Girls Fuck

Her body is stretched taut, back arched, head thrown back. With her lips pursed in a half-smile, she tastes beads of blood as her teeth, fiercely clenched, pierce through tongue in her attempt to muffle escaping moans, moans that are elicited at the hands and mouth of the woman crouched deep between her thighs, the woman who works deftly with tongue or fingers or fist at the pulsing cunt before her.

Perhaps the cool metal of bathroom stall walls confines them.

Maybe exaggerated movement is encouraged by open air and overarching sky, but simultaneously prevented by the brush burn that the gravel carpet underneath threatens.

It could be that their quickened moans mingle nicely with the laughter and conversation of people just inches away, or even blend seamlessly with the rhythmic pulse of the DJ’s musical soundscape.

Or maybe these two women are just one of many couplings throughout the room, as chicks – singly and in plural – engage in the pleasure of licensed public sexual play.

While the backdrop may vary, each sexcapade maintains the same flavour: women fucking one another in public spaces.

Public sex is nothing new. Women fuck. A lot.

They fuck outdoors, in parked cars, in bar corners and bar bathrooms, at private sex parties. They fuck at bathhouses and underwear parties. They fuck with voyeuristic eyes in mind, and they fuck within public view as privately as possible, just to relieve the desperation and urgency that a peaked pussy demands. What is particularly interesting, however, is the fervour with which women’s public sex is entering into cultural discourse.

With the recent establishment of two sex shops for women (Good For Her and Come as You Are) and two hugely successful women’s bathhouse nights (Pussy Palaces), it would seem that the thriving nature of queer female sexuality has only just burst onto the scene.

Since opening in 1997, the two stores host consistently sold out workshops – like Lapdancing (Legally!) For Lovers, Role-playing For Grown-Ups, female ejaculation, fisting and SM.

The first Pussy Palace, last November, engendered pandemonium, boasting the attendance of 450 women and a solid two hour line-up of eager beavers just waiting to step inside. The atmosphere was fun and titillating, as women 19 to 50 frolicked in the newness. The second Pussy Palace, three months later, was also packed to bursting with chicks, but the crowd was younger and the air heavy with sex as girls cruised one another with a vengeance.

For the third women’s bathhouse night, scheduled for Wed, Jun 23 at Club Toronto (at xxx Mutual St), the theme is playtime, girls, so look forward to getting down and dirty with sex dice, naked Twister, and other such pleasantly perverted playtime delights.

There’s an obvious interest among women to get it on in public.

But this really isn’t the beginning. Casual sex among women, and the public performance of women fucking, emerges from a long lineage of underground sex.

Queen St West’s Boom Boom Room hosted Dyke Night on Saturdays throughout the late 1980s and early ’90s. Though the club was not a sex bar per say, it maintained a highly sexual atmosphere that encouraged SM play and sex among its thriving crowd. Says Michelle Ward, who frequented the bar during its heyday: “I had several one-night-stands stemming from the Boom Boom Room.”

Like clubs today, the bathrooms of the Boom Boom Room were sexually well traveled, and its upper area offered darkened corners for girls to get it on while others watched through the shadows.

Indeed, women have long engaged in the sly and secret illicit public fuck.

Privately organized sex parties have also provided public sites for sex. For those of us who’ve never attended, though, sex parties take on a mythic quality. Sex parties are exclusive, invitation-only, held at private homes or small rented spaces.

While it’s nice to go somewhere with the intent to fuck, sex parties have their downside.

Says one attendee: “Because they’re so small, individual dynamics really control the mood and direction of the night. Usually everyone already has her preferred fuckee in mind, and there is a lot of pressure and work involved in getting what you want. And you don’t always get who or what you had in mind.”

Ange Holmes prefers those parties that, organized as a simple get-together, spiral into sex play with tension-building games like truth or dare and spin the bottle. “Expecting the unexpected always makes for the most fun.”

But it’s the huge success of Pussy Palace that has publicized the public sex in which women have long been engaging.

Organizers say the event, one year in the making, was met with resistance by bathhouse owners unwilling to rent to dykes. You know those tired stereotypes: women don’t engage in casual sex; women don’t fuck in public; women are asexual; women are gentle creatures with a penchant for nurturing, not hard-core fast and furious anonymous fucking. Yep, we’re still struggling to wash away the sex-negative residue generated by the radical lesbian feminism of the ’70s, the we’re-holy-and-pure mantra.

There’s an interesting tension, though, within the creation of Pussy Palace, because the bathhouse is organized around safer sex education for women. While this is useful – and necessary – the bathhouse becomes less about radical and revolutionary public sex acts, and more about policing sexual expression by confining it within the framework of education.

Of course, there is a different set of vulnerabilities for those who wish to engage in public sex. Attempting to find a place to fuck, Debra says “parks were ruled out because of the peril of safety for women, coupled with the threat of bashing and rape.” For Debra, the bathhouse is accessible and safe.

Pussy Palace had companion underwear parties, Afternoon Delight – held amid The Barn’s cages and on-site dungeon equipment. Unfortunately, after three (in January, April and May) the underwear parties have been discontinued. The reason? Low attendance has resulted in The Barn’s decision to pull out as host. While the festivities averaged a crowd of up to 60, these figures don’t compare to the 200 men who attend similar functions, nor do they measure up to the packed to bursting Pussy Palace turnout.

So why haven’t women arrived in droves to drop their drawers? Timing is one possible reason. Held from 3 to 8pm, Afternoon Delight’s time slot was perhaps intimidating.

Others, however, found that it was the daylight that particularly heightened their experience. Says Debra: “It was really kinky to be heading into the club in broad daylight for the purpose of sex play, because most sex gets hidden within the darkness of after sundown.

Bathhouse committee member Leanne Cusitar thinks ineffective advertising contributed to low attendance. And the event’s time-sensitive nature – four hours to get in and get off – might have deterred some. “Sites that permit public sex are intimidating because women have never been licensed to attend such venues. And so women need a different atmosphere than men. Many need an extended period of time to get comfortable with their desires, to build up a level of comfort in sexually expressing themselves, especially in a public venue. While the bath house offers this because it goes strong all night long, the underwear parties don’t.”

There may be other reasons, too. Some women dislike that the events are housed in sites that cater specifically to men. Others dislike the lack of anonominity. After all, this is the one night that all the girls come out to play, and chances are you’ve already slept with half of them; a quarter have been fucked by your current or ex lovers, and you want to steer clear of the remaining quarter just because you’ve heard that they’re fucked.

Other women dislike the sex-driven nature of both the bathhouse and the underwear parties. Says Ange: “There’s something about the staging of an event for the purpose of sex that makes me queasy. First of all, it becomes an intensely high pressure night. Secondly, it’s all too performative. There’s nothing hot about expecting, planning and then performing sex. Fucking in a bathhouse is not subversive at all, but convenient, because it’s like one big bedroom.

“It turns really radical sex into a trend, and the whole scene at the bathhouse becomes carnivalesque. It’s just a big circus. The whole point of public sex for me is to fuck whenever the mood strikes, wherever I may be. The hottest public fucking I’ve done has been in bar bathrooms, on porches and on public transit. I remember one night in particular at the Dance Cave, when I jerked off my friend while we were seated side by side at a table. It was such a rush to be getting it on like that in the open space of the club, especially in a heterosexual space. And the reason that all of this public sex is so hot is because it’s all been spontaneous.

“I wasn’t planning on fucking – it just happened. And it just happened to be in the prospective view of others, which carries with it the thrill of being caught or seen.”