A Word of Our Own: Ch 2 Porn Stars and Poetesses
Surely, the simple fact of Chloe liking Olivia couldn’t inspire such scorn, and such hate. After pursuing every rabbit down every hole, I did what we all do these days— I turned to Herr Google.
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A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—my quest to discover why lesbians are hated. And why it’s so hard to use the word.
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Chapter 2: Lesbians Online: Porn Stars and Poetesses
Surely, the simple fact of Chloe liking Olivia couldn’t inspire such scorn, and such hate. Writing my speech, I thought and thought about what a lesbian was, then after pursuing every rabbit down every hole, I did what we all do these days— I turned to Herr Google. Who, in 2017, just prior to his re-adjustment of algorithms, told me everything I needed to know by juxtaposing a Wikipedia article illustrated by a Nineteenth century painting of two women in flowing robes gazing chastely at each other, with page after page of red and black adverts for high def girl-on-girl sex.
Clicking on them I found golden-haired, or dark-haired models who did nothing but fling around their enormous tresses and fuck, two —or three or more—girls alone if they had to. But really just killing time until the plumber turned up and they could take his big tool in their mouths and suck. The postman would do as well, any man really, the paunchiest, slack-jawdiest chandelier-swinging chimp, the pimply-faced Incel boy with gun grease on his hands, the exec who dreams of nothing but money and two or three women perched on it making out—until he opens the door. I admit I’d forgotten—how our bodies are all for you. All for you our strangely hairless naked skin armed with artificial Barbie breasts, nails of a logistically impossible sharpness and length, and the pussies that must be made of plastic for the beating that they take.
It was like looking in a mirror, in the reflective window of a train, but seeing a blank space where my face used to be. Or like that time I used the free wifi at a library in Paris and discovered every article I’d ever written had been disappeared from the world. Along with every mention of dykes anywhere. Because the City of Paris, at least then, used to block as pornography the word in all its forms, lesbian, lesbienne, lesbiana, goudou and gouine. You should have seen her face, the lady at reception, when I dared ask why. I actually said it, the word, “lesbienne.” Her eyes got wide. She almost puked, like I had steaming dog shit falling from my mouth. My God. What your dirty minds are full of. You who stare at us and see yourselves.
The Wikipedia article was almost worse than the porn, trying so hard to counteract it, prove how normal, how undisgusting we were, that it too created a pathetic pervy effect, especially headed up with that Victorian painting of the poet Sappho and her lover in a garden on the Greek island of Lesbos. Sappho, I loved as a poet ever since I subscribed to the Sapphobot on Twitter, but to rep us? No!
I could smell the dust already, the sickening perfume of the eau de toilette covering the stink of old cunt. Though it made sense, because the writers immediately referenced the dictionary, declaring Lesbian related to Lesbos, or— because that island hosted Sappho’s reputed band of inverts and tribads — homosexuality between females. As a noun it had settled into meaning a woman who is a homosexual.
Staring at my screen, I imagined a gender studies student, some young brainy queer with Foucaultian glasses already ripping the definition to shreds. “Just what is a woman?” They asked. “What is a female?”
Cast your questions aside, I murmured, swigging tea. They don’t matter. Weren’t you paying attention to the porn? The whole thing is a scam, a hustle, lesbians only exist for the titillation of undeconstructed men.
Just kidding of course. No, not at all. Or am I? I had to Laugh Out Loud when the Wiki writers compared us to male homosexuals (how I winced at that un-ironic phrasing) asserting, correctly, that men have always been more free to pursue sexual relations, and faced the consequences, as if we haven’t, though perhaps less publicly. I’d just written a piece about Chechnya, for instance, where fags and trannies were carted off visibly by the cops, but dykes didn’t escape, just suffered invisibly. Tormented, suicided, left in pools of blood, quietly tortured and killed by their brothers, their father, raped correctively by the family friend.
Nevertheless the Wiki writers went on to announce that women’s homo activity has often been considered harmless in comparison to that of men. “Harmless!” I muttered. “Yes, everything men do is more important. Their accomplishments bigger, their transgressions more transgressive. Except when it comes to women. A rape, for instance, hardly counts at all. Mustn’t let it ruin the life of a promising young man in the unusual case that he is caught. You can even boast of it and get elected U.S. president.”
Yes, everything women do is diminished. Just let us enter a once-respected field like teaching and watch the salaries flatten and sink, the social value erode. But harmless? Lesbians? If that were so, why is the word so poisonous? So sharp? As effective as a cattle prod when straight women get out of line? And how could it be true when women’s bodies in general have been so controlled so punished, almost everywhere? Almost always? Still are. Taliban banning girls from school. Oklahomans convicting Brittney Poolaw of manslaughter—for having a miscarriage.
I know what you’re thinking. That I’m starting to sound shrill. Too disruptive with my wails and bleats for the library’s calm and venerable stacks. I’ll move on. Finish up. Report how I skimmed the rest of the Wiki article with my jaw silently clenched in annoyance. It was like reading about strangers, all very complicated, technical, bloodless, written in the passive voice. Men thought we should be killed for a while, and we were, then were not. Laws were passed to contain us, then decades, centuries later revoked. We didn’t quite know why. We were criminal, then sick, then nothing at all, invisible, unnamed. In many places, anyway. In some places, little to nothing had changed. The war against us was hot.
By the time I hit the footnotes, I wasn’t angry, but troubled. I vaguely imagined the lesbians (I’m sure it’s lesbians) who wrote it, the pressure they felt, the pitfalls. The obstacles to telling the truth. The consequences. And frozen like deer in the spotlights of all those politicians and preachers and sexologists, all those accusing men, and women, the straights, and Queers, they censored themselves until they’d eliminated almost everything they knew about how real lesbians have moved through the world, how we resisted, or at least circumvented, these definitions, these pronouncements every step of the way. How we actually live. And laugh and fuck.
Even in the section about constructing a lesbian identity, they only hinted at the multitude of possibilities with the brief quote from the RADICALLESBIANS’ manifesto declaring, "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” Without our history of resistance and survival, they couldn’t explain how the word lesbian transitioned from a description of behavior and sexual orientation into an identity with a history and community capable of writing any manifesto at all. The article wasn’t really about lesbians, but the pathetic story of how the world has seen us.
Could I do better than them? Can I now? The same eyes looking over my shoulder?
I closed my computer and wondered what it must be like for a young dyke to type lesbian into Google and get X-X-X porn, or a Wikipedia entry that smells of mothballs like a Natural History museum in a small, impoverished town, in which we rarely speak. Are not quite human, are objects, not subjects ever. No word made flesh complete with blabbing, kissing, screaming, smiling, devouring, mewling, protesting, bickering, mourning, celebrating, raging, laughing out loud, and sucking-her-tittie mouths.
Look at me, I tell them. I am what a lesbian is. This ordinary, this everyfemale, housed in this slightly stylish, subtly humorous, chronically depressed shell. I should be in Wikipedia. In Webster’s. I should be on the news. Caught with my pants down. Instead, I will say it aloud in the street and allow people to stare. Lesbian. Which ironically only means something in public, or in private when the World peeks over my shoulder. Alone, I am nameless. Alone, I am nothing at all. But with you there— the word, the world—now bears my face. And if you douse it with acid, a monster unsurprisingly appears.
To read next week’s Ch 3. A Lexicon of Lesbian
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home
xoxo K