“Hot Girl-On-Girl Action”

I’m really confused about whether I might be a lesbian. I’m attracted to guys and I have a boyfriend, but I get really turned on by watching lesbian porn. I use it to masturbate all the time. However, I’m not attracted to any of my girlfriends or any of the girls I know. Am I a lesbian or bisexual, or is all of this just a normal part of growing up? Please help me, I’m so confused.
–It’s Hard Not Knowing

I feel you, girl. I know a lot of straight women who dig lesbian porn, and the whole thing can be very confusing, both personally and politically. I’ve thought about this issue a lot (as have many other feminist thinkers far more learned than yours truly), and my feeling about the “lesbian” porn you find on the Internet is that it’s not really about lesbianism or same-sex desire at all. That particular brand of porn is all about women performing a simulacrum of lesbian desire for an assumed-to-be heterosexual male audience. (Of course, a lot of the audience is actually female—in much the same way that the real audience of the now-defunct Playgirl magazine was not straight women, but gay men. But I digress.) The point is, I think a lot of the directors and producers of porn assume that straight men want nothing more than to see lots and lots of naked girls prancing around—if one is good, then two (or more) is even better. And if those two girls happen to be making out, well, that’s just part of the game, too. The implicit assumption is that they’re not kissing because they’re really attracted to each other (‘cause that would be, you know, too gay), but because they’re both so into sex that they’d do it with anything that moves, even someone of the same gender. “Girl-on-girl” porn is such a crazy mix of homophobia and queer performance that it’s hard to know what to think.

But for what it’s worth, here’s what I think: while there’s something disturbing about the way lesbian desire has been defanged and commodified for straight consumption, there’s also no reason why anyone should have to apologize for what turns them on. Provided that a person’s taste in smut doesn’t include incest, pedophilia, or bestiality, I don’t think it’s at all productive to ask an individual to account for what turns their crank. If you like lesbian porn, then you like it. It’s really as simple as that. I wouldn’t worry too much about whether that makes you bisexual—and even if it did, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Just one thing: if you find yourself becoming attracted to women in real life, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just go with it.

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