14-May-2006
FOR THOSE OF US who expect reciprocation, no matter how much we love our pillow princesses, we may never feel loved back. Probably the worst, most frustrating pillow princess I was ever involved with was a pale, ponytail sporting girl named Meredith, a self-described “intellectual” and “literary type.” She was studying to become a literature professor, and her claim to fame was her inability to actually pronounce the word literature, which she always called lidda-cher. This was not a joke to her, but some sort of chronic—and probably genetic--brain fart. Meredith was a classic Sleeping Beauty Princess; she conked out after every orgasm, and it wasn’t just with me. In later years, I spoke with one or two other women she had slept with, and they always told the same story. Not only was she no good after she came, she wasn’t that hot before either. Yet she was always complaining about never having a girlfriend, or just about women in general. Women were shallow, she could never have the one she wanted, and so on… She despised butches as giving lesbians “a bad name.” She preferred to chase after what she called “high femmes.”
Years later, in graduate school, Meredith experienced an awakening of her “true identity,” and called to tell me about it. She’d decided to claim the part of herself she’d been suppressing all these years: the identity of the butch top.
Two months later, Meredith visited. She’d cut off her ponytail and was wearing a man’s tweed suit from a thrift store. It made her look like Pee Wee Herman with a flattop. She told me her queer studies classes at Granola University made her finally feel comfortable with her butch identity. Besides, she was tired of losing all the good femmes to all those swaggering “superbutches.” She was giving up her femme-to-femme philosophy, and damn it felt good.
(to be continued...)
