Butch, Femme, the L Word: A Tearjerker

Unfortunately, I only wish I could say that this week's episode was a horrific, error-ridden affront to actual lesbian behavior. The class wars continue to rage and the ladies insult and abuse each other. But the best I can say is they aren't MY people. Certainly there are lesbians for whom this sort of close-minded interaction is regular. I could issue a call for friendly or kind dykes, certainly. I know I don't want lesbians everywhere represented as so bigoted. Then again, this seems to be a natural progression for them.

They ostracize anyone without a manicure and impressive hair product. I'm sure my people would feel just as uncomfortable at that dinner table as Moira did.

The true problem with the last episode is once again with Shane. Why is she, of all people, so nasty to Moira? I feel ambivalent about having a trans-teaching moment on 'The L Word' but I feel even worse about NOT having a butch-femme teaching moment. The last thing young queerdom can take right now is another caged conflation of butch/trans/gender-variant topics. We have to remember that the ladies' learning moment is meant to be one for the rest of the audience (unproblematically heterosexual males included.) Okay, so right now they don't understand her, they think she's a freak. And then what, acceptance? Moira's transition can be accepted but her rough-and-tumble dykehood can't?

It's the writing here that falls on it's face. The show proves to be a relic of close-minded lesbian feminism, where butch/femme meant capitulation. But, guess what dear readers? It isn't the 1960s anymore. Rejecting femme, rejecting butch, are not effective ways to escape the infinite domain of male expectation. Just like grunging it up is just as much "giving in" to the patriarchy as people think pumps and lipstick are. No need to marginalize another community in this Halberstamian love fest (and I DO mean that in the worst way).



I'll take a different opportunity to talk about how the writers make Carmen (the woman of color) capitulate to her parents. I'm too angry to verbalize all of the problems with her huge, loving, easily-duped family and their cultura.

Castration, Degradation, and Humiliation on 'the L Word'

When 'The L Word' premiered three years ago everyone seemed to have something to say about the girly girl lesbians. Queers met the homogenous, facile, femininity with adulation and criticism alike. I knew some gay girls who were thrilled to have hot femme-on-femme-action televised every Sunday. Even they were a little wary about the ubiquity, though. I was living around Boston at the time where the androdyke reigns supreme. There, it seemed, the dykes there felt un[der]represented and also unattracted.


For the writers of 'The L Word,' this wasn't a manifestation of out-dated lesbian feminism. Alice, Bette, Tina, Dana, Marina, Jenny, and the rest of the cast weren't dressing/acting the way they did/do in response to oppressive patriarchy. They weren't worried about oppressing women by acting like men. And they most certainly weren't responding to hegemony as femmes.

So then from the very start Shane, "the butchest one", developed into an icon. And just as the old saying goes, 'L Word' fans either wanted to have Shane or wanted to be Shane. Starting off as the the charm'em and leave 'em favorite, she accumulated a contradictory inner life. The show gave her a history of drug problems and possibly homelessness. They also made her a former boy sex worker. These histories are conflated with her illusive and flighty present pathology. It's a major script error that she has several straight male friends- let alone that she agreed to live with one and his video camera. I have a hard time believing that someone with her history would really be pals with her roommate (I know MY "butchest one" roommate would have punched the man out.) Shane spirals in and out of control until she meets Carmen, the one who would reform her. Carmen "tames" Shane, addressing "intimacy problems" with directness and Shane apparently prepares to do anything for love.

Carmen insists that Shane wear a short white dress twice around her family. When Shane first dons the dress, Carmen exclaims that Shane looks like a little girl. Shane squirms as Carmen's mother makes alterations to the her old garment. The second show of the third season has Shane made-up with hair extensions and pumps. Were Shane an ACTUAL person, it seems impossible that she would cross-dress in order to please her lover's family. There could be no compromise as Carmen transforms and alienates Shane. For some reason, she show portrays Shane as upset and resistant but not terribly uncomfortable. She concedes and seems fairly comfortable in the white dress.

We're still supposed to buy the following hot sex scene intro after Carmen belittles and castrates her lover. If the cross-dressing isn't enough to have your head spinning, Carmen's pillow talk brings her misperception of Shane to the forefront.

Any hope that this was just a blatant and horrific agreement between the two capitulating lovers, misrepresented for the audience, is shot to hell when Carmen wants to fuck Shane. Visibly uncomfortable at this suggestion Shane declines (at least the writers don't have her concede). It becomes clear here that Carmen sees Shane as someone who can be fucked. Certainly this (tragically) happens in real life from time to time, I'm just hoping that the writers aren't going to have Shane change over time in order to accomodate Carmen's sexual expectations. They seem to be a whisper away from claiming that Shane's bodily homelessness is nothing more than some vestige of unreconciled trauma.

I'm sure that they are trying to feminize Shane in order to highlight Moira's upcoming transition but I think this is a monumental mistake. The last thing we should be doing is taking away Shane's phallus to make room for Moira's. The best we can hope for is that Shane will be able to illuminate the severity of Carmen's misperception. Because Carmen doesn't SEE Shane, there is really no peaceful way to reconcile this issue.

In the meantime, I won't be rewatching this excruciating episode if I can help it.

The L Word Serves Misogyny to Start the Third Season with a Bang

In my months away from the L Word, I did enjoy a feminist armistice among my homo-lady-brethren. As long as we don't talk about the show in the off-months, I find we can all agree on a few things. First and foremost, I think we can all safely say that rape and sexual assault are bad. I mean, it's not like it's the first thing people want to talk about- even when something in particular seems to give reason for dialogue. And it's easy to lose conversation interest when you bring up second-wave hit words to many lesbian crowds. If I weren't such a demagogue, I'd try to stay further away from 'patriarchy' and stop mentioning Dworkin, Lovelace, MacKinnon, and Solanas as if they were dear friends. But I've never been good at playing nice with the "community." And fortunately, the new season of 'The L Word' has given more than ample reason to vent man-hating anger to my homo in-group once more.


Maybe you, like I, find it genuinely hard to evaluate which subplot of our show is the most offensive. Who can really pick when there are so many colorful options! Is it the way the show addresses poverty, drug-use, homelessness, and sex work? Not this week. What about the way it valorizes the traditional family and affluence? Nah. Although the scenes with Bette and Tina, Kit and Willy, and Carmen's family were all egregiously problematic and painfully simple. Most viewers watch it like they do the rest of contemporary television, with the expectation that it will represent upper-middle class characters. Of course, I could get all riled up about the ongoing class, race, and gender politics of the show. (We are assuming here that even the vague IDEA of Ivan must be ignored/forgotten in order to spare the life of your personal television.)

It's hard to acknowledge the fact that despite the horrific acting, Jenny's character is the most realistic one. Maybe I should be more critical of her simplified trauma-survivor Schtick. No, after all of that, this week's episode was comparatively MOST offensive when it came to exploitation and degradation.

As if it wasn't bad enough that the end of season two had Jenny on speaking terms with her voyeuristic male roommate! Shane leaves off all buddy-buddy with the fuckhead; she even takes him to a dyke event where he picks up a girl. (Something Shane, kiddishly teases him about later.) Season three leaves the problem unaddressed.

How can the writers, producers, and creators perpetuate such an evil, misogynistic thread? Okay, okay. So it's not exactly a precedent. After all, the end of the first season featured an UNdiscussed rape. The most the show does is imply that Tim's rape exacerbates Jenny's pre-existing trauma. I'm so glad that 'The L Word' finds it prudent to reiterate the old "she-was-asking-for-it" routine. That some dark, Darwinistic biologism bullshit, batman. Most women accept the rape in the first season as at least mundane or terribly ordinary, not uncommon. This worries me. If an apparently savvy lesbian audience doesn't perceive acquaintance rape as RAPE, what can we hope for from mainstream audiences. Certainly, I don't think we should be prepared to chalk up the apparent indifference to the fact that we're watching gay t.v. After all, rape is a 'gay issue' more worthy of a three minute round table discussion than what Alice calls her cunt.

So why is it that Jenny and Shane (and Carmen) are able to "forgive" the man? It seems like it should be on affluent lesbian television that this man can be judged without seeming villainized. And their excuse for accepting his behavior? He's really sorry? (No REALLY!) He's just a human? He wants it to be better? Or worst of all, this is his nature and he is trying to grow as a person? Jenny did have one brief lucid moment in which she told the fucker that she didn't exist to make him a better person. Following scenes now make it seem as though they were trying to play her as crazy. Isn't this the wrong forum for another vision of a "frigid" woman, denying a man what he's owed by her (her sex)?



And I'm not even going to touch the entirely uncritical and idiotic Freud tear in the first scene of the first episode of season three. It doesn't really warrant investigation, as much as it does contribute to knee-jerk faux feminism and pop-psychology of every day life.

I'm also not going to spend too much time (yet) worrying about that forced feminization scene with Shane wearing that white dress. It's fucked up in one way or another but I guess it depends on where they're going with it.

Until next week, I'm done here.