The Elusive 'L': A Hardcore Look at Lesbian Pornography, Part 1

We’ve all been asked the awkward question: “So how do lesbians have sex, anyway?” Our lovemaking might just be the most misunderstood type of sex in the world.  But as a lesbian with many lesbian friends, I realized something interesting: straight people aside, even we cannot seem to come up with a standard definition for sex.  With that in mind, I took a video camera to the girl bars of West Hollywood and Long Beach in search of answers.  One girl told me: “Gay [male] sex and straight sex are so well-defined [read: penile penetration], but lesbian sex is so undefined that people think we don’t have sex, or that we can’t have sex…they discredit it.”

Unsurprisingly, every woman I interviewed gave me a different answer when asked to define lesbian sex.  They were, however, in agreement about lesbian porn: they all hated it.  Every girl (out of 20) resoundingly denounced lesbian porn as the worst thing she had ever seen.  Even more intriguing is that many actually prefer gay male porn, simply because it is so visually stimulating (i.e. the opposite of lesbian porn).  So why is girl-girl porn so bad and why do lesbians despise it so much?  Well for starters, it isn’t even made for us; its target audience is clueless straight men.

By its very definition, lesbian sex should involve females interacting sexually with each other of their own accord, but “lesbian porn” is recast through the scrutiny of the male gaze, resulting in women acting to fulfill a male viewer’s idea of “girl-on-girl action.” We are left with simply a reworking of what fails in straight porn, that is, the inability to visually show true female sexual fulfillment (read: orgasm).  Straight porn’s solution to this problem is the “money shot,” or the shot of the man ejaculating on the girl, which masks whether or not she is climaxing too.  In lesbian porn, this is compounded by the need to reassure the guy at home with the beer and the hard-on that he still matters, rather than acknowledging the (unsettling) fact that a man is not required to get a girl off. 

In my porn odyssey, I started with a series of films called, Women Seeking Women, made by Girlfriends Films, which is representative of mainstream lesbian porn.  Although there are of course lesbians who identify as femme, there is a huge difference between a femme lesbian and a straight girl in disguise. The cover of the DVD depicts two young women, a blonde and a brunette, hair and makeup done, naked, with one leaning over the other one.  They are both looking at the camera directly, the brunette on top has her well-manicured hand on the blonde girl’s head, while giving the camera a coy stare, as if to say, “come watch us play with each other, we don’t mind if you look.”  Known in their scene as “Lena” (the blonde) and “Zoe” (the brunette), these two girls demonstrate exactly what is wrong with mainstream lesbian porn.  

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