The 50 Foot Redhead (Patreon)

My girlfriend is visiting! Yay! I wrote this essay about how we went from being rivals to girlfriends in the space of a few months but it's not quite in fighting shape yet. It's *very* long and very work-in-process so feel free to skip the entry. I just wanted it up in some form before I go back and try to shape this thing into an actual article I can pitch.


I woke up in a soft bed with a beautiful woman. Her skin was soft, she smelled sweet and spicy, she caressed me with admiration in her eyes. I felt safe and loved, in bed with a former rival. Just a few months ago, seeing her name made my heart hurt, my stomach swell with panic, the dark voices in my mind whisper what a failure I was. And now...she's my girlfriend?

I’ve always had a fucked up relationship to competition. My mom was convinced that I was SO SPECIAL that I thought that me being anything less than the best was an utter failure. And being the best at everything is, well, impossible so I started thinking that failure was inevitable for me.

I do my best to avoid competition. I never play board games because I know it will make me cry. I rarely apply to festivals or scholarships. Even sending resumes to job postings seems pointless.

So being polyamorous was not the best choice for me. But it wasn’t really a choice for me. It was something I’d always been, my only chance at happiness in a relationship. It just became a problem when my boyfriends dated someone who looked like me.

For a long time my best friend looked like me. Sort of. We both had red hair and pale skin but we also talked the same and shared so many in-jokes that people thought we were sisters. Men always wanted to sleep with us. Not necessarily both of us separately, but both of us at once. Twinsecst is a popular fantasy and sisters-who-are-not-sisters are the socially acceptable substitute. As a result we compared ourselves constantly. We just never said it out loud. Like dysfunctional families we fell into ironclad roles. I was the sexy one, she was the smart one. (Never mind the fact that we were both sexy and smart. I had more boyfriends, she had more A’s, so we ignored all other evidence.) She was the rich one, I was the thin one. She was bright and bubbly, I was quiet and intense. We both felt a painful lack in our lives. And what either of us lacked the other had in spades. It made us hate each other a little bit, but we also loved each other deeply. We fit together like puzzle pieces.

So when I went to college and met another pale redhead with similar sensibilities, I immediately befriended her. But something felt wrong. She was sexy AND smart, rich AND thin, outgoing AND intense. She had no cracks for me to fit in. I had no advantages to smugly console myself with. When I looked at her, I only saw a better version of myself. I felt redundant, useless. I tried to be her sidekick but I felt more like her knock off.

This pattern repeated every time I met a skinny redhead. Before I even really got to know here I would assume she was the better model of my “type.” And anything she said or did that was smart, or outgoing, or hinted that she might have more money than me, seemed like proof that I was right. And it didn’t help that the dudes I dated usually wanted to date her too. Every boyfriend or ex-boyfriend she dated confirmed my fears that I was replaceable. A starter redhead for guys to learn on till they found something better. I started begging my boyfriends not to date anyone I could be in a line-up with.

So, of course, the first big problem we had in our relationship was when my fiancé started dating a skinny redhead. In my mind she became the 50 Foot Redhead. She was 7 years younger than me, more well known in the burlesque world. She was a sex worker so she must have a magic pussy. She was a natural redhead (inherently better somehow) but she bleached half her hair blond so not only was she obviously more interesting than me, she had the time and money to dye her hair regularly. She did photoshoots all the times, more evidence of her time and money. She wore make up more often than me. She wore cute outfits more than me. She wore booty shorts in public and was apparently cool enough to not care what disgusting things men would say to her on the street. And she was smart and she was funny and she was confident enough to tear men to shreds if they stepped out of line on the internet. Didn’t that mean she was smarter and braver than me? Also she had boobs! And even if she had human flaws, she lived in Seattle so my fiancé wouldn’t see those flaws until he, inevitably, left me for her.

But I knew I was being insecure. That’s it. I was just being insecure. My fiancé was doing nothing wrong. He wasn’t acting differently towards me. He didn’t love me any less. He told me all the time that I was amazing. But every time my mind whispered “But not as amazing as Maggie.” I’d been on the other side of this too many times. I’d dated plenty of guys who said they were ok with polyamory until rubber met the road and I dated someone I really liked. Suddenly it was a problem, but they couldn’t say what I was doing wrong or what my new partner was doing wrong. It was just suddenly a problem. I knew that when my boyfriends lashed out in jealousy, it had pushed me away. Not wanting to hurt them, I kept my new relationship secretive. The secret drove a wedge between us, a growing space made up out of all the words we didn’t say to each other. 

I didn’t want that to happen but I didn’t know how to avoid it either. The less I spoke about my fears, the larger they loomed in my mind. The more I admitted to insecurity, the more secretive my fiancé became. I could tell he was lying to me when he said they were “just friends who had sex.” He was bad at hiding all the time he spent texting her. And her photo came up every time his screensaver started. I never saw a photo of me.

To make things worse she was being SO NICE to me. After their first overnight she left me a thank you note. Who does that?!? She sent me gifts and said nice things to me on Facebook. This bitch was trying to overnice me so I’d look like a horrible parson for hating her! And it was working.

So the inside of my head became a reenactment of All About Eve. One part of me shouting to anyone that would listen that this lady was bad news, and the rest of my brain calling me a crazy bitch. And even though Margo was right, she really didn’t deal with her feelings well and that allowed Eve a lot more destructive than she would have been otherwise.

I tried to just pretend I was fine, but the distance in a relationship is entirely made up of the things you don’t tell each other, the little hurts you don’t give voice to, the tiny grudges you hold. The things you hind loom large in the room. They fill your mouth up your mouth with silence. And the bigger the thing is, the more it rattles around in your head like a pinball until you lose your mind.

So finally I said “I need to say a thing about Maggie. And I don’t want you to do anything about it. I don’t want you to change what you’re doing. I don’t want you to distance yourself from her. I don’t want you to break up with her. I don’t want you to try and fix this or force us to be friends. I just want you to listen so that we’re not hiding things from each other.”

And I told him all the things I’d been afraid to say. I told him how and why she was the 50 Foot Redhead. I told him that I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust that she liked me. I didn’t believe that she was attracted to me. She had very clearly avoided me the last time she’d visited. And I reiterated that I wasn’t saying this to make him do anything. I wasn’t saying it to make him feel bad. I was saying it simply because I would go crazy if I didn’t.

And he listened. And he teared up. And he asked, his voice shaking “You don’t want me to break up with her?”

“No,” I told him.

“I’m not doing anything wrong?”

“No.”

“And you still love me?”

“Of course.” I threw my arms around him. I felt better already. Just saying my fears out loud made them seem so much smaller in my head.

“I wanted to go see her in Seattle in July,” he confessed “But I won’t. It’s too soon.”

I thought about that quietly but then I said

“You should go.” I stopped myself and checked again to see if this was my martyr complex coming into play. But it didn’t feel like it. “It’s better if you spend some time with her. Get to know her in person. I know how easy it is to idealize a long distance relationship. I think I’d feel a lot better if you could humanize her a little more.

Things got better after that. Not a hundred percent, but at least by 50%. We’d been honest with each other, even when our feelings had been hard to deal with. And that was the most important part. Once it wasn’t ricocheting around my mind, I was able to realize that there was really only a very slim chance that Maggie was a sexually charged supervillian out to steal my boyfriend and take over the world. Really, the most I could accuse her was hatching a nefarious plot to make it seem like she liked me more than she did.

A couple months later, when we actually got engaged, Maggie sent me $50 to buy us a celebratory dinner. This spoke to me more than any note or present or show on Facebook. In the secret language of sex workers, nothing says “I value you” like cold, hard, cash. No one knows the value of a dollar like a sex worker. Anyone who has thought “Gee I wish I could pay my rent with all this fancy wine and lingerie some client gave me,” knows just how much more a gift of money can mean.

So maybe she really was happy for us. Maybe she really liked me.

Then she scheduled the show she was producing specifically so I could be in it. And she worked to help me get more gigs in the area. And then she asked me to domme in one of her sessions. I was apprehensive for about a second. And then I was super turned on. The thought of a threesome with her and Johnny still scared me. That would put us in direct competition. But a double session always made for more of a connection with your fellow worker than with the guy in the room. Then she asked if I’d want to domme her. We talked about it and our fetishes were almost exactly the same. To give her a great scene, I’d just have to create one of my own fantasies and enact it on her.

“But, um, usually those fantasies usually involve sex,” I warned her “I mean, would you be ok with, like, a strap on?”

“Yeah totally,” she replied.

So, like, now she wanted to have sex with me? Like, for real? 

Sex workers have a different relationship to sex than most people. We’re a bit more like bonobo chimps. Sex is around all the time. It’s not necessarily connected to desire. So, yes, I’d given my fellow dommes orgasms during our down time, but I didn’t think of the as sex exactly. There was nothing romantic about it. They just hadn’t had orgasms before, so I changed that. It was more like someone saying haven’t seen Riverdale yet, you can say “Oh it’s really good.” Or you can pick up the remote control and say “want to watch it now?”

So her saying “Let’s play together and you can fuck me if you want.” Could have just been a friendly offer. It didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to have sex with me.

Sometimes I’m a little dense.

Because yes, she did want to have sex with me.

And once I thought she might actually be interested in me, my jealousy evaporated. I mean, she couldn’t be that much sexier than me if she wanted to have sex with me. But mostly I think I felt insecure because I felt left out. I felt like she’d chosen Johnny over me. I wonder how much of female envy is bound up in unexpressed desire. I’m not the first person to point out that the lyrics of Jolene are actually pretty damn gay. And the episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend where she becomes obsessed with  her crush’s girlfriend, her imagined version of the girlfriend is *very* sexualized. My ex-best friend who is probably the reason I have this complex in the first place, wrote an essay about me where she said she never figured out whether or not she wanted to have sex with me, and that she often thought of me when sleeping with her current partner.

So when I got to Seattle I was curious to see where it would go. And also really nervous because I haven’t had one on one sex with a lady more than a couple of times. To steal a metaphor from another friend, I’m very comfortable having sex with men, and I know women are different, so it’s like studying for an algebra test and then taking a test in geometry. So we spent the first couple of days just hanging out and getting to know each other. By Sunday I thought to myself “Ok, I’m gonna try making out with Maggie on the way home tonight.”

So, of course, we ended up going home with two of her friends to have a foursome.

Because sometimes things just happen.

That foursome didn’t go very well. The short version is her friends got into a small fight and, when they were getting ready to leave, one of them realized she’d left her phone in the uber. So we all had to wait awkwardly while the uber driver came back. Maggie was incredibly sweet and supportive to her friend. And I just stood around trying to hover somewhere between compassionate and invisible.

When her friends left I asked Maggie if she was ok. We’d both been through a bit of a rollercoaster and she had just done a LOT of emotional labor so I wanted to make sure she was feeling alright.

“Yeah,” she said “I’m just really worried I screwed things up with you.” I was honestly flabbergasted. She’d done nothing to make that foursome go sideways and she’d done amazing damage control. And I’d felt so useless as the random naked girl in the situation I couldn’t imagine why she would worry that anything in this night had made me think less of her.”

“You’re just, like, so cool,” she went on. “You’ve had this amazing sexual history and you’re super talented and respected. And I made that foursome happen and *I* felt cool. But it all went wrong and I…wasn’t one of the cool kids anymore.”

I continued to be flabbergasted. This lady had sex for a living,  why would she be impressed by anything about me? But instead of saying that I said

“You DO understand that when Johnny started dating you I was really worried that you would be the cool, sexy, girlfriend and I would be his boring wife, right?”

“Yeah but when he told me that I laughed in his face. I couldn’t imagine why you’d feel insecure about me.”

“You know, you are just really pretty and sexy” I confessed “and you’re so much younger than me.”

“But you’re thinner than me,” she broke in, puzzled. That stopped me short. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was something about me that she might envy. It also hadn’t occurred to me that these measurements of worth were so arbitrary and so meaningless.

And what did this competition accomplish, other than making us hate ourselves and each other?

So we had sex and we talked and we were vulnerable and we got to know each other. Obviously the solution to female competition isn’t just to fuck each other (fun as it may be) but it did occur to me that we feared each other less when we talked to each other ABOUT each other rather than connecting and communicating through the man we were both dating. Maybe the solution is to meet each other as real, vulnerable, people, rather than a list of things that make us more or less desirable. Maybe the solution is just to realize that arbitrary measures of worth are really really dumb.