So Sad Today - Melissa Broder Page 0,29

tape of vomiting sounds (my own, fake) played on my Walkman. I fantasized that I was Kimberly, a pretty, popular gymnast-girl. I imagined that I/Kimberly was running down the hallway at my school, not making it to the bathroom, vomiting all over the place in front of everyone. I wanted this pretty girl to know shame, the shame that I felt in my own body. This turned me on. At the same time, I felt that Kimberly—as a pretty and popular girl—was beyond reproach. Even when out of control, even at her most disgusting, she would be embraced. I wanted to experience that as well.

In retrospect, I may have simply been sexually attracted to Kimberly, vomit or no vomit. But it was easier to mask this attraction with a vomit narrative than to grapple with the terrifying thought that I might be into girls.

So I humped George Jetson and imagined that I was Kimberly vomiting. I also imagined that I was a girl helping Kimberly vomit. As I humped I felt better and better. Then, a miracle occurred. From my vagina to my legs, I was suddenly rocketed beyond the space-time continuum. For a few moments, I was taken completely out of my own ego into a soul world of pleasure. I couldn’t believe that this feeling existed. It seemed crazy that I had never heard about this before! Had I invented it? I patched up George (his stuffing was falling out) and joined my family downstairs for dinner. But I knew what I would be doing later. I was going to give myself this feeling forever.

Kimberly is still a lurking fantasy for me. I am very loyal to my fantasies, and once I get a good one I hold on to it for life. Here are a few of my other favorite vomit fantasies:

• I am having sex with a hot Roman emperor. We have just feasted. The Roman emperor is fucking me and vomiting at the same time. Sometimes in this fantasy, I, myself, am the Roman emperor. Or I am watching.

• I am an obese, very femme woman on a business trip. I binge eat in a hotel room. One of the things I binge eat is a bad tuna sandwich. Then I go to an office to deliver a PowerPoint presentation. In the midst of the presentation I show visible signs of nausea. I escape to the bathroom and begin dry heaving. A powerful butch lesbian follows me to the bathroom and asks to be let in. At first I am resistant, because I feel ashamed. But then I let her in. The butch woman is deeply attracted to me: my body, my mind, and my vomiting. Other employees can hear me vomiting and they can hear her helping me vomit. When I am slightly recovered, she takes me home to her house, where she goes down on me for, like, three hours. I think we get married.

• I am a Chinese prince of the Ming dynasty. I am receiving a blow job and being caressed by multiple concubines. While I am getting the blow job I begin to vomit. One of the concubines gets excited and accepts the vomit into her mouth with great delight. The other concubines continue to blow and caress me as I vomit into her mouth.

• I am a six-foot-tall frat bro: hung and cut. I am the alpha of the pack, the broest of bros. I do a series of beer bongs in the frat house. Then I begin burping loudly. A fellow frat bro, who is secretly gay but not out, hears me burping and gets turned on. He then stands behind me as I vomit and rubs my back and abs. He wants me.

These are all fairly loving fantasies. What unites them, aside from vomit, is that each of them involves a complete acceptance and embrace. While some of them delight in the shaming of someone beautiful and/or powerful, the ultimate resolution of that shame is always self-acceptance by way of another’s acceptance. To me, that’s sexual fulfillment.

When searching for emetophilic porn (an emetophile is the name for a person with a vomit fetish) on sites like pornhub, you’ll mostly find women gagging and vomiting on dicks. This doesn’t do it for me. In those videos, the power is going in the wrong direction. It’s too forced. I like a natural vomit. I like a vomit that comes as a surprise to the vomiter. But the Internet has