LESBIANS

Sex is one of those things that everyone always wants to talk about—myself more so than most—but when it comes to fetishes and fantasies, no one wants to say anything, oftentimes not even to their partner. This is largely because fetishes and fantasies are something dark, something outside the norm. No one’s fetish or fantasy has ever been something as white bread as plain old P in the V sex, instead, fetishes and fantasies are mostly made up of fairly innocuous things like latex, role-playing (not Dungeons & Dragons, though), and maybe a little pain. On the other side of the spectrum there is scat, golden showers, dressing up as stuffed animals, etc. Most of these fetishes and fantasies pale in comparison to the one fetish that is the most nonsensical of them all: lesbians. Ask any man what his ultimate fantasy is and lesbians will almost always have something to do with it. I used to enjoy watching women on the internet embrace their Sapphic side until I realized that the lesbians in my fantasies wanted nothing to do with me because, they were, surprise, lesbians.

From my experience, people men who are “into” lesbians view lesbianism as this fluid thing that will shift when a penis is introduced into the equation and that’s a large part of the lesbian fantasy, in fact, that’s probably all there is to it: the idea that if two women are having sex, they are only doing so because there is not a penis available and if one is produced, the two women will automatically ditch their sexual orientation in favor of pleasuring the male. Some of the men reading this will probably be like, “so what, this is nothing special.” But it is actually something quite special in that I would bet there are very few women who would watch two men having sex and think that the two men would switch from homosexuality to heterosexuality if only her vagina was in the room. This is a phenomenon that is, I believe, limited only to men.

It would be impossible to chastise men for thinking they can “turn” lesbians (and it is not even my goal, really, to do so. I merely seek to educate) because that is what the media has, by and large, led us to believe. In every program I’ve seen (I haven’t seen The L Word) where there is a lesbian character, she will, at some point in the series, sleep with a male whether it be some drunken indiscretion or simply to see what it was like. The media, nefarious beast that it is, sends the message that lesbianism is no stronger than a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon or idle curiosity. Conversely, every homosexual male on television will awkwardly, but politely, rebuff a female’s advances. For many people, through television or film is the only way they will ever interact with the idea of homosexuality, and it is conveying the wrong message, so it is no wonder every male on the face of the planet is a “big fan” of lesbianism, when, in fact, they don’t really know what lesbianism means at all.