Dating Women: The Most Enticing Romantic Possibility Life Ever Threw Her Way
This week’s New York Magazine Sex Diary features a 35-year-old writer going out with a woman for the first time and it’s pretty adorable. It’s absurd and ridiculous at times, too, but mostly does a good job of capturing the experience of somebody who suddenly finds themselves considering a possibility they’d never before considered. Namely, the possibility of WOMEN.
I don’t mean to sound immature but at this point, I’m still in shock that I have a date with a girl?! I have zero hang-ups about gay/straight/bi sexual orientations. This isn’t about shame or anything like that at all … it’s almost the opposite. It’s like this is the most enticing romantic possibility life has ever thrown my way.
This kind of story — grown-up straight woman meets grown-up not-straight women, then suddenly considers the possibility of dating women for the first time — is a popular one in film, television and literature, but rarely do these revelations occur without a great deal of hand-wringing, retrospection and self-doubt. What does it mean? Am I gay now? Is this why I was so obsessed with Britney Spears? What will my parents think? What will my friends say? Why am I ashamed to hold her hand in public?
But our culture is shifting, slowly but surely, at least in some circles in some parts of the country. We’re hearing more and more real-life narratives from adults in which falling for a woman in your twenties or thirties, while unexpected, isn’t shocking or confusing, either. Nor do these stories fit into the “falling in love with this one woman helped me realize I’d always been queer / bisexual / gay, NOW WHAT DO I DO” column, which is probably the column most “coming out to yourself” stories fit into, including the fictionalized ones.
If there is a column for these new narratives, it might be this: “falling in love with a woman made me realize I was capable of falling in love with a woman.” The sentence doesn’t have to end there, of course, most would also tack on an “and therefore I guess I must be queer or bisexual or gay or sexually fluid, but whatever, it’s not a big deal.” What makes these stories different than so many other queer narratives is the complete lack of internalized homophobia — for people like me, it’s stunning that any woman could be so nonchalant about suddenly finding herself playing for a different team. The idea of going on a date with a woman for the first time was hardly incidental for me, it was loaded with meaning. I spent most of my life completely certain that I was straight and completely horrified by the idea of being a lesbian, despite growing up in a very liberal area with a queer parent. In fact, my former aversion towards out-and-proud lesbians remains the only evidence I have that I’ve been queer all this time, because I don’t have the formative “crushing on my best friend” or “fantasizing about women” stories I hear from many other lesbian and bisexual women.
The Sex Diarist’s narrative is one of many we’ve heard lately remarkable not for treating the gender of one’s partner as incidental (historically exemplified through ideas like “we’re all just humans! I fall in love with a person, not a gender!”, which is true or a lot of people in the middle of the Kinsey Scale but not for everybody) but for acknowledging that yes, for most people, dating a woman is different than dating a man, but it’s not “less than,” it’s not bad, and it’s not a big deal, either. We’re entering an era when it’s possible for a woman to grow up in or live in a homo-friendly environment that enables her to consider dating a woman when the opportunity presents itself without worrying about coming out to intolerant family members, being rejected by her friends or suffering at work. Even big-name Hollywood actresses have publicly acquired girlfriends without losing work (e.g, Kristen Stewart), which would’ve been unthinkable ten years ago.
Historically, even the most open-minded liberal couldn’t consider suddenly dating a woman without some degree of strife unless they’d already cut themselves off from traditional society and expectations, like hippie communes. Musician Julia Nunes touched on this in her recent Autostraddle interview when she talked about how she was lucky enough to grow up in such an accepting environment that eventually falling for a girl for the first time wasn’t a big deal or an identity crisis.
Chloe Caldwell’s 2014 novella Women, a beautiful story about the author’s first same-sex love affair, manages to address frankly how different it is to be with a woman without making sexual orientation itself the subject or the obstacle of her story. Early in the book, when she’s found herself drawn to this woman, Finn, but hasn’t yet given it a name, Caldwell writes, “I knew I found Finn’s aesthetic attractive, but I hadn’t yet explored feelings of being attracted to her, in part because I hadn’t yet explored my ability to fall for a woman. I figured if I was going to be with a woman, I would have been with one by now. I would know if I was bisexual or gay. Being a writer, I assumed I was at least mildly self-aware.” And then, of course, she falls, quickly and desperately, in love with a woman she cannot have because this woman is already in a relationship with somebody else. It’s unhealthy and destructive. But she falls, and falls, and falls, and this new categorization of affair is approached not with hand-wringing, but with nervous, tentative, flushed excitement and curiosity.
A similarly enchanting narrative begins mid-way in the new Netflix documentary Tig, when out lesbian comedian Tig Notaro becomes fast friends with Stephanie Allyne, a straight actress she worked with on the film In A World. Although Allyne and Notaro are clearly falling for each other — texting nonstop, becoming inexorably obsessed with each other’s every word and move, involving each other in their work whenever possible — Allyne resists to categorize it as “falling in love” because, of course, she’s straight! “I don’t know how to go forward in my life without this person,” Allyne recalls feeling after her and Tig had decided to take a break from their friendship because Tig’s feelings for Allyne were too strong. “I knew if I don’t say ‘yes’ to this in my life then I am not following my feelings and my heart.” I won’t spoil the film for you, but you’re probably already aware that the two are presently engaged to be married, so there’s that.
Ye olde fictional narratives never turned out quite as well as these present-day true stories do. Jessica Stein tried really hard to love her girlfriend as much as her girlfriend loved her, but ultimately she was just too straight to make it work. Samantha Jones quickly grew tired of her relationship with Maria in Sex and the City, and exited with several digs at lesbian relationships in general. In Six Feet Under, Claire’s brief experimentation with bohemian lesbian artist Edie was similarly short-lived, as Edie reminds Claire that “the world’s not your own private fucking chemistry set.”
I don’t know how we’ll categorize this type of human going forward or where this type of experience will fit in to other LGBTQ narratives — if anywhere. We’ll never know if it worked out for the Sex Diarist and her anonymous female date “Rose” — if her quickness to judge Rose for not making cookies from scratch is any indication, it probably didn’t — but rest assured they did eventually have sex and “it felt fucking incredible. Every single second of it. Fucking. Incredible.” But you probably already saw that one coming, eh?
NY Mag Sex Diary Stars Lesbian Couple Getting Kinky in Provincetown
Clearly my devotion to reporting up-to-the-minute news regarding lesbian inclusion in New York Magazine’s Sex Diaries has led to a proliferation of such diaries, praise Goddess.
In the past, we’ve ventured into the bedrooms of The Queer Woman Who Sneaks Into the Fitting Room With Her Partner, The Lesbian Law-Firm Intern Hooking Up With Her Co-Worker, tThe 29-Year-Old Lesbian Whose Dreams Are Dirtier Than Her Sex Life, The Single Bicoastal Lesbian Smoking Lots of Weed With Two Gal Pals and The Queer San Francisco Woman Having Group Sex in New York.
This week we get a little more traditional with a 40-year-old butch/femme couple vacationing in Provincetown, one of the gayest places to visit, ever. Both ladies are horrified, then, to arrive at their vacation rental and discover they’re sharing the unit with three other families — all straight, all with children. Take a gander:
We head back into the house to have sex. If seeing us visually doesn’t scare the straight people away, we decide hearing us have sex in the middle of the day will. My partner wants to play Daddy/girl, which is my favorite sex play. She has brought a new toy, a pink pacifier that says “I heart Daddy.” She puts it in my mouth like it’s a ball gag. She does me, first with her hand, then with her cock. She takes the pacifier out for my final orgasm so I can scream.”
We’ve got allergic reactions to pacifiers, Erotic Masseuse/Banker’s Wife roleplay, feathery masks, sensory depriving blindfolds, Daddy/girl play, anal sex, floggers, fisting, strap-ons and lines like “the sun is hot but it’s low tide so we basically just pee and hold each other like a dirty Indigo Girls song that they never wrote” and “my freshly waxed, ocean-douched body is on the edge of the bed while my butch is sucking, licking, and biting me close to orgasm.”
So next time someone says that lesbians in long term relationships stop having sex and enter into lengthy periods of lesbian bed death, you could direct them to this lovely post!
New York Mag’s Lesbian Sex Diarist Tries Having Sex With Other Girls
I have this fantasy that the more we talk about New York Magazine’s lesbian sex diaries, the more New York Magazine will publish lesbian sex diaries. This theory is not entirely non-sensical because Rachel Kramer-Bussel, the editor of New York Magazine‘s Sex Diaries, is a friend of Autostraddle, but it’s probably non-sensical because I imagine they don’t get a lot of submissions from lesbians and probably use all the ones they do get, because really who needs it when we have The Real L Word? Just kidding, that show blows harder than a job.
Anyhow, here I am to report that yet another lesbian has spread her legs for New York Magazine, because I always tell you when this happens. Witness The Lesbian Law-Firm Intern Hooking Up With Her Co-Worker:
I’m already caught up in my head about this. Why am I not more into it? She’s making all of these sexy noises and writhing all over the place underneath me. Normally this would be insanely hot. Am I too into LDG? A random hookup will be good for me, so I keep going.
This sort of reminded me of what it was like to be 26 and gay in Manhattan and I felt wistful. I also think somebody needs to compile an erotica anthology compiled entirely of stories wherein a Questioning Lady who thinks she might be gay finds out that you’re gay and decides to use you to figure her shit out, and you’re totally like “no problem! lez do it!”, and then you find out later that you were essentially offered up to the Questioning Lady by a mutual friend who said something like, “[x] is gay, you should talk to her!”, which the Questioning Lady seems to have interpreted as “[x] is gay, you should have sex with her!” You know what I mean?
NY Mag’s Queer Poly Lady Sex Diarist Has A Lot Of Actual Sex, Goes There
Yes fine homosexuals of Sodom, it’s me again here to inform you that New York Magazine‘s sex diaries feature a lady-loving lady this week: The Queer Woman Who Sneaks Into the Fitting Room With Her Partner! This particular woman has actual sex. Like a lot of actual sex. New York Magazine only had to go all the way to San Francisco to find her, but they did.
For example:
I love looking up at T’s breasts from between her legs; they frame her face so nicely. I love how she starts to shake as she comes in my mouth. “I shouldn’t give you my tongue so quickly. It turns you into a puddle,” I tell her. Of course, I don’t really mean this — the part about keeping my tongue from her. My tongue is directly connected to my ego, and my ego likes the feel of come dripping on it.
The diary comes complete with butch bra shopping, Daddy play, shaving, near-fisting and bossy bottoms. Commenters are confused about whether or not fisting actually feels good and are actively debating the merits of removing or not removing one’s pubic hair as if nobody’s ever conversed on the topic before.
To be honest, sometimes witnessing these intimacies dissected by commenters on the website — the sex diaries commenters are a prolific gang of regulars — feels strange, like we’re giving them our secrets. Due to the horrible representations of “lesbian sex” in straight porn, there’s a lot of misconceptions about what lesbians actually do in bed, and for some reason that often makes our sex feel more special. But here we are on the internet, with 98% of somebody’s fist all up inside us! Ta-da.
New York Mag’s Sex Diary Features Lesbian With Dirty Dreams, Lots Of Exes
I feel it’s my duty to inform you every time New York Magazine’s Sex Diaries feature a Sapphicly-Inclined Human, and thus it’s my pleasure to announce that today’s Sex Diary stars a “29-Year-Old Lesbian Whose Dreams Are Dirtier Than Her Sex Life.”
The diarist is a PR agent with a 46-year-old girlfriend/partner/”lover.” They volunteer at a soup kitchen, go to flea markets and art museums and talk about ‘academic events.’ Most of the sexual situations in the diary, however, are solo affairs, fantasies about ex-girlfriends and dirty dreams:
Lover looks sexy. I can see her pierced nipples through her little tank. She’s 46, but has the physique and spirit of a much younger woman. Unfortunately, her hormones don’t match up and menopause is rearing its ugly head, battling my own high sex drive. I throw some verbal flirtations her way and follow up with kisses on her neck and chest, hoping the morning might replace channel surfing with some body surfing. I’m met with a tender turndown sealed with complaints of bloating, cramps, and a hot flash to round it out.
Most comments on New York Magazine are pitying — “I must say that I feel a bit sad for her. This woman needs more sex, love and affection – Woman, will you please communicate this to your Lover?” — and some are gross (“why not just have sex with a dude”) and some are weird (“If you live in Long Island City you are stupid and I hate you.”).
After trying to think really hard about whether or not I know this girl and coming to terms with the unnecessarily elevated and flowery language the diarist employs, my number one feeling about this diary was that it made me think of this Stephen Dunn poem “After Making Love.” It’s perhaps unfair to Stephen Dunn to mention him within the context of a New York Magazine Sex Diary, but whatever — that’s what poets are for, I think, they take our crude poorly-expressed stupid flowery melodramatic feelings and make them sound like, well, poetry.
After Making Love
No one should ask the other
“What were you thinking?”
No one, that is,
who doesn’t want to hear about the past
and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present
filled, even as it may be, with pleasure,
or those snapshots
of the future, different heads
on different bodies.
Some people actually desire honesty.
They must never have broken
into their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key,
never seen with an intruder’s eyes
what is theirs.
– Stephen Dunn, from Loosestrife
What did you think?
NYMag Sex Diaries Features Weed-Smoking Bicoastal Lesbian
We feel it’s our duty to let you know whenever the New York Magazine Sex Diaries feature a queer lady. We also imagine this will encourage them to feature more lesbians, so that we can read more about actual lesbian sex and therefore accrue the same kind of gratuitous sexual knowledge heterosexuals have the opportunity to absorb every single goddamn day. This is all a very honorable thing we do here, on Autostraddle.
This week’s foray into Sapphic Sex is “The Single Bicoastal Lesbian Smoking Lots of Weed With Two Gal Pals!” This lady has a habit of naming objects (“The Purple Friend”) and people (“The 25-Year-Old Lovely”) and a habit of eating marijuana. It’s amazing because she talks about her feelings/exes approximately a million times more than other sex diarists!
Last summer I was feeling horny so I went on Craigslist and a woman posted a picture of her naked body and I responded. We e-mailed back and forth a few times. The next day we decided to meet and when I saw her she looked familiar. At one point I asked, “Have we dated before?”
Is anyone else confused about what happened to the 25-year-old at the end when she was crying a lot? Also do people still act like that on facebook when they’re grown up? More importantly, why isn’t this woman on The Real L Word?
Today’s NY Mag Sex Diary is “Epic,” Queer, In An Open Relationship
New York Magazine‘s Sex Diaries, which we have discussed at length in the past, are consistently one of the magazine’s most controversial and widely read features. Sometimes it gets a little gay, and this week’s “The Queer San Francisco Woman Having Group Sex in New York” was described by editor Rachel Kramer Bussel as “epic.” See for yourself at New York Magazine:
“I arrive home from a literary event to find twenty partially clothed friends in my apartment. It’s a mini bon-voyage orgy thrown by my partner, S. In two days, we fly to New York. This journey back to his hometown is an annual ritual since we moved to San Francisco. A mix of business and pleasure, I’ll be reading from my novel at a bookstore and wedging in as many dates with New York lovers as possible.”
Happy Tuesday!!!
New York Magazine’s Queer-Friendly Sex Diaries: Yup, They’re Real.
SEX DIARIES: We love New York Magazine‘s sex diaries for the obvious reasons but especially because they’ve included some fascinating perspectives on queerly oriented persons rarely found in mainstream magazines, such as The Female-to-Male Pre-Op Transsexual, The Royal Duchess of Slutiness, The Lesbian Player, The Bisexual Polyamorist and our favorite The Newly Lesbian Lesbian, Who Is Loving It.
They’ve often seemed just too perfect to be true — for example, The Ex-Banker Living on Alcohol, Hook-ups, and Unemployment was so on point that we suspected it was another masterminded trick by those “Dating a Banker Anonymous” Blog Hoax Gals, but Adrienne Cohen insists that indeed they are real. She even shares the process of becoming a Sex Diarist. Perhaps you will be next!
For this sex diary focused issue (the diaries are only published online, so this is their first cameo in the print mag), a NY Mag writer was forced to ‘read all 800 pages of The Sex Diaries and, using them as a source text, develop some kind of taxonomy of contemporary sexual anxities.” Among other fascinating insights he confirms that “the quality in a Sex Diary most admired by commenters is the kind of confidence (or masochism) that allows for ruthless candor.”
WEB-GEEK: Yahoo’s Geocities is closing on October 26, taking a whole bunch of data with it. That’s right — gone. FOREVER. So this is your last chance to dig into those HTML tables and extract your Ani DiFranco guitar tabs, graduation photos, Alicia Silverstone gifs and that .wav of Jim Carrey yelling “Do NOT go in there!”. Founded in 1994, Geocities was one of the first services to offer an easy way for early Internet surfers to publish their own Web pages.
READING RAINBOW: An ex-gay group says their views are not being heard because books like You Don’t Have to be Gay are missing from libraries. Yes, these people suck, but unfortunately, it shouldn’t be any tougher for them to get their books in libraries. Book-banning is awful, and first amendment rights should apply to everyone, even if their message is hateful. Any argument that could be made against them could also be used to ban great, gay-friendly books. On the bright side, most of the ex-gay arguments are so ridiculous, they refute themselves.
Meanwhile, controversy simmers around a children’s book with Lesbian Moms … yeah so, that’s been banned from Scholastic Book Fairs:
According to the School Library Journal, Scholastic says the book, released on October 1, failed to meet its vetting process because it contains offensive language and same-sex parents of one of the main characters, Milla.
TRANS HOMECOMING QUEEN: The College of William & Mary elected their first transgender homecoming queen.
GAY MARSHAL: We’ve talked about the woman nominated to be the first gay US Marshal before, but apparently she’s been a gay pioneer for years now. Back in the ’90s, she came out big time (on the front page of the Minneapolis paper) in an effort to make her fellow police officers more tolerant. It sounds like the military is going to need some people like her once DADT is gone. (@sfchronicle)