the sapphic handwashing sorority

In high school, I’d come to the awkward (yet ultimately welcome) conclusion that, for me, gender didn’t matter in terms of who I found attractive. Mulder and Scully were both acceptable targets for my fanfic-driven lust, after all. In other words, I just found people hot, if the person was hot, and it didn’t matter - boy, girl, whoever. My friends have told me this is called pansexuality, but I’m not entirely sure.

Apparently it differs a bit from just being bisexual? I couldn’t care less what it’s called… I’m just me. It guess doesn’t matter now, because I’m married and my entire attraction belongs to my spouse. Regardless, back then, it was quite a novel thing, as was any form of attraction (I suppose) for someone in their late teens, I suspect. I had, up to a point, mostly hidden any feels for ladies. It was true that in my sophomore year of high school, I’d been “outed” though a complex series of events, but that hadn’t gone terribly far, and plausible deniability was in play. I tried my best.

Online, though? You can bet your pearls I was open about my queer attractions, though, in the quasi-anonymous world of America Online, forums, and loosely-connected blogs. This was, after all, how I discovered Aristasia, that strange sapphic cult I fell into. It’s also how I ended up reading so many, ahem, high quality fanfics featuring a wide array of attractive characters. Given I was lacking certain life experiences at that young age, my own fanfics were likely pretty awful.

I went to great lengths to keep this part of my life somewhat separate from the rest, not sharing online identifiables with people at school. It felt relatively safe. At one point, my rudimentary blog had gotten leaked to a boy in my class, but that itself wasn’t tied to my truly secret life online. I was very careful about that, never visiting anything interesting in the presence of anyone else, and certainly not on the school computers.

I (of course) carefully deleted my browsing history after reading the spicy fanfics, many of which hyper-focused on X-files leading actress Gillian Anderson. In retrospect, most of them were really bad. They were mostly written by teens like me, and that I know for a fact. Many of the fanfic authors were my online friends. We were all kissless virgins, writing about Mulder and Scully banging.

It was rather ridiculous if you think about it, and in the end, we all had slightly warped ideas about sex and how it worked. I remember one incident in my last year of high school where I had to tell an (online, fanfic-addled) friend of mine that women don’t have prostates. She simply typed, “Damn, and I was looking foward to that, too!” That might sound humorous, but is it really?

We were still just teenagers. Most of us probably didn’t get very good sex education from the adults in our lives, and that was a bad thing. We also definitely shouldn’t have been reading and writing erotica, of course, which only warped our perceptions of sex further. It just wasn’t healthy for young people. Sorry, not sorry, but that’s a hill I’ll die on. It wasn’t a good scene, and I wish it had never been part of my adolescence.

Nevertheless, it would be a few years before I would completely ditch the habit of reading fanfic and other weird stuff online in my spare time. One day in high school, I came across something… unique. I can’t even remember how I found it. I think it was on one of those completely unrelated “weird links” sites I religiously frequented at the time. I found all kinds of interesting things on there, and this was not an exception by far. With a deep curiosity, I clicked on what I can only call the Sapphic Handwashing Sorority.

This site was a themed archive of erotic stories, at least in theory. It was primarily text. In fact, the only images were a flowery background and some cartoonish pictures of bars of soap, if I remember right. I recall thinking it looked dated, even back then. There were maybe four or five stories, total, and they were quite short, but rather… unique.

They focused entirely on the gratuitously sensuous act of women who love women washing each other’s hands. In each story, a new girl arrives at a university sorority. She’s bicurious, of course, perhaps with a bizarre backstory. Regardless, in a candlelit ceremony, she discovers that it’s secretly home to a club of handwashing enthusiasts. There’s some making out. She has her hands washed, and it’s described in extreme, erotically-inclined detail.

Then, everyone starts washing each other’s hands orgiastically. Handwashing party. In some of the stories, it goes slightly further, but that’s it. End of plot. Each story, crafted with the same early-2000s precision, featured sexual allusions, but detailed mostly hands, soap, and the act of cleansing. Safe for work? Perhaps some of them were! I know that it didn’t load on my school’s (censored) internet connection. Still…

Vivid pornography? Not exactly…

If you really think about it, they were a bit ahead of the curve, though, weren’t they? I suspect all the ladies involved were in a position to survive COVID quite handily (so to speak). I wonder if that fetish still exists (probably), and, on second thought, what the pandemic was like for people into it.

I don’t know if the site itself got many hits, or if it was just one strange lesbian’s solo project (or maybe a duet). It might’ve even been some kind of prank, or the work of a guy (double fetishes? no clue here). I was pretty shocked that it existed either way. I, of course, showed it to all my loser friends on AOL Instant Messenger. We all passed it around in our circle of X-Files fans and other nerds for kicks.

I giggle about this site, but I won’t mention some of the other sites I, and other people, ran into back then. Most people know the calibre of horrible stuff haunting the web back then. This site, though, might not have been particularly graphic or gross, but was so weird as to be unforgettable, even twentysome years later.

It was one of those moments when time stands still while you chuckle.