Nailing It

by Devil’s Food Cake

It’s possibly one of the best scenes from a lesbian film ever. Bound‘s climactic moment: Jennifer Tilly seducing Gina Gershon slowly and sensuously up on that screen, their bodies intertwined and writhing as she goes in for the kill. And then suddenly, what should have been one of the hottest scenes known to mankind goes horribly, horribly wrong for me – because all I can think about is how nobody should be doing any fucking on that screen, not with nails that bloody long.

Remember that scene from The L Word? Where Shane and Alice are coaching Dana through the wonders of gaydar (the sixth sense, not the website)? One of the things to look at, they tell her, is a girl’s hands – more specifically the state of her nails. Short? She probably plays for our team. Long? It’s a probably a whole different ball game. It was like an epiphany for my young, freshly un-closeted self. Lesbians don’t have long nails! Like, duh!

That discovery has served to furnish me with two things: a much higher success rate when I was single and a healthy phobia of long nails. I mean, seriously – the things scare the shit out of me. I can be on the tube, or getting coffee or discussing my borrowing needs at HSBC, but if someone in the vicinity has long nails, my concentration is shot – ripped to shreds by ten overbearingly bright talons.

I’m not sure exactly where this fear came from. I suspect, though, that it has something to do with the first girl I was ever fortunate enough to enjoy carnal relations with. The girl – let’s call her L – was tall, Swedish and fresh out of a goth-lite phase. We met in the delightful, dark recesses of a seedy Soho bar, and one date later, I was back at hers, drunkenly exclaiming over her collection of 50’s print ads and the fairy lights adorning her windows. Some rough and tumble later, we were settled into a pleasant, non-commital rhythm, but it wasn’t long until I was snapped out of this reverie by the discovery one morning of a series of long scratches running the length of my arms, legs and back. I looked like I’d been wrestling a cat. Not to mention the discomfort in other places. It turned out that one of the remnants of my Swedish paramour’s goth dalliance was a penchant for long, neatly-filed claws – a fact I’d conveniently managed to ignore for the two months we were together. Her refusal to just let the damn things go probably contributed to the early demise of our ‘relationship’, and definitely sowed the seeds of my deep-rooted loathing for the rancid things.

I can see however, that I am at least a tad biased. I guess long nails aren’t that bad if they’re not monstrously long. When, however, you can measure your nail length in centimetres, do your ladyfriend a solid and invest in a manicure. Her epidermis will, at the very least, appreciate it.