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There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices that they can caress fairly openly by virtue of their both being women ‘Nobody was looking,’ she thinks to herself ‘I realised they probably thought we were only two friends who liked to touch each other a lot when they talked’ While the obliviousness of those around them is conducive to their affair, this moment encapsulates a problem queer women frequently encounter when searching for their counterparts in print and on screen So little attention is paid to women’s relationships with each other that amity and eroticism are too often confused, to uncomfortable effect: such blurring shows the lack of significance regularly attributed both to lesbianism and to deep female friendship When I was younger and first looking for media that represented my own experiences, this inchoate model of relationships used to make me cautious about ever getting too close to my female friends, in case they or I became similarly confused I was already lonely without a queer community, and this caution made me even lonelier   But in recent years I’ve begun to notice an increase in art by women about female friendship, which I hoped would help to make clearer the difference between these two kinds of relationship Perhaps, I thought, if we had more iconic examples of non-romantic, non-erotic friendships, representations of things I might do on a date with another woman — like holding her hand, or kissing her — wouldn’t be so readily coded as just being really great pals But on reading and watching works feted for their depictions of female friendship, I found that even writers I admired seemed determined to shoehorn in eroticism as a way of showing how close two women are I was disappointed by the passage in Zadie Smith’s NW where Natalie gets given a vibrator by Leah, whose past as a not entirely straight woman feels tacked on amid much more thoroughly explored class- and race-based discomfort The section of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant