Sexy to someone

Quick love, quick sex and being perceived on dating apps

“You’re perfect,” he says when we’re lying in bed afterwards.

I take in the scent of the hotel room and close my eyes. I pretend to be in Europe with someone who means what they say; who knows me; who isn’t just saying what they think I want to hear. The room smells faintly of sun tan lotion and the AC hums a love song. Later that day, we go our separate ways, spat out into the East London grey. I tap my nails against the seat in front of me on the bus ride home. 

We’re looking for quick love or quick sex. After all, the promise of both is held in the palm of our hands at all times. If I can order from the nice new takeaway spot, listen to almost every album ever made, find the answer to each passing curiosity then why wouldn’t I also be able to download an app and fall in love, or at least find someone to fuck – immediately, and on my terms?

Of course, the reality is quite different. Dating apps are dying because they could never fulfil their promise. Love is too nebulous to be accessible through premium subscription plans, but dating companies keep guzzling up money and trading in collective loneliness anyway. We want quick love, but that’s not possible. I don’t have the patience to keep dating strangers. 

I sit at my desk and watch the notifications light up my phone screen. The infinite eyes glancing up and down my profile. If we match, some of them tell me I’m sexy. They’ve never seen me laugh or talk about something I’m passionate about or chew on the inside of my cheeks when I’m bored or anxious. I want to be sexy to someone, not to anyone or everyone. Not to every person mindlessly swiping for quick sex or quick love.

On the lead single from Charm, Clairo sings about the feeling of wanting to be sexy to someone. It’s a departure from 2021’s, ‘Blouse’,  which depicts the disillusionment and bitterness that resulted from the sexualisation she experienced as a young woman in the music industry.

While being a public figure magnifies the stickiness of being perceived and desired by strangers to a much larger extent than dating apps, I can relate to the dual emotions of discomfort and longing that come from being a woman seeking love, but too often finding something much less substantial and more objectifying. It can be easier to feel bitter about it than to admit that, despite it all, you would still like to be sexy to someone; that, as Clairo sings, you might need that to live. 

The years creep along, as though we have forever left. This is what I have – the long sickness of waiting, the hangover of a second chance, whispered maybes, bloated notifications that promise oblivion. Then one day time jerks forwards. My heart is soft then hard like a pebble. I want to get down to the fleshy part of the feeling and tear its guts out. 

I try to match my breathing with the tide and wish that, like the sea, I could just be. That any beauty I have would consume, inspire fear rather than desire. But what is desire if not fear that you will never fulfil that desire? Both grip my whole body, keep me up til dawn when I toss and turn in empty beds in Brighton and London, Kent, Paris, Sheffield. 

I don’t want one day. I want now. I want loudly then with no sound at all. I want next to warm bodies and in arms I’ll waste in. They want me tonight. In an hour. For a drink. They’ve got a free flat. We could meet there? The news announces the murders of more women and I cancel all my plans. 

I’m buried in the hollow of the empty night where we drink to being casual because quick sex is so much easier than quick love. I used to drink recklessly mid-week, fill weekends with dates when I didn’t have anything better to do. I would be sincere and vulnerable and messy with it, falling in and out of bars, infatuated with people I barely knew. Sometimes I would cry. Sometimes I would write poems. Sometimes I would stay all day wrapped up in their shirts. They said I was sexy.

This is an accumulation of the past few years. There is no start or end point. Just the to and fro of our desire that moves like waves crashing onto the beach. One moment, you feel it everywhere. The next it pulls away as the moon watches on.