on lesbian sex

note: this blog post contains spoilers for chapter 28 of Don’t Worry About It!!!

Sometimes, I struggle with being a woman. Sometimes, I worry I am a woman first and then a person, as in, my personhood gets “womanwashed”. I worry that my entire life is going to be lived through the marginalized experience of being a woman, and maybe, possibly, through an accidental gap in that emotional baggage, I will occasionally view a person with a personality and thoughts and feelings and hobbies and likes and dislikes that are detached from “woman”.

What’s funny about this is I’m not suggesting that women need to be any certain way or have any certain personality to be women. On my good days, I am a woman regardless of what I do. Bad days, other days, many days, I feel that Margaret Atwood quote from a book I’ve never even read down to my bones:

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

In the sex positive world of fandom and the choice feminist world of liberal politics, there is no home for me. I struggle and I worry about being attracted to women. I feel all of the stereotypical things that lesbians feel about being attracted to women; predatory, guilt, hesitance, uncertainty. There is nothing revolutionary about being attracted to the people who have spent their entire lives being told they are supposed to be attractive. What is attraction? Other than a can of worms, I mean. Politics? Science? Biology?

Part of my (unsuccessful) pitch for Don’t Worry About It was its “titillating” nature. And guess what? I felt bad about that, too, despite the fact that lesbians are humans and most humans enjoy sex. Sex sells because culturally, we’re all prudes. You know how it goes. However, I also pitched it as an exploration of lesbian desire. A bit schlocky, maybe, but not incorrect. And a much kinder interpretation of my intentions.

I don’t know what to do when it seems like the line between exploitation of women and an honest, overdue examination of their sexuality grows so thin as to be nonexistent. I don’t know what to do when the majority of people (of women!) would simply say depicting lesbian sex and “owning it” is, in fact, the most feminist act a woman can participate in. That presenting female bodies (already considered commodities) in a sexual manner is empowering and nothing else. I don’t know what to do as a woman who is attracted to women when I think about what it means for women to be attractive.

For fun (and to torture myself) I have often daydreamed about what a film adaptation of Don’t Worry About It would look like, and then I inevitably get to the part where it would be almost impossible to depict it onscreen in a way that feels both honest to the source material while not being disingenuous to its themes. Were it to go all out, like, full frontal, there is still a real woman who would have to play Wren. There is still a woman who would get paid to be on display for all to see, while spending the rest of the narrative wrestling with the concept that as a woman, she is meant only to be consumed, who copes with this by consuming other women in return.

These thoughts were fairly frequent while I was writing Don’t Worry About It, especially during the not insignificant number of sex scenes. Because I really did want to write an exploration of lesbian desire. But also, on a much more primal level, I was invested in writing about lesbians fucking, because it’s hot. In a way, these goals are contradictory. In a way, these goals feel like they cleave my mind in two. In a dark, dirty way that makes me feel very bad inside, I feel like my attraction to women is in competition with my support of womenkind.

In a way, it is not only Wren who is the one in the chair.

I understand why a lot of women have embraced the idea that attractiveness = empowerment. It is really hard to spend your whole life being told to be hot, then suddenly feminism swoops in and says, actually, you don’t have to be hot! Your attractiveness does not define your personhood! And then companies and marketing departments swoop in to capitalize on that, switching their mission statement from “this makeup/clothing/skincare/whatever makes you fuckable” to “this makeup/clothing/skincare/whatever empowers you”, and then, just like that, you can be fuckable and empowered. The best of both worlds, and the only thing that had to change was a slogan.

You might be thinking this applies to normies only, but have no fear, I was there when the tumblr crowd decided the new cool thing was to be the “hottest person in the room”. And maybe tumblr’s version of “hottest person in the room” is more anti-establishment than normie world. And the “queer” (quotes used because I personally do not use this term) version of “hottest person in the room” is similar to that. Trust me, as someone who has recently been introduced to the absolute horrors of online dating (don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it) being deeply hot is still deeply engrained in womankind’s collective consciousness.

Cause at the end of the day, regardless of sexual orientation, you’re a woman, and you need to be fuckable.

And that makes it really hard to write sex scenes where women fuck each other without feeling like I am contributing to my own subjugation. A woman with a man inside watching a woman. Turning any women who read it into voyeurs, participating in the evergreen watching of women, judging them, and their attractiveness, and their hotness, and their fuckability. An endless cycle from which there is no escape, let alone an opportunity to actually discuss or explore women’s desires in a way that doesn’t, in some shape or form, circle back to how much they are desired by others, even themselves, or the man inside themselves, forever watching.

The fandom scales started to fall from my eyes when I realized that spending the majority of my time in that environment meant endless discussing, analyzing, and fantasizing in some form or another about men. Not just men, but gay men, fully eliminating women from the equation. In a way, it’s just so much fucking safer. As a woman and a lesbian, I could pretty well erase myself from existence by proxy. And sure, we all played the game of including da ladies, whether it was through performatively stanning more-than-tertiary female characters or including them as (friendly or otherwise) exes, friends, and family, which is all well and good. But they existed, as always, to fill in whatever empty space the male leads left. So how easy was it for me to convince myself I was being normal about women and also being normal about my sexuality while simultaneously erasing both from my life.

(Sidebar: i know there are small pockets here and there of weirdo gay women online who hungrily and exclusively consume the tiny sliver of lesbian content out there/stan for random lesbian rarepairs, and honestly more power to you).

I’m sure there are women out there who do not carry this psychological weight in the same way I do. I envy them. I ignored the Woman anvil hanging over my head for a long time before the rope got cut and it squished me like a cartoon character. For a long time, I wouldn’t and couldn’t admit that I shared in the same oppression as every other woman. I wouldn’t and couldn’t articulate why girl power, body positivity, and choice feminism, even when obviously well-intentioned, never sat quite right with me. I pretended like every time I passed a reflective surface, I (the man inside) didn’t watch myself in it. The idea that my life will always suck just a little bit more because I’m a woman is intolerable and axiomatic.

I tried to capture this amorphous feeling in Don’t Worry About It, especially in the sex scenes, and especially in the sex scene in the most recently posted chapter (28). The strap sucking scene lived in my head for a long time before I got to this point in the narrative. I also changed my mind multiple times on how graphic to make it, and how far Wren and Ashley should go (for the sake of the narrative or my anxieties above? Sometimes it feels impossible to decode). For a while, I was convinced the furthest I could take it without it feeling needlessly gratuitous was the almost. I’m pretty sure by the time I got to this point, I had underestimated just how much Wren and Ashley want to fuck. It’s important for themes to drive characters, but my personal philosophy is that it’s even more important for characters to drive narrative.

Bloviating aside, navel-gazing aside, the narrative won. Wren has a lot of sex and Wren and Ashley have had a lot of almost-sex. Speaking of cleaving my mind in two, it is very strange to think all of the above, while also understanding that the story takes precedence over everything. This is a novel, not a pulpit. I’m not here to convert you, preach to you, or convince you of anything other than the fact that Don’t Worry About It is good. Everything else beyond writing a good story, no matter how worthy of discussion, takes a back seat. The narrative doesn’t grind to a halt because I feel conflicted about Wren getting her pussy out.

I think it’s fairly obvious at this point that Don’t Worry has things to say and points to make. But it’s not only about those things and points. It’s about Wren. Everything else is texture that enriches the story. Writers will always leave fingerprints on their stories— that’s just the nature of art, for good and for ill. There are pieces of me, conflicted as they are, sprinkled throughout Don’t Worry About It, for good and for ill. But Wren and her heart and her brain and her pussy and her autonomy are the center of the story. She certainly isn’t doing a ton of handwringing about wanting to fuck other women… a little. But not a lot.

Don’t Worry, in my mind, occupies a strange space between more on-the-nose feminist works that are blatantly about being a woman and character driven literary fiction that has less to say about external politics than internal ones. I think that’s fairly emblematic of my struggle described above— what feels like the forever tug-of-war between facets of my mind, of my genre, of my identity and my politics, of my writing and my characters and my themes. Part of being a writer is meshing all of these things. And I hope that as I gain experience both in writing and in life, that divide I feel between my work and my self can finally be bridged.

In the meantime, maybe just install some monkey bars or like, a human-sized t-shirt cannon?