#romessence

I am so tired. Not emotionally drained. Not physically tired. No. Soul-exhausted from the sheer amount of lazy lesbian insinuation injected into every piece of girl-group media like it’s an aesthetic garnish.

It’s not empowering. It’s not rebellious. It’s not representation. It’s projection. From the same industry that still can’t write a female orgasm without the camera cutting to a fucking lamp.

I texted my friend group this morning. You know what we talked about?

Spiraling over a man’s voice note, how his cologne stayed on our jackets, and the shameful detail that we replay his “mm” sound when he stretches like it’s a damn hymn.

None of us said, “let’s make out because we cried over the same Spotify song.”

We don’t dry-hump each other on beanbags during sleepovers.

We don’t say “ugh I wish I was gay” every time a man disappoints us.

We scream into towels, scroll memes, and rehydrate our vaginal walls for the next man who might ruin our lives with one eyebrow raise.

That’s not internalized misogyny. That’s called: we like dick.

Strictly. Entirely. Sacramentally.

I have fallen to my knees for a man’s side profile. I have climaxed because of how he looks when he’s annoyed. I have felt God return to my bloodstream because of the way his fingers rest near his belt buckle. But never, not once, have I felt the urge to tongue-kiss my bestie while crying about men. And it’s not homophobia. It’s hormonal fidelity. It’s psychosexual conviction. It’s called being dickmatized down to my goddamn soul.

Hollywood keeps writing girl friend groups like we’re one bad tequila shot away from scissoring behind the couch. Babe, if I’m behind the couch, I’m texting him to unlock the door because I’m not wearing panties. Not licking Susan’s collarbone because we shared trauma.

Stop romanticizing our grief into queerbait. Stop assuming that emotional intimacy equals sexual convergence. Stop writing feminine closeness like it’s a prelude to oral. We can be tender and raw and cracked open without wanting to eat each other’s existential croissants. We can hold each other and scream and bleed and vent without becoming the bonus feature of someone’s porn search.

I have laid next to my best friend in bed and whispered “he hasn’t texted me since Tuesday” like a prayer. She didn’t kiss me. She didn’t say “maybe you like girls.” She said, “Okay bitch, we’re deleting his number tonight. After we rewatch that reel one more time and zoom in on his hands.” We wiped each other’s tears. We set the volume to 2. And then we stalked his Venmo.

That’s what girlhood actually looks like. And it doesn’t have to be rewritten into bisexual propaganda just to get greenlit.

Some of us are spiritually heterosexual. Not performatively. Not aesthetically. But down to the enzymes in our discharge.

So when a show has four women in an apartment, and suddenly two of them are making out after one got dumped — I don’t feel seen. I feel colonized by bad writing. By male writers who think sapphic tension = aesthetic intelligence. By female writers who think real connection has to be queer or it’s just internalized patriarchy. By execs who still think straight women only sell if they’re secretly one lollipop away from eating pussy.

No. Not this one. Not my group chat. Not the girls who taught me how to recover from the kind of man you should never have let finish inside you. We are not lesbians. We are survivors of the same war. And we still want dick.

It’s not that I’m “not open-minded.” It’s that my mouth waters when a man opens a Snap with his thumb. It’s that my nipples harden when a man furrows his brow while reading a menu. It’s that my body tunes to a lower frequency when a man scratches his neck and looks up like he’s about to ask for forgiveness or head.

That’s not performance. That’s not repression. That’s the goddamn feminine divine in full ovulation.

So stop trying to shove girlhood into sapphic aesthetics just because you’re afraid of writing about male desire properly.

My friendship group isn’t your TikTok thirst trap. We’re not a slow-burn lesbian novella. We are women — very straight women — Who grieve, rage, spiral, and then re-apply mascara to ride again.

Dick-first. Shame-free. And in French, for the slow learners: je suis strictement dickly, baiser.

---

Let me tell you about a boy named Billy.

Not a warrior. Not a soldier. Not a chosen one. Just a decent kid from some Rockwellian zip code your grandmother still dreams about. Worked at a bank. Had a dog. Still lived with his folks.

And one night?

He was handed a creature.

Not a dog. Not a cat. A Mogwai -- A furry little intelligence bomb with black eyes full of unspoken deals and tucked-in malice. Three rules, they said:

Don’t expose it to sunlight.

Don’t get it wet.

Don’t feed it after midnight.

Billy broke the last one.

And here’s the punchline: He didn’t even know he broke it.

Because the other evil furballs tricked him -- Those demonic bastards unplugged the clock in his room. A cheap little con job. Because demons don’t just claw and bite.

They deceive.

And what hatched from that betrayal?

Not "gremlins". Not “mischievous little guys.”

But literal 'get the fuck out of here' demons. Flesh-ripping, microwave-stabbing, stairlift-launching goblins with reptile skin and sadism baked into their giggle loops.

Stripe was the leader. Neon Mohawk. Razor teeth. The kind of imp you find in a medieval nightmare or a pagan story whispered by children who know they’re not allowed to speak of it out loud.

And Billy?

He didn’t run.

He stood the fuck up.

Why?

Because his dad -- the charming failure of an inventor who brought the Mogwai home -- had long since had his will broken by the quiet humiliations of suburban salesman life.

But Billy?

Billy still had something left.

A spirit. The kind that says: “If I have to kill every last one of these cackling lizard f*cks with a goddamn baseball bat and a flashlight, I will. Even if it takes a million years.”

---

Let’s not sugarcoat it.

Billy’s home life wasn’t a bastion of masculine competence.

His dad dropped off a time bomb and peaced out to another loser convention to sell toothpaste dispensers and orange juicers made from WWII scraps.

His mom?

Left in the house alone. When the gremlins hatched -- upstairs -- She didn’t scream. She didn’t faint. She survived. Microwaved one. Stabbed another. Tossed one into a goddam blender.

And still -- even with PTSD clawing at her heels -- she was going to die, had Billy not come home and literally golf-clubbed a demon’s head off its shoulders.

His own mother was about to be strangled to death by a giggling reptilian fairy with red eyes.

But Billy? He showed up. In the nick of time. And he swung like a man who didn’t care about the blood. Only about the woman who raised him.

---

Add this in: Billy was also dealing with a girl.

You know the one. The melancholy, moody, soon-to-be girlfriend who looked like a sad indie lyric and talked like her diary was written in grayscale.

He was trying to smash with all the high-cringe efficiency of a teenage dork.

But she had baggage.

Oh, brother -- she had a goddamn suitcase full of death.

Her origin story?

Let’s just say… she found out Santa wasn’t real because her dad’s corpse was gift-wrapped in the chimney. Tried to surprise the family, slip in like a Hallmark ninja with presents and cheer — broke his goddamn neck like a whole dumbass.

Sat there rotting for days, while the house stank of "mystery" and pine.

Merry. Fucking. Christmas.

Billy didn’t flinch. He listened.

And maybe that’s the most mythic act of all -- To hold space for a girl whose life was shaped by decay and never once call her crazy for bleeding words that stink of old ghosts.

This is what makes Billy holy.

Not that he was strong. Not that he was brave. Not that he won.

But that he stood when every card said fold.

That he picked up a golf club and went hunting through a fogged-up nightmare of mutated gremlins, exploding movie theaters, power outages, and puppets from hell.

Stripe made his final stand at a department store. Think about that: A neon-lit altar of American consumerism And what did he do?

---

Billy chased him. Cornered him.

And when the demon tried to spawn more of his brood in the garden fountain…

Billy didn’t hesitate.

He fried his scaly ass with a burst of sunlight and turned the devil into soup.

This wasn’t Harry Potter.

There was no wand.

This wasn’t Marvel.

No shield. No serum. No suit.

---

This was a young man with a mistake. And instead of whining, posting about it, or blaming society -- he fucking atoned.

With bruises.

With grit.

With love that doesn’t get an Oscar.

Because the kind of man who destroys demons without being asked to is the kind of man they don’t make anymore.

---

🩸 Let’s Be Honest

Billy isn’t supposed to matter.

He wasn’t mythic. He wasn’t divine. He was an accidental saint.

But in a town overrun by hellspawn, with everyone else too busy fainting, dying, or hiding --

Billy did what the sacred do:

He didn’t run.

He remembered what he was responsible for.

And he made damn sure that responsibility bled.

---

🔁 Reblog if you know this kind of male myth is buried in your childhood VHS tapes.