Girls and Girl on Girl

Since it’s both actual fashion week in New York (an exciting time for legions of women with incorrect, Gwynethy priorities to get gaymansplained how to make their spines look different) and generally rad gay stuff week at VICE, that means it’s time to get real low, like reeeal low, about girls plus gay. Or, “girls squared”/“girls nth” which is how perv-nerds think about lesbians, right? Maybe? I sure do.

Also for Valentine’s Day it is important to remember that love and sex plus men remains excruciating.

FEELINGS
Maybe this is as open and vast as the Mo-obvi Desert (picture me sucking down a celebratory bong hit for that one) but sharing intimate feelings with women is better than sharing intimate feelings with men, which is why I’m pretty good with declaring gayness better. Not like it’s a choice, but you get what I’m on about here. Men are great and girls don’t give them enough credit for their legit emotions, complexities, anxieties, and subtleties, but if someone is going to withdraw into a calcified no-emo shell, especially after sex/a cargument/breakfast/actual phone call, it’s going to be a straight guy. Even when you’re under absolute thrall of a man—just in so much love and it’s mutual and sound and a whole cartel of fun and sex and care and positive assholery/jokes/hijinks—there is still a unit of difference that will almost guarantee that you remain tourists in each other’s heads.

Par exemple: Tomorrow I am getting a no-big-deal/scary-to-me medical thing done and a straight male said that doing it makes me “a good example” (aka a good example for him) and a gay female sent me an epic fireworks display of supportive, encouraging text messages. LIKE, COME ON. When you get old enough to stop making up fables for why guys are the way they are, and what they really mean when they say what they actually mean (which is nothing), it kind of comes together that it’s not going to play out the way you want, but there you are. Alone in the Mo-obvi Desert, fucked. That thing about how you’re born this way applies to straight or mostly straight girls who need to get sex from scumbags with hairy tummies, too.

ALL-STRAIGHT EVERYTHING
It gives me sadness that Girl News is so much about dick, btw. I guess I left all that appropriately and thoroughly contextualized stuff back in 2004 (or 5? WHO KNOWS) when I graduated with a medium-hard university degree mostly in political theory and started being like, I’LL DO WHAT I WANT NOW, THANKS. Girl News should be gayer. I’ve sexed with girls a bunch and I’m not very good at it. Doing all those moves properly is so hard! When I was lesplained what fisting was and how to do it I think I did some Ren and Stimpy reactions. Both Ren and Stimpy.

PORN
The common understanding about girl-on-girl porn is that you can tell from the nails if they’re real lesbians or not, because real lesbians can’t/wouldn’t have porn talons. (You know how John Waters says that if you go to someone’s house and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them? Can we do a thing where if you start watching porn and the girls have sandblasted, gel-sticky anal knives on their fingers, don’t masturbate to them? It is gahross!) Nails don’t actually matter, though, because with a trained porno eye you can really tell when the porn girls, especially the barely legals, are so grossed out by having to fuck each other. You can just taste their homophobic flyover-state genetics pulsing cortisol and adrenaline through their bodies, and they’re all so obviously dry and hesitant. I would pay actual dollars to see two girls without tattoos or experience slap the fuck out of each other and get weird and mean it. Actual dollars! On the internet!

BISEXUAL
I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m saying that word is corny.

THE FUTURE
I most enjoy talking to artistic homos/party gays about their relationships. Here’s why: if you’re a gay man who is not deeply political, not interested in marriage or super into monogamy, definitely grossed out by kids and possibly also dogs, then your relationship with your boyfriend is the de facto purest of any possible relationship (except for super-old peoples’). Without the unnervingly present “Where is this going, though?” stuff, you get to base the existence and quality of your relationship on things that matter like, do you like each other? The closest that a girl can get to a wobbly slice of absolute, non-mainstream, post-internet sex freedom is by not wanting to have sex with guys. SAWRY.

POWER
The funniest thing that ever happened to me is when my brother’s friend came over and pulled his guitar out and said “Let me lay a song on you,” then yell-sang-spoke a performance piece of such intensity-in-ten-cities that I couldn’t make eye contact with my brother. I actually have no memory of what happened when it was over because I was still emerging from a socially stunned deep freeze. Anyway “Let me lay a song on you” is now what I/we are using as a preamble to a possibly psychotic theory that I happen to think is pretty accurate/righteous, and here it is: In a certain and finite way, gay girls are much more powerful than straight girls.

I don’t mean it in a backwards Republican affirmative-action naysaying way; I do mean it in a girls who have less of an instinctual need to be understood as feminine, palliative, and acquiescent are lucky way. I mean how different girls are before they are sexualized (which is never, really) and after, and how like 80% of the total number of girls I know who returned to being kind of cool with their bodies and behaving the way they really want to are gay girls. It is almost straight-guy-ish in how much they will not be spending their Saturday thinking mostly about other people’s needs. Gay girls are just as raped and harassed and diminished and everything else, but not needing straight men in the same way as me is a power closer to straight-man power than mine. I get that this is still a really white equation but there’s only so much I can do on a Thursday night, you know?

All of this is also why I’m not as impressed by cool gay girls as I am by straight ones. Why wouldn’t you be cool, not give a fuck, do whatever? That behavior in non-insane straight girls is actually much harder to come by.

CRUSHES
When lesbians have a crush on a girl it means they want to sleep with them, not draw them a comic and scream-laugh with them over brunchables or anything like that. Do you see why lesbians are better than straight girls now? Empirically?

CHEATING
Girls cheat just as much as Dog Men. There is no vagina flag on the moral high ground so let’s stop fronting about it please and thank you.

THREESOMES
As close as the majority of girls get to being gay is having a threesome which is really too bad because the athletics and purposeful Ikea-manual sex is not as cool as just having it. And if you’re the girlfriend you’re trying to look and fuck better than the third and if you’re the third you’re trying to look and fuck better than the girlfriend. I really recommend getting an older dyke to teach you what to do in the back of your Toyota instead.

REAL REALNESS
Look, I’m not gay. I’m probably gayer than you are and I definitely dress half-lesbionic but unless you are willing to put your whole mouth on a girl’s period-pussy and never feel like that’s maybe something you don’t want to do, you’re not gay. (When I think about it really hard I think about that Rashaad Newsome piece “Succubus,” which is a vagina dentata for Gucci girls.) There is no cred in attaching lesbian daydreams to your heteronormativity and attendant privilege. Like, none. Girls are pretty and of course you want to kiss them, but be over yourself. Me too.

LESBIAN BED DEATH
Not really sure what it means but I like it as a metaphor. I mean, I know what it means in a magazine way, but I don’t get it. If you get to sleep with girls like you mean it, wouldn’t you want to do it all the time? Or is saying that like when boys say they would touch their boobs all day if they had them? (???)

Previously – Girls and Work

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway