I think we’re kind of starting to get away from this but have y’all noticed how in the vast majority of popular media, sex scenes don’t actually tend to involve a lot of talking/fumbling/awkwardness unless it’s for humor or to indicate that the people having sex are a.) probably Wrong for each other somehow or b.) inexperienced, possibly having sex for the first time?
but “good” sex, between people who are experienced and In Love etc, is almost always effortlessly athletic and steamy and they somehow telepathically know exactly what to do. I’m not talking about knowing what their lover enjoys, that’s entirely feasible, but they never even have to coordinate what they’re doing. there’s no “do you want me on top?” or “do you want to do [x]?” or accidentally getting in each other’s way.
the overwhelming message that I’ve always gotten from pop culture is that Good Sex happens without communication and, more dangerously, that needing to communicate is a sign that you’re somehow bad at sex, when in reality that’s almost definitely a sign that you’re, you know, a considerate partner who actually gives a shit about people being comfortable when they have sex with you.
why doesn’t this have more notes
because I posted it less than 12 hours ago; give it time, friend
If the mean people in our lives were crappy 100% of the time, it would be easy to leave them. We would shrink from becoming friends with them or jump aboard the nope rocket in the early stages of trouble, and we would feel only relief when they are gone from our lives.
The problem is that very few people are evil all the time. They don’t wear villain costumes purchased at ForeverEvil. They don’t laugh maniacally and stroke their evil goatees while monologuing about their evil plans. They appear in our lives as People-Who-Would-Be-Awesome-Except-For-That-One-Glaring-Problem. They have potential to be awesome, and sometimes they are awesome, and they make us feel awesome, so we relax and let out that breath we’ve been holding in, and then BAM! They show their mean side, and we do a ton of mental work trying to reconcile the mean stuff with the awesome stuff.
Breaking up brings relief, as you lose the constant mental labor of managing the relationship AND the stress of being constantly disappointed and hurt, but it also brings grief. Shitty people who forget your birthday and give little backhanded compliments and gossip about your secrets sometimes give really good hugs, or presents, or are your favorite people to get drunk and watch figure-skating with, or were the sole witness to an important time in your life. The good times were real.
I cannot express how much of a lightbulb moment it was when I realized people did not have to be unilaterally awful in order for you not to want to be in a relationship with them
my favorite thing in dramatic romances is when the couple that’s been separated and put through hell is reunited and instead of going for like this all-tongues makeout they hug as tightly as they can and i just love it when that happens
So I promised my wife I would tell this story because she said she would pay me with a 1946 wheat penny if I did, and I was like “Sure, lady, if you can just conjure one out of thin air” and then she pulled one out of her bra. So like…. you do what baby asks when she delivers a 1946 wheat penny from her magic titties.
ANYWAY this morning she woke up at like 2 fucking a.m. and decided to just stay up. I, a lazy and exhausted sunnovagun, kept sleeping until about 4:30 when she woke me up for good.
Now, let me set this scene. I’m laying there dozing and comfortable and probably dreaming and suddenly a figure slips into bed beside me, curling her arm around me and giving me a very slight, very gentle shake. And when I crack open my eyes, the light filtering in from the open window is blue, cool and carrying that summer morning hue that lays like chiffon over everything it touches. She’s got herself propped up on an elbow and she’s looking at me like nothing else matters in the world. Like she’s been awake two hours without me and even that is too long and I think to myself that I missed her too, even if I didn’t realize it while I was asleep, because everything just feels right when she’s laying beside me.
And I feel tears start to well up because I love her so much and she looks almost pale in the light, unreal and completely angelic but for the fact that I can feel her pressed up against me, so human and familiar. And she’s quiet and beautiful and soft beside me under the covers and her hand is so gentle where it rests on my belly and this woman is my wife. I have the incredible and unfathomable fortune to wake up to her, blue in the morning light.
And outside the window, a clutch of leaves rustles– once, insistent. I hardly hear it, but baby… baby’s eyes widen and she stares at me with shock, maybe even fear, and in a whisper almost too quiet to hear, almost indecipherable to my tired mind, she takes one cautious glance out the window and says the first words she’s uttered all morning…
“Squirrels’re fucking.”
And this is honestly just one moment among many thousands of moments that has made me realize that she is, in fact, the most perfect human being, and I am honored to be allowed to spend my life with her.
not to be a bitter asshole but the overwhelming “my gf is perfect and relationships between women are are all pure and perfect” culture on here is annoying. there are a lot of us out here being used, cheated on, dumped, abused, having communication issues and shitty breakups, and lesbian culture is not a binary of “im alone and pining after an imaginary perfect gf” or “i have a perfect gf”. it does baby lesbians and bi women a disservice. don’t feel like there’s something wrong with you if you have bad dates or weird dates or women treat you like shit or trespass your boundaries and in general don’t act like perfect magical moon princesses and your relationship isn’t a magical dream of cat ownership and cuddling. women are people too, and that means women are flawed too. there are wonderful women out there and you will find one someday to build your life with but there are a lot of assholes out there too, you’re not failing at anything if you date one of them. and you have the capability of being a shitty asshole too!
Boy there’s a lot of defensive creeps on this post!
“I’m a lesbian in a perfect relationship and I would never downplay that so that other lesbians aren’t jealous that’s ridiculous“
jesus, yeah this is definitely about jealousy not lesbians and bi women in toxic or straight up abusive relationships feeling isolated and wanting to change that!
A key reason why some believe LGBTQ IPV to be rare may be due to an assumption that LGBTQ people are inherently nonviolent. This may be particularly the case for sexual minority women. In contrast to the aggression often associated with culturally prominent masculinity norms, many lesbian women are socialized to perceive relationships involving two women as a peaceful and ideal “lesbian utopia.” Unfortunately, this powerful stereotype can impede lesbian female victims’ ability to recognize that a partner’s behavior is in fact abusive rather than normal.26 For example, in reflecting on her same-gender IPV victimization back in the 1990s, Julie describes the ubiquity of the lesbian utopia ideal in the United Kingdom that prevented her from discussing the abuse with anyone: “Well it was during a period where everyone was just raving about erm how brilliant woman-to-woman relationships were and also I don’t think anyone believed that one woman could do that to another woman—there was just no, no sense of reality around that at all. There was sort of a political euphoria about lesbianism at the time; well not even lesbianism, just woman-to-woman relationships.”27 Echoing these sentiments, a victim of female same-gender IPV in the United States explains the powerful influence the lesbian utopia ideal had on her ability to recognize the abuse: “No—I thought, well, I just thought that it was fine because we were girls, like, and girls don’t hurt each other like that. So I just thought that it was the way it was supposed to be.”28
– LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Research by Adam M. Messinger
An example of what can happen when a group of people are glorified
This is exactly how I got into an emotionally abusive relationship. My other bi friends had told me “relationships with women are better because there aren’t power dynamics like there are between women and men.”
I doublethought (doublethunk?) my way back to “this isn’t a power dynamic” every time I felt demeaned and afraid, because “there are no power dynamics between women,” so I couldn’t have been living one.
Lesbianism-as-purity stuff terrifies me now, y’all.
I’ve spoken about this before. One of the advantages of hands-on, community-building LGBTQIAP+ activism is that I had the opportunity to talk directly to hundreds of people and counsel them on a whole variety of concrete issues. By far the thorniest problem I was faced with was intimate partner violence within relationships between women. Many abused women came to me in emotionally fragile states, yet adamantly refused to do anything more than talk with me in confidence – such as speak to one of our official counselors or to a support group, never bloody mind even the idea of filing any kind of charges against their girlfriends!
Within the community, they were taught the idea that same-gender relationships between women were not only inherently ‘better’ and had ‘less capacity for containing abuse’ than other kinds of relationships (particularly straight ones), but that ‘airing their dirty laundry in public’ (talking publicly about their abuse) would be a damaging act toward the LGBTQIAP+ community as a whole, as it would give homophobes more dirt to fling in our direction. Given my disgust toward everything related toward purity politics and respectability politics, you can imagine what my stance toward the above is – I value truth, transparency and not throwing domestic abuse survivors under the fucking bus a hell of a lot more than I value us presenting a sanitized, artificially clean image to the world, when we should all know by now that our most irrational detractors would continue to hate us even if we were the human incarnations of purity! There’s a subset of people you just cannot win over and I’d rather have them crow like broken records about the problems within the community, rather than glossing over said problems and doing a hell of a lot of damage to young queer people in the process!
Before anyone starts screaming – the takeaway people should be taking from this isn’t ‘so now I can’t talk about my perfect WLW relationship?’ or ‘you people want to trash the image of lesbians!’ or other barmy shit like that. No, the message is ‘same-sex relationships between women fall on a scale that’s much more complex than ‘shades of soft, pastel-pink’, the way Tumblr all too often presents them.’ Queer women are people. Queer women are humans and as such, we’re as fallible and mistake-prone as anyone else on this Earth, no matter how much we might pretend that we’re some sort of ‘evolved form of person.’ We’re not exempt from perpetuating toxic, abusive models within our relationships and trying to ignore that does us all an enormous disservice.
You do not have to be affectionate all the time to care for someone, in fact, caring can also mean a couple of texts or silence for a few days while you both live your lives happily and separately.
People do not care for you less when they’re busy with their own lives. It’s your reaction to them being their own person – and your ability to make yourself happy – that determines how they feel about you.
Not everyone reciprocates to your actions the same way. If you want someone to acknowledge, be interested in, or treat you a certain way for your efforts, all you have to do is let them know. They will try their personal best to accommodate that within their personal spectrum of feelings.
No one owes you 100% of them, not even after 30 years, because someone having a percentage of themselves is what keeps them sane at the end of the day and that’s okay.
On Saturday I went to the opera with a friend and we started putting together an Objectively Perfect romantic fantasy. It goes like this:
SHE is a high-powered highly paid something in the City. Executives tremble before her. She is in her forties and wears exquisitely tailored suits and works fourteen hour days. She does not have time for love.
YOU are a poverty-stricken late-twenties millennial who will never be able to afford a house.
You meet by chance (you are a waitress at a corporate event, perhaps.) She has been thinking of setting up a mistress for a while. She buys you a cottage in the country. She does not live there: she has a flat in central London worth seven figures. Every other weekend she comes down to visit you, in your cottage, and her only requirements are that you need to have cooked something and you should be wearing a low-cut top. She has given you a credit card so you can buy the kind of clothes she likes to see you in. She really does not mind what you do with yourself the rest of the time. Every once in a while she needs a date to an event (an opera, gallery opening, colleague’s wedding to his fourth wife). Sometimes this involves flying you out to New York. The flight is always business class.
She is pretty bossy in the bedroom, but you’re into that.
Eventually you fall in love, but it takes a while because she is so, so busy. Meanwhile you look after your little cottage, practice cooking delicious food, and work on your book. It is heaven.
(She looks a bit like Cate Blanchett in a designer suit. You look like whatever your favourite result is when you Google ‘cute floral dress’.)
Some important addenda to this post:
– Robin Wright is an acceptable alternative to Cate Blanchett – if Googling ‘cute floral dress’ doesn’t work for you, try ‘cute florals + your body type’ – there is no such thing as not being cute enough for this fantasy. this fantasy is for everyone. – people who would rather identify with the successful career woman who uses her financial and social power to scoop her cute girlfriend out of poverty and misery: you are extremely valid, I bet you look incredible in a suit, and half of tumblr would like you to call them
Steel Phoenix Studios 