Once, I was at a party. It was a small party. A little group of friends. Nothing odd or kinky about it. It was not, let’s be clear, a femdom tea party. (I don’t go to those. Not that I get invited. Not that I’d go if I did – I’m allergic to other dominant women – it’s a sad, sad thing. No, really, submissive men complain about the deathly dearth of non-insane dominant women, but that sad fact is just as brow-furrowing for me. ‘Cause it’s lonely at the top and ten times more lonely for the fact that everyone else up here is a crazy, sex-phobic, materialist, asshatter-o-bot.)
But, so, yes, normal party. Little gathering of people. A cluster around a table. Drink flows. Conversation, uh, also flows.
So, you get it, right, everything that ought to be flowing, is.
The talk is, as it often is, of popular culture. Celebrities we’d like to fuck. We, are seven or eight of us at a table, urbanites, almost exclusively thirtysomething, artsy professionals – basically, if you handed any of us a latte we would drink it – and then one woman, a good friend, says, yeah, but we’d all fuck Angeline Jolie, right?
Next to me, Pan tenses and turns. Amber alert. An eye roll as micro-expression. Now Pan – Pan is drop dead smart. Smart like a superpower. Sometimes I think Pan is like Doctor Who or Dungeon Master (not in *that* way). Or a giant chess-playing computer. It’s like he has always worked out every possible next move and evaluated them all against a probability algorithm. Pan is so stupid smart, it’s only a matter of time before the military take possession of him.
But in this case, Pan has no need of smart smarts to flash me an easy tiger. This one is as predictable as lung cancer in the Malboro Man.
‘Cause I’m cross about the Angelina factor, oh yeah, I’m seething and I would say something. But my little bleat of, I wouldn’t, ‘cause of my straight, gets lost, lost like my lost love Sayid, under a quick-smart barrage of everyone else in the gorram fucking world saying that, yes, they would, but of course, and how damn true. So I never get make my point that if they’re all queueing up for Jolie jollies does that mean Brad Pitt is at a loose end, cause that’s the end I’d rather be at, frankly, even if he hasn’t be really properly, actually hot since Twelve Monkeys Thelma and Louise. No chance. Nah, hush up Bitchy, everyone, yes everyone, would fuck Angelina Jolie. Some cultural memes are just bigger than any one person’s personal sexual preferences.
And you know what, this happened over a year ago. And I have been brooding about this event twelve long seethe-heavy months. Because, although it could have been the case that all the other women present were into women – not actually that unlikely in that particular gathering. Like I said before, young urban, urbane, liberated trendoid women have a practical obligation to recreational lesbianism. Anything else would be bad!feminism. ‘Cause not sleeping with women = hating women. That’s why. That’s why gay men are all such misogynists and straight men are… uh, hang on…
(Ah, gee, straight men, you know I love you, but you’re so fricking clumsy. I know, I know, growth spurt in teenage years, never quite got your body image back – and yet you park like wheel-whisperers so what’s all that about? – but, hey, you clumsy old daddy bears, any chance you could stop breaking, like, everything, with your big clumsy man paws and emotional autism. Hey, for me? Is that a no? God you’re such fucking bastards. And I don’t mean in, like, a hot way.)
Anyway, after a year of sulking about it seemingly unproductively, I realised what this shit is about. (So take that, dismissers of sulking as a way to get stuff done.) Not just that conversation, but every time ever I have been talking to a woman about some other woman, a girlfriend or a celebrity that she admired and adored and the accolades would end with the claim that my companion was so enamored of this other woman that she had a girl crush, or even more simply put that she would so totally sleep with her, or go gay for her, or whatever. You know these conversations you’ve probably had them. And, don’t think I don’t know, you have probably said it about me.
And don’t think that I think that if you are a straight woman and have said this about another woman that you are dumb or lazy or stupid or bad!feminist of a breaker of one of Bitchy Jones’s rules because I have done it, but I try not to do it now, because I have realised why people do it.
It is because the highest compliment you can pay a woman is to proclaim that you find her fuckable.
Always and forever and as simple as that.
If you admire a woman and like her, if you find her witty and attractive, if you like the way she thinks, well obviously, you want to fuck her. Because if you were a straight man, that’s where that would lead. But if you’re someone who isn’t sexually attracted to women, you might think you are feeling that too, you might even feel that you are insulting that woman if you don’t want to sleep with her (dishing out the ultimate insult by calling her unfuckable).
And, you know what, hey, let’s bring this around to me: Say you’re a straight woman (or a gay man – this can apply to you too, buttercup) reading this post and thinking all how it is, hey, awesome, and you might be feeling all kinds of emotions about me and want to express how simply damn great you obviously think I am. Well, you can call it a crush or an urge to want to sleep with me if you like, but chanow, all you really want there is to meet me, hang out, talk shit with me, drink tea and find out if I’m really so clever and witty in real life. (Clue: no. Did you get the part where I mentioned that I figured this out a year after the even that triggered it.)
But, yeah, back on the point (this blog’s most overused phrase), which is that this I’d-so-sleep-with-her phenomenon is pretty much just a side shoot from the whole damn dirty deal where women are mainly for fucking and generally supplying sex and men are the choosers and enjoyers of that sex. And also the whole thing that every piece of expression of anything ever should be expressed in the kind of terms and ideas straight men would use, as if that is some kind of default language because straight men will get confused if you don’t because they have never learned anything else, and they’ve never learned anything else because they are the default so they don’t need to. Like the circles that you find in the windmills of mostly annoying things – yeah, those windmills, okay. Just like how if you speak English you don’t need to bother learning anything else, or how everyone converts into American measurements and monies on the internet.
Hemingways, remember I mentioned gay misogyny earlier, well, that kind of links up here too. I’m not saying gay misogyny doesn’t exist (*cough*drag queens*cough*) because gay men live in the same patriarchal wilderness I do, and are therefore just as likely to display a bit of casual misogyny as anyone (that likeliness: sadly, quite likely. Shoot!) but, what often gets called out as specifically gay misogyny is actually gay men expressing an active personal sexual dislike of women’s bodies. I’m not saying that saying vaginas=gross is helpful for anyone in a culture where women’s bodies are simultaneously deified and demonised, just pointing out that I also find the idea of putting my tongue in a woman’s cunt gross (seriously, even Angelina’s. I know. Freak me!) and I know what it’s like to have the world assume I would fucking love it and what it is like to feel the need to keep on pointing out that, no, I don’t think that tits are the fucking last word in a sexay design feature on a human body
Plus, god, do we live in a fucking culture where it is perfectly okay to laugh at the supposed grossitude of cocks – just let me check, why, yes we do – and do any of the lesbians or straight men who faux-barf at the idea of a warm bed and a hot man get accused of misandry. Why, no.
Oh.
And this is because saying you don’t want to sleep with a man isn’t a personal insult to him, particularly if sleeping with men isn’t your thing. And saying sleeping with men isn’t your thing (even with graphic penis-repulsion-reenactments) is never called misandry. In fact the average gross-out comedy’s compulsory gay-panic scene will often get (rightly) called homophobic – never misandric.
Saying you wouldn’t want to sleep with a woman is practically a slight – even if it just isn’t your port of call. And thusly and conversely any stream of praise for a woman must end with the claim you would sleep with her, or surely that is faint priase. Saying you’re not into women in general – if couched in the right squelchy terms – is called misogyny. This is because rejecting women as unfuckable is a far bigger deal (their lives now have, like No! Meaning!) Than rejecting men as unfuckable. (Like, whatever, dude)
In some ways the compulsory recreational woman-fucking liberal culture assumes of all its female members is down to some misrouted idea that not wanting to sleep with women would mean hatin’ on women. And we liberal woman don’t go hatin’ on women, do we?
So we make sappy-sexless claims that women smell nice and have soft skin (I mean, oh fuck that noise, women (or, men) who are actually into women don’t slime around with that shit about nice olfactory and tactile sensations. Where is the lust? Shit, if you’re using the word ‘nice’ about any damn thing, check your pants, ‘cause you’re not experiencing lust, baby.) When, fuck that, men smell of sex and their skin is a sensation playground with the hair and – if I’m lucky – the work-wrought rough patches. I feel this way because I am straight.
Just because we live in a culture where all of everything ever has been defined by straight men doesn’t mean we have to fall for it. Dumb lies that women are just the sexual bullseye. And the dark heart of that is that even if you like being bully, even if you – no shit – find it empowering, when women get to be the sexual it thing, you know what, not all women get to be that.
I don’t.
I know this post can be read as somewhat, uh, dismissive of ideas of sexual fluidity. I do appreciate that there is a whole Kinsey scale and everything. And that wherever you might think of yourself on that scale it isn’t fixed for life, but I didn’t want to clutter up my beayootifuel writins with endless qualifications about how this might not apply if you are bisexual or some other kind of self identified sexual lucky dipper. But sexual fluidity can be used to wash away women’s own sexual identities. Too much fluidity, too much choice, ends – bizarrely – in homogeny.
And I hid, rather well I think, the fact that even I am blinded my own preferences to the point that I simply refuse to believe that anyone, anyone, not matter what their magic number would prefer Maggie over Jake.
Ah, damn me and my straight. Mea bloody culpa. As cupla as us all.
The thing about Richard Ayoade is that I actually love him.
Oh Alex Zane! Oh how I wish I didn’t fancy Alex Zane. In fact I can spend days even weeks happily kidding myself that I do not find him even remotely attractive.
The thing about Heston Blumenthal is that I can’t actually belive he is real. Like, did I imagine him? But he has a page on wikipedia and usually men I have only imagined, don’t. So all I can conclude is that one night while I was sleeping some benevolent mysterioso reached into my mind and plucked several aspects of my dream man and then bred Heston in a Petri dish.
So, this is a bit shameful too. Maybe you’re thinking, sure, she has weird taste – that’s like the whole Beej thing. Or maybe you are right now falling to the floor clutching your sides whilst simultaneously being sick.
Go read the first post in my awesome new blog about craft over at Stephen Elliott’s The Rumpus
