Lesbians On The March

I have noticed that you rarely publish letters by lesbian or bisexual women in your column. What’s up with that?
–Represent

Excellent question, grasshopper. It’s absolutely true, I don’t print very many questions from lesbian and bisexual women, primarily because I don’t get very many questions from lesbian and bisexual women. A good ninety percent of the e-mails I get are from men. I’ve wondered about this for a while, and my feeling is that despite the fact that I promise anonymity for all letter-writers, most women are simply too uncomfortable to send even a confidential letter to my column. And with good reason—if a woman sends me a letter about her sex life, she’s taking much more of a risk than a man. The consequences for a woman admitting to not always having pure, heterosexual thoughts and desires are far graver than for men, and I think the fear of being judged and punished is so ingrained in women that very little can make us feel safe.

So let me put this out there for all you women readers, particularly the lesbian and bisexual ones: your letters are safe with me. I do not reveal names, I usually try to remove all identifying markers from letters, and I will never show your letter or share your contact information with anyone else. I invite your letters and I will do everything I can to represent your concerns in the column. Also, I invite all my women readers to weigh in: why do you think that women don’t send in questions as frequently as men? Send in your responses and I’ll print them in next week’s column.

“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.

Mo Problems

I wrote to you earlier—I’m the 15-year old lesbian girl in Delhi. I have more problems now than before. One of my friends has told me she doesn’t want to be friends with me and another one is blackmailing me and threatening to tell my teachers that I’m a lesbian. I’m really worried about this. The other thing is that I’m in love with a girl who is a class senior to me and I want to tell her. Should I send her and anonymous love letter or is there some other process. Please help me. I feel like dying. I cry all day.
–Goody Dash

I remember your previous letter. It was published on April 26th. Honestly, your problems sound much bigger than what I can address in the scope of this column. You are dealing with shmucks for friends, falling in love, and the pressure to keep your sexual desires secret. That’s a lot for a 15-year-old kid and you have my fullest sympathy. Seriously, I my heart goes out to you.  My advice: call the TARSHI (that’s Talking About Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues, a non-profit in Delhi). They have a hotline for people who need to work through address issues of gender and sexuality in their lives. They’re very non-judgmental and caring, and they protect your privacy and confidentiality all the way. The helpline phone number is (011)-2437 2229 and the hours are 10 AM to 4 PM, Monday through Wednesday. Give them a call and see how they can help. And keep me posted about how you’re doing. You’ve got a definite supporter way down south in Chennai.

Gazing On Desire

I have often been asked about the nature of my desire as a lesbian woman. My budding feminist leanings have convinced me that community and desire go hand in hand for the average lesbian woman. Generations that have legitimized and propounded heterosexuality (and unequal power relations) have created one kind of desire, whereas a lesbian consciousness (which in India is largely created from individual self-reflection) has been built around silence and the social conditioning of being women. Thus lesbian desire is different from heterosexual desire. Can you please shed some light on this? How is the lesbian gaze different from the male gaze?
–Learning More

It’s really great that you’re reading and thinking critically about your sexuality. And I think that it’s very promising that you’re making the connections between patriarchical oppression and women’s sexual desires. However, I disagree with you that it is possible to make a clear distinction between lesbian desire and the heterosexual male desire. I can see why you came to that conclusion—heterosexual men and lesbian women both desire women but are clearly different from each other—but I think it’s very problematic to box yourself in because desire is fluid. For example, you may think that as a lesbian woman the only women you want are butch or androgynous women. So what happens if you suddenly find yourself attracted to a femme girl, the kind of person that heterosexual men are typically attracted to? What does it imply if a hetero man is primarily attracted to butch or gender-transgressive women? And what about gay men, bisexual women, straight women, and trans men and women? Do each one of us have desires and a sexual “gaze” that corresponds perfectly with our given sexual identity?

I wanted to open out the question to others, so I called Ponni Arasu, a queer activist and member of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, and read her your question. “Oh dear,” she sighed,  “that’s such a large question. While I do see how these identities, such as ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘straight’ can be great sources of strength, they can be enormously oppressive to different expressions of desire. The letter-writer should know from her readings of feminist texts that talking in terms of heterosexual versus gay desire can be very problematic—for example, do gay men and lesbian women experience desire in the same way? It’s very important to use these labels critically and with self-awareness.”

Agreed. I understand how having a strong sense of identity around sexuality can be empowering, but it’s also important to continually problematize the ways that identity and desire intersect. One of these days you might find yourself falling for the kind of woman that you think only straight men want, and then you’ll have to radically reassess the whole notion of a lesbian gaze. Desire can be a fluid and mutable thing, and it’s better to keep an open mind now than to face that kind of confusion later. You can still have a strong identity as a lesbian woman without necessarily painting yourself into a corner with regards to the kind of women you desire and in how you should desire them.

Fakies

I am a 20-year-old girl from Bangalore. I have a boyfriend that I have sex with. My sister is a lesbian and one day I walked in on her and her girlfriend having lesbian sex. They asked me to join in and I liked it a lot. I have started fantasizing about my sister and her friend joining in when I have sex with my boyfriend. How do I talk about this with my sister and boyfriend? Please help me!
–Looking For Foursome

I call fake on this letter. First of all, because most people who get walked in on by their siblings during sex scream at them to get out, get up and slam the door, and then never speak about it again. They don’t invite said sibling to join on in. That’s just weird.  Second of all, about a month ago I got another letter from the same person that reads like this: “I am a 19-year-old girl from Bangalore. My problem is that I just love lesbian sex so much. I have only done it three times before and now I just want to do it all the time. I tried to get my friends from college to do it with me, but they don’t seem interested. If I am not able to do it soon, I will go crazy. What should I do? Please help me!” Yeah, okay. Now, it’s possible that the letter-writer is a woman with same-sex desire who is concocting all these strange queries in order to get me to tell her that being a lesbian is okay and normal. Which it is. But something about the tone of these two letters indicate the writer is just some loser guy who watches too much lesbian porn and is trying to get a reaction out of me. Granted, there are some strange and surprising things in this world, but I can tell you right now that most lesbian women do not talk about how much they “love lesbian sex”—just like most straight people do not talk about how much they love straight sex. The specificity of this claim is what leads me to believe the letter-writer got all of this out of some cheesy porno flick. Yuckies.