Lesbians In Bed: Reading Haikus

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I was the one who seemed to stress this rule the most. I warned my partner about it all the time: Don’t leave me. But they were confident that they’d always love only me; with other people, they assured me, it would only ever just be sex. We both like Justin Bieber, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, babies, spicy foods, and romantic comedies, as well as traveling, swimming, dressing up, having sex, being tall, biking (“cycling,” she’d say), and making detailed plans well ahead of time. We also appear, at this admittedly early stage, to be each other’s scarily perfect sexual complement; lesbian sex can look like a million and one different things, and we like so many of the same ones that it is, honestly, a miracle we ever got out of bed and did anything normal, like eat dinner or generally interact with other people. (Turns out, there was nothing wrong with me during my sad stretch of a dry spell after all — I just hadn’t been having the sex I actually wanted to have.) Gershon: Look at your body. Honestly, whenever I wasn't sure of what I was doing I would just stare at your chest. Before meeting Lynette, she of the multiple grooming products, I’d gotten used to dating people whose own beauty routines consisted of, if anything, 3-in-1 body wash. They tended to gently poke fun at me for all my feminine trappings: the 20 minutes I’d spend each day on my serums. I’m a little ashamed of how, over the years, living beside various permutations of my partners’ easy masculinity, I’d defend my own femme rituals with I’m-not-like-other-girls insistence: Hey, at least I don’t shave! At least I barely wear any makeup! My frivolity was never out of hand. And I prided myself for that, for the ways in which I deliberately limited myself.

Per the rules of our loose nonmonogamous agreement, I FaceTimed with my partner about what was happening on the cruise, first telling them about the catamaran girl and then, in so many words, about Lynette. I suspected, even early on, that I was about to break our most important rule of all: Don’t fall in love with anybody else. Tilly: This scene here it was all [advisor and feminist sex writer] Susie Bright's friends. That's why the bar scene is so authentic—it's all lesbians. Jamie mentioned that she’d previously passed on an Olivia cruise when she saw that a speaker booked for the trip was Lisa Vogel. Vogel, the creator and producer of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, shut down the lesbian feminist women’s gathering in 2015 — closing its doors entirely, after 40 years as a safe haven of living lesbian history, rather than allowing out trans women to attend. For a lot of millennial queer women, myself included, MichFest is the perfect example of something beautiful and sacred we would have loved to take part in — something we’d be forever thankful for — if only, if only, they hadn’t seen trans women as the enemy. While transmission is less likely during oral sex than during penetrative penis-in-vagina or penis-in-anus sex, there are still many STIs that can be passed on. Most commonly passed on this way are herpes, gonorrhoea and syphilis. Although less likely, chlamydia, HIV, hepatitis A, B and C and HPV – which causes genital warts - are still able to be passed on during oral sex. STI tests And we all know what happens when you leave oxytocin floating around: trips to Bed, Bath and Beyond.

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It's been four years since Alaina was raped and she still has no plans to pursue formal charges against her rapist. She says, unflinchingly, that she has moved on in other ways: She's chosen to change her name, and has moved to a new city where she has pursued a successful freelance writing career, often writing about sexual assault within the LGBTQ community.

Furthermore,” Blair explains, “very few women in same-sex relationships reported very brief sexual encounters, possibly providing a hint as to why their sexual frequency numbers tend to be lower than the other three groups.” Perhaps it’s trite to say that “representation matters,” but some things are cliché because they’re true. The first time I ever saw lesbians onscreen was when my high school’s Gay Bisexual Straight Alliance played part of the first scene of the original L Word series. (The “sweet little figs” scene, in case you were wondering—the girls who get it get it.) Even so, it wasn’t until years later, when I first saw Blue Is the Warmest Color , that I actually found a queer story that reminded me of my own. I would sob in a car to uptown Manhattan, where my friend Alia would take me in her arms and tell me it was all going to be OK. I was less confident. But perhaps it wasn’t that I didn’t trust my partner; it was that I didn’t trust myself. For so long, I’d put off the possibility of us opening up our relationship because — try as I might to be cool and aloof and whatever about casual hookups — I typically like sex best when the person matters to me.

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Before I left, I talked to a few of my reporter friends about it, just in case a hookup opportunity should present itself and I decided to partake for, um, research purposes . We decided that my Olivia story fell in some sort of weird journalistic in-between, just like my own job does. I sometimes do reporting, but I’m not strictly a reporter; I’m a writer, editor, and cultural critic. Plus, I wasn’t assigned this story to go and passively report out what everybody else was doing on the cruise; I was supposed to immerse myself in the experience (while, of course, disclosing to anyone I spoke with that I was writing about the trip). And the thing a lot of women on the cruise were looking to experience was, yes, getting laid.

I tried to tell myself that lesbian bed death isn’t real, all the while heartily blaming myself for our increasingly diminished sex life. I was the one who never really felt like initiating, or at least not with anywhere near the regularity we’d had as a hormone-crazed new couple. I assumed, at best, that all passions cool somewhat over the years; at worst, I thought something might be wrong with me. I would move out of an apartment that I adored, that I’d almost single-handedly furnished, that I thought I’d live in for years to come. I would hug my landlady, crying again because she was crying for me. So I’m surprised to say I might actually travel with Olivia again, skeptical as I remain of cruise ethics in general. And that’s because of all the things that happened in the eight days I spent aboard the Summit — things I wasn’t remotely expecting. I come from a queer universe where traditional butch/femme identities seem old-school and retrograde, second-wavey, practically heteropatriarchal. There’s a lot wrong with that perspective — for one thing, a lot of the modern queers who shit on butch/femme dynamics aren’t from the working class, where those identities were born — but it’s one I still sympathize with, especially as someone who’d previously been hesitant to claim femme identity as my own. Survivors are trapped in a cycle that delegitimizes their experience: first by downplaying the likelihood that it could happen at all, then by not validating it once it happens, and finally by not analyzing the data—and therefore creating awareness—after it does.Stephanie Trilling, manager of community awareness and prevention services at the Boston Area Rape Crisis (BARCC), observes that for her queer female clients who have been assaulted by women, the first hurdle is simply understanding the assault as rape. Since this scenario is rarely portrayed in the media or in educational programming, "it can be especially challenging to identify their experience as violence," she says. "Many people have a difficult time believing that a woman could be capable of inflicting violence on another person." Scissoring is another hotly debated topic. If you’ve ever watched lesbian porn, you could be forgiven for thinking scissoring is all women and vagina-havers do when they have sex with each other. In truth, some queer people love scissoring and do it regularly, others say it doesn’t work for them and it’s not part of their sex lives. Oral sex I actively choose to identify as a lesbian and a dyke, as well as a queer. I have found love and community unlike anything else I’ve ever known in what still exists of lesbian culture, despite all external (and, TERF-wise, internal) attempts to exterminate it: the art, the literature, the physical spaces. Plus, most importantly (and most obviously), the word “lesbian” quite literally describes what I am: a woman who loves women in both a feminist way and a super-gay way. I would move into a house with some friends in Brooklyn, where a room had just magically opened up. There’d be a dog, and a yard. It would feel like a sign. (I’d start getting really into signs.) When I first pitched this story to my editors, I thought I’d be reporting on a lesbian cultural artifact in its twilight years. The women who’ve faithfully gone on dozens of Olivia trips over the decades are getting older, and I didn’t have a lot of faith that younger queer people were going to step in and save companies like this from extinction. Other elements of lesbian culture have been steadily dying; why should Olivia be any different?

It wasn’t until the day afterward that we’d realize exactly how much of a spectacle we’d made. Lynette had been chatting with a few women the day before, more than one of whom confronted her in the cafeteria the next morning. “Everyone saw that young blonde hanging all over you last night,” she told her scornfully. “You better be careful.” Another woman caught us goofing around in the pool and reported to Lynette that we were causing a bit of a scene. Ever since Director Sebastián Lelio's Disobedience premiered at TIFF in 2017, it's been the talk of the town among the five queer women who care about this kind of stuff. The film tells story of Orthodox Jewish lesbians in London: Esti (Rachel McAdams) caught in a loveless relationship with a Rabbi, and Ronit (Rachel Weisz) trapped in a series of meaningless heterosexual hookups. Another oft-recited stereotype is that lesbians are known to process everything to death. Q: How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: I don’t know. Should we use LEDs? What wattage? Are these recyclable? Maybe this is a sign we should be lowering our carbon footprint. Let’s make a pro and con list of solar panel options and revisit this next year. I’m loose and light and a little sleepy from my second Corona and a blossoming sunburn. Sure, I say, why not, thinking all the while: If any other 27-year-old lesbians could use a self-esteem boost, all they need to do, clearly, is get themselves on an Olivia cruise.

I would go straight to my friend Dom’s house, not even stopping at home to shower first, where I told him that I was, indeed, having a quarter-life crisis. Tilly: Somebody said, "Oh, you know, females don't have any sex organs." [Susie] goes, "Yes we do; it's called a hand." So they did do a lot of shots of hands. Tilly: Everyone's positive that they're so in love, and they're going to live happily ever after, but I really think in Violet's nature, she's a predator. I do not think it's going to end well. Violet's in love with Corky, but she's very damaged and I just don't think it's going to be like one of those, "50 years ago, we met cute," you know? Gershon: God forbid we have these two women actually in love. We had to go with the "f—ing" scene. In the "f—ing" scene, they were really going at it, and it wasn't as emotional. They were okay with that, which is bulls–t. Tilly: It was a classic film noir, except instead of the lead being a male, it was Corky. A studio offered the [Wachowskis] a lot more money to make the movie, but they said that they had to make Corky a man.