I think, a couple of weeks ago, back when the horrors of the past few weeks were still fresh, I alluded to the fact that there was an open tab in my browser that was a Refinery29 piece about a bi woman who loves having long nails. It is still in my tabs (well, it was until I closed it a second ago, anyway) and today feels like the day to weigh in on it — or at least write an essay loosely inspired by it, as is my general wont.
Long nails! Can queer women have them? Yes, of course, who cares. Whether or not you have long nails is a personal choice (I personally cannot do it, the keyboard clacking drives me nuts when my nails are even minimally long), and if you’re worried about the sexual implications, you can always do that thing where you keep the nails on the business fingers short, or don a latex glove with cotton balls in the finger tips before you go spelunking in someone’s holes. Or just be really careful, that’s another strategy that works. It also feels worth noting here that while queer women might be more likely to have to worry about whether their nails will damage someone’s delicate internal tissue, straight women also use their fingers in people’s orifices — whether because they’re masturbating or because they’ve mastered the art of the prostate massage.
But that’s not really why any of this gets brought up in conversation, is it. No one is actually launching discourse around the queer manicure because they care about the (very easy, very boring) answer as to whether or not you can successfully finger a person with acrylics. They’re bringing it up because of a belief in a queer aesthetic, one that does not include women who have long nails. It’s the same belief that gives us these endless essays about bi women with boyfriends who shave off part of their hair and feel reconnected to their queerness, as though having too much hair prevents you from being attracted to your own gender.
(Full disclosure here that I did have an undercut from about summer 2014 to fall 2018, during which time I did have a boyfriend, but I did not do the undercut so that I would read as more queer. I did it because I thought I looked cute.)
Anyway. I love fashion. I love aesthetics. I love a good look. I also feel inherently at odds with this idea of communicating my queerness through how I dress. Some of this is just my inherent orneriness and contrarianism: I want to dress for me, for what makes me feel good, not for the world to assess whether I am queer or not. As a teenager, I chafed at the idea that being sapphic required me to don flannel and listen to folk music, and as an adult, I still have that irritation.
But this brings me to the promise of the subject line: what even would a bisexual aesthetic be, you know? It feels like a bizarre thing to even ask, given that bisexuals come in a variety of genders and gender presentations even before you get to the whole “we date people of many genders” thing. When people talk about bisexual aesthetic — which is, again, mostly in the form of those endless essays about women’s haircuts — it feels like it’s about “looking queer” while one finds oneself in a straight appearing relationship. But then how does one flag as bisexual when one has a queer partner, you know? Is a bisexual aesthetic going super gender non-conforming when you’re with a different gender partner but super gender conforming when you’re with a same gender partner? What if you’re dating another bi person? Do you do some Tilda Swinton/Tom Hiddleston thing when you’re in a “straight” relationship and both do your best Pete Buttigieg (or the lady version of Pete Buttigieg) when the relationship is queer?
When I try to imagine any of this I get a mental image of that half man/half woman figure that appears on gender neutral restroom signs.
Anyway.
You should dress how you like. You should date who you like. It doesn’t matter if you are immediately legible to other people, or if how you dress communicates someone else’s idea of queerness, you know? I mean, yes, I understand the idea of a queer aesthetic as a way of flagging one’s identity in a hostile world where queerness cannot be spoken aloud. But we’re not in that world anymore.
Dress how you want. You’re still bi, I promise.
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