Issue 18: Yeah The Girls
Frankie Dale | She/Her
THE COOL GIRL AND THE PRINCESS
After being fingered on a roof in Chicago at my step mum’s 50th by a guy that looked like the 2007 version of Jonah Hill, I felt pretty good about myself. Dad was furious, but, whatever.
It’s no secret to you and I that female sexuality has been policed for-fucking-ever. In our lovely society, where voracious male sexuality is celebrated and passive female sexuality must be protected; we are all a bit fucked. Because female sexuality is so policed, we are expected to be the cool girl with the bald vag but also the princess who doesn’t have an opinion on anything who doesn’t even like sex. I think both of these characters still require you to shave.
Embarrassingly, I have definitely attempted to embrace both characters before. An ex of mine would consistently come home at around 3am after he got bored of attempting to cheat on me. Not only did ol’ mate have an obsession with being called ‘daddy’ but got annoyed when I wasn’t game to upload our amateur sex tape to Pornhub—“our faces aren’t even in it?”. Yeah, but my family portrait is!
Even as the princess, I found myself shaving because I knew it made him so uncomfortable seeing a single piece of hair. More depressingly, I had been faking it every single time for three years. When he moved on from our relationship by fucking my best friend, the stockholm syndrome I acquired from years of having a ‘cool girl’ mindset told me to give them my blessing and move on. Cool girls never get angry.
When I used to have sex with my year 12 boyfriend, I never questioned the fact that I found myself saying things like “you’re the best I’ve ever had”, as if I wasn’t a sexually inexperienced 16 year old who had just discovered that a blow job didn’t require you to actually ‘blow’ on a penis. I’m worried that I have permanently impaired his ability to pleasure women from the various acts I pretended to enjoy. Unfortunately, the rigid missionary sex we had was less arousing than watching Trump’s inaugural address. But how was he to know that I was mentally checked out during sex? I never said anything, and he never asked, because at the end of the day I wanted to exist in his mind as the completely unphased, always DTF, cool girl.
My friend was complaining recently about the fact that we have normalised sex centred around male pleasure so much that she sometimes can’t even tell if she even needs to be there or whether she could be replaced by say, a sock. True, she had just finished watching Normal People, but she has a point.
So, what’s going on here? We live in a society that dictates how women are meant to feel about sex. The majority of the time I need to be adopting a damsel in distress persona whilst also being completely unaffected and cool. I need to be doing the most and doing the least.
Do any of us stand a chance at rebelling against this predicament? I tell myself that I was willingly taking on these characters—can I even blame guys for this?
Sex is complicated, for everyone. Feelings get in the way, people get hurt. Unwanted syphilis is always a bit shit too. To be Frank (honest) , there’s really no shame of what you’re into or what you do—ever. But, make sure you are feeling safe, respected and most importantly liberated. Shave, don’t shave—remember no one who matters gives a fuck.