The XX Factor: What women really think.

A Farewell to Girls in Heat

Margaret, Marjorie, I've been studiously avoiding reading your posts on The L-Word finale until now. My prosecutor recorded it and—tell me this isn't love—waited until I could watch it with her last night. Finales tend to be disappointing; this one was as well. (And how disappointing that we didn't get to see more of Lucy Lawless as the butch detective, a little wink to her longtime role as lesbian icon in Xena.) But gosh, the show was fun while it lasted. In the last season I enjoyed watching them turn Jenny (possibly the least believable lesbian on the planet, except maybe Erin Daniels as a tennis god—yeah, right) into an all-out bitch who hurts every last friend. I kinda enjoyed how much fun they had making everyone into Jenny's potential murderer; I'll vote for Bette. But the sixth season didn't have nearly enough sex. The fifth season included Tasha and Alice going at it with some excellent hungry heat, which they didn't have this season. And aside from them, there was all kinda kitschy sex: sex on a movie set! Sex in a movie trailer! Prison sex! Car sex! Bridesmaid sex! Adulterous sex! Shane, that hounddog, racing away from angry girls who've just had the best orgasms of their lives! Oh lordy, I laughed so hard at it all. And I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to watch girls do it the way girls really do it—not with long nails, like a porn movie for men, but down and dirty. Straight folks get this in their dramas and comedies all the time—realistic, well-shot heat—but I've never before seen it depicted well so consistently for lesbians. Just that deserves some awards.

And oh, how I loved Pam Grier being rescued from the purgatory of the blaxploitation bin. She should have a show all to herself, somewhere, somehow.

But you both should know that the biggest surprise audience—bigger than straight men, who didn't watch as much as expected—was straight women. They ramped up the clothes in the second season into goofy-looking femme wear specifically to appeal more to that Sex in the City-missing demographic. Thank god for Tasha and Shane, who provided at least a minimum weekly requirement of butch girls, one for whom I could pine. I got more good dyke hit off Rachel Maddow most weeks than off most of The L-Word. Not that I'm complaining! I could have gone on watching dyke drama with those femme gals for years to come.

Not With a Bang but a Wimpout

Margaret and Marjorie, we're framily and all, but yikes do I disagree with you about the finale of The L Word. My feeling? Thank Sappho that's over! I hate to quote a man right now, but I'm with James Wolcott: The episode "set lesbianism and the art of storytelling back about fifty years."

Coming into this final season, you'd think I would have learned not to expect basic narrative cohesion or even entertainment from The L Word, but Season 6 failed to meet even my barely there standards. It was, in short, an utter abomination.

Yes, Jennifer Beals is magnificent (the suit she wore in the cast's final strut across the screen almost made the whole nightmare worthwhile), and Laurel Holloman can act, as can the gorgeous Rachel Shelley (naturally, she was given nothing to do all year except drink and stare into the middle distance), but I feel certain I could've gotten just as much out of this season if I'd watched the whole thing with my finger on the fast-forward button.

But you know what really annoys me? The final season of The L Word failed to obey the fundamental law of Showtime. Showtime is the poor woman's premium cable channel (actually, the rich woman's, since it's truly elective—HBO is what you get if you can afford only one premium option), but it long ago came up with a winning formula: Don't worry so much about a script, just cast a bunch of attractive people with nice bodies and have them go at it on a regular basis. (I stuck with Showtime for five seasons of Soul Food, and believe me, it wasn't for the story lines.) The final eight episodes of The L Word might as well have played on network TV for all the skin we saw—it was as if they were pre-censored for their second run on Logo.

Many people have observed that network television's gay and lesbian characters never get to have sex, but I didn't imagine that their cable siblings would be similarly deprived. Thank heaven for Bette and Tina's final-episode bedroom scene. It was over in an instant, and we viewers glimpsed nary a nipple, but at least it was there, and at least they enjoyed it.

Love, Politics, and Laughing Out Loud

Julia and Marjorie, thank you for pointing out these designers' complete (and amusing) inability to draw a black woman. How behind the times these ethnocentrists will be in just a few short weeks, their limited talents overtaken by events! (My own stick figures are SO superior.) Your posts reminded me—[alert: this thread now being hijacked]—of the astonishing skill of Alison Bechdel, the brilliant "cartoonist" who can reveal differences in ethnic background, gender identities, and class attitudes with the slightest of strokes, no after-the-fact coloring-in or cartoonish exaggeration needed.

Bechdel broke into wider public view with Fun Home, a stunning graphic memoir that NYT's Dwight Garner said "knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over." It had a narrative and metaphoric depth that was literary in the best sense—meaning not "poetic" but profound. But some of us can boast that we already worshipped Bechdel's pen. Like every other lesbian of a certain age and attitude, I've been addicted to—infatuated with—Alison's work since she began chronicling and gently mocking our shared subculture with hilarious precision in Dykes To Watch Out For. Back in the day when the only place to find gay news was in weekly lesbian and gay newspapers (remember newspapers?), some of us would turn first to the back pages for our Alison fix. Every week, her characters, apparently based in Northhampton (aka "Lesbianville"), were working themselves up into soap-operatic fevers over love and politics all at once. Who else could intertwine (and send up) discussions of the perils of dating and monogamy, the unitary executive theory, bisexuality, Guantanmo, sex toys, the dot-com bust, academic jargon, internal debates over same-sex marriage, credit card overspending, and the problems of parenting with such kind, laugh-out-loud accuracy? Her work, over time, has added up into a kind of Dickens-like chronicle of my generation's sociopolitical world.

Now she's published the Essential Dykes To Watch Out For collection—which means I needn't keep trying to find back issues of my life (er, old collections of her strip) in used bookstores. For anyone who wants to know what a certain slice of feminist lesbians have been worrying about for the past 25-ish years, buy this book! And if, um, the publisher wants to send me a free publicity copy, I wouldn't send it back.

Bechdel is a goddess—and, to my regret, taken. (Note to my prosecutor: So am I, baby, nothing to worry about!) But seriously, folks: I have no idea why Alison Bechdel hasn't yet received a MacArthur Genius Award. She's the real thing, walking amongst us.

Runaway Lesbians in Cambodia

Doing research on something else entirely, I came across this item in the Phnom Penh Post's police blotter for August 22, 2008 (today):

MOTHER SEPARATES RUNAWAY LESBIANS
Oun Malis, 35, and Toucha Tith Thida, 25, a lesbian couple with Oun Malis in the role of the husband, were separated by one of the girl's mothers in Takhmao, Kandal province on Monday. The women met when they both got jobs as security guards just over a year ago. Before the couple fell in love, Toucha Tith Thida married a Korean man who later left her to return to Korea. Toucha Tith Thida's mother tricked the girl into coming back home by telling her that her husband had returned from Korea and wished to see her. Oun Malis has told Toucha Tith Thida that she will kill herself if she does not return to her within a week.KOH SANTEPHEAP

Now, I don't know any of the facts here. My heart breaks for these two, if all this is true. We would have called this "baby dyke drama," once upon a time, had it happened here in the states. But the context is obviously very different—why in the world is this in the police blotter, of all things?—so I can only wonder what's going on.

But it reminds me of a spate of runaway lesbian weddings in India a few years ago, in which young adult women ran away from home to be together, marrying in informal ceremonies. The surprise was that, when the families went to the police to try to break up the couples, the police or the judge would side with the young women. It was part of a shift in attitude toward gay rights, I learned in 2005 from Aditya Bondyopadhyay, a fearless and amazing gay rights organizer based in India (who risks violence there, as well as in his work in Pakistan and Nepal). I will write to Aditya to find out more about what's going on in Cambodia, but he may not know. If any XX Factor reader happens to know something, please send it along.

California Dreaming

For the rest of us: Did anyone see Pam Belluck's New York Times article on Sunday about lesbian and gay Massachusetts married couples? Except for the fact that it was primarily illustrated with photos of male couples (not her fault), the story was almost embarrassingly on target. She was entirely accurate about the ordinariness of lesbian and gay couples' attitudes toward marriage, now that the initial rush and excitement is over: As she notes, the numbers marrying have fallen off precipitously, the pent-up demand having been spent. Now we're marrying in more ordinary proportions.

But I got a call from a reporter today who was surprised by our ordinariness, asking: Isn't there something unique about how gay and lesbian folks respond to marriage? Well, no. Remember that we were born and raised in every ZIP code in the country, in every possible subculture, from the Bronx to Bellingham, Wash. We tend to relate to marriage the way our social peers or siblings do. The Cambridge politico gals—the ones who wash out and reuse their Ziploc bags—are going to have a different take on marriage than the Dallas debutante couples who get their hair freshly dyed every four weeks, whose take take will be just as different from that of the D.C. black-church-choir male couple. We are no more unified about our attitudes toward marriage than the rest of you. 

But what Belluck did nail, embarrassingly so, was the different attitudes that men and women bring to marriage—amplified when both halves of the pair are the same sex. Whether it's nature, nurture, or culture, men and women do have some different predilections. A couple of weeks ago, when y'all were having that monogamy discussion, I bit my tongue about this. But Belluck has now outed us, so I'll chime in.

1. More women date with an eye toward serious partnerships. You know the joke, right? Q: What does a lesbian bring on her second date? A: A U-Haul. Everywhere that same-sex partnerships have been recognized, female couples sign up at twice the rate of male couples. That's two female marriages for every male marriage. That doesn't mean every woman is marriage-minded—generalizations can never fit everyone in a given group—but women do seem to be, quite literally, twice as interested in marriage as men.

2. Men marry without seeing it as necessarily monogamous. Here's the other half of that joke: Q: What does a gay man bring on a second date? A: What second date? Many gay male couples—not all, as my gay male friends have insisted to me!—leave room for the occasional meaningless sexual encounter. God bless 'em. I hope they are all wearing condoms.

3. Women are serially monogamous. If anybody cheats, it's over—but only sexually, not necessarily emotionally. I used to joke that the waiting period for female-female marriage licenses ought to be two years: If they're still together by then, they should be safe until about year seven. Here's the embarrassing part: Belluck finds a few lesbian couples who've broken up and yet who remain each others' families. (She even airs the dirty laundry of women who leave their gals and start dating men instead—many butch women I know have had to return their toasters when their gals went straight!—but she leaves out the problem of the "straight" married lady next door who starts hitting on you.) One such couple in her story is buying a duplex so that they can still raise their son together. Oy, lesbians and their exes! By the time you get to middle age, you are never dating just one woman; you are dating her entire family of exes and exes' exes. Those are going to be your in-laws, so you might as well make a good impression on them early. They have the key to her house. They walk her dog when she's away. If you have kids, they will babysit for you when you need a night alone together. Learn to love them.

5. Same-sex couples are less likely to go nuclear when they argue. OK, this is from a Science Times article earlier in the week, not the Belluck article, but this also rings true to me. If you're not blaming the entire sex for being incomprehensible, you have a little more room to laugh. My ex and I used to take each others' side in the really common arguments. It made us laugh and it helped. Until it didn't. The other point in this article also rings true: We argue just as often, and in many of the same ways. Consider what they call the "demand-withdraw" approach: One side pushes for more intimacy and the other withdraws. Two women or two men have that too. It broke up my own marriage.

Because of all the above, I'm going to guess that lesbians divorce more often—expectations are higher—and that gay male marriages last longer—they are less likely to marry in the first place, more likely to forgive straying. But I haven't seen numbers on that yet.

Once again to the Californians: Good luck, and may you persuade your neighbors that they have nothing to fear from the married women next door!

Not Her Mother's Feminism

Two things bother me about the Rebecca Walker essay (which last week stirred up a hot intergenerational discussion on a feminist listserv I'm on). First is her conflation of her mother and feminism. I'm sorry, but when did Alice Walker become the spokesperson for and avatar of the second wave? One older (in her 60s, I think) feminist writer on that listserv wrote that her version of feminism didn't posit motherhood as slavery; rather, her feminism meant trying to enlarge the world so that men and women didn't have to divide up the worlds of work and family because each would be involved in both. In that vision of feminism, men and women both would be important in children's lives--as would some social responsibility for children's futures, including early childhood education, flextime, and all the other things necessary to allow families to integrate work and childrearing (and, let me add, being human). That's the feminism that I learned and subscribe to. Walker, instead, personalizes her mother's mistakes (or her perception of those mistakes--hard to know whether memoirists are reliable narrators) as if Alice Walker's bad behavior stood for the mothering failures of the entire second wave. Um ... nope.

Second is the way Walker elides her relationship with Meshell (note: new spelling). Of course her past life is public and all over the Internet; there's no way she can pretend she has only been heterosexual. But in this Daily Mail piece, her lesbian "phase" is elided from her neotraditionalist narrative, in which she is lost until she finds full life satisfaction from mommy + daddy = baby. Oy. (Note for later blog post: Today California begins marrying same-sex couples! Hurray for the Golden State!)

My novice impression is that the younger Walker is melting down and has some institution in her future. But I don't know the woman, and who am I to psychologize without a license? Her mental state is none of my business. Her politics ... well, it isn't even a politics. It's just whining.

California: Girl + Girl = Marriage

Naturally, the conversation turned toward the Californians' frustrations that Gov. Arnold kept vetoing the California legislature's freedom-to-marry law ... and their frustrations that their progressive nongay friends dismissed their concern with the issue. After all, their nongay friends told them, registered domestic partnership protected them (California's domestic partnership is equivalent to Vermont's civil unions): Wasn't that enough? Nope. There are legal differences. But even if there weren't, as one friend of mine loves to say, you get to your destination whether you sit in the front or the back of the bus ... and yet it's still an indignity to be forced to sit in the back. I mocked my friends mildly that California was trailing so far behind my state of Massachusetts, and I promised to come to their weddings when they won.

Hearing frustrations that we had almost forgotten in Massachusetts, it struck me how very deeply the Massachusetts marriage decision had sunk into my psyche. I really have stopped feeling 'queer' here. Nobody around here blinks an eye when I talk about the confusions of dating (or not dating, as the case may be: now accepting applicants!) after two decades of marriage. Here in the Boston area, same-sex couples hold each others' hands in public or kiss goodby at the airport without anyone glancing at them: After all, they could be married. Two women or two men who look like they are together get treated openly as a couple—at restaurants or shops—in a way that feels simply honest and dignified. It's a complete transformation from my youth, when the possibility of violence always simmered nearby, when shocking comments could flow at any minute. Another friend says that listening to me is like listening to her older black friends describe living through the end of Jim Crow. Yes, there's still antigay sentiment here in Massachusetts, but it makes an enormous difference when a couple's vows to each other are recognized not just by the pair, not just by their families, but also by our government.

And it's hard to convey how very proud so many Massachusetts citizens are of having gone first. I've had state legislators tell me, in their deeply-stained Massachusetts accents, that they were opposed to gender-neutralizing marriage at first—but once they started hearing from their newly married constituents, they knew they had to vote in favor of upholding the Goodridge decision. They did vote on our side. Those who voted against full marriage rights lost their seats.

California's legislators have already voted twice in favor of full marriage rights for all; the Governator vetoed it, tossing the issue to the courts. Now the issue will be voted on popular referendum this fall. No state's popular vote has yet favored full, gender-neutral marriage. Although California's opinion trends are in the right direction, the state has an enormous conservative population. (It's the state where a 14-year-old killed his classmate for being openly gay.) This vote will be a big test. The good news is that California activists have been preparing for this matchup ever since they lost their first marriage ballot in 2000, in the proposition that the CSC just struck down, with widespread education. If any state can do defeat this bill, it's the Golden State.

I won't be flying out for any California weddings this week; my friends will wait until they've really & truly won. But I lift my coffee mug for the state's 100,000 registered domestic partners and their children—who are full citizens, for now. May the very large country of California, with its population of 36 million, be as peacefully and easily transformed as the tinier, chillier state of Massachusetts!

AND NOW a question for Dahlia: Am I reading the decision correctly? Did the California Supremes just say that sexual orientation is a fully "suspect class," equivalent to race, sex, and religion—that discrimination against LGBT folks gets, as you lawyers say, strict scrutiny? And is that as big a deal as it strikes me?
 

We Need To Talk

Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.

And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)

It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.

We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.