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The Hook Up: A Relationships Column

Hailing from the rough-and-tumble deserts of southern Arizona, where one doesn’t have to bother with such trivialities as “coats” or “daylight savings time,” Anna Pulley is a professional tweeter/blogger for Mother Jones and a freelance writer living in San Francisco. Find her at annapulley.com and on Twitter @annapulley.

A question I’d love to see raised is why lesbians/bi women seem to go straight after 30? Lot’s of my friends have done so. Sure, children might be a reason, but that’s possible in a gay relationship too. People have started to try to fix me up with men since they seem to think it’s about time I got over my youthful follies, or something. Not going to happen for me. Am I missing something here? — Anonymous

Anna Says: Right, you must’ve missed that addendum in the Lesbian Handbook. Let me paraphrase it for you: It’s like Cinderella. Once you’ve hit 30, your carriage turns into a pumpkin casserole recipe from Martha Stewart Living. Your L Word DVDs will also turn into Katherine Heigl rom-coms, so look out for that.

This is all speculation on my end, of course. As a lowly 27-year-old, I still have a few good years of lezzin’ it up before The Curse kicks in. The time span is even shorter if you’re a gay penguin, like Roy and Silo from And Tango Makes Three, who became ex-gays after only a few short years in the limelight!

I’m kidding, folks. I can think of quite a few (hundred thousand) people who’ve managed to stay gay past 30 with seemingly little effort. Sexuality is rarely something that stays fixed our whole lives. It’s a narrative, and it takes as many variations, forks, U-turns and U-hauls as necessary to fulfill this crazy little thing called love. After all, very few lesbians are lifers, meaning they’ve at one point or another sampled the male species, and some continue to partake even after they’ve expressed their love for the ladies: We call these people “Republican Senators.”

I’m sure there are a few people who go back to being straight because it’s easier, culturally and socially. But I think mostly, people simply change. Or maybe they only change on the surface, but they still desire, fantasize, and occasionally hook up with women, even though outwardly they may seem like just another straight chick. Sexuality is incredibly complex, but it’s (sadly) often only defined by who we are sleeping with at any given moment.

As one of my friends put it, “I think that there is a visibility question here — people read me as straight because I present the image of a straight woman. It is easier for me, being married to a Marine and all, to not be “out” about being bi. People see what they want to see, no matter what is going on internally/emotionally.”

It doesn’t help that bisexuality is a sexual identity that is often shrugged off as “a phase,” “confusion,” a “gateway,” “homosexuality lite” or “college.” The more we counter these stereotypes, the easier it’ll be for us all to live the lives we want to live.

You can start by telling those friends trying to hook you up with dudes to STFU.

What’s with the death of the lesbian hook up? I live in Sweden and here you simply cannot go out on a Saturday and pick a stranger up. The culture is very clique-y and if you don’t know someone they will consider you weird if you hit on them without “proper introduction” so to speak. In short, people don’t have sex anymore. Is this a Scandinavian thing (pretty uptight lesbians here!) or is the hook up dead? I’ve noticed a distinct change in climate during the last few years. I’ve read lesbian blogs and articles claiming the same from different parts of the world. What’s your take? — Salicia

Anna says: I feel your pain, Salicia. Sadly, what with the whole legalizing gay marriage, repealing DADT, ending employee discrimination, passing hate crime legislation and watching Rachel Maddow five days a week, we somehow ran out of time to fight for the right to hook up. Even Shane became a one-woman gal at the end of The L Word. Where are our priorities?

I’m only partially joking. Though I do wish we could be more like gay men sometimes — make a quick trip to IKEA for lampshades and end up with a hot Swedish meatball instead. In fact, in all of my lady lovin’ years, I’ve had exactly one one-night-stand. And even then, she tried to get me to come to her birthday party the next weekend.

One of the reasons queer women have fewer no-strings-attached hook ups is because we love strings, obvs. Our casual sex often involves someone who is an ex, a friend, a friend’s ex, an ex’s friend, the barista at our favorite Starbucks, etc — basically someone we will eventually run into again. This tends to make hook ups complicated, guilt-ridden or just plain awkward.

Also, women are socialized not to aggressively pursue people we want to sleep with. We’re subtle. We flirt and listen and engage, but such strategies rarely turn into a steamy trip to the coat closet. It doesn’t help that lesbian bars police the hell out of their bathrooms. I got kicked out of a bar once because a friend was in the stall with me, helping me put a band-aid on a hard to reach place and the lezstapo just assumed we were being inappropriate and booted us. It didn’t help that I wasn’t wearing pants at the time. (Kidding!)

I don’t know how the online dating scene is in Scandinavia, but in the U.S. it’s becoming more and more common practice to meet potential hook ups that way. Of course, we’re a tad behind the curve on that one. There aren’t a lot of sites that focus purely on hook ups for queer women. Lesbianpersonals.com is one. Though they asked for my cup size upon signing up, and then never sent me my login info, so who knows if it’s legit. Maybe they knew I was a spy. (Call me, SassyPants03121908!) Many dating sites give you the option of choosing “casual encounters” versus “seeking someone to share pets and argue with in Trader Joes.” Going online takes care of the cliquey-ness you’re feeling in bars, though it does tend to be much more time-consuming.

As much as I’d like to see queer girls the world over wearing buttons that say, “Let’s have sex and never see each other again,” I don’t think that will be happening any time soon. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say hook up culture is dead, I would say that it may have gotten lazy and decided to just watch Buffy instead.

Readers, what say you? Is queer girl hook up culture going the way of the dodo bird? Where have you had luck meeting potential flings?

Got a question of your own? Send it to [email protected].

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