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.