The Sexualization of Lesbians

[Mister D]

The bolded item reveals how little you know about lesbian culture. While most lesbians don't exactly look like the perfectly femme women who men would love to do that you see in "lesbian" pornography, most aren't "butch" women either in terms of how they present. In terms of how lesbians typically present, in my experience, most lesbians are "tomboyish", as they say, sort of like me; somewhere in-between being super masculine-expressing ("Pete Rose lookalikes", as you crudely put it) and super feminine-expressing like most women. The unfortunate reality of the matter is that butch women have always been stigmatized and isolated in the lesbian community itself, not just by outsiders to it. Many of the super masculine-expressing ones today are accordingly adopting male identities now that transgenderism is in, doubtless in part just out of a longstanding feeling that they simply don't fit in with other women. It's horrible, but that's what's happening.

Now us "tomboyish" women are definitely more common in the lesbian community than among the general population. There's a more relaxed atmosphere to the scene. For example, I do my clothes shopping in both the women's and men's departments (categorizations that I view as artificial and personally believe should just be abolished), have a limited beauty regimen and rarely bother shaving my legs or underarms. If I were interested in men, that would mean I'd have no chance, but I find that other women don't care. Body hair, for example, isn't viewed as a sign of laziness in the lesbian community like it is in the wider culture, but as an indicator of maturity; as an outward sign of adulthood, like how society tends to see it on men. In the wider society, women aren't allowed to age. You're expected to infantilize yourself. You're expected to appear completely hairless as though you never hit puberty because men prize youthfulness in women. That's a reality I first came to a full awareness of by engaging with other lesbians.

(You're right, of course, that the women in "lesbian" porn obviously aren't lesbians by and large. My point though was that porn is the main lens through which people view lesbianism as a concept and they can behave accordingly toward actual lesbians.)

Polly, I've never met an attractive lesbian and if not shaving your legs and underarms is common that helps explain why. I have known a couple of cute girls who who thought they were bi but eventually wound up with men but no lesbians. Lesbian "culture" (whatever that is) doesn't interest me at all nor is it relevant.

Of course I'm right but let me leave you with a final point: men are not demanding sexual acts from random lesbians they meet on the street. The number of pathological and paranoid delusions you subscribe to is...unsettling.

[Standing Wolf]

People are aroused by what they're aroused by. That will never change. As long as we're talking about consenting adult human beings, I don't think anyone should necessarily feel the need to apologize for it. Most heterosexual men, whether they admit it or not, are turned on by attractive women being intimate with one another; to what extent the typical visuals of that do or don't conform to the real world is largely irrelevant. (The best pornography tends, I suppose, to be that which is the least realistic.)

[IMPress Polly]

People are aroused by what they're aroused by. That will never change. As long as we're talking about consenting adult human beings, I don't think anyone should necessarily feel the need to apologize for it. Most heterosexual men, whether they admit it or not, are turned on by attractive women being intimate with one another; to what extent the typical visuals of that do or don't conform to the real world is largely irrelevant. (The best pornography tends, I suppose, to be that which is the least realistic.)

You're definitely right about the least realistic material in pornography being the most popular. For example, "hentai", which is animated pornography (frequently rape porn involving underaged school girls with impossibly gigantic boobs being attacked by monsters, aliens, robots, animals, gangs of men, etc.) is the fastest-rising category of pornography at present, and currently the second-most-searched term on Pornhub (the leading online pornographer) after 'lesbian'. In fact, it's the #1 category among teens and college-age youth now. You can't get farther away from reality than that, where characters commonly have boobs bigger than their faces, dicks the size of small buildings, and the scenarios are typically the most brutal and blatantly misogynistic in all of pornography, involving all manner of illegal activities (rape, children, mutilation, bestiality, etc.) and stuff that's physically impossible.

Where we disagree is in the idea that people's preference for highly unrealistic material is somehow a good thing. Consider that there is now a whole generation of people who's first, and perhaps only, form of sex education has been exposure to this sort of material. That clearly has negative affects in real life. In addition to producing serious body image issues among both men and women alike, you're also seeing consequences of it in the increasing commonality of practices like anal sex that are fun for men, but painful for women, as well as women (especially young women) being involuntarily grabbed by the throat and choked during sex, and so on and so on; practices that young men are clearly learning for pornography. And it's demonstrably resulting in the women especially becoming less interested in even having sex at all; you're seeing a trend away from sexual activity altogether that's being led by younger women. (See point 4 here.) Is that really a good thing?

[IMPress Polly]

The number of pathological and paranoid delusions you subscribe to is...unsettling.

I live to please you, Mister D, so it pains me to know that you disapprove of my perspectives broadly. [/sarcasm]

[Mister D]

I live to please you, Mister D, so it pains me to know that you disapprove of my perspectives broadly. [/sarcasm]

I demand that lesbians please me. Must be the sense of entitlement I get from porn.

[Standing Wolf]

You're definitely right about the least realistic material in pornography being the most popular. For example, "hentai", which is animated pornography (frequently rape porn involving underaged school girls with impossibly gigantic boobs being attacked by monsters, aliens, robots, animals, gangs of men, etc.) is the fastest-rising category of pornography at present, and currently the second-most-searched term on Pornhub (the leading online pornographer) after 'lesbian'. In fact, it's the #1 category among teens and college-age youth now. You can't get farther away from reality than that, where characters commonly have boobs bigger than their faces, dicks the size of small buildings, and the scenarios are typically the most brutal and blatantly misogynistic in all of pornography, involving all manner of illegal activities (rape, children, mutilation, bestiality, etc.) and stuff that's physically impossible.

Where we disagree is in the idea that people's preference for highly unrealistic material is somehow a good thing. Consider that there is now a whole generation of people who's first, and perhaps only, form of sex education has been exposure to this sort of material. That clearly has negative affects in real life. In addition to producing serious body image issues among both men and women alike, you're also seeing consequences of it in the increasing commonality of practices like anal sex that are fun for men, but painful for women, as well as women (especially young women) being involuntarily grabbed by the throat and choked during sex, and so on and so on; practices that young men are clearly learning for pornography. And it's demonstrably resulting in the women especially becoming less interested in even having sex at all; you're seeing a trend away from sexual activity altogether that's being led by younger women. (See point 4 here.) Is that really a good thing?

Perhaps the proximity of more than one line of thinking in my post left a wrong impression, but I wasn't arguing that pornography, generally speaking, was a good thing at all. When I referred to "the best pornography", I was thinking about Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon in Bound, or Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger. Big budget Hollywood stuff. Or almost any random episode of 'The L Word'. Unrealistic in the sense that soft music is playing in the background and nobody's cell phone goes off - not that people are being forced to do things they don't want to.

[Hal Jordan]

Wait. Hentai isn't just animated tentacle porn anymore? When did that change?

Speaking to sector 2814 via the ring.

[Captdon]

I live to please you, Mister D, so it pains me to know that you disapprove of my perspectives broadly. [/sarcasm]

Why do you know so much about lesbian porn? Seriously, why do you know so much?

[donttread]

There was a story I was just now reading that I'd like to highlight: Google tweaks algorithm to show less porn when searching for 'lesbian' content.

The campaigners for this cause observed that "in their research, they found that only the word 'lesbian' was linked to pornographic sites, whereas searching for 'gay' or 'trans' linked to informative pages including Wikipedia, top news articles, and specialized blogs".

This is a real issue. Because lesbians are an all-female group by definition, we are sexualized way more than anyone else. The top search term on both Pornhub and YouPorn (two of the world's leading online pornographers) is, in fact, 'lesbian'. To judge by the leading search results one encounters (a large percentage of which seem to involve things like penetration with penile-shaped objects), one seriously doubts that it's mainly lesbians who are doing these searches. Even gay men sometimes participate in the sexual objectification of lesbians (example).

The consequences of people viewing lesbians more as entertainment than as people can get very real. To highlight a high-profile example of what I mean that made global headlines earlier this year, there was group of male teenagers who approached a lesbian couple on a bus in London and, on learning of their sexual orientation, demanded that they kiss for the group. When the couple refused, they were beaten and had to be hospitalized. Likewise, just the other weekend, a lesbian couple was physically attacked at Amsterdam Pride after refusing the advances of two men. In these sorts of ways, we can see how pornography fosters a dangerous culture of male entitlement to women, and not just the straight or even bi ones. So yeah, I'm very glad that Google has recently tweaked their algorithm for the term 'lesbian' to produce informative results comparable to what appears when one searches for 'gay' or 'trans'.

Sure, a lot of hetro men search lesbian for a little thrill. I used to watch a few episodes of the "L" word where I learned that all lesbians were smoking hot and wear black underwear all he time. LOL.
Are you suggesting that viewing a little soft porn is sexualizing an entire group of people? If that's the case then we have all been sexualized haven't we?

[IMPress Polly]

Perhaps the proximity of more than one line of thinking in my post left a wrong impression, but I wasn't arguing that pornography, generally speaking, was a good thing at all. When I referred to "the best pornography", I was thinking about Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon in Bound, or Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger. Big budget Hollywood stuff. Or almost any random episode of 'The L Word'. Unrealistic in the sense that soft music is playing in the background and nobody's cell phone goes off - not that people are being forced to do things they don't want to.

That's not porn. That's actual art.