Girls are pretty. Come on, who are we kidding? Girls are smoking freaking lose-your-mind hawt, haute, hottt. And as girls who like girls, we are in a tribe apart, a literal different mindset from the heterosexual population.

Not to be rude to breeders, because I love my procreating penis-loving folk…they’re fantastic at parties, great with the small talk and anecdotes on being part of the majority…well in short, you peeps are priceless. But this is a story of how we queers have extra special talents, like superheroes who are incredibly skilled at making out with other chicks. So to get to the point, driving along the highway and catching a billboard with the latest underwear model or Natalie Portman advert we have a truly unique experience.

As a woman, most of us females constantly imagine the selves we wish we were. Big tits, pursing lips, bedroom eyes. I used to flip through the magazines and cut out pictures of brides, models, Xena Warrior princesses and the occasional Femme Nikita whose ass I so should have. Perfect abs, that line down the back, the eyebrows that had no bushiness and the nose that managed to avoid my requisite Jewry. In short, less bump, more hump and a helluva a lot more sexiness.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Anna Paquin or Angelina Jolie, we all have the image of the girl we want to be. In today’s disturbing anti-feminist society we all wish we were someone else. Hell, Jolie probably wishes she had someone else’s looks, possibly the thin-lipped beauty of Jodie Foster. Unless extraordinarily cool with oneself or truly deluded, all of us have a ‘better’ image, an ‘ideal’ that the very ideal would reject if shown a mirror. The women of today are guilty of the worst grade of buyer’s remorse, especially since our genetics made the purchase, leaving us entirely out of the whole compare/contrast/fret-and-create-bleeding ulcers-from-stress-part-of-the-decision segment. We have no choice in who we are, yet the whole world is constantly telling us how we should curve, where we should bend and blend and how thick our eyelashes should be.

(And as a personal aside to Brooke Shields and everyone else pushing eyelash thickening I have to dedicate a giant ‘What the Fuck?!’ Seriously people, eyelash mass? No one wants to be trying to see through a Sasquatch forest. Leave our eyelashes alone.)

But the real creepy twist comes in as a product of our own queerness. We love women, we love women we see as perfect, we want to be perfect women, and therefore we want to love ourselves.

Wait…what?
Yeah, I said it, we want to be someone else, and then we want to fuck ourselves.
I remember as a teen running into a consistent nightmare/fantasy where I’d set up the perfect lesbian couple: the Pfeiffer/Demi Moore, the Uma Thurman/Anne Hathaway, the Scarlett Johannssen/Amy Adams.

And who am I?
I don’t know who I am; I’m someone in that mix. But sometimes I’m both. I am Jolie screwing Jolie. I am the Halle Berry twin duo. I am the nefarious coupling of Rebecca Romijn and Rebecca Romijn and the only way I could get any sicker is switching roles between Deschanel sisters…which we have ALL done.

We are women who love women and so we want to be attracted to what we wish for ourselves. As Kim Lee says, “I’ve definitely been attracted to women who have a really nice job, a good grasp on responsibilities, desirable physical attributes, people in extremely good physical shape. Not because I like it so much but because I wanted to be like that.”

Sure, our heroes are up there in the attributes department, but because they don’t have six-packs and twenty-inch packages. Instead, they are Wonder Woman, the bathing-suit/underwear-on-the-outside and they are us and simultaneously they are our biggest crush. This duality in some ways might be seen as disturbing, might be seen as ‘odd’ or even perverse in the same way we observe the ‘kissing cousins’ of my beloved south.

But unlike the wrongness of making out with one’s own blood and family, wishing to be the person that you were making out with isn’t quite the same. Perhaps it could be seen as selfish or narcissistic, but since we’re imagining ourselves as ‘other’ it isn’t even that. In the end, this is a dream. It’s a weird, unique dream directly related to who we are as women who like women. We have our obsessions with our bodies, and we have our lust and love for the same sex. It’s all there in the perfect storm and so for a short moment as the lights turn out and the hand slips down past the band of our underpants, we get confused.

“It’s very common,” says Lee, “You end up looking up to the people you’re into. Until you realize that nobody has anything to offer that you can’t obtain yourself. The problem with the whole scenario is when you look at people you only see that through your perspective. You don’t really know what it’s like for them. For example, ‘Oh, they have such a nice body, I wish I had her body. It would be so nice.’ The truth is, nobody else can fulfill the void but you.”

And it’s true. I have found women enthralling who saw themselves as plain. I have wished myself into their position or life or body to only find that they had perceived flaws that outstripped mine. They had lives that out-sucked mine. They had horribleness that I didn’t want to take upon myself. In the end, a bit more fat, the hirsute nature of a Polish/Russian Jew mix, and the errors I find in my own physicality are all matched in these beautiful women by deeper flaws.

They wished that they were smarter instead of gorgeous, they wished they were kinder instead of in the possession of the greatest ass on the face of the earth, they wished that their middle finger didn’t turn to the right and their face wasn’t so flat or their chest wasn’t so small and envied something of me that I myself hated.

In the end, we all feel lacking. We all wish we were something else.

As children we wished ourselves to be unicorns or princesses or superheroes or the president or the ultimate emperor of the world. As adults, we look at pictures and movies and pray that we can slim down or tone up and somehow become these people, but we also see in them something else. We see worth. We see the hidden gems that they themselves are busy wishing away.

We wish we were them just so we could hold them and be worthy simultaneously, so we could have a moment of equilibrium. So for once the individual could see themselves in the shining diamond light in which they exist for others. For once we want to let the beauty we want to be have its carnal nasty skanky sumptuous way with itself. And we want to be participant and watcher.

Perhaps the straights get majority rule in most political decisions. Perhaps they get marriage and the entire range of human rights and the ability to not have to deal with custodial courts every time they move into a southeastern state. But they don’t get this.
Nope, the breeders have no idea how great it is to fall in love with yourself when you are someone else. They are the untasty Bruce Willis/Cybil Shepherds of the world as we are the Rosario Dawson/Sarah Michelle Gellars. Or Sarah Michelle Gellar banging her doppleganger. Either way, they’re kind of alone there. There is always a partner in the mix that isn’t ‘them’ while we can be either one.

There is nothing truly wrong with wanting to bang one’s own fantasy self. It’s a reconnection, a grounding, a different way of accepting who you are, all through the filter of a celebrity or even fictional other. As Mona Berrelleza notes, “The thing that turns me on the most is when I’m completely feeling my body; You have to be in tune with yourself.”

In a world where we are taught to hate ourselves we have the perfect escape, the best excuse to love who we are, all through the filter of the gorgeous, famous and celebrity. Perhaps it seems perverse, but in this case, wanting to screw yourself is likely one of the healthier aspects of being queer.