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Wednesday, December 5, 2012 // The Statement B
When I was 16, I had a panic attack
in my high school's cafeteria
because I got the urge to push
a beautiful ballerina against the menu-
plastered bulletin board, grope her ass and'
feel her pulse under my tongue.
I shook my gaze from her tight body and
stared at the linoleum floor. Blood slipped
quickly past my ears; white-hot adrena-
line seized my corroded artery and blasted
my optical nerves. Holy shit. Holy. Shit. I
thought, stumbling over to the soup station
for a handful of oyster crackers. What if I'm
gay? My life would be so totally over.
This wasn't the first time I looked at a
woman this way. When I was little, I worried
that I was in love with an older neighbor girl
named Hope. She was a Scandinavian vari-
ety of beautiful: storm-blue eyes, billowing
blonde hair, thin buta little chesty. She might
be a dance major now, at Duke or Bard, but at
the time she lived down the street and I'd go
out of my way to see her riding a bicycle into
downtown Beulah, the little town in north-
ern Michigan where we lived. At the time,
I chalked this longing up to jealousy. Hope
was gorgeous and I probably just wanted to
be her, not be on top of her.
My feelings during the Ballerina Inci-
dent of 2009, I told myself, were no differ-
ent. After tossing back a few packs of oyster
crackers and a waxy granny smith apple,
I felt better. In fact, in no time at all, I had
convinced myself that my desire for the girl
was pure envy. After all, I'd had sex with a
bunch of men, and I was great at it. I really
like dick, I told myself. Dick is great, the great-
est. Everything is going to be OK.
So Icontinued to screw men.And yes, I real-
ly did love it. That following summer, I had my
first orgasmwhile ontop of a hairy jazz pianist
with hands the size of Frisbees. However, the
desire to bury my face between a woman's legs
continued to permeate my sexual conscious-
ness, and it only became stronger as I became
more confident as a sexual being.
I gave once-overs to women who slowly
rose, glistening and bikini-clad, from lakes
in Northern Michigan. Tipsy nights of mixed
gender Spin-the-Bottle left me inventing
complex fantasies of woman-heavy three
ways. I developed a crush on "Mad Men"
star January Jones.
By the time I got to college I was
left wondering: Was I ambisextris?
Heteroflexible? One of those attention-
hungry chicks who arrive at college deciding
to give girls a try? Was I a cry for help?
Admittedly, part of my confusion was
based on my lack of experience with women.
With men it was easy: If they hold eye
contact, assume they're interested unless
obviously gay. With women, I felt like I was
starting all over again.
I'd go to house parties in dingy basements
with black lighting and rickety beer pong
tables, and search for girls with figurative
"WSW" stamps on their foreheads. How did
accidental? Even ita girl grinded with me on
a drunken, half-lit dance floor, she could still
be straight and trying to get a man's attention.
I needed there to be a designated girl-on-girl
make-out corner, or the God of Gay Sex to
cast my sights in the right direction.
More than that, I had to prepare myself
for actually getting a girl into bed. The age
old question - What do lesbians really do in
the bedroom? - was hitting me hard. When
my friend, a playwright from New York
with the nape of her neck shaved, described
her only lesbian experience, she shrugged
her shoulders and said, "It was nice, like
a full body massage." This wasn't enough
information. I imagined purchasing suction
cup dildos and strap-ons from Amazon.
com, or wandering into the Safe Sex Store on
South University Avenue only to leave with
nothing a few minutes later.
Of course, I wasn't just worrying about the
sex. What if I found a lady soul mate on pride
night at Necto, or in an empty cafe reading
Bob Hicok and playing with her hair? Was
I gay enough to fall in love with a woman?
To come out of the closet? I thought about
joining a bisexual support group or going
to mixed-gender speed -dating, but I was
paralyzed by my own complication. Instead
I stayed home and watched "The L Word,"
trying to analyze the love scenes.
When that didn't satisfy my inquisitive
appetites, I took courses in sexuality,
thinking academia could help me figure it all
out. However, while my first sex professor,
a 70-year-old lesbian with a smoke-
lowered voice, flicked her laser pointer
over unimpressive penises on ancient
Greek statues and lectured about the Molly
House Raids, I only learned more about the
complex divides between hetero and homo.
As PowerPoint slides about Oscar Wilde
and Lady Chatterley flickered before me,
the existence of bridges between the two
sexualities seemed less and less possible.
When I read the "Symposium" a year
later, I was only more confused. Plato's the-
ory on the creation of love seemed to cast out
bisexuality altogether. Aristophanes spoke
of ancient creatures that scurried about the
earth with four legs, four arms and two sets
of genitalia. These hybrids could have been
two fused women, two fused men or a fused
man and woman. However, when the gods
decided these beings were becoming too
powerful, Zeus split them down the middle
and they became what we are today: male or
female bodies. These divided pairs then spent
their lives searching for their other halves.
The hiccupping Aristophanes went on to
say, "Those men who are halves of a being of
the common sex(es) :.. are lovers of women,
and most adulterers come from this class,
as also do women who are mad about men
and sexually promiscuous. Women who are
halves of a female whole direct their affections
towards women and pay little attention to
men; 'Lesbians' belong to this category." In
hybrid, they were attracted to their own sex;
if they came from opposite-sex hybrids, they
were what we would now call "heterosexual."
Well, great, I thought, more exclusive cat-
egories.
Later that week, my professor spoke
candidly of our doom. He said that as
descendants of these creatures who rolled
around on eight limbs, we are cursed with
a desperate need for unity. But our only
means for serious connection is sex. And sex,
according to him, is a total letdown. The act
is insufficientbecause, even if we go through
the motions of wining, dining, eye-fucking
and foreplay, the resultant sexual encounter
is short-lived - for a college kid, probably 15
minutes at best. Then, once the condom is
lying impotent on the rim of a wastebasket,
the desperation for connection begins again.
Wow, I thought, that is some poetic shit.
I completely bought into the turmoil
of it all. Human existence was chiseled
down to walking the Earth in search of our
counterparts, and on top of that, even if we
found our other halves, we could only unite
with them in a series of brief and entirely
unsatisfying sexual experiences. My little
identity problem seemed microscopic in the
face of all this eternal loneliness.
A few days later, ina cafeteria not unlike the
spot of my ballerina-induced panic attack, aboy
takingBiologyofSexmentionedthetruthabout
the anglerfish. He said that during the mating
process, a male angler literally melts into a
female's body;makingthemone organism.
"What?" I gasped, throwing a curly fry
down on my plate. "Are you for real?"
"Yeah," said the boy. "So?"
"So? So? Don't you realize this means an
anglerfish, a big ugly fish at the bottom of the
ocean with a light on its head, can achieve
the one thing that we crave more than any-
thing else?"
Of course, no one realized. Half the
table looked at me blankly. The other half
continued to discuss an upcoming Econ test
and lap at soft-serve ice cream cones.
"True connection! Like in Plato's
'Symposium,"' I said.
"Isn't the anglerfish that scary one in
'Finding Nemo?' " asked a girl.
I left a couple minutes later, huffy and
masochisticallywrapped up in the poetics of
it all. Basically, it was official: We are alone
forever, lower on the romantic totem pole than
a fish dwelling in the ocean's deepest caverns.
During my oceanographylectures, I doodled
anglers in my notebook with a black felt-tipped
pen; I considered tattooing one on my hip as
homage to the fish's superiority. But, like a lot
of trite ideas I've had - a surface piercing above
my eyebrow, a commune called The Roach
Hotel - this impulse faded with a little time.
The magic of my professor's lecture on Plato
also dwindled, and I was left with my original
question: Where does this leave me?Plato spoke.
through Aristophanes about the history of
what we now call "straight" and "gay" people.
beings with two vaginas and a penis that
could have represented me in the distant past.
My love of both sexes left me ancestor-less; I
wasn't recognized in the contemporary or
ancient world. I was just as lost as before.
It took a guy who was both my ex-boyfriend
and best friend to shake me out of the hopeless
place where I found myself. He was a product
of science, concocted from the donated sperm
of a gay man in California and the egg of his
lesbian mother. His mom raised him with
the support of many gay women, and this
upbringing made him a sort of secondary
authority on the subject of lesbian lifestyles.
"It's not penis envy," I said as I sprawled
across his dorm room futon with my head in
his lap.
He played aimlessly with the hair I briefly
considered hacking off as a neon sign of my
sexuality. "OK, then what is it?" he asked.
"Or maybe it is ... I just don't know how to
find her, you know?"
"It'll happen when it happens, Em," he
sighed.
His intonation was plain. He was gently
telling me to calm my ass down, and he was
right. I fell into a light sleep as he rolled
through reruns of "How I Met Your Mother."
My struggle seemed a bit silly after our
talk, and I wondered why I felt the need to
nail down my sexuality. I recalled the facts
of ancient Greece, where everyone was doing
everyone. My imagination recreated an
ancient text in which two women happily go
to the cobbler to buy dildos made of sheep-
skin and then return home to their husbands.
Back then no one was gay or straight, but
everyone was screwing. Maybe they had the
right idea.
Sexual preference gradually became
overrated in my eyes. As my friend intuited,
I was obsessing over labeling myself because
I wanted my attraction authenticated by
experience. I thought that if I joined queer
culture's exclusive club, I'd feel like I belonged
to a group. But why did everything have to
come down to my "interested in" section on
Facebook? If I defined myself by who I slept
with, I might let my sex life eclipse some of
my other, equally important parts.
Instead, I decided that I wouldn't broad-
cast my urges, but I wouldn't ignore Them
either. I'd figure it all out when the time came
- perhaps if I met the right girl. And with
the right girl I might not be able to merge
with penetration, but so what? The g-spot is
only an extension of the clit anyway, and the
male anglerfish literally becomes just a pair
of gonads when he painfully melts into the
female's body.
I didn't want to lose myself while seeking a
soul mate. I could be satisfied with whoever I
was with, man or woman, as long as we could
make each other come, tasting those sunbursts
that expand through the skin before rolling
onto our backs to rediscover the sky.
Emily Pittinos is an Art & Design and LSA
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