Lesbian Sex Kittens and Gross Gay Sex

It’s no secret that nothing stirs up the jockey shorts of America’s frat boys like two girls kissing. Or two girls touching. Or two girls fighting (a boob might pop out! Can you imagine?) The nauseating list of girl-on-girl obsessions goes on and on, creating a culture wild about anything lesbian, as long as it’s all about sex between them. The voyeuristic compulsion of the heterosexual male imagination seems harmless enough, just boys being boys about girls doing girls. After all, it’s ancient history now. We’re all aware of this fixation on lesbian sex.

Unfortunately, it seems like society knows little else of lesbians. A cursory Google search of the word “lesbian” brings up a scandalous lesbian story arc on the new 90210, a new lesbian werewolf movie, the potential lady affair of reality television star Kim Zolciak and a knock-down, drag-out “lesbian feud” between the actresses who played Jan and Marcia Brady. To hear Google News tell it, the L in LGBT stands for lascivious.

Most straights forget about the fact that lesbians are facing battles to marry, parent and even divorce, which apparently means little to the same heterosexual men who get their jollies off at our expense.

Gay men, on the other end of the spectrum, face another heterosexual perception of their sex — mostly that it’s disgusting. Slate recently detailed the gay sex gross-out factor in an essay about Martha Nussbaum’s From Disgust to Humanity. In it, Nussbaum describes how subjugated people are perceived as icky to most of society until the majority realizes that the minority are just people; they think, they feel, they love, they want.

The idea is that the outward display of disgust is where the journey begins. As people hear and see more personal stories of gay people, they will think less about the mechanics of gay sex and start to think about us as fellow human beings.

Wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately, women who love women face a longer journey than their gay male counterparts. Men only have to go from being a disgusting human to just plain human, whereas lesbian and bisexual women have to go from being a vagina and a pair of breasts to an entire human; heart, brains, bones and all.

The gay community sometimes mistakenly accepts the exploitation of women as something laudable, because at least it gets us out there. When men kiss on the front of the Washington Post, the world throws a shit fit in repulsion and the gay community protests. When women kiss on Law and Order, the gay community says “Look! They’re letting women kiss on TV!” Only, at least in the case of Law and Order, they didn’t let women kiss on TV. They let women kiss on a promo to entice people into a sensational plot and then axed the scene altogether when it was actually going to be a semi-serious look at lesbianism.

We have to be careful about what society deems as alright. Lesbians kissing will usually be okay because, to others, we’re just sex kittens who love to get naughty with each other. We’re just nymphos who like to have pillow fights and upset our boyfriends with lesbian affairs. We’re just anything but human. And that’s what’s really disgusting.

Photo Credit: Marco Gomes