This reminds me of a conversation I've had with my girlfriend, who's a lot more experienced I am. "I'm not used to the idea of stage-managing my own sex," I said. "Deciding what, specifically, I want to do. I always kind of thought I just had to show up and be willing and the other person would figure it all out."
"Yes," she said wisely. "This is the problem in the sex lives of many lesbians*."
*Meant inclusively, like "wlw"
I recently watched a Canadian film from 1995 called When Night is Falling, which is a bizarre disjointed mess story-wise but very pretty; and it occurred to me that while in the movie as presented there's no reason for the protagonist to sleep with her female love interest, you could rewrite the movie to say, "She's ostensibly Christian but already having sex with her male fiance; she must have already done a lot of work on her own sexuality and figured out a lot about her desires to go that far. If that were a part of her character that would explored, the eventual relationship with a woman would come out a lot less from nowhere."
I think part of why it's so hard is that you have to figure out why these women want to have sex, and what sex means to them--and that's so much more complicated than it is a lot of the time than with men. Because it's related to the real problems real wlw have expressing our desires or even knowing what they are.
But on the other hand, I think that if you allowed that question to form the spine of a story, you could do amazing things with it. Start with two wlw who both know the other's queer and single and working in an office together or something, and walk them through that process: Do I want her? Does she want me? Should I do something? What should I do? How might this end? How do I want this to end? What might go wrong?
I'd love a story like that. I'd recognize myself in a story like that.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 08:35 pm (UTC)This reminds me of a conversation I've had with my girlfriend, who's a lot more experienced I am. "I'm not used to the idea of stage-managing my own sex," I said. "Deciding what, specifically, I want to do. I always kind of thought I just had to show up and be willing and the other person would figure it all out."
"Yes," she said wisely. "This is the problem in the sex lives of many lesbians*."
*Meant inclusively, like "wlw"
I recently watched a Canadian film from 1995 called When Night is Falling, which is a bizarre disjointed mess story-wise but very pretty; and it occurred to me that while in the movie as presented there's no reason for the protagonist to sleep with her female love interest, you could rewrite the movie to say, "She's ostensibly Christian but already having sex with her male fiance; she must have already done a lot of work on her own sexuality and figured out a lot about her desires to go that far. If that were a part of her character that would explored, the eventual relationship with a woman would come out a lot less from nowhere."
I think part of why it's so hard is that you have to figure out why these women want to have sex, and what sex means to them--and that's so much more complicated than it is a lot of the time than with men. Because it's related to the real problems real wlw have expressing our desires or even knowing what they are.
But on the other hand, I think that if you allowed that question to form the spine of a story, you could do amazing things with it. Start with two wlw who both know the other's queer and single and working in an office together or something, and walk them through that process: Do I want her? Does she want me? Should I do something? What should I do? How might this end? How do I want this to end? What might go wrong?
I'd love a story like that. I'd recognize myself in a story like that.