Lesbian Visibility Is Up, But Who’s Looking Hardest?
'Knee deep in the passenger seat and you’re eating me out, is it casual now?' wonders singer Chappell Roan, who’s giving lesbian life some serious airtime. We’re in the middle of a lesbian renaissance, some say. There’s been the pulpy sleaze of bodybuilding melodrama Love Lies Bleeding, starring Kristen Stewart, the lesbian road tripping Coen Brothers film Drive-Away Dolls, the UK’s first ever lesbian dating show, I Kissed A Girl, with a selection of relatable femmes and butches finally doing what we’ve seen the straights do for decades now (just being kinder about it). And of course there’s the music, with Roan, Renée Rapp, Billie Eilish, JoJo Siwa and Romy from the xx singing about adoring other women. Elsewhere, The L Word’s Kate Moennig is now voicing lesbian erotica, Cara Delevingne is out, sober and proud and lesbian footballers (and their teammates) play to ever larger crowds.
And of course that’s not even to mention the many, many lesbian and bi and pan and, basically queer women on social media like TikTok and Instagram who are teaching young girls it’s ok to be us. After decades of being sidelined in culture, lesbians are everywhere in the culture. There are even now two full-time lesbian bars in London!
Part of me - a small part, I promise - is grizzly about this stuff. Today’s young lesbians just get a whole culture handed to them. It's primed, ready and waiting for them, like pre-grated cheese, or contactless payments. Sorry to sound like someone with back problems, but in my day, when Section 28 had a chilling effect on speaking to young people about anything LGBT I had to slog away at cobbling together a sense of my own culture.
While straight people - and to some degree, gay boys - around me had plenty of role models to look up to, my cultural diet was formed of the scantest of crumbs; older folk singers, The L Word, obscure feminist blog sites with images of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings tiling the background, and then any woman in film or TV who was refusing to give a man what he wanted - and likely getting punished for it in the end. I’d pore over everything for clues of lesbianisn. Sometimes I rate my investigative journalist skills because I reckon I’m naturally great at weeding things out. Then, I remember, all lesbians my age are capable of detective work, because we’ve spent so long vigilant to any glimmer of a reflection of ourselves in a society and mass media that, by design, ignored us.
We needed to signal in secret, and consistently co-opted ways, which way we 'swung'. A bolshy manner, thumb-rings, short hair, wallets on chains, side-panels shaved off, were some of the things I looked out for, which of course are by no means exclusive to lesbians. Now, today’s lesbians only need go on a dating app to find other women, or social media to hear their stories.
By the time Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson rolled in during the Noughties, the first celebrity twenty-something lesbian pairing I’d ever known of, I was delighted. Finally! Some representation I could relate to! But both of them clearly struggled with a multitude of issues, including a harsh, homophobic and misogynistic media glare. They were set to implode, and with them, the feeling that lesbianism was only ever a path of chaos and misery, a glitch in the norm.
I’m so glad that things have moved on, and I wouldn’t wish that toxic lesbophobic culture on the generations below me. I’m delighted that lesbians’ brains no longer have to be occupied by the hunt for lesbianism and, worse, the crushing self-doubt that comes from being invisible.
However, as someone who’s been out for about 20 years, I know that any progressive step forward is met by backlash. And for lesbians, this is most apparent in the fact our representation is still not entirely ours. In truth, the medium most prolifically churning out content that pretends to represent us is actively working against our interests.
I’m talking about porn. It was a lousy way for me to try to discover my own sexuality, and still is, because all it does is show that lesbians can’t actually bring each other any pleasure, and must instead intently wait for the man to come along and show them, brutally, how it’s done. By centring men in an act that is, by definition, not about them, 'lesbian' porn works to remove an identity away from a group who have fought for rights under that banner. Sure, we might be more inclined to pay for 'ethical' porn, but we live in a world surrounded by men who’ve been raised on the cheap stuff. Of course, other women and a hell of a lot of minorities are frequently diminished by porn, but none of those groups are defined by not wanting men. For too many men, we’re the thing they can never have, and it makes them not just want us, but hate us.
Since I came out, the most severe and impactful homophobic abuse I’ve had is from men with a sense of entitlement to my sex life. Remember those two women who were beaten up on a London bus by a group of young boys just five years ago? The boys only set upon them after the two women refused to kiss on demand. They refused to embody the pornified ideal of what lesbian was, because they were too busy being actual real people. And my worry is that young men - decreasingly likely to care about women and feminism, according to one recent study - still aren’t getting the message.
Despite this recent slew of sensationally sapphic stuff that young women are drawn to, young men’s algorithms are serving them very different content. So this is where my resentment for younger women fades, and my sympathy soars. Online porn is more abundant, accessible and atrocious than ever, and so is manosphere content that suggests women should be back to the kitchen, serving men at all costs. Young lesbians have their own battles; they’re having to exist around the young men who just don’t respect them. I’m sure things will get better, but we’ll need more than a lesbian renaissance; I want a revolution.
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