The inescapable male gaze.

Or, confessions of a former party girl.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a young woman enjoys making out with other women in public spaces, and especially in spaces where straight men are present and potentially observing, that she will be decried as a “fake bi” or a party girl, or, you know, just a lady whose sapphism is entirely about male attention and appreciation rather than genuine desire for other women. Few people feel motivated to defend the party girls, to cast their adventures as anything other than an embarrassment to the rest of queerdom, a disgraceful fetishization of sapphism repackaged for men’s enjoyment.

Which is why it pains me to admit that, well, in my twenties, I was kind of a party make out girl myself?

It’s not that I only made out with other women while drunk, or that I professed to be straight outside of the bar scene. No, I was an out and proud bisexual all the time. I just also happened to be a woman who’d get drunk and make out with other women at parties, a woman who didn’t mind if men were turned on by it, a woman who’d occasionally indulge male fantasies about her sapphism because, well, it was fun. There are numerous pictures of me in my twenties locking lips with another girl at a party, cozying up to a woman for the camera, just generally being the stereotype of the I Kissed A Girl type we all love to hate.

I’ve been thinking about this period a lot lately, as I try to fully unpack my own bi shame. There’s a moment in particular that sticks out to me, from a party at the Etsy offices where I kissed a friend of mine and snapped a pic of us in the process. Probably I mentioned something about my boyfriend at the time thinking it was hot; definitely she seemed horrified at the thought that our affection might be for another person’s — a man’s — benefit. Remembering that moment always stops me cold: a slap in the face that made me reconsider everything, that made me see myself as one of the bad ones, the girl packaging herself for the patriarchy when she thought she was just having fun*.

It’s hard to unpack my motivations, especially since it’s been over a decade since I was that party girl, but here’s what I think I know:

1. At the core, I made out with women at parties because I was attracted to them. Full stop. It wasn’t just because the boys thought it was hot, or because I wanted to be popular or edgy or cool. I was attracted to women, I wanted to hook up with them, and that’s why I’d grope a tit or put my mouth on another lady’s mouth or whatever it was that I was getting up to.

2. So why make out at parties? Largely because it was a venue where make outs with other women felt accessible to me. When I think about the friends I most frequently made out with, I remember them being women who probably wouldn’t have hooked up with me one on one, who I couldn’t ever see myself falling into bed with. They were friends, not potential lovers, and the chances of us dating — or even full on fucking — were slim to none. But in these drunken, festive moments, there was a moment for us to come together, to find each other, to have fun, in a low stakes way that allowed us to live outside ourselves. If I thought a woman was beautiful, if I loved her as a friend, and she wanted to make out with me in a pool while we did Jell-O shots, was that really so wrong?

   1. There’s one memory in particular that sticks with me on this front, from a Valentine’s Day costume party** I went to in 2012. Midway through the evening, a slate of burlesque performers took the stage, one of them in particular caught my eye; after her set, I had the good fortune to wind up making out with her on the dance floor for the rest of the night. We wound up exchanging contact info, and met up again a few days later. In the daylight, without our costumes, totally sober and separate from the headiness of the night, I realized that we weren’t a match at all. We had no interests in common, no chemistry. But did that make that night we’d shared on the dance floor any less hot? I mean, not for me.

3. So. I was making out with women because I enjoyed it. And I was making out with women at parties because they often provided an opportunity for a specific type of casual make out, for an exciting connection with someone I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten intimate with. Can we all agree that that’s legitimate? Great, because now we get to the sticky part, which is, of course, the men.

   1. Did I need men to be present when I was making out with women? Absolutely not. Did I mind their presence? Well, it depends. If a dude was overly aggressive, or trying to inject himself into this intimate moment I was having with a woman, that was obviously gross. But if he — and especially a he who was a friend, or a boyfriend, or a dude I was hooking up with — was respectfully appreciative, then that I didn’t really mind.

   2. I think I thought we all felt this way.

   3. With boyfriends in particular, well — it was important to me to be the most interesting, most desirable, most sexually adventurous woman they’d ever been with. Is that a little gross and self punishing? Absolutely. But it was part of my mindset. And if being bi, if being the girl who would make out with other girls, if being the girl who would make out with other girls and send you a picture of it made men like me more, well, what was the harm in reaping that benefit?

   4. Again, I think I thought we all felt this way.

   5. It’s not that I was incapable of having sex with women, of having relationships with women, separate from the observation of men. It’s just that my boundaries so often felt porous — not just about this but about so many parts of my sex life — that I didn’t always know how to withhold the things that mattered just for myself, didn’t know how to treat my sapphism as something precious, something off limits, something not for male fetishization. I didn’t really know how to treat anything that was special to me that way. As I mentioned in 3c, I needed to be the girl who would do the most, felt as though all of my value resided in my refusal to say no, and that made having boundaries, well, kind of impossible.

In that moment at the Etsy party, when my friend suggested I was tainting our intimacy by packaging it for my boyfriend, I managed to step out of myself for a moment, to see myself as, well, bad. Not just a girl who was having sexy fun with friends and maybe pleasing dudes in the process, but as some kind of traitor, as a woman exploiting other women, as something monstrous, something gross. I carried that shame with me for years, particularly during those low moments when I hated myself enough to date, or at least hook up with, men I didn’t even respect, the men who were most likely to objectify my sapphism and attempt to use it for their own sexual benefit.

But now, I mean — now I don’t know what to think of it all. I’ve gotten more protective of my queer relationships, more “our love is not for your gaze,” as I’ve gotten older; and certainly my waning interest in men and male attention has helped speed that along. But I wonder, sometimes, how ashamed I should be of that younger me, the fun girl who loved to make out with her friends at parties. Was she dirty? Was she bad? Was she a traitor to the cause? Or was she just an inexperienced and insecure young woman trying to explore her desires through the avenues that felt available to her? Was she just, you know, young?

What I wonder, too, is who is really served by this bisexual respectability politic, the one that insists that there’s a “correct” way to be a bi woman and it absolutely does not involve party make outs that might entertain and delight nearby men. It’s not like the shame I felt served as a corrective, or like it made me behave “better” — if anything self loathing drove me even further into “bad” behavior (though that is a topic for another day). Are the party girls — be they bi, straight, heteroflexible, or something else entirely — actually hurting anyone? And if not, why can’t we just let them drunkenly make out in peace, let them navigate their desires, their boundaries, their identities, free from mockery and shame?

* Interestingly enough that friend is mostly straight? Really flips the whole “straight girls making out with girls for male attention while bi girls do it for legitimate and queer reasons” logic on its head.

** The theme was Tentacles of Love, it was very anime and specifically tentacle inspired; I got myself a pink crossbow and put together an outfit that I said was an anime-inspired Cupid