I am, but.

I’m still transitioning off Substack. My preference is to have people on Patreon rather than Buttondown or Mailchimp or whatever because I’m already set up on Patreon and have some cool rewards for paying readers. The downside to shifting to Patreon is that I cannot add you as a patron myself. You have to sign up, even if it’s just at the free level (which I support fully!).

So that’s why I keep reminding you to sign up for my Patreon. Did you know that $5+ patrons got access to this essay yesterday?

Additionally: all B+ Squad essays are now archived on my new site. I’m still tweaking it (I need to add a search bar!) and I’m trying to figure out how to get posts sent out by email via Wordpress. If anyone has expertise here, hit me up.

There is a scene in the A League of Their Own tv show that has been on my mind of late. I'm too lazy to look it up so I can quote it verbatim, but the gist is along the lines of this: Abbi Jacobson's character (Carson? I think her name was Carson) is asked by another woman what it is like to have lesbian sex. And Carson (that is her name, I just checked IMDb) starts going on about how sex with a man is nice, but sex with a woman — I think she compares it to ice cream? There's definitely some dessert metaphor involved.

Regardless: the takeaway from the scene is that sex with women is better than sex with men, at least from the perspective of Carson.

But — and this question is the reason why I keep thinking about this scene — are we also supposed to walk away from this scene understanding Carson as a lesbian? Given the binary way that sexuality is always talked about, a part of me thinks the answer here is yes: she thinks sex with women is better than sex with men! Lesbian detected, give this woman a flannel and a Subaru, stat (in before someone says that's anachronistic given the setting of ALOTO).

And yet: from what I recall of the story, Carson is also a fairly young woman who has had sex with one man and one woman. It seems strange to make grand judgments about her sexuality (about anyone's sexuality) from such a small data set: is it not possible that Carson simply had sex with a man she wasn't compatible with and a woman that she was extremely compatible with? Gender is hardly the only factor that goes into determining the thrill of a sexual encounter: if it were, monosexuals would never have bad sex with their preferred gender, and yet.

So that's one thing that I think about. But then there's also this: let's say the comparison holds. Let's say that Carson is more attracted to women than men, that sex with women is always going to be better than sex with men (or, at least, the best sex with women will always be better than the best sex with men, because surely there will be some women whose appalling sexual skills/lack of chemistry are topped by the pleasant sex she claims to have had with men). How are we to understand her then?

The rational, unemotional part of me knows that the answer is "we are to understand her however she chooses to identify." If Carson (or the writers who created Carson, or someone who sees their own story in Carson's) understands herself as a lesbian, she's a lesbian. If she understands herself as bisexual, she's a bisexual. The specifics of her sexual experience aren't the point here, it's her understanding of herself that matters, her understanding of herself that is the end point of the conversation, even if it changes over time.

And yet. I feel called to write this essay because that rational, unemotional part of me is only one section of my brain. There is this other part, this frantic, insecure, and anxious part, that keeps feeling like I have some responsibility to rank, to choose, to pick a side; like unless the scales are equally balanced I am not allowed to continue to exist in my liminal space.

And the scales will never be balanced. This is not a newsletter about my personal sex life (and dear god I would never write one, for so many reasons), but I do feel comfortable disclosing that the ways in which I am attracted to women and the ways in which I am attracted to men are fundamentally different, and that this inherently affects how I experience sex with men, with women, with non-binary people. I want — I need — different things from sex depending on the gender of my partner, and it's easy to formulate this as a "I am more attracted to [this gender] and therefore sex is more effortless" or "I have these experiences with [that gender] and therefore sex is more intense" and the mere fact of their difference causes that frantic, anxious, voice to ask me if I'm really into both or if there is some self deception or —

I should note here, as I have noted before, that I am a person who lives with obsessive compulsive disorder, and specifically has experienced obsessions around my sexual orientation: at one point becoming convinced I must be a lying straight girl pretending to be bisexual, at others convinced that I'm just a lesbian pretending to be into men. There is no question in my mind that the anxiety I, personally, experience about my own sexuality is fueled by OCD, and yet I also feel that, even as I might be Certifiably Crazy™️, the underlying uncertainty that I experience — the sense that a difference in experience must mean a preference which must inherently mean bisexuality as a path way to monosexuality and not a destination in and of itself — isn't coming from nowhere, isn't just about me being nuts. I might feel it more intensely than other people due to my festive brain chemistry, but I suspect it is an underlying anxiety felt by others as well.

And while I do believe that the ultimate answer here is the one that is offered by that rational, dispassionate voice — the one that says that if you feel bisexual then congrats, you're bisexual; and if you don't feel bisexual, then congrats, you're something else — I also think that voicing the anxiety is part of how we defang it, how we see it for the foolishness that it is.

Because truly: I can do my whole, "I'm a bisexual because I say I am" speech until I am blue in the face, but as long as I'm using it as a shield to hide my anxieties, to pretend that I do not have them, I will always feel like a fraud. It is only when I allow myself to say, "I am a bisexual but my experiences with different genders are not identical, and sometimes I feel like I'm more attracted to one gender than the other, but still and all I remain bisexual because sexuality is about so much more than which configuration of body parts gets your motor running the quickest, because there are emotional and social and other domestic factors beyond just what leads to the most intense sex that can shape our identities and understanding of our romantic and sexual orientations, because this binary 'sex with this gender is nice but sex with that gender is nicer' framing is so simplistic, so incapable of encapsulating my experience as a human in this world —"

It is only when I allow myself to say that that I understand that I am bisexual because I am simply too complicated not to be, that I am bisexual, not in spite of my various gendered preferences but because of them, because they are a confusing and complex tapestry that cannot be sorted.

I am bisexual, but I am bisexual because I am bisexual because I am.

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I'm still releasing my novella in-progress, Mermaids of New York, to $15+ patrons. (Also publicly releasing it really has inspired me to start working on it again so hopefully it will soon be a novella, full stop, no "in-progress" needed.) Here's a sample of the most recent installment:

Tula had never had sex with anyone before — prior to Mary Ann, her sexual repertoire had been limited to some light make outs and boob groping — but she was terrified if she mentioned this she might miss out on her shot to experience, well, whatever it was that Mary Ann was offering. She was drunk enough to ignore her anxiety, and that night, she just gave herself over to the intoxicating rush that was Mary Ann: the way she tasted, the way she smelled, the way her body felt as it was writhing against Tula’s.

All installments can be found here.