What is with the straight man's obsession with two girls falling into a heap?
Jennifer Tai, March 19th 2003
A week ago, my husband came home with some startling news.
"(So and so) just became a lesbian," he said, quite out of breath obviously from the excitement from this piece of news. "(a male so and so, who was party to such information) just told me!"
A girl friend of mine who was with me at the time, started to protest in disgust, but stopped short when she heard my response.
"Wow, you must be celebrating," I had said. L was surprised.
"It's repugnant!" she cried out, "Even straight men have this fantasy!"
"ONLY straight men have this fantasy," I corrected her.
The male preoccupation with lesbians and lesbianism has intrigued, annoyed and most of all, puzzled straight women for centuries. Just look at how Russian pop duo tATu (which, in Russian, means, 'this girl loves that girl') is doing in the UK music charts these days, banking on nothing but lesbianism.
As a straight woman, who admittedly enjoys looking at women's bosoms once in a while if just to lament at the meekness of my own, I was once plagued, and at first angered, by the fascination men find in two women canoodling each other. It seemed to be just another manifestation of a man's lust for tyranny over women.
Why indeed, would a heterosexual man find such delight in two homosexual women? I decided to investigate the psyche behind this fixation online. The search yield much more material than I had expected.
Camille Paglia, the feminist fatale who dishes advice to the culturally disgruntled, was asked this question once by a straight man doubting his sexual identity simply due to his fascination with lesbians. Camille accords the beginnings of this fetish to the Greek myth of Actaeon, the hunter who spied on the goddess Artemis bathing with her nymphs.
"…I think the fantasy of women together is actually matriarchal," she writes in her response.
"Lesbian lust is supercondensed female sexuality, all smooth, soft, shiny surfaces, evoking for heterosexual men a subliminal memory of the lost paradise of the maternal body, where they blissfully floated in the warm, sensuous bath of the womb," is Camille's explanation.
As mentioned earlier, the male preoccupation with lesbianism has now been capitalised on these days, and no man seems to find it disapproving. William Leith of the Guardian, UK explores this in his article, and he says, "…When men talk about lesbians, and images of lesbians, and images of girls pretending to be lesbians, it is taken as a given that we approve." He later says that "…we don't have the same anxiety about it as we do about male homosexuality," suggesting that lesbianism sells, but male homosexuality, does not.
In the end, as Leith says, is it just male sexual vulnerability?
We are brought up to believe that men are more promiscuous and sexually charged than women, because women form emotional attachments and are less casual about sex because we view it as "giving something away". This makes us restrict our sexual adventuring, which makes men think that we view sex adversely. Is that why two women looking horny on a poster, posing as though they just love to get it on all the time even if no man is present, such a turn on for the rice and curry straight man?
Whatever the case, it is harmless and healthy for a straight man to like watching a little girl-on-girl action once in a while, if not all the time. Camille says it's Oedipal, Leith says it's social, and I say it's natural.
It's when he doesn't like it that you should be worried!
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