Coy Apples: To the Girls I've Loved Before

 

This is not a blogpost of me coming out of the closet. In fact, I have been so far out of the closet for as long as I can remember I’m almost completely outside the house already, but I can also say that no, I am not really a lesbian. 

Or am I? I know young women and gender-fluid persons and non-binary people today like to think outside the containment of a sexual orientation – or gender nomination - box, and this is all good – this is just me talking, and this is me being, specifically, a woman about it. Despite a life-long habit of crossdressing ever since early puberty, and adopting behavior patterns traditionally reserved for the man, I have never wanted to be treated or referred to as a man, nor have I ever entertained a single moment’s desire to transition into one. 

Be that as it may, I feel often that what I consider discussions worth having are not the same discussions that are actually being had, and one such notion is that of the ever-evolving spectrum of sexual tastes and desires, and who should desire what according to their gender.

I guess the real killer is that instead of being a gay woman, I am, much in the same exact way I consider myself a panentheist and a transcendentalist by nature, a neurotic pansexual, with secret terms I only divulge to a select few.

A long time ago I was discussing sexual labels with an acquaintance, and it wasn’t until they declared themselves as demi-sexual, I realized my kind of unsure sexual behavior does indeed have a name, and one I recognized as kin, and while it was a word I had never encountered before, reading about it started making all kinds of sense the more I studied it.

I have been rewatching an old favorite, Sex and the City, after a lengthy hiatus, and since I have experienced a metamorphosis of the deepest level since I watched it last, and have outgrown some of my intense female friendships of youth and discovered a few new ones, I felt it was overdue to rehash the pros and cons of what makes the love affair friendships between girls a non-straight question of intimacy by sharing and why this is so often attacked and pronounced as unhealthy and threatening to the man, why I declare myself as non-straight, even though hard-ass lesbians would devour me whole for toying with their terminology – and why is that? Why is it necessary to correct in the most embarrassing way possible anyone who by accident or lack of possession of the latest issue of Another magazine misuses the modern terminology? Wouldn’t it be keeping with the inclusive heart-felt 2020’s to embrace the curious into the fold instead of making damn sure anyone who can’t pronounce the letters in correct order be outcast and ridiculed? 

I have been in love with each my girlfriends from day one. Losing a girlfriend has been every time a devastating loss, but in a completely different way than losing a love interest of the opposite sex. 

I will never forget the day I got my Dear John -letter from a childhood friend, a young woman I was trying to still call my own, but was slowly realizing things were a bit strained between us, and had been for a long time. We grew up to be completely different people, with very different world views and value systems, and I guess things had been in the air for a while when she decided to break up with me via a hand-written letter. 

I cried. I was furious. I was devastated in a completely unprecedented way. I almost ripped the letter to pieces because I felt out of the two of us, I was the one who deserved to be the one to walk away, I was the one who had endured my friend’s homophobia and racist remarks, I had held her hand in heartbreak and all sorts of catastrophes but had little or no experience of vice versa being true for the last five years in the friendship. 

But! She was the most important person of my life for many years. She taught me how to kiss – yes that’s right, it’s not just gross male fantasy, young girls do that – she taught me what things meant, she inspired my imagination so much we became the non-homicidal equivalent of Heavenly Creatures for a long time, almost the complete duration of our formative years. We would play dress up, we would concoct very elaborate stories and play them out, running around at all hours and drinking Coca-Cola and roaming the neighborhood in lace negligees stolen from our mothers’ wardrobes at twelve years of age just because we thought the they were pretty. She taught me how to talk sassy, where everything went, how to smoke cigarettes, how to apply make up, how to act when a boy asked me to slow dance. 

I was lost for words reading her goodbye, even while I absolutely knew it to be true: we no longer had anything in common except our exceptional youth together, and there was no point pretending we did.

I had loved her, and in a way, I always would.

The remainder of my female relationships in life, much in a very familiar vein of Rob’s pensive voice-over in High Fidelity, have been a variation of that first dramatic break up, and I guess, growing older, I can see now the one constant has been the following: change. Change in circumstances, change in attitude, change in how we relate to each other.

Change seems to be a universal deal breaker for any kind of relationship. To tolerate and learn to embrace change in each other we may have a shot at things working out in the end. But few of us learn how to negotiate change in a loved one. Sometimes not being able to stand how different and foreign the other person has become while one was looking elsewhere becomes the easy way out; sometimes, it’s the only thing left to do, if common ground just cannot be reached anymore. Mostly, I guess people end up tolerating the other person in their new and improved state but secretly harbor a desire to leave or tell them to their face this is no good anymore. This is a very difficult thing  to do, and I have failed in truthfulness like the rest of them, more than once. I have sucked up my unhappiness and said nothing, I have ghosted people to whom I felt I no longer had anything to say. But I have had the awkward conversations, too, and at least tried to make things work as well as possible, but if I’m honest, there are some moments in my life when I could have been more sincere instead of never returning a call again or, say, trying to make a relationship happen in an unsafe environment.

The biggest break up reason regarding a friendship with a woman for me, ever since my Dear John note from Sukie, has been disloyalty, which is a huge change in terms of emotional security. But I haven’t always been able to verbalize it to my girlfriends.

I guess it is a character trait; one cannot be fair-weather friends with me. I have absolutely no use for those. If you are with me, you are with me. And that includes secrets shared, time shared, joys and sorrows shared.

Not everyone can handle this. I have lost more girlfriends than boyfriends. And I have cried for them all. Intensity in friendship is seldom a welcomed thing, and I tend to have periods of as intense loneliness in between my love affair friendships. I demand absolute love, and I give it right back. Be friends with me and I will make you feel like the only woman on the planet.

When things go wrong, I need to take the edge off, and some years ago, for a long time, I lived vicariously in the wonderful friendships of the New York four. These ladies really love each other; I mean, have you ever entered a bathroom to remove a diaphragm from inside a girlfriend?

A young woman whom I considered a great friend not only caused a permanent scar by hissing at me in a heated discussion about friendship rules that she did not owe me a goddamn thing, and later on, flat-out turned against me when I was having a disagreement with mutual colleagues – and guess what the disagreement regarded? This blogsite. This from a woman I had divulged my deepest feelings to and sought support in crisis. 

Many years later, when I accidentally bumped into her on the street, neither one of us stopped to say hello properly, but waved hands while rushing past each other as quickly as possible. I hadn’t thought about her in years, but for the next few weeks, she and her cruel comment were all I could think about.

Like Carrie, I immortalize people who matter to me on paper. This has not always gone smoothly, and I have experienced shunning and borderline hatred over the blog.

Then again, there have been those who have realized in a heartbeat what I am trying to do, and have taken these essays as letters of love. That certainly has been the case with every one of my girlfriends who have remained, oscillating in the fringes of everything I do, even when they don’t perhaps know it, or even when their names aren’t mentioned.

Sally had a child and moved into a very different sphere of living where it was impossible for me to follow. She used to dress me and calm me, and listen to and read as e-mail attachments my early stories. I see her less than I would like, but her support over the years has meant more to me than I can put into words.

Harlow is a woman I was friends with as a kid, then many years passed, and getting an invitation to her wedding after what felt like a lifetime of living outside each other’s orbits brought us together again. She lives far away and has children and a house much like mine, meaning there is more than enough on her plate, and as consequence I know very little about her day-to-day existence. But I think she will be one of the ones who will stay forever. We were kids growing up on the same street, and those people stay with you.

Vanessa and I had a huge meltdown and consequently uprooted our entire friendship. For a long time I thought we would not be able to bounce back from it, since it was the worst break up with a woman for me since Sukie’s letter. We really went nuclear on our entire friendship, and she went so far as to question her entire personality and life choices, telling me I had been such a huge charismatic influence on her when we first met at a Creative Writing course that she felt it was my doing she had applied to college to study Literature in the first place, and now that she was seeing clearly my monstrous power over her, she needed to reconsider everything she had thought she liked in life in reference to this discovery. Years have passed, and I guess it really isn’t like it used to be anymore. But I have also discovered maybe that’s ok. We are not young women anymore, and the longer the friendship, the greater the changes. She has had a hard life, and I wish nothing but the loveliest things for her. I see her seldom, but think of her often.

Priscilla vanished from the face of the Earth. She started drinking heavily in our final year as friends and would not listen to anybody’s concerns over her downward spiraling life. There was a time in my life we hung out practically every day, and it has been hard to accept the fact that nobody seems to be able to find her anymore, she has disappeared from social media, stopped answering her phone, and even people from back then have had no contact with her in years. I have no idea whether our friendship would have survived to this day had she not disappeared: a lot of things were left unsaid, although I did tell her many times she was losing it, and it wasn’t nice to see her every time hungover, and having to reluctantly remain seated at our favorite Chinese restaurant as she repeatedly excused herself to go lose her lunch in the bathroom.

Adeline, my university girl, was fathomed into another place, too, after years of meeting intermittently after college. Adeline’s beauty was immense and ethereal, and out of every one of my lost and current friends, her way of interior design – and her taste in music - most reminded my own. We studied philosophy together, so the talk was about that, but it was also about a lot of things. I felt maybe it was my doing we drifted apart, for once; it wasn’t at all something I had wanted, but I think there was a distance that may have been created by me, and it has taken a lot of years to undo it. I believe it will be undone, for some reason I trust the friendship to ultimately remain unscathed, similar to my friendship to Harlow.

I remember so many things from times with all of them, and I don’t know if they think of me as much, but friendships with these ladies, and others not mentioned here, have shaped me more, I think, than my affairs with men. 

I remember distinctly what color Priscilla’s hair was when she let it loose and the setting sun from behind hit her strawberry blond locks as she was sitting next to me on the terrace, laughing. She was the one to introduce me to Gilmore Girls, one of my all-time favorite TV shows that has since become a household item in my writing as well as in the way I negotiate life.

I remember Harlow’s hazel eyes and how gorgeous and thick her dark brown hair was even as a kid, what her house smelled like, and even her stuffed toy monkey from her childhood bed. Her laughter is the most infectious laughter I have ever known, and I recall playing with our Barbies outside amid her mother’s sloping shrubs, pretending it was a jungle. 

I remember endless movie marathons with Sally, and having a smoke on the balcony, back when we were both smokers, I, Marlboro Lights, she, Marlboro Silvers, the horrible lighter-than-light ones that really were just blades of dried grass in a paper hull, and how we would light up tealights in Oriental style colorful lanterns around my studio apartment, and giggle at nothing. 

I remember sipping strawberry lemonade with Vanessa at a trendy café in Pispala, years after our fight, talking idly about whatever, and the weather being so hot my underpants were soaked and stuck to my buttocks. When we left the café she told me she could read the words RUN-DMC imprinted in sweat from my panties at the back of my white skirt, and how we almost double down from merriment. I also remember sitting in her dorm room, back when I first got to know her, watching her dress while discussing some assignment and looking around her room, the endless amount of house plants and candles. She wore flowing maxi skirts and black rhinestone-speckled tees. 

I remember making tea and serving it from my earthenware pot I still have to this day, and pouring it here and there and finally into cups, and Adeline would laugh and tell me she had been listening to Sade lately, and how was the Aesthetics course going, mysterious, dressed in black and eyes smoldering. She would write her thesis on the Ancient Greeks, pre-Aristotle, if memory serves me; I would drop out to pursue a career in writing.

The earliest memory of betraying a woman friend is a painful one; being a vocal advocate of female friendships and persisting there is no such thing as an overshare between girlfriends, I, too, have walked the thin immoral line of boyfriend stealing, and realize painfully how much I look like a hypocrite right now, and this is just to say: we may forget the man we stole, but we will never forget the woman we stole him from. I have no idea whether that love affair friendship would have lasted anyway, we were all very young and exceedingly romantic and everything we did we did with an enormous amount of fuss and drama. We had just finished our first volumes of Henry Miller and Sartre and Almodovar’s book of stories, wore bobby pins and vintage leather jackets from the Seventies, listened to Tito Puente and Suede and The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony on repeat, and liked to throw around words like eternal love and soulmate, I mean really, how likely is it to stumble on these things at seventeen? I loved Marlo, but I fell in love with Marlon.

But unless there are rules involved and everybody knows what’s what, and there is at least one copy of The Ethical Slut on the table, you just don’t do that.

Did shows like Sex and the City provide unrealistic expectations for me on how women should relate to one another? Was it bad luck I had crashed already into such heavy friendships with girls when the show aired I was like sure, that is exactly what female friendships look like?

This was a difficult question, but not as difficult watching now every single one of Sex and the City’s ladies have no problem whatsoever to jump into bed with someone they just met. 

Let’s be clear: I have no interest in shaming this act at all, in fact more power to them – but here’s the catch: is it true that these ladies would all have very similar ways to encounter another person sexually, in fact it looks to the viewer completely identical, while my gut reaction to this is that it applies only to perhaps Samantha and Carrie – NOT to Miranda, and definitely not to Charlotte. And watching it from inside today’s jungle of sexual terminology, I find it a bit lazy that every one of the fabulous ladies would be from the exact same mold, sexually. They all have absolutely no problem orgasming with someone new, nor do they experience any problems with their orgasm, period, while I’m finding it fantastic that that would actually be the case. 

Also, depicting all women as universally orgasm-ready at the drop of a hat made me keep my hard-to-orgasm problem to myself for too many years, and in fact considered it a fault so personal I could hardly address it with any one of my sex partners for years and years. Some closest girlfriends knew. Women talk. So, yes, I blame Sex and the City for making my own private difficulties at intimacy and everything about an easy orgasm such heightened a problem for me. Just kidding. 

Maybe.

I used to think the ladies in the show were so different from one another, but when it comes to sex and how to have it, how to discuss it and how to make themselves sex-ready, they are almost disturbingly like one another. Not one of them is depicted as having any, even the tiniest, trauma about it, there are no nightmarish teenage gropings or near date rapes to get over, none of the ladies seem have any real worries over any of that, nor do any of them seem to have any fetishes, they are all just – Barbie-land normal. And if such gropings or any other malpractices take place, they are happening in the present tense of the show’s timeline, as the lovely women are in their thirties and extremely adept at taking care of themselves.

Talking from the experience of forty years of discussing relationships, sex, body issues and neuroses with my girlfriends I know this to be untrue, and while I salute and celebrate Sex and the City’s sex positivism of its time – I remember well how ground-breaking it was when it first aired in the late Nineties, and the glamour and good times, and realize the show reaches its demographic peak more easily presenting its leading ladies as eternal sexual hopefuls and almost erotic spring chickens each time with a new person, as well as living in the stylized version of New York of the Eternal Spring.

And I am not even talking about the unnatural whitewashing of the population and dateables of New York, or body shaming or some other obvious problems the media has already ripped to shreds regarding the show many years ago: what I am finding fantastic is the sheer monochromatic way in how the ladies’ sexual appetites are depicted throughout the series. And this, I can’t help but notice, hasn’t been corrected even in the trying-hard-to-rectify-every-single-mishap-in-one-fell-swoop sequel to the show …And Just Like That, which works better in the second season when everybody has calmed the fuck down with the checkpoint inclusion sheet.

It would be great if everyone in reality was actually as open and care-free, and now that I think about it, I guess I am the anomaly in my circle of friends and always have been. Of course, for a light comedy of twenty minutes per episode, everything needs to be made a bit simple, and words like frigid or trauma don’t belong there at all – and yet.

A small sidestep; My biggest grievances of non-sexual nature to date:

Why oh why does Carrie insist on going to Big’s church after he had specifically made clear it was a tradition between him and his mother? Big may have commitment issues, but Carrie crosses a line, too, in having zero respect for Big’s wishes. Family can be a difficult issue, and not minding what was asked is in my book a huge mistake.

Why oh why does Miranda treat Steve like utter crap from the get-go, and looking at the way she behaves, why would Steve even bother with her in the first place? Miranda is beyond rude, hostile, aggressive, and totally un-romantic, and has little or no patience for him. Also, Steve being one of the very few of the truer-to-life characters of the show, I would have liked to see a little more on the issue of how they tackle the question of unequal income as a couple. To style Steve into an entrepreneur so as to make him worthy of Miranda is one of the show’s shameful declarations of a superficial value system, and a missed opportunity. Everyone needs to be wealthy in order to be successful in love; in fact, this is Samantha’s line from the show: “I have never met anyone who was bad at life but good in bed.” And bad at life, most clearly, inside the world of Sex and the City, means not being a person of means.

Sure, the show hints around at financial instability, most prominently in Carrie’s voice-overs about constantly maxing out on her credit cards, and when her love affair with Aidan ends, she needs to make ends meet by borrowing money from Charlotte, an awkward situation and an isolated incident in the world of Sex and the City. But I’m glad it’s there, however short an interlude.

As a budding writer in my twenties, I used to identify with Carrie the most, although in my heart I knew I was more like the opinionated and uptight Miranda. 

Watching the show in my forties, though, I feel like the smartest attitude, the truest commentary, and the healthiest self-love in the show belongs to Samantha.

That is not to say I am like her, or wish to be like her; but in some ways, it is in Samantha that the real American character traits I have always envied are embodied the best: her unapologetic demeanor, her soaring self-esteem, her incredible self-reliance and the ability to speak her mind without hesitation and to the point, however unpopular her opinion may be. She is the only one of the foursome to think outside the box about a lot of things, and usually, her point of view is the most interesting one.

I’m not saying I want things in TV shows to be as realistic as possible; as a storyteller I know first-hand how incredibly lame and boring that can be. I don’t really mind that everyone in the show is “very successful” and “totally sexy” almost to the point of being a prerequisite as well as nauseating, and as a clothes person I can’t say I’m sorry to see so many beautiful outfits and styles on so many lovely bodies and celebrating style and presenting what was currently in vogue like that – but I feel like making at least one of the leads into a less than perfectly adapted sexual creature in her thirties – when, I can tell you, one still doesn’t know shit about their own bodies and what makes them tick, and I say this with a fair amount of certainty; if there are those who have had it all figured out by the time they have hit thirty, call me, we’ll compare notes, and I will write a correction if necessary – would not have made the show any less of a glamour ride, only a bit more varied and, yes, real.

And for the odd viewer looking to identify with any one of the main characters, I feel like it would be such an obvious thing to consider. With all its apparent cutting-edge vibe, the show is still one that describes the ladies having orgasms in vaginal penetration without aiding things along themselves, and the few times a vibrator is broken out during sex, the male response is always hostile and defensive. This, even in the sequel. Why does it have to be one or the other? And you know it really doesn’t, and I bet so do the makers of the show: then why be so damn coy about it?

Is it really the age-old difference between apples and oranges? 

Still, depicting sexual behavior as potentially dangerous and deviant should one dare to present a vibrator into the mix is in itself potentially dangerous, and most assuredly deviant.

I don’t see any reason why the show would advocate such a pristine, either/or sex life for anyone. To remain mainstream and super successful? Would the millions of viewers disappear, if the Sex and the City franchise developed its own signature line of couture fetish items for sale? I mean, in the show, there are some truly lovely pieces I myself would not hesitate to buy: in the episode La Douleur Exquise! Samantha’s lacquered heart-choker and extremely beautiful, obviously handmade whip; Carrie’s show attire undies from the catwalk; the shoes from the carriage ride in the Park with Big; the list goes on and on. And here’s a thought: why not create a complete line of sex toys made to feel like their respective character names: the black, no nonsense Miranda-the-lawyer dildo, the pink Charlotte combination dildo and bunny-eared clitoris massager, The Carrie, a golden air-pulsating clitoris teaser with preferably a Gucci logo on the handle, and The Samantha, the whole nine yards, a triple vehicle to penetrate both orifices as well as stimulating the clitoris simultaneously? Wouldn’t everyone who was ever a fan of the show line up to get at least one?

I know I would.

I guess I will never really tire of watching Sex and the City – an interesting point: I did meander through both seasons 1 and 2 of the somewhat forced and grimacing sequel, and will force-feed myself any forthcoming seasons as well, but I have absolutely zero interest in replaying any of those episodes the way I have played the old faithful original six seasons time and time again. I have loved those disgustingly perfect ladies for twenty-odd years now, and no way am I letting them go. Not yet, anyway. 

People change. I have changed. I have changed so much from when I first watched the show on TV during my obligatory stint working at a video rental and the show came on at midnight on a Tuesday, I think, that the mere experience of seeing the same ladies tackle the same problems from this side of life, that of a forty-something divorcee and wrecked in love many more times than I can say, that of a sexually liberated mature woman who needs to admit she has only now started to really know herself sexually, her likes and dislikes, and is learning how to ask for things instead of perpetually perfecting the blowjob ad nauseam or going through the motions of trying to make herself feel inspired by stuff she has no idea how to relate to – it almost feels like watching a different show now.

Women, watch porn. Correction: watch women-directed porn. Find Erika Lust on your smart phones and at least check it out. Watch erotic films, read erotica, check out sex parties if you feel even an inkling of curiosity, touch yourselves, wear leather or latex or spandex or silk on bare skin to find out if it feels good in a particular kind of way; experience things, if not with a partner, then in the best possible company: alone. And this is from the heart: get yourselves a vibrator immediately. There are still too many ladies out there not taking everything their bodies have to offer out of sheer demure. Coy never made anybody’s life any better, and it most definitely did not get anybody off even for a second.

I thought I had had things figured out in my thirties, but I hadn’t. It is the forties that are looking like the best years of my life. Sure, there is a lot of crap to be dealt with, too, that is a given when one reaches these advanced levels of being – but knowing oneself is so different from any form of self-knowledge of the artist as a young woman, read: one in her twenties, or I’m telling you thirties even, one can’t even discuss those things in the same post. I have loved, I have had my heart broken, and have done my share of breaking hearts in return. I have adored every one of my boyfriends and girlfriends, and while I do not to have de facto sex with my girlfriends, I cannot say my friendships are in any way devoid of a sensual side. Being a woman, I feel this very intensely, and feel like if I don’t share any unique, passionate thing, a mutual love for music or nature or share at least somewhat similar values in life for instance, with another woman, I don’t think I can become their friend anymore. It is one thing aging has brought along: a clearer sight. 

Sex and the City offers a peek at how women relate to one another. So does Golden Girls. So does Gilmore Girls. So does Girls. Isn’t it curious how the relationships between women are much more interesting and endlessly enjoyable, thus standing the test of time so much better than, say, shows about crime or a legal practice?

And the most delightful thing about aging: when, once in a blue moon, someone new still manages to surprise me, it leaves a mark so galactic I instantly fall in love all over again.

We evolve, we are constantly in flux. Who knows, perhaps in another ten years I’ll be grimacing at my own deep and heart-felt discoveries here, laughing at my younger self with compassion and understanding and enjoying yet another run of Sex and the City for what it originally was meant to be: a comedic, often bra-less (except Miranda, check out her beautiful bras underneath that smart lawyer attire), slightly naughty, slightly line-crossing, and at the time it was running very avant-garde, phantasmagoric, fun show about sex, fashion, friendship, eating out in all meanings of the term, making mistakes and getting up again, the club scene, restaurants, in-vogue shoes, and all things fabulous about the great cinematic city, and, what’s best: what New York felt and looked like in the early Aughts, and instead of finding the leads’ appallingly unblemished and disgustingly perfect red-carpet sexual attitude fake, I will laugh and accept them for who they are, for this is their only flaw.

That, and the constant cosmopolitans. Give me a champagne flute over hard liquor any day.

Demi-sexual is an umbrella term for a person who cannot become sexually aroused unless they experience a deep, meaningful spiritual or emotional connection with the other person. They instinctively connect sexual behavior with love and deep personal connection and find the prospect of having to go to bed with someone they don’t have that connection with, for instance, a stranger, horrendous and off-putting.

I have always found it laughable that one of my exes used to jealously guard my comings and goings like a perpetually ill-suspecting hawk and throw in my face phrases like Use a condom! when I was going out without him. In hindsight, perhaps it was a clear declaration of the fact that we really never know the people we are sleeping with.

Some of the non-binary people I know may be horrified by this text, but I want to tell you: I think you are gorgeous, and flowing and boundless, and some kind of wonderful. I will continue to support you like crazy, and if you simply want to forever refrain from checking any boxes, I am here for you, box-free and loving your choice.