I was horny… and bored.

So, as a girl who lives online and knows the right app for everything, I took matters into my own hands and downloaded Bumble.

I was intentional about my profile. The perfect percentage of thirst-trappy and intellectual-looking pictures, thought-provoking handwritten prompts, a nice quote at the end that would be a great conversation starter for a smart man. My bio read:

“Hi there, I’m looking for raw, quaking lust.”

It was simple enough to convey that I didn’t have energy for long talking stages, and it widened my net because, to be fair, all the people on Bumble are horny.

I’ve always found phone sex hilarious because eight out of ten times I’m doing something else totally unrelated to the conversation, like eating an orange, while the other person moans seriously from the other end.

I learned how to have sex with men, which means I learned how to fake moans and orgasms early in life. Like Maddie in Euphoria, I learned how to perform sexual enjoyment for men from porn videos on the internet. I would reenact what I learned when I was with him, and when he collapsed, wasted on top of me, and asks, “Did you cum?” I would always answer yes.

I am no longer in the business of telling men that they made me cum when they did not, but I was seriously bored that Saturday morning when I found Henry, and I needed something to entertain me, so I indulged him.

‘What are you going to do to me?’

‘I’m going to put my dick in your mouth when you’re under the shower.’

‘But I’m going to be standing up, the proportions…’

‘I’ll bring you down’

‘No man can bring me down’

‘Babe, you’re spoiling the picture I’m creating’

‘Oh, sorry.’

His voice settled back into its a deeper shade. What was he going to say this time, and how would my body react to it?

“I want to be drunk eating your pussy” he said.

---

All you need to be a hoe on the internet is basically a mix of disgusting amounts of yearning and horniness. Gilmore should make a new-age yearning skit because we don’t write letters and flowery poems or fight and die for each other like the lovers in the past. What we do is stalk each other’s digital alter egos for a few weeks and exchange reels and nasty talk over video calls with no emotional depth before we eventually grow bored of talking, promising, and never getting to make those promises true.

This call was a kind of interview. Usually, when I match with men and like their vibe on Bumble, I give them my WhatsApp number and we have our first call. I gauge their vibe and intellectual capacity from this call. Is he a misogynistic fuck? Is his voice sexy enough to talk me through it? Does he seem kind? Is this someone I can sleep comfortably beside without the fear of being recorded for a coven of useless men on the internet?

Often, the conversation trails into sex and relationships. Somehow, they’re all miraculously single. But at least by speaking directly to them, as opposed to texting, I’m able to gauge if they’re a yearner like me, if they’re as horny as me, if they’re a hedonist, and if they’re dedicated to this hoe lifestyle. Like me.

A lot of times, we never get to hook up because they say something horrific, unprompted, like the guy who threatened to move into my place “to be closer to me,” or the shady guy that called me by 6 a.m. and just jumped straight into phone sex. No hi. No hello.

But in those first few days, those first few hours, when the question of who you are is still unanswered, when all they have to go on is what you show them, when you’re still a mystery and they hunt you like an animal for information about you, in those first days you can tell they want you. And in those first days, you could be anything in the world. You could be the coolest person on the internet, with nice, fancy internet problems like carrying a disgusting amount of horniness around.

Jola and FK released a special episode of the ISWIS podcast last year where they were talking about yearning, about how we need to bring back yearning. Permit me to resubmit that petition.

There are many ways to enjoy life, but none like the sickly sweet pain of sitting beside your phone, excited for a person’s text, catching yourself mid-gesture and realizing slowly, your heart dropping into the ocean of your belly, that you really like this person and that you are vulnerable, open. They could hurt you if they wanted.

There is nothing like the embarrassing and miserable ordeal of being a loser for somebody’s body, being hungry for a person’s soul. It’s like slowly unwrapping something you desperately can’t wait to eat, and it makes you feel like a disgusting pervert half the time. To want them so much that you let them consume your thoughts. Every waking breath is spent begging something in the universe responsible for love to curse them with the same fate as you. For you. For them to be as besotted with you as you are with them. What’s better than feeling shivers when they hold your hand?

We’ve grown so nonchalant it aches my soul to see a generation said to be destined for so much walk around with their necks stuck deep in their phones. Drab. Dreary. Passionless. Where is the whimsy? Everyone is so embarrassed of being seen, of being recorded, of being human in public.

Maybe what I want is love. Yeah, what I want is love. I want to fall in love, and I want it to break my heart. I want a new me to rise from the ashes of the heartbreak and write something so achingly beautiful it could only be born out of pain.

I am not interested in discussing the politics of my desire right now. It is just what I want.

But I know that the odds of me finding a man I’d fall that much in love with are really slim. As it is, men are not a very impressive bunch.

So I microdose male attention by being a slut on the internet and faking orgasms for men I find attractive.

Why am I seeking passion through a phone speaker? Why am I looking for something that doesn’t exist?

God. Am I a bad feminist?