absolutely no control

you: wh

me, briskly removing my shoes and shaking fragments of rubble out of them: One Direction is perhaps the first band to exist entirely within the Panopticon, from the very beginning, and yet even that was not enough for us. Can you imagine how difficult it would become to hold onto a “self” when what people want most from you are the moments of your life that specifically are NOT FOR THEM? It wasn’t just what they DID, we wanted to know what they FELT, constantly. We demanded to know but we did not want to be TOLD. The knowledge could only be “authentic” if it was not meant for us

you: why are you in my house

me, climbing into your bed and pulling your blankets up to my chin: The endless “documentaries,” the social media – we had an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly intimate, degree of access to these people, and still what we valued most were secrets and accidents. What we wanted was their interiority, and when we could not have that we invented it. Wouldn’t you resent having to constantly be GRATEFUL for that grasping, rapacious love? I would

you: are you crying?

no matter what we’ll do after this, we’ll never ever beat this

When this sort of information first came into my circle of lesbian friends, we tended to see it as conforming to what we know from our own experience. We were not surprised to hear that we “had” less “sex” than anyone else or that in our long-term relationships we “had sex” a great deal less frequently than other sorts of couples. This seemed to pretty much fit our knowledge of ourselves and of each other. But on more reflection, and looking again at what has been going on with us in our long-term relationships, the nice fit between this report and our experience seemed not so perfect after all.

It was brought to our attention during our ruminations on this that what 85% of long-term heterosexual married couples do more than once a month takes on the average 8 minutes to do. Although in my experience lesbians discuss their “sex” lives with each other relatively little (a point to which I will return), I know from my own experience and from the reports of a few other lesbians in long-term relationships, that what we do that, on average, we do considerably less frequently, takes on the average, considerably more than 8 minutes to do. Maybe about 30 minutes at the least. Sometimes maybe about an hour. And it is not uncommon that among these relatively uncommon occurrences, an entire afternoon or evening is given over to activities organized around doing it. The suspicion arises that what 85% of heterosexual married couples are doing more than once a month and what 47% of lesbians couples are doing less than once a month is not the same thing. And if they are not doing the same thing, how was this research done that would line these different things up against each other to compare how many times they were done?

I remember that one of my first delicious tastes of old gay lesbian culture occurred in a bar where I was chatting with some other lesbians I was just getting acquainted with. One was talking about being busted out of the Marines for being gay. She had been put under suspicion somehow, and was sent off to the base psychiatrist to be questioned, her perverted tendencies to be assessed. He wanted to convince her she had only been engaged in a link youthful experimentation and wasn’t really gay. To this end, he questioned her about the extent of her experience. What he asked was, “How many times have you had sex with a woman?” At this, we all laughed and giggled: what an ignorant fool he was! What does he think he means by “times”? What will we count? What’s to count?

Another of my friends years later, discussing the same conundrum, said that she thought maybe every time you got up to go to the bathroom, that marked a “time.” The joke about “how many times” is still good for a chuckle from time to time in my life with my lover. I have no memory of any such topic providing any such merriment in my years of sexual encounters and relationships with men. It would have been very rare indeed that we would not have known how to answer the question “How many times did you do it?” If what heterosexual married couples do that the individuals report under the rubric “sex” or “have sex” is something that in most instances can easily be individuated into countable instances, this is more evidence that it is not what long-term lesbian couples do…or, for that matter, what short-term lesbian couples do.

What violence did the lesbians do their experience by answering the same question the heterosexuals answered, as though it had the same meaning for them? How did the lesbians figure out how to answer the questions “How frequently?” or “How many times?” My guess is, for starters, that different individuals figured it out differently, to some degree. Some might have counted a two or three-cycle evening as one “time” they “had sex”; some might have counted that as two or three “times.” Some may have counted as “times” only the times both partners had orgasms; some may have counted as “times” occasions on which at least one had an orgasm; some may not have orgasms or have them rarely and may not have figured orgasms into the calculations; perhaps they counted as a “time” every episode in which both touched the other’s vulva more than fleetingly and not for something like a health examination. For some, to count every reciprocal touch of the vulva would have made them count as “having sex” more than most people with work to do would dream of having time for; how do we suppose those individuals counted “times”? Is there any good reason why they should not count all those as “times”? Does it depend on how fulfilling it was? (Was anybody else counting by occasions of fulfillment?)

–Marilyn Frye, ‘Lesbian “Sex”’

this is a cis woman writing in 1987 so predictably she uses the word “phallic” a lot etc. but she’s right about how “sex” is meant to operate in the broader (heteropatriarchal) culture. all lesbians do ourselves a disservice by measuring ourselves against that rubric. if you’re feeling dissatisfied with your sex life then you can talk to your partner about it, but having a preconceived idea about the inevitability of sexual dissatisfaction in lesbian relationships is certainly not going to help.. not to mention how transparently this seems to be based on, not only a rubric that doesn’t do justice to how lesbians tend to have sex, but also an idea of women in general as being fundamentally less sexual than men / of our sexual pleasure being less important than men’s (as Frye points out, if there’s no man in a sexual relationship to have orgasms, can you really be said to be having sex at all?)

Curled up with my head on your chest It’s the best remedy for the pain and the stress If the world doesn’t change then we’ll never get dressed

“The only ziall headcanon I have is them laying in bed and Zayn carefully showing niall R&B track after R&B track or or playing Jhené Aiko’s entire discography as niall falls in and out of sleep and Zayn strokes his hair…”