Monetizing Lesbian Chic by Sara Lansing

Many a gay writer has probably experienced a certain peculiar instance of self-doubt. Mingled with the pleasure of exploring one's world, telling a story and saying things that are personally important, there's that momentary flicker of wondering if one is exploiting one's own sex or sexuality for gain -- one which het writers probably rarely ever feel. Am I, as a bi woman, in any sense exploiting the community of which I can claim membership when I tell a story about women who like the same things I do? I think the answer is self-evident, it is no more exploitative than any other gender- or sex-based group, nor any less. Does anyone question whether big “assets” on the cover of a magazine are exploitative of women? Of course not. Nor is there any doubt that appealing to what lies between the het male thighs makes males part with the money in their pocket. And at the end of the day, we would all like to make a living at what we do, valued by our readers and respected for the quality of our tales. That's what this wiki is all about. Is it exploitation? Definitely not, but there’s plenty out there that is.

“Sexploitation” is nothing new, it's been around since time immemorial, but our own society has its own views on the matter. Pornographic literature has always been around, some of it very rough and ready, some very slick and sophisticated. Several years ago I enjoyed the three-volume paperback edition of a long-lost classic, the stories written in the 1880s for an underground publication, The Oyster, and thoroughly enjoyed the classy, smooth narrative and the remarkably liberal, forward-thinking world-view advanced by the writer in notable contrast to the late-Victorian era's erotic fascination with brutality. Did I consider myself exploited as a woman to be the object of desire in the pages of this male-penned and male-oriented work? Not for a moment! The delight with which women are described and the respect with which this writer celebrates their charms and their integrity (as sound, intelligent people living what today we would call lusty, healthy sex lives, liberated from the repressive morality of their era) were refreshing and highly entertaining.

Xena was an early highlight in lesbian chic, it was certainly the phenomenon that made the term a reality for me. I was a huge fan of Xena: Warrior Princess in it's heyday, and though I lost patience with the direction the show took in its later seasons I still look back on the early years with great fondness. While I have no intention of opening the can of worms over the behaviour of the characters in later seasons that so divided the fan base, the very term "sexploitation" surrounds the show. Xena was the first fully developed female hero ("shero") to come along, disproving the old bias that it was not possible to hang a competent, dynamic, fully-featured story with adventure elements, on a female central character, but her provocative appearance (yes, Lucy Lawless was an eyefull in those days!) and the sexual dynamics of much of the writing, especially the earthy comedies of the mid-seasons, to many smacked of frat-boy sniggers, and that is sexploitation at it’s clearest. In a similar way, the comics genre erupted in the 90s with a plethora of eye-candy heroines (Witchblade, Cyblade, Elektra, Shi, Lady Pendragon, the list goes on...) and the term "boys with breasts" was coined to describe them -- doing male things in male ways, just clothed in female flesh to please a male audience.

What about lesbians? The gender divide gets very blurred -- nobody reading this needs me to say that! We live in an age of woman space shuttle commanders, women fighter pilots, explorers, engineers, scientists, soldiers, almost any occupation is open to women today, so to depict them in a narrative is to show women functioning in the roles society expects and permits. After that point, adventure and intrigue operate as always, so a story can unfold as it would always have done, with the exception that the protagonists are now culturally allowed to be female. Of course, comics make no claim to being reality, and that alone is probably their saving grace in the grander scheme of things: what they have never denied being is eye-candy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Just as gay men love those oiled, muscular torsos that appeal to straight women on all those calendars, the idealised and impossible figures of those battling females strike at least some sort of chord in lesbian female readers. I’ll leave it at that for the moment, as the fact that some of those chords sound very un-true notes is fodder for another post entirely. The difference between a stylized graphic narrative and a literary work is of course massive, and at many levels, and either of them can be exploitative, while neither is necessarily so by virtue of its genre alone.

But exploitation does raise its head in very ugly ways in this liberated modern age, and it’s all to do with the dollar (it usually is). What prompted me to write today was a breaking news story about a young Aussie model, Catherine McNeil, of the bi or L persuasion, on the verge of a career break in the States, and whose agents are reportedly furious about photographs having found their way to the public featuring her in a same-sex kiss, which might damage her monetary potential in a repressive and patriarchal culture. Not the Swedish model she kissed a while ago, she was important, but an unimportant model in the US.

Find the details at:

http://www.iinet.net.au/customers/news/articles/820596.html

This is the most cynical of homophobia -- that she may be same-sex inclined is not the issue, it’s how she is perceived by those who purchase the commodity she represents. Her monetability, in other words. Stalking a catwalk with a stomping pony-walk is what she does, displaying her body as a canvas for goods to be mounted upon, but put the thought into people’s heads that off the catwalk that body rolls around with the others in the troupe instead of with some rugged, hairy beau, and the gravy train encounters a bump in the track.

Lesbian chic is a profitable commodity, the last ten years has seen ample evidence of that, including the ‘doomed love’ stereotype (one part of an L-L pairing always dies in the end, in some spectacular and horrible fashion, think Xena and Buffy), or that at least one partner must needs be evil at some deep level, leading the other astray (into a perverse and unnatural relationship -- fill in the blank with your own examples! -- or  so the dreary unstated logic of the thing naturally goes at the level of the viewer’s subconscious). It’s as if a stable, loving same sex couple are too boring to hang a story on, and maybe that’s as true as it is trying to tell dramatic stories about stable, normal het couples. Stable, normal people don’t live very dramatic lives, after all. So the titillation of the same-sex relationship to the general marketplace must be thematic, while being insufficient in itself to carry a product... Or so, apparently, goes the Hollywood theme song in the current economic, social, religious and moral climate. And a catwalk model is not a character who can be killed off, she is a living entity which people will pay to see, but only if her image is untarnished, which makes her real-life situation one in which lesbian chic carries negative profitability, unlike mid-evening TV.

Sigh. We live in a better age than most that have ever gone before where personal securities and freedoms are concerned, but in real terms we have a long way to go before the wider community is tolerant of the merely different. That’s why writing science fiction and fantasy is such a drawcard: as Mel has said more than once, you can put this baggage behind you and get on with telling a great story in an environment less fraught with the cloying, exhausting realities of the present.

Ciao, Sara