Gender trouble.

(Oh look, a "sneaky" allusion to the famous Judith Butler book of the same name! How many people would have got this reference without me pointing it out? It's too late now, your time to shine is over, yes my blog post is using the name of a book published four years before I was born. Think of it as inter-textuality. So post-modern!)

Gender sucks. This is an opinion but also kind of a fact. As my non-binary squeeze asked me a few days ago, "what is gender?" And I kind of floundered and offered a few responses - it's a set of social behaviours, it's to do with human conditioning, it's innate, it's learned, it's a spectrum, it's all performative actions - but none of them seemed to really work in the face of their gaze, their cool almond-shaped eyes looking up at me, ringed with delicate eyelashes and deep thought.

I have to have some notion of gender, right? It's something we all have, but not something that gets critically considered unless you or someone you know isn't cisgender - that is, having your gender identity and your physical sex match up. I am not cisgender. I am a demi-girl, which is one of those "tumblr genders" that people seem to think doesn't exist. But also being pansexual, I'm used to erasure.

Being a demi-girl, to me, means I have some level of detachment from being feminine or female. As much as I am female, I am also not-female. This element of not-female isn't male, either: it's just not really anything, maybe agender or genderqueer (i.e. having no gender, or being somewhere in the middle of the indiscrete mass of gender identities) but not specific. Being a demi-girl, for me, means some kind of disconnect between my XX-chromosone, supposedly 'female' body and the expectations placed upon me for being a girl.

For all my behaviours - my empathy, my need to please but also challenge authority figures, my rebellious streak, my wanderlust, the Maths papers I bailed on - I worry whether they were truly my choices or made by the environment I grew up in, which necessarily includes the patriarchy. I am good at remembering names, but is that because of the burden of femaleness impacting my thought processes and others' expectations of me since I was a kid to the extent that it's become part of my personality?

I have too many unanswered questions about this, so identifying as not-a-cis-girl helps me with it. Being demi- helps me feel more secure in my skin, helps me challenge notions, helps remind me that acting typically feminine does not make me a stereotype, that girly is not synonymous with weak, that internalised misogyny is not my fault but that of the system I was born into. (It's like one of my agender friends commenting how accepting her gender identity as agender helped her be more comfortable wearing dresses and skirts: to paraphrase, once she accepted she had no gender and thus nothing to lose from not being 'feminine enough', the act wearing feminine clothing didn't carry the same problems and was liberating.) I have no problems with the undeniable womanly curves of my body, as a binder would probably damage me too much without doing anything to sort out my hip-to-waist ratio that proves I endured female puberty - but being unhappy in your body is not a prerequisite of any gender identity whatsoever. Dysphoria is not essential to the trans or non-binary experience.

You may feel this exact way and yet still identify as cisgender, but guess what? That's your prerogative. Like not every person who is attracted to people of more than one gender has to identify as anything other than how they feel, nobody's going to try and make you have a gender that's not what you identify as. (Shout-out to all the straight guys in the back I've slept with! Guess what? You've fucked a non-binary person! If that makes you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem.) At the same time, there are options.

Gender isn't a fixed construct. We get to make up our minds ourselves. There are more words than there used to be, but there's also much more awareness and discussion of feeling like this. Feeling confused over my gender isn't a new phenomenon for humanity, and not for me - I've been a conflicted tomboy all my life, stealing my brother's girls but pretending not to like pink to keep my brand consistent - but I have the language now to express it. Technically I am trans, in that I am not-cis, but I don't see myself in that umbrella. Rather I am in the non-binary camp, of people whose gender is not either girl or boy, yes or no, pink or blue. How is increased language and awareness a bad thing?

And because of all this, and because of understanding gender as a spectrum before I even worked out where I was on it, I define as pansexual. I am attracted to people, and their gender is irrelevant. Call me bisexual and prepare for a long discussion about this.

I still don't know what gender is. For my enbie beauty (whose non-binary label they wear as a hesitant badge of pride), it's freedom to dress as they feel on any given day without giving a fuck. It's not worrying about not being served in Betty's for wearing a skirt and not having their identity questioned on the days they wear combats. It's something that makes them happy in a world full of insecurity and uncertainty: the knowledge that they are not boy or girl, and that it's okay and really most people don't care other than to compliment them on their banging Hello Kitty dress.

Dating my enbie (non-binary person) brings its own string of challenges: it's made me aware of how I use language so much more, the arbitrariness of gendered clothing, the constant weighing up of whether to confront catcallers or not, and the total shittiness of men in women's clothing being a "joke", like femininity is funny and shameful.

Wearing female clothing brings you into a female space regardless of biology, and on the streets that can mean harassment and danger as others feel entitled to look at you and make comments. My enbie happens to be 6'2" and wear stubble with their flowing red and brown locks, which raises even more confusion from passers-by. There's not been much actual street harassment, but there's so much whispering and confusion, comments to friends, wolf-whistling. I ignore it, burning to confront harassers and educate them about gender; I can't imagine how it makes my other half feel.

Neither of us are out to our parents, and there's something depressing about that. If we can't be who we really are round our families for fear of them not understanding - or worse, laughing about it, or reacting badly, or cutting us off - then living authentically gets that much harder,

Maybe we all have gender trouble. But if you learn anything from this, it's that your cheap laugh at the expense of a muscled dude in a red dress in the Fallout 4 E3 previews is a bullet shot to the hearts and souls of gender non-conformers around the world. Laughing at a man wearing a dress says you think women's clothing is embarrassing, and any feminist worth their salt can see why that's problematic. So, I will fight tooth and nail to keep my non-binary friends and kin safe, even if that sometimes means the best way to fight is through stony glares and silence as we walk on in our swishy blue skirts.

Be happy, go think about your ex.

In continuation of my perfectly contradictory way of being, the happier my relationship is, the more I think about my exes. For possibly the first time ever, everything is functional. There's no communication issues, no co-dependence, no unequal states of affection or distance that tests commitment. What this proves to me is that my sadness over past loves is unrelated to my current relationship. It's not that I am "not over" my exes: it's that I will always be sad about the way things ended.

I think part of the reason we can become so bitter to our exes is that, for a time, they were so important to us. The gap remains between what they were and what they are now. Once, they were close to us. They slept next to us, spoke to us over every little thing, held our hands and occupied our heads. But after you break up, they can become strangers.

While I've never had a shouting-till-dawn break-up, there's been a mix. The ones where you stop responding, the ones where you promise to stay friends, the ones that distance tempers into being not quite so harsh. My exes are all on my Facebook, but I wonder if they remember. When we pass by without making contact, do we both think back to the days we said we were happy? Were we really?

None of this can be verified against another's experience and we are all different. Even though it happened more than two years ago, I can still get sad about being broken up with over dessert after going to London aquarium together. I feel guilty for dumping a long-distance girlfriend over text when I was 16, and it makes me sad we don't talk any more. Clinging to the past is toxic, but there's a melancholy in realising these people that were so close once are now nothing.

Losing touch scares me, How easily we can be forgotten, If we are nothing but the sum of the relationships we make, what does it say when they can be forged and broken so quickly? We are all fragile. And I guess that goes for friends, too: the people I know who are graduating used to be so close to me, and are now gone. Yes, when we became friends they were sweet, and perhaps they became less so the better we knew each other, but that doesn't stop them from being close.

We forget too many people. Getting left behind is awful. This is all stuff we know, but don't want to consider. Maybe that's why I think so much about the people I had so much almost-happiness with. Things aren't meant to last: all things end. But it's not really so bad to think about the relationships that did. They had meaning too, and their status as passed doesn't negate the value they had at the time. That is not to say I react healthily: I bottled up my angst at someone who hurt me which ended in wanting to punch them. How are you meant to respond to that, when you also know their own ex had physically abused them? I compete with others on arbitrary scales to measure happiness, and I am aware of my bizarre jealousy over who moves on first and how easily exes seem to get over things. My best friend is technically my ex: he has moved on, and I think I'm losing him now to a girl the year below me. That hurts more than anything, as our friendship survived my multitude of inadvisable relationships and torrid flings: it's upsetting that one person can decide to curtail things and they just end.

Whatever. I think and write about this well-trodden ground far too much. Go stroke a puppy or something.

Anecdotally... 1: Smiling at strangers on trains

Welcome to Anecdotally..., another semi-regular column. But rather than calling bullshit, this is just going to be me telling you stories. Anecdotes, if you will. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then we shall begin...

It had been a long, mostly enjoyable day. I had wandered around Hyde Park and drunk chai lattes in a coffee shop, crossed to the East End of London via the Central line and DLR, watched a band I love play a show, and then sat in a pub with an old friend drinking and laughing. By the time I got on the train home, at just past midnight, I was starting to fall asleep.

Instead, I got out the book I was reading, which went by the unwieldly title of This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You. It was a collection of short stories which I had taken from the Bloomsbury marketing room on my last day, and after slogging through a 500-page novel alongside my exams, I fancied reading something a bit lighter. Everything was ready for a normal train journey home: I sat down in a window seat facing backwards with my iPod in my ears, a book under my nose, and the rest of the world blocked out. Someone sat down opposite me, but I didn't pay them much attention.

About five minutes into the journey, I heard the drumming of fingers on the train wall. I saw a hand just beneath the window, on top of the "no feet on the seats" sign. I glanced up. I checked my feet weren't on the seat.

The boy opposite me raised his eyebrows. He was too old to be called a "boy", really: in his early 20s, I thought, with dark hair and thick stubble. He wasn't quite attractive in the conventional sense, but there was something interesting in the way his face was arranged. I smiled slightly, shyly, the way you smile at a stranger who is encroaching your personal space when you want them to stop.

I looked back at my book, and he drummed again. He motioned with his hands, and I realised he wanted to see what I was reading. I showed him the cover wordlessly, but my attention had been diverted from the paragraph I was staring at.

"That's in my pile of books to read," he said, and I was taken aback by how nice his voice was. "Though, the pile is about this big," he added, and held up his hands about two feet apart. Before I could stop myself, I laughed.

"I have exactly that problem," I said. "I just picked this because it was the smallest book on my list."

"That's the smallest? Then what's the longest?"

"Probably A Dance With Dragons," I said.

I couldn't help it. I'd been sucked in. We started talking about Game of Thrones, and science fiction authors, and how trains were better than buses. After a couple of minutes, I took out my earphones. After ten, I closed my book and put it in my bag.

I could remember two other times in my life when I had engaged in long conversations with strangers on public transport. The first was when I had been 15, on the day of the General Election, when a handsome bartender had spoken to the guy next to me and swapped seats on the crowded tube, purely because he wanted to speak to me. He'd mentioned his job. He said that talking to strangers was how he amused himself on his commutes. I thought him incredibly brave. He'd asked who I voted for, and I lied and said Lib Dem, flattered he thought me old enough to be able to vote. I was sad to get off at Chalk Farm, because I had to leave this interesting conversationalist behind. His name had been Robert, or Richard. He had smelt of cinnamon.

The other time had been on the train home, wedged in a table seat opposite two American Football fans who'd seen a game that day in London, and next to a Canadian on his way to the airport. Once the football fans had left, I'd talked to the stranger next to me: he had been from the Yukon. He was catching a flight to Portugal, where he intended to pick fruit and then catch buses across the country. He had lived on his own since 13 and had hitch-hiked from Germany to India (or possibly the other way round). He features, occasionally, in conversations: I contribute his existence whenever the subject of hitch-hiking comes up. I don't remember his name. Perhaps he didn't tell me.

"I'm V, by the way," I said, feeling emboldened by my drinks through the day. I'd had three in the last few hours, which - on an empty stomach - had the effect of making me giggly and confident.

"Oliver," he said, but I heard it as Holiver. We had a long conversation about this, our hands still clasped. "Oliver," he said again, "like Twist, the little street urchin. All-singing, all-dancing crooks. That's me."
"Yes, I know," I told him, "I just misheard you, added an imaginary H. Very cockney."

He had moved to the same town as me - counting on his fingers - four days ago, as the office for his job had moved. I let slip I was 18, and though he claimed he'd had me sussed, I was pretty sure he'd assumed I was older. People always do. I guessed he was 23; he was 25. His favourite band was The Eagles and he worked in 3D modelling, which sounded terribly interesting but had little to do with what his degree was in.

"About a year and a half ago, when all the stuff about Blackfriars 1 was on the news - that was our company."
"I don't remember that," I told him.
"It's a weird building. A skyscraper. Looks a bit like a thumb."
"A thumb?"
He demonstrated what he meant by half-bending his thumb. "Yeah, it goes up, and then it's got a kink in it."
"My thumb kinks the other way," I said, because I quite like showing off my weird hands. I have a thumb that, when straightened, bends back at about fifty degrees. Everything about my hands is weird: the tips of my index and middle fingers bend off at angles too. My peace signs have a definite tilt to them. He laughed, and pressed the ends of my index fingers together, the way I always challenge people to do, and laughed more as they sprang back and I told him that no, it didn't hurt at all.

As the train approached our stop, he stood up and I realised how tall he was. I also decided that I wanted to keep talking to him, this stranger who had started a conversation with a girl with pink hair based purely on the book she was reading.

"I kind of want to have lunch with you sometime," I said, and his wallet was out. He pulled out a business card, with his number on it, and a QR code underneath, in case I was "that kind of geek".
"Consider it done," he said.

My dad was waiting in the car for me outside the station. I texted Oliver once I got home, with one kiss on the end, and he said he'd "been about 15 seconds" from asking me out too.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's not often you end up organising dates with strange men you meet on the train. He doesn't seem like a potential murderer, but then again they never do. Still, I'm intrigued, but mostly amused. And if nothing else, I have a vaguely interesting anecdote to tell my friends.

Some things he ruined.

So, in the manner of a girl who gets ahead of herself, it turns out my future planning has come to naught. My ambiguous manfriend is now just a "friend", of the "I think we should just be friends" ilk (and I catalogued my emotions pretty thoroughly on Thought Catalog).

It also occured to me that pretty much every post on this blog is about him in some way, seeing as I started writing it the day before our first date. It was the day he quit his internship, and yesterday was the day he started a new one. I'm just the stop gap amusement.

I think I'll have to make this the last post about him, as he's not The Boy any more. He's just a boy, who I thought I knew, but I guess not. I'm letting myself wallow for the moment, because I am upset, but I know I'll need to start feeling better sooner or later. It's not heartbreak, just heartbruise.

But for the moment, here is a list of things that remind me of him:

- Triathlons (because he runs them)
- Whole Foods in Kensington (because it was where we had our first date)
- My dress patterned with locks (because it's what I wore the first time we made out)
- Red-eared terrapins (because we watched them having a fight and laughed)
- Margherita pizza (which I am very annoyed about, because HE RUINED PIZZA. Because he described it as "naked pizza")
- The word "pugnacious" (because we argued about its definition and he couldn't believe I was right)
- My ceiling (because he made jokes about my posters)
- The Crane Wife by The Decemberists (because I spent ages trying to get him to listen to it, and then he didn't like it much)
- Picnics (because we promised to have one. Which never happened)
- Panda cupcakes (because he asked me to bake them as a joke, and I did)
- The music of Passenger (because he introduced me to it)
- London Aquarium (because it's where we had our last date)
- Scuba diving (because he insisted I should try it out)
- Nail varnish (because I painted my nails differently for every date)
- Fight Club (because we watched it together, and guessed the plot twist, and I fell asleep on his shoulder and missed the ending)
- Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude (because he was told to "play it to any girls he was courting", and didn't play it for me)

Every time I see or hear or think about one of these things, I get that feeling of being sucker-punched in the sternum all over again. He ruined them. But luckily time has a way of healing all wounds. It won't be long before they're fixed: it'll just be a while.

Queer. Here. Happy.

The day I made peace with identifying as queer also happened to be the day of my first date with The Boy.

I had been at a talk on YA literature the evening before, and was struck by the way these panelists threw around the word "queer" as an umbrella term to encompass LGBTI identities. Of course I'd heard it used that way before, but only online. Here, on the internet, it feels like a little separate bubble - people talk in a different way. A lot of them are from different places and live in a different societal context to me, with different privileges and prejudices, fighting the same battle different ways or different battles that I will never have to face. And now, there were people in front of me, talking in a way I'd only ever seen written down before.

"I'd hestitate to call my character a lesbian," said one of the authors. "I prefer queer - it's more general."

Queer. Originally meaning strange. Peculiar. Different. It has a degree of fluidity to it. While gay originally meant "happy", and has since been accepted in our daily vernacular to mean (a typically male) homosexual, queer hasn't been shoehorned and strongarmed in quite the same way.

It was a term of abuse originally, wasn't it? One which we reclaimed? And in that time, the mainstream seem to have become more accepting of sexualities which aren't just a binary of straight or not-straight. Queer did mean gay. It also meant bisexual and pansexual. Straight transpeople can identify as queer if they so please. Hell, it's not something we police. You don't get stopped by a sexy butch with a crewcut and ferociously pink uniform, brandishing a clipboard, who demands you fill out a survey in order to qualify for using the term.

And yet, the term never quite sat right with me. I was bisexual, pansexual, sexually fluid and - sometimes, contrarily - "label-free". Other people were queer. I was a girl who sometimes liked boys and sometimes liked girls and sometimes liked people of an indeterminate gender, or people who identified outside of two genders. I preferred jeans to dresses, felt a thrill of transgression at wearing formal mens' suits (and looking damn sexy in them), and cheerfully joked about being the "token not-straight person" - but I was never queer.

It's not like sexuality is something I can turn on or off either. I can remember dating a girl and commenting to my friends about an attractive guy who walked past - and they looked at me, and said "don't you have a girlfriend?", an accusation, a rebuke. As if, while dating a girl, I should only be attracted to other females. But it doesn't work like that. And it doesn't work the other way, either: going out with a boy does not magically erase my attraction to girls or androgynes. 

Stood in a pub on Friday, a skinny musician sort with long ginger hair and a shirt unbuttoned to the sternum smiled at me. There was a tattoo on his chest which I couldn't quite make out, and he was wearing biker boots. Pretty rather than handsome. The sort of guy who, a year ago, I would have fallen for in an instant.

"Are you from round here?" he asked, closing the distance between us slightly, and I wondered if he was flirting with me. I was in my denim jacket studded with badges, shorts and laddered tights, my short hair recently dyed a lurid shade of scarlet and the metal ring glinting in my nose. I looked a bit edgy, I supposed.

"Ah, no," I said, smiling. "I'm just a visitor. I'm here seeing someone."

"Oh! Seeing the guy who just went to the bar!"

"Yeah."

"Your boyfriend, I presume?"

"I hesitate to say boyfriend... he's my... person that I'm dating."

"Ah! So the person you're having sex with, you mean."

"No, actually."

"Really? Well. He seems nice. Polite. Said "after you" to me and all."

"Yeah. He's one of the good guys, I think."

We started discussing Alkaline Trio and Reading festival, and moved away from the topic of my relationship. The above exchange lasted maybe a minute at most, but I wondered if he would have made the same comments had I walked in with a girl. If he would have broken into that creepy over-interested schtick, or made a lurid invitation for a threesome, stuff I've dealt with before and become almost resigned to as the associated bullshit of liking ladies.

(My ambiguous manfriend, on account of being a generally decent human being, has never done anything like that. He just accepts me the way I am. He sympathises when I complain about microagressions that he as a straight white cisgender guy has never experienced. He laughs with me while I crack jokes about the rainbow painted over my door - "really, my parents should have known better; I shouldn't come out to them, I should just point at the paintwork" - while knowing I'd be pissed if he made that joke himself. So far, he is definitely a good guy.)

Hetero relationships comes with privilege. I'm mistaken for straight as a side-effect of being in a straight relationship. I've yet to deal with being thrown out of a queer space for being mistaken for an interloper, but it's definitely a fear I have. It's called bisexual erasure - when bisexual people are misidentified as straight (when they date someone of the opposite sex) or gay (when dating someone of the same sex) and somehow shunned by both camps as being capricious, greedy, indecisive.

But - to me - being queer means being able to embrace who you are, contradictory personality aspects and all. I am queer when I am drunk and asking boys to rate my tits (which still makes me cringe when I think about it). I am queer when I am rebuffing advances from straight girls looking to titillate their boyfriends. I am queer when reading about lesbian sex or when kissing The Boy goodnight.

I kind of feel like this is what life is about - finding who you are, coming to love it, working out the words that suit you rather than trying to change to fit into expectations. That's why I'm coming to like the term "queer". It's not as specific or narrow as other words. It's not the whole of my identity, just one of the pieces I'm putting together. It's a puzzle. There are gaps I haven't filled yet. I'm okay with that.

Perhaps I will write love letters.

The English language is an amazing thing. It's malleable, and adaptable; it grows and changes and, magpie-like, picks up words and phrases from other tongues. We are a country forged by invasion. We speak words every day that we inherited by Romans and Saxons and Vikings. We are influenced by Greek and French and German. And yet, we only have one word for love.

On Wednesday, I looked around a university to find out if I wanted to go there. It was St Andrews, a pretty university in a pretty village on the pretty coast of Scotland. It wasn't so pretty when I was there. It was raining so hard the drops bounced off the ground, forming a grey mist for several feet around. I knew all about the course and I had looked up the different halls of residence. But I had to visit.

It's like online dating. You might be the perfect match on paper, but you have to meet in person, to find out for sure. To see if you click.

St Andrews and I didn't click.

On my third date with The Boy, on his birthday, we were sat in a bakery in London, on barstools, eating cake with shiny metal forks. I sighed, and told him all about the fact I was torn between two universities. It had been a long time since he was in my position. I don't know if he ever felt that indecision. I just wanted to talk through my feelings, and had arbitrarily decided he was going to listen to me.

One university was a more logical choice than the other. It was a case of practicalities, I supposed.

He looked at me over his carrot cake (all our conversations seem to happen over food) and said, "Don't make a logical decision. Base it on your feelings. Go with your gut."

I had assumed, therefore, that I would fall in love with one or other university. Naively, I had thought that when I found the place I wanted to go, I would just know. I would become enamoured with the campus, the town, the dorms. The very feel of the place. I would leave, and know in my bones I wanted to go there.

York was... nice. I could imagine myself there. St Andrews was also nice. But neither one made my heart pound and flutter. Neither one gave me that swelling in my chest, or the sensation of my blood skipping in my veins, that made me think "...oh. I want to come and study here." Neither town felt like home; they felt like places I was passing through.

And so, with no emotional component to make me select one place over the other, York seemed more sensible. It is closer home, closer to a big city, and with better travel links should I wish to escape the campus for the weekend. I don't love it, but I feel that maybe I will come to. Love at first sight is all well and good, but it's got a limited scope. I think I prefer the love that grows and develops, which falls for flaws as well as the pretty veneer over them. 

I firmly believe you can fall in love with things other than people. Love is a word with many sub-categories. Saying "I love you" to my friends is different to saying it to my grandad, or my paramour, or my cat. When we talk about "love letters", we think of notes written in copperplate to a husband, a girlfriend, a romantic partner who makes your lungs feel squeezed and gasping for air.

I think we need to write love letters to everything and everyone we hold dear. I need to write love letters to my friends, to my family, to individual aspects of life that makes it worth holding onto.

If I could, I'd write a love letter to a place. I'd write it to Bawdsey, a village in Suffolk, a place which smells how I imagine 1955 would smell. I would pen the letter on a rock from the shore; write it with a stick of chalk; fashion an envelope from the leaves in the graveyard where my paternal family are buried; post it out to the slate grey sea and watch it wash up on some other beach, in some other town that smells like another time.

Perhaps one day I will want to write a love letter to York, to its castles and history and cobbled streets. Perhaps one day, I will want to write a love letter to The Boy (because it's so much easier to communicate when there's a piece of paper to act as a barrier between you. And a text just wouldn't be the same. It's all very well having the versatility of English, but that counts for nothing when a smile can wipe your mind blank. I can't imagine heaving my heart into my mouth; I'd rather keep it in my fingertips.)

The way I see it, we all cultivate our own language. It's a personal amalgamation of slang and phrases and injokes and gestures and expressions that is so uniquiely us. It bends according to how others speak, what we read and what we hear. It's our own little take on English. And in my take on English, love still means many things. I love home. I love my laptop. I even love you, dear reader. I think I mean love most when I write it down, because letters on a page are a solid record. They are there long after the whispered Iloveyous have evaporated into the air. I want love to exist than more than just a memory: I need the proof.

Not a Madonna or a whore.

Everywhere you look, there are conflicting messages about heterosexual girls' virginity. If you have sex, you're easy. If you don't, you're frigid.

It's amazing how prolific the Madonna/whore complex is, how it's permeated even modern-day life. In its most basic form, it's the idea than girls come in two models of sexuality: Madonnas, the image of purity and chastity; and whores, sexualised and seductive. Which one is portrayed positively depends on the tone of the writer, if either is at all. It's a hangover from ancient times, when women having sex outside marriage would ruin your reputation, and illegitimate children were a threat to inheritence. Thus Madonnas were idolised. Since the rise of birth control though, girls who won't put out are uptight; they need to loosen up. What are you meant to listen to? It's a tangled skein of contradictions.

Honestly, it seems like a wonder anyone has normal functioning relationships at all.

"Sex is everything!" scream some sources. "Sex is the whole point of human existence! People only exist to be eye candy! See this girl? SHE IS TITS AND A BUTT. She's there for you to fuck! See this shirtless guy? HE IS THERE FOR SEXYTIMES. If you're not having sex YOU ARE WRONG. Asexuality doesn't exist! People should want to fuck ALL THE TIME. The answer to any of your woes is to HAVE MORE SEX."

I exaggerate, but you know the sentiment. If that sounds overly familiar, and I'm not exaggerating, then that's just scary. The advertising industry is the worst. It seems like ANYTHING can be sold if you stick a pair of tits next to it.

Then there's the more insidious 'sex-positivity' that comes from Cosmo and that ilk - the sort that doesn't actually encourage you to enjoy sex, but how to "make your man" happy. Your own enjoyment should come from pleasuring your boyfriend/husband/one night stand! Your sex drive should be malleable to his! If you ask for him to do anything for you, you're a greedy scum-sucking road whore!

On the flip side, you've got the Modesty Police and all those conservative moral guardians. No sex before marriage, or you will be forever tainted and no man will ever want you again. If you get raped, it is YOUR FAULT for being a sneaky whore and tempting men! These are the people who think women should be meek and mild. You know those chastity balls where girls take vows never to even TOUCH a boy before marriage? That's the extreme end of it. 

Looking at these contrasting positions, I find it strange that I, as a person, seem to fall more in line with the latter - the chaste one. I've had a few chances where I could have had sex: my friend's drunk friend who asked me to eat her out; my crush and I spending the night making out heatedly on an airbed; the boy I'm dating staying over at my house. (It was great; he'd lied to his parents about where he was, the same way as I'd lied about who I was having for a sleepover. I loved the puerile secrecy of it.) But I've never gone there, not yet.

I think I must have been corrupted by television. For all my sex positivity - which largely comes down to "YOU DO YOU!" - I don't want my first time to be on a whim. I want it to be... as near to perfect as possible. I want it to be with someone who loves me, male or female. But that requires relationships. I'm normally too lazy for those: I am a virgin out of passivity. That said, I'm pretty ambivalent about my virginity. It's just a transient status which has no wider reverberations on my personality, akin to saying "I bleach my hair" or "I have asthma". It's hardly a sufficient summary of my whole personality, you know?

One of my friends lost her virginity to a boy she'd known for three weeks, and been dating for two. I was kind of surprised - another friend and I sat, over coffee, wondering if she'd come to regret it. We thought she'd get hurt. But while our concern for her well-being may have been valid, it was misplaced: we were treating sex as something dangerous. We were denying her agency, something I take up arms about in all other situations. If she wanted to have sex with him, why were we this surprised about it? It was like we were slut-shaming. I spent the next few days mulling over that conversation, hating myself for being so judgemental.

In the same way as over-sexualisation is bullshit, modesty is bullshit. The idea that girls should cover up lest they tempt men to rape them? Utter balls. But it's still permeated our culture.

I'm half-expecting everyone who reads this to raise their eyebrows, but you're probably young liberal sorts, more likely to wonder why a virgin is writing about sex than why a girl would talk about her sexuality on the internet.

If things keep going this way, there is a good chance I'll screw The Boy. It seems too far away to think about in detail; even last night, when we were rolling around in my bed in only our underwear, firmly established at second base, sex never really crossed my mind. (I thought I could feel his boner against my thigh, but I didn't want to ask in case I was wrong, or my intentions were misconstrued.) It's less about actively protecting my virgin status, more just a reluctance to do anything in case I regret it later. It's not even an aversion to sex - hell, just writing this is making me want to jump his bones - but an aversion to trying to force the pace of our relationship.

Maybe I need to live more in the moment. Maybe I need to stop second-guessing myself. I definitely need to stop judging other people. It doesn't matter if your first time is with someone you love or someone you barely know; as long as it's consensual, it's all good. I will lose my virginity when I feel comfortable, and I shouldn't be made to feel guilty if it's sooner or later than anyone else.

It doesn't matter if you're a nymphomanic or totally asexual, Jezebel or the Virgin Mary - judgement is bullshit. The virgin/whore dichtomoy is bullshit. Real sex positivity comes from just doing things that give you pleasure, and fuck other people's considerations: you do you.

Kiss me.

Kiss me the moment you see me.

Kiss me like an almost-drowned man kisses the land. Kiss me like an astronaut kisses the stars. Kiss me like a 19th-century Russian novellist kissed their typewriter.

Kiss me like you can't believe it's been so long since you last kissed me, like the time has gone by in an irksome crawl since then, like this waiting has been a mistake you want to rectify as soon as possible.

Kiss me like I'm a test you've been studying for all week. Kiss me like your last-minute nerves are kicking in your belly. Kiss me like you're going to get full marks.

Kiss me like there's a butterfly on my lips and you want your breath to tickle its wings.

Kiss me like there's a magnet under my skin and your lips are made of iron. Kiss me like we're hydrogen atoms and you want to covalently bond. Kiss me to get me to stop making terrible science jokes.

Kiss me like a supernova. I don't even know how that would be possible. But I want it to happen. I imagine it will be colours and lights and heat and spectacle, something rare and sharp and shocking. Kiss me like that.

Kiss me on the Tube. Kiss me in public, where everyone can see and judge us for being obnoxious and young. Kiss me when we're travelling, because it's not the destination that matters but the leaving, the going, the arriving.

Kiss me like I'm the love of your life. Kiss me like I'm a porn star.
Kiss me like I'm made of memory foam and every touch lasts forever. Kiss me like you're trying to corrupt me.
Kiss me virgin, kiss me whore, kiss me patriarchal dichotomies where, just for once, I'd win either way.

Kiss me like an absolution.

Kiss me like you're telling me your thoughts in another language we're both trying to learn.

Kiss me so hard that you've backed me against a wall and it's all saliva and teeth and lips and tongue and basic human anatomy, and all rational thought has been replaced by the need to be close, closer, closest.

Kiss me like a secret you can't bear to hide any more.

Kiss me like you could break me, fix me, bend me, shape me, mould me, push me, pull me, complete me, empty me, perfect me, ruin me, totally and utterly verb me.

Kiss me goodbye.

Kiss me like we're kids hiding in a tree house and learning what each other's bodies are for. Kiss me like I'm going to write a song about it, and you want it to be three minutes of heaven. Kiss me like you wish we could spend the night, like this wasn't the end of another date.

Kiss me like you want to keep me.

Just shut the hell up and kiss me.

Broken rules and bleeding hearts.

There are rules about how to act in every social situation. They may be unwritten, or contained in tomes nobody owns up to owning but everyone does; they might be whispered in corners or written about in op-eds for swanky magazines, but there are rules governing everything. If you transgress the rules, who knows what might happen? You'll get a sneaky side-eyed sneer, or maybe a public critique, or perhaps the whole of society will crumble and crash down around your ears - and it'll all be your fault, because you didn't obey the rules.

One of the things I'm aware of is how I play by these rules, even when I don't consciously mean to. I'll find myself waiting for hours to receive texts from people, and then - rather than replying instantly, which is my usual course of action - I'll instead leave the message, saved as a draft, on my phone. I won't send it until half an hour, an hour, two hours, have elapsed - to make it seem like I'm just SO in demand, I'm too busy to reply to texts instantly, and you should be glad I bestowed my pity upon you and typed out a few lines of banal conversation. It means I spared you a thought, when I could have just forgotten. Be grateful.

This applies to everyone - friends, family, crushes. I just get scared of being in a position of vulnerability. I don't want to admit I like someone, in whatever capacity, because that means peeling back a little bit of your skin and showing something raw; and once it's out there, anyone can come and prod it, and make you hurt. Better to keep your bleeding heart in your chest, rather than where it habitually rests on my sleeve. Better to wear a coat and stop your feelings from being seen.

When I do come out and say exactly what I mean, I tend to get hurt. And everyone's afraid of being hurt. That's why there's so much bullshit in who is supposed to say what when, where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to want. If you stick to the rules, you are safe. You're working within an established framework. Even if things go wrong, they'll fuck up within a pre-existing situation.You won't be far away from where you're supposed to be, and it's not that hard to get back in the game, start a new turn, and let all the rules carry you along again.

It's why I feel guilty about my last kiss. It was the end of a first date (with a boy who makes me feel like I swallowed a dragonfly) and we were at Edgeware Road. He had to catch the tube one way, and I the other. He stood on the train, and I on the platform. There was a narrow gap in the roof of the station. We shared a quick, chaste kiss while the thin snow fell through the gap and powdered our hair. The tube departed, and I watched him go, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling I had been left behind. That was one of the rules of heterosexual, traditional relationships - the girl is supposed to leave first, making the boy wait for her, his breath catching in his throat. It's not supposed to be the other way round.

I crossed the bridge to the other platform, to catch my own train, and had to avert my eyes from all the happy couples canoodling in the cold. Their laughter mingled in front of their faces, a soft-focus mist which could have come from either set of lungs.

I wished, one day, I could be that happy - even if it was only superficial. Maybe in the grey light of morning they would sit next to each other in bed - these laughing, kissing couples - and they wouldn't speak, keeping their unhappiness to themselves, maintaining a facade on the streets of London that they were bright and chipper and in love. But there's a reason you keep misery at home: the only thing worse than public displays of affection is public displays of unhappiness.

And that's just another rule. Keep the dirty laundry to your own washing machine.

If I were that unhappy, though, I would argue in public. I would make a scene, run onto the wrong train on purpose, lock myself in a bathroom and have a public official be called to get me out. I would make old women tut and young professionals avert their eyes in embarrassment and children stare, slack-jawed. If you're going to unravel, you might as well do it somewhere everyone can see. Maybe, just maybe, there would be a sympathetic stranger around to help patch your frayed edges back together and resew your hems. I have faith in the human race yet.

But I also have faith in myself. These rules might have been around for years, but I'm sure I know myself better than some anonymous set of social norms. So I might provoke the ire of traditionalists everywhere, but I will tentatively display my battered heart, and blame only myself if it gets broken. I will text back immediately and watch people leave me behind - because I am stronger than my anxieties, and I trust that everyone I love will come back - it might just take them a while.