By Kate Murphy
Despite what we, as a society, seem to believe, women do not, in fact, exist purely for male satisfaction! Surprise! But we really don't seem to understand this. Look in nearly any show, ad or magazine and you will see the performative, painful version of sexy that exists as the standard for women. Because of this, seeing media representation of queer women is uncomfortable for us, to say the least. Women loving other women? No men involved? Sex… without a man? How dare they?! Wait. Actually, maybe it's… hot? It was decided that seeing representation of queer women was sexy. Well, two women having sex is sexy. Not all that love and emotions garbage. But the problem is that media, be it television, film or printed media, is largely controlled by straight men, who, unsurprisingly, don’t know a lot about lesbian sex. So, everything that was a turn on about queerness was thrown together. This disregarded almost anyone who isn’t a high femme, and all the complexities of relationships, as well as the unimportant little thing, called love. This left nothing but straight passing, “sexy” women in lifeless, loveless, sexual relationships. And thus the sexualization of queer women, lesbians, in particular, began.
Specifically, in media, the objectification of queer women is not only gross, but a marketing tactic to bring in male viewership. Before we explore this further, we have to look at what sexual objectification is. To objectify is defined as ”to treat as an object…”. Sexual objectification is when someone is treated as merely an object for sexual pleasure. That's exactly what’s happening. The versions of queer women that we commonly see are not women with complex relationships, feelings, or communities, they are objects to be put in sexual situations to draw in viewership. Specifically male viewership. According to Ogi Ogas, neuroscientist and author of A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire, men react more to visual stimuli in sexual situations. While emotions play a much bigger role in women’s sexual fantasies, men’s are based around visual stimuli of what they find attractive as well as visual stimuli that downplay complex emotions. Therefore it actually makes a fair amount of sense that men find two women having sex “hot”. It’s twice the visual stimuli of what they find attractive. This is something the TV and advertisement industries have learned to manipulate. By adding a lesbian kiss in the first few episodes of their show they can draw in male viewers without ever really having to develop the characters. A great example of this is Riverdale. In one of the very first episodes, a kiss is shared between Betty and Veronica, a kiss that was heavily featured in the promotional material for the show. However, nothing more than an awkwardly and inappropriately steamy kiss comes from this, no relationships, no love, not even real queer women. The same can be seen in advertising. Earlier this year, Calvin Klien released a commercial featuring two models kissing. However, once again, all they did was kiss. They were shown purely in a sexual way, they didn't even hold hands. This gutted version of queer women’s love is used as nothing more than a marketing technique.
This warped and performative version of queerness that has been presented to the world has not only made the everyday sexualization of queer women commonplace, but it has also negatively impacted the world's view of queer women. By only showing the “sexy” lesbians, the majority of an entire community is not being represented. There are very few examples of butch women in media or queer mothers, or really any queer women in love with all of their clothes still on. This has lead to harmful real-life stereotypes such as the “predatory lesbian” trope, one that says that lesbians go after straight women, try to “turn” them and sleep with them. Which is just gross, unrealistic, and ironic since straight men have a thing about “turning” lesbians. This is perpetuated by TV as it is an easy-to-use scenario to get to girls to make out and then never have to continue an emotional relationship. But stereotypes like these are dangerous in real life as they warp straight people’s (who may not know many queer people) idea of queer women. Giving the idea that they are dangerous, or that all queer relationships are about is sex. Yes, that’s a real stereotype that has been around for far too long (see: the basis of conversion therapy). This entire idea invalidates queer relationships, shows them as not as important as straight ones, or not as loving, a very dangerous thing to have thought. While perpetuating homophobic mentalities is (hopefully) not the intentions of those writing these queer women, it is a very unfortunate symptom of the disease that is objectification.
This is a large problem, and to find the solution one would have to think for a lot longer than I have to finish this article. However, I can hypothesize as to how we can start moving in the right direction. There is, of course, the obvious of stop writing inaccurate and sexualized queer women! Duh. But we also just need to talk about this more. It can be a hard topic to bring up, given the stigma around sex and of course stigma around queer women. In fact, there are many things that would have been nice to bring up in this article that I couldn’t because this is going in a school newspaper. Just for starters, a whole paragraph was planned about lesbian pornography and it’s male viewers as it is a very important part of this conversation. However, I do understand that there is a time and place and this is not it. It’s a hard thing to talk about, but by not bringing it up the problem is going to get worse, or at least not get any better. By talking about the gross sexualization of queer women the idea can at least be implanted in people’s minds that the women they are seeing on TV and in ads is not what real queer women are like. It can start breaking down the homophobic stereotypes set up by this oversimplification of queerness. While the entire entertainment industry can’t be changed overnight, even confronting the fact that there is a problem with the representation of queer women is a step in the right direction.
The objectification of queer women in entertainment is the sad reality of our society. They get forced into a little box of what is considered sexy and palatable. And this isn’t real representation. Queer women are shown to only be sexual objects to draw in an audience, not real people with complex relationships. This is not only gross but damaging to the world’s perception of queer women and their perception of themselves. While this is a problem that is quite deeply ingrained in our culture and won’t get changed overnight, the least we can do is talk about it. So, if you're going to take anything from this article, let it be the idea of a conversation. Sorry that that happens to be uncomfortable. Not my fault.
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