year-of-yes

[year-of-yes]

Rabbit Hole

There’s nothing that those of us with ADHD love more than falling down the rabbit hole of a new hobby. I’ve decided that my new rabbit hole will be vaginas. Queer vaginas. 

I’ve been exploring my sexuality more thoroughly this year, prompted by quarantine and my last year of grad school, to really lean in. 

I’m a serial monogamist and find myself with free time - my boyfriend is studying abroad for the next year - and we’ve decided to open up the relationship. Given that I’ve always been in relationships, or spent most of my pre-tinder years woefully sexually repressed, I’ve never just gone balls to the wall in terms of prioritizing MY sex life. For me. I’m a notorious people pleaser and just the thought of telling a guy on a first date that I was only interested in casual sex would have made my skin crawl 5 years ago.

But no more!

The first few months of my new found freedom have been a veritable smorgasbord of men WAY out of my league. Something about knowing I’m in an open relationship allows guys to relax and just have fun with intimacy. (Men are the worst.) Ive never been on smoozier dates, with nicer wine and hotter guys in my life. Should I ever become single again, I will probably just continue to pretend to have a boyfriend, because DAMN. I’ve started keeping an album in my phone of their tinder profile pics just so when I’m old I can look back and remind myself that yeah, I FUCKED. 

Part of this new exploration has been coming to terms with the fact that yes I like women, and yes, I’m not attracted to ALL women, and yes I have mostly hooked up with guys but YEAH, I was definitely bisexual. And that I should stop being afraid and just DO IT.

But like any baby dyke on her first foray into the unknown, I was like a traveler with a brand new passport leaving the country for the first time, blinking out of an airport to realize that I didn’t speak the language, and oh yeah, I was dressed like a tourist. 

Despite the wisdom in taking things slow, my ADHD impulsivity had taken over and like any good hobby worth hyper focusing on, I was determined that I would learn by DOING. I wanted to have sex with women. Now, preferably.

I thought hooking up with a woman for the first time would be as easy as matching with someone hot on tinder - after all, thats all it really took with guys. I casually started following more queer women on instagram, tiktok and twitter, paying attention to what I could learn, assured that on any given day, I’d run into someone at the grocery store or match with a babe on tinder who would sweep me off my feet. Because now I was ACTIVELY looking at women! Not passively checking them out!

WRONG. After months of falling for dozens of matches who never messaged me, or conversations that never led to plans, or plans that fizzled out, I pulled on my big girl pants and decided that I was going to be a woman of action and get.myself.on.a.date. I’m hot goddamn it! I was going to MAKE SURE they knew I wasn’t just another straight girl bored on an app. I WANTED TO EAT PUSSY.

 it might be time to introduce that in addition to my very noticeable ADHD, I also have much less noticeable autism. All that business about girls presenting differently than boys means that others rarely pick up on it - and I don’t feel the need to mention it unless I think it will impact our relationship, like with a friend or coworker. I’ve learned that mentioning it on dates doesn’t really make things easier, but thanks to years masking, I can pull off a first date no sweat. Continuing on to dates 2 and 3 can be trickier, but I’ve learned how to navigate those waters with men who, suffice to say, are rarely intuitive enough to pick up on anything. In fact, I would venture a guess that most people on a date with me consider me very extroverted. Nevermind that I’m too mentally exhausted to leave my room the day after a date. I talk a lot, occasionally too much. I often look bored or bitchy because resting autistic face is more exhausting to change than resting bitch face, so I make up for it by being overly chatty when we hit on any of my special interests.

I have NO idea how this will translate on a date with a woman. My instinct is to say that I am overthinking and likely it will feel like any other date, but then I’ve always found women harder to read than men, and found it harder to see how they read me. I was also terrified that flirting would feel different - what if I was giving off a friendly vibe, not an I-want-to-fuck vibe? Is it typical for women to fuck on a first date? Should I touch her to let her know I was into her? Or did the fact that I had gotten all the way from a swipe right on tinder to an actual date suffice in itself to let her know? These might not be the sorts of questions a non-anxious neurotypical person might ask themselves, but they are the questions that I had slowly built up an arsenal of information for over the last 14 years in my interactions with men - information that was no longer applicable. So I set about seeking out this information in a way familiar to most autistics learning information that came naturally to others.

Google! I realized that I know very little about the actual gay scene despite having queer friends. How do lesbians flirt? How do you pick one up? What is considered too forward? And how in gods name did you eat pussy? Because goddamn it I intended to be good.

I had heard the term lesbian tiktok thrown around and decided to see what was what. Mostly I found videos of 20 year olds with flawless skin making lewd tongue movements that were supposed to be sexy. After probably 40 cumulative hours of trawling tiktok I realized I had a type: androgynous girls who were beautiful despite dressing down and not wearing a ton of makeup. Then I had a real heated soul search with myself. Was I attracted to them because I…wanted to be them? Liked the way they looked and dressed because I too aspired to cool androgyny? A few more days on tiktok and I put my guilt behind me: I definitely had a type and who gave a fuck if it was sort of self indulgent.

I also refused to go back to a time when I was bad at sex. I consider myself a solid sexual partner, keeping guys generally out of my league coming back for more. Thats because I refused to feel self conscience naked, was an excellent kisser, an active participant, vocal about my desires and (most important for men) my ~enthusiasm,  and understood the power of delayed gratification. 

I realized that while I could read articles about eating pussy all day long, it would ultimately come down to what the other girl was into. I’m a proficient masturbator and know what I like others to do to me - but I wasn’t yet accustomed to picking up on the cues that women give about what they liked. I resolved that the first time I was with a girl, I was going to lean in to the delayed gratification. Focus on kissing, touching, necks, ears, breasts, navels etc. so by the time I came face to face with a vagina it would be so wet I’d have my work cut out for me. In a little vagina shaped cake. Why not just ask them, you say?? Because! I’m extremely awkward and don’t want whoever she is to know that I’m woefully inexperienced. Fake. it. til. You. Make. it. 

It was like being a horny teenager again: desperate for interaction but unsure how anything worked. I was googling phrases like “bisexual style” and “how to eat pussy without getting tired”. I read hours of r/actuallesbians, Tumblr posts and go magazine articles. Mostly I realized that I would be able to skirt through to some degree: I was a solid 6-7 on the attractiveness scale, willing to be aggressive and outgoing no matter how awkward it made me feel, with a roommate who could make sure I looked stylish and a can-do attitude.

Now all I had to do was find a girl I wanted to fuck, who wanted to fuck me too.