During the peak of the second wave of the pandemic, I got a booty call.
It was not your classic, unsubtle, textbook example of “Hey, you up?” but one that at first glance, would be a decent, genuine WhatsApp message, and maybe even a little feminist.
Z asked me in many well constructed and full of ‘apologies if this is unwelcome’ considerations if I wanted to have sex with him again. I can’t deny that this did not do anything to kindle my libido, however, beyond my excitement, I was queerly amused. It was the peak of the second wave and this was the first text he had sent me in two years.
He began by invoking a shared connection of a past hookup and turned it into philosophical musings of revisiting moments of comfort, a shared sexual appetite and kinky desires. At one point, he even used the phrase “negligible cognitive dissonance”.
Dating culture and the fictions of a post-feminist world
Dating apps like Bumble, Tinder and Hinge have radically altered the dating game by making it easier to access sex and intimacy (although only to those with caste-class capital), pushing hookup culture from the times primarily meant for cis-heterosexual men to have a free rein on sex with women, to a more sex-positive, feminist, and queer exploration of one’s desires.
Bumble is now the ‘feminist tinder’ which operates on allowing women to make the first move, and the ads for Tinder and Bumble are both queer positive. Just like Tinder and Bumble use ‘feminism’ and ‘queerness’ as a market driven tool for tokenistic representation – Tinder is notorious for banning trans and non-binary people – in this day of ‘woke’ performative politics, cis heterosexual men have also started using feminist and queer positive political buzzwords to navigate the waters of hookup culture (ironically, I met Z on Bumble).
The unsubtle ‘hey you ups’ and ‘wanna fuck’ propositions of ‘fuckboys’ who treat women as sexual objects have been swarming in the digital space for a long time but now that we have arrived at this supposed post-feminist world, these men have changed tactics from ‘hey you up’ to ‘negligible cognitive dissonance’.
Bisexual shame and guilt
I felt discomfort at receiving his text. Not because this might be a case of #menaretrash and that so many women I know hook up with men who seem mildly progressive or decent as the dating pool for good men could not be more shallow.
But because I am attracted to men like him.
And as a bisexual woman, the discomfort is even greater. Bisexual folks experience stigma not only in heterosexual communities but within the LGBTQIA+ community as well. They are often excluded and rendered invisible in LGBTQIA+ spaces and conversations because of assumptions of being straight and are judged for dating cis heterosexual men.
Feelings of inadequacy, of not being gay enough or being an imposter, often contribute to feelings of shame and internalised homophobia in bisexual people. Conversations with other bisexual and bi-curious women close to me, circle around this shame of still being attracted to men, when “the sex wasn’t even that good”.
To have arrived at a juncture, where I can identify as a bisexual woman, has had its own ups and downs and for the most part of it, dating men has crippled my sense of identity as a queer woman. Until recently, I found immense unease in my attraction to partners who are men because I was having average sex and was resigned to it as my fate. As someone who knows her queer theory and feminist writers, I felt embarrassed and shameful. I turned any scope for pleasure into an abyss of self doubt. Why do I find myself attracted to men and if I do, am I really gay?
But there’s still desire and we hate ourselves more for it.
The complexities of desire and consent
Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story ‘Cat Person’ about a college student who had bad sex with a 30-year-old man divided the world around questions of consent and captured this double bind very well. Halfway through the date, Margot realises she does not want to have sex with him but has it anyway because she felt that there exists a point when it is ‘too late’ to withdraw – the awkward effort to end it being too exhausting. People debated if what happened between Margot and Robert was consensual. Was Robert the bad guy because he was not intuitive to her discomfort, or was Margot at fault because she did not communicate it?
Also read: My (Now Ex) Boyfriend Told Me He’s Bisexual – Here’s Why He Should Wear It With Pride
What is most interesting is that so many women identified with Margot and confirmed the truth about the plague of bad sex in times of progressive dating. Why Roupenian’s story is so effective is because her story helps us question the limitation of the register of consent to understand positive desire. In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again : Women and Desire in the Age of Consent, Katherine Angel writes,
“Consent – agreement to sex – should not be conflated with sexual desire, enjoyment or enthusiasm, not because we should be resigned to bad sex, but precisely because we should not be. That women experience so much misery-making sex is a profound social and political issue and consent cannot solve it for us.”
Beyond heteropessimism
I, as a bisexual woman, have been having bad sex and joking about it as a sign of my resignation to the insurmountable problem of heterosexuality. The jokes become an anaesthetic submission to heteropessimism and graduate into reposting memes on the internet about compulsory hetersexuality and ‘can’t with men’ as if the sole problem of the institution of heteropatriarchy is men. But as Seresin says,
“To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better.”
Desiring men is not the problem, the institution of heterosexuality is, one which culturally engineers all structures of society to uphold it as the norm. While Seresin pushes us in the direction of change, I still wonder if there’s ever a way of challenging the structure of heterosexuality and not resigning ourselves to a life of shame around this desire? Why do I still think about entertaining booty calls by men whose priority at the peak of a pandemic is a quick fuck? And most of all, how do we have better sex with men?
Will sex be good again tomorrow?
To imagine a transformation beyond a numbing resignation takes time and energy. Cis heterosexual men have definitely not made it easier when accounts of intimate partner violence, manipulation and gaslighting are the everyday realities of most women who date these men, the almost weekly call out posts bearing proof of that.
But heterosexuality is not hopeless – we must not settle for bad sex and unkind relationships because ‘that is just the way it is’ while laughing our way through it. Participating in shaming ourselves because of how we desire, will not benefit us. But practicing queer hope and working towards building relationships of uncompromised pleasure will. I want to demand pleasurable sex with not just women, but everyone.
But until then, here’s to believing there can be good sex, one where we are not riddled with shame because #allmenaretrash but where we can be our queerest, desiring selves.
Ankita Dhar Karmakar is a recent post graduate in English Literature from Ambedkar University. She’s mostly chattering away in her book club and making digital artwork. She is fascinated by digital sexual cultures and cats. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter.
Featured image: Pariplab Chakraborty