There’s often a frisson between female friends
After Mel B’s confession, Rowan Pelling recalls the feelings she has shared with other women herself
Ihave always maintained the early stages of a blossoming female friendship can be near identical to the sensations of falling in love. There’s the moment you first glimpse the object of affection and know with the full force of your sixth sense they were destined for you. It’s like catching a faint radio signal and registering the broadcast is in your own particular vernacular, with shared hinterland and humour.
When you catch eyes, a glint passes between you that acknowledges a mutual allure and feels a little like flirting. The plain truth is you want to get to know that person better and will go to great lengths to do so. It may not be exactly sexual, but there’s often a faint buzz of erotic energy about a new woman friend that translates into keen insights about why a man, or gay woman, would want to sleep with them. Occasionally there’s something more, a slight frisson when you touch and a sense that if you were just a bit more fluid, something would happen.
So I’d guess no women, other than the purest innocents, were surprised to learn the two sexiest Spice Girls had gone to bed together. Mel B, aka Scary Spice, confessed to Piers Morgan under intense questioning that she and Geri Halliwell had crossed the line from good friendship into something more intimate when the group was at the height of its fame. This made perfect sense to me. They always seemed more worldly and experimental than the others; magnetic, somehow. What would be easier when you share the phenomenon of a sudden rise to fame, and all the stresses that come with it, than to move from confidante to lover?
I’ve experienced my own versions of this intimacy, although none involved actual sex. While at university I forged a friendship with a bisexual classmate. We would often share a bed and fall asleep wrapped round each other, which was a huge comfort.
Over a decade later I felt a similar closeness to a colleague on the Erotic
Review magazine, who remains one of my dearest friends. We worked so closely together for eight years that we developed a form of telepathy – in many ways, she knew (and still knows) me better than my husband.
When I was 35, I had a terrible year: my father-in-law died after falling and setting himself alight in his sitting room fire, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and, shortly after, I learnt my first pregnancy wouldn’t go to term as the baby had a fatal chromosomal disorder. I had a termination followed by appendicitis resulting in further hospitalisation.
Nevertheless, three days after my appendix was whipped out, I decided I would attend the Hay-on-wye literary festival as planned. I wanted to head out of my misery and lose myself in events. My beloved colleague and a few other friends came along to support me, and on our final night I got quite drunk and emotional, as if all the tension of the year was bursting out of me. She pushed her bed against mine and put her arms around me, at which point I felt something electric happen: it was as if radiant energy was flowing through us. Both of us could see and feel the force and said in unison, and then repeatedly, “I love you.” Which was true. I’d never experienced anything like it apart from the feelings I’d had for my husband when I first met him.
Three of our room-mates slept through this beautiful moment, but another (a publisher we didn’t know very well) witnessed it all and fled the dorm. We found out afterwards she’d told half of Hay we were lesbians, which made us laugh.
I’ve never heard a male professional tell a similar story about a colleague: it’s hard to imagine Simon le Bon suddenly confessing his night of passion with Nick Rhodes, despite the camp lyrics and Eighties’ guy-liner. Women do appear to be more sexually fluid than men, perhaps because gay male sex has been both illegal for most of recent history and viewed as a mortal sin, whereas religious texts don’t bother so much with woman-on-woman passion. Male-led institutions have, historically, been appalled at the idea of male gay sex because it confronts them with deeply-embedded taboos; this is at odds with our new gender-fluid world where almost all the young women I know define themselves as bisexual or non-binary.
A recent UK study by Grazia and Onepoll found that a quarter of women aged 18-24 described themselves as straight, but had still notched up a clinch with a woman. It’s easy for modern women to take a detour to another woman’s bedroom but still think of themselves as heterosexual.
What’s wonderful for women in the 21st century is that so many of us are at ease with the idea you don’t fall in love with a gender, but an individual – and the possibilities are boundless.