315. Decrease (V)

Lesbians tend to find me attractive. This is why, one drunken evening, some Swedish seamstress from the Royal Opera House, complete with close-cropped blonde hair per military regulations, ended up with her tongue down my mouth. “Why do you like me?” she said. “Well, I’m a feminine man and you’re a masculine woman, so the energy balances out,” I whispered in her ear. As usual, the truth went down without reaction. “It all sounds very disinhibited,” my mother observed sometime later; and, indeed, it was.

Lesbians tend to be a bit marginal in their lesbianism; as someone once observed, “It’s not like being gay, lesbianism is more light-hearted.” In other words, there is no sodomy involved; and lesbianism features prominently in masculine sexual fantasies, although these fantasies do not feature actual lesbians and instead use heterosexual women whose labile sexual desire can be easily manipulated for pornographic purposes.

There are outright dykes who have almost zero attraction to men, but then there is a whole range along that spectrum—including unattractive girls who spoof lesbianism to get attention—so I always end up targeted by the marginal cases. I know why this happens: I was raised by a single mom, so I modelled myself on women; and this means that I signal femininity, interact with people in a more feminine style—and I have a lisp which feminises my voice; but this is inherited via my mother’s sister, her non-identical twin. So lesbians who are not total dykes find me attractive, since they are residually interested in men and reproduction and yet are attracted to female features.

There are always marginal cases who would never declare as lesbian but work the borderline. As far as physiognomy goes, they have larger clitorises that most women—and I suppose the clitoris is a latent penis, in these cases developed to a greater extent by high testosterone. They have masculine-type jobs, they work in Information Science or manage databases and the like; more logical, more scientific—more like men. Yet one girl I went out with was still upset when her boss was gay; she realised there was no way, unlike her old straight boss, to flirt round him and get her way—a woman’s contribution to the workplace. Still, I caught her longing gaze at a dancing cage girl in a casino once; the eyes never lie.

Here is a case that asked for my phone number (makes first approach, not lady-like). Her parents were doctors, a surgeon and a gynaecologist. There are two ways to cut this case, a case that split 70/30 lesbian/straight: hormones and psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytical explanation is that she modelled herself on her mother who spent all day at work looking at women’s genitalia; she wanted to be like mom, so she became lesbian—and a devoted feminist. However, there was ambivalence here; she eventually managed to paralyse herself below the waist in a car crash. Psychoanalytical: “Mom, you spend all day making women fertile, but you didn’t make ME fertile!” So this was revenge for her mother’s career and divorce, her failure to show her daughter how to be a woman and, in fact, her decision to prioritise other women’s fertility instead. Her mother was a peculiarly vulgar woman I recall, with a sadistic streak—it goes without saying that female gynaecologists hate women.

For the autists in the audience, the explanation is hormonal: her father was a surgeon, a high testosterone profession—a good butcher; her mother was a consultant, so pushy and doubtless high testosterone—probably latently lesbian, hence her specialisation in gynaecology. Put them together and you get a high-testosterone daughter—a proper lesbian feminist; indeed, she had masculinised facial features, large shovel-like hands, and quite a moustache. She was racing her car at the time she was paralysed (to be one of the boys). She could have broken her neck or lost her arm; but it was below the waist, gynaecological; so symbolism remains, even under Occam’s razor.