Girls Kissing

Barb Lee's documentary on the male obsession with watching girls lock lips

UNDERSTANDING WHAT DRIVES the male fascination with two women together is something that has plagued scholars and laymen (or laywomen) alike. Barbara Lee, one of the founders and a current director of the Vancouver Asian Film Festival, remains undaunted by this mammoth mystery concerning human sexuality. We sit at a coffee shop in Tinseltown, home to the VAFF office, chatting about her documentary, Girls Kissing. Barb began filming in April of 2001. Her quest for answers sent her traipsing from Vancouver to Toronto, Los Angeles and New York.

“Mainstream media seemed to be embracing this idea of two women together, and it just seemed [like] a popular way to get ratings,” Barb muses. “I was just wondering what the heck all this was about.” She isn’t the only one wondering. When she pitched the idea to others around her, Barb found the response overwhelmingly positive. Her voice rises, imitating their responses, as she explains: “Yeah, I wanna know. What’s with that?”

Hoping to give outlet to the topic’s varied voices, and to provide a starting point for discussion, Barb interviewed all walks of life, from the Christian Ministry in Washington to Scott Seomin, the media director for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). Judging from the 30-plus hours of raw footage she edited into the 90-minute documentary, people had a lot to say.

Girls Kissing begins with layers of unidentified voices speaking out over image after image of two women together. “It’s glorified to be a lesbian.” “Two women together are beautiful, sensual.” “It’s a taboo.” Sue Johansen even suggests that this is the “last frontier” after anal sex.

We’ve all got an opinion, it seems. Why shouldn’t we? Our species is commonly, and rightly so, thought of as a sexual one, with desires and fantasies. But why has the “girl-on-girl ”image been popular enough to sell everything from vodka to sunglasses, from horror flicks to sci-fi literature?

When interviewed by Barb, Judy Lotas of Madison Avenue Marketing in New York argued that lesbian imagery is a way to “break through clutter via shock value.” But shock alone couldn’t possibly be enough. For an image or a fantasy to sell, it must first excite our desire.

Many of Barb’s interviewees suggested that the fantasy of two women together was arousing because of its mysterious and taboo nature; its apparent elusive, exclusive intimacy was an attracting factor for both males and females. It was also suggested that males intrigued by this particular fantasy just want to sneak a peak at how women please each other in order to snag a few pointers.

THE MALE FANTASY OF TWO WOMEN TOGETHER RESTS ON A SINGULAR PREMISE: THE POSSIBILITY OF HIS PARTICIPATION. MORE BOOBS, MORE ASS, MORE PUSSY, MORE OF EVERYTHING A MAN IS SUPPOSED TO FIND ATTRACTIVE.

Sounds convincing, sort of. We do produce an alarming amount of media addressing situations we know nothing about. But sexual identity simply doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is informed by and based upon the norm, notions of desire and the influence of the media. If enigma were the central attracting factor, wouldn’t men try to unravel the mystery by seeking a real understanding of lesbian relationships, or even of lesbian sex? What did the gay community have to say about all this, anyway?

Barb recalls her conversation with Otter, one of the owners of Womyn’s Ware. “Otter was talking about these images originating in the male perspective. You get women with long fingernails, [which] in a real lesbian relation ship is just not seen. And the things they do, the way [they’re] posing—it’s just not very realistic.” So it appears that the driving force behind the male fantasy of two women together isn’t to explore its mysterious nature, after all. Could it be yet another creation made to stimulate the often-vilified male gaze, that vision accused of unilaterally degrading and objectifying women?

Pragmatically, Barb contends, “Anything in the pornography industry, the adult entertainment industry, is aimed toward the male. The male is the largest consumer of pornographic material.” She also recalls, “The gay community’s perspective is that it’s always heterosexual women that are shown…. This representation of women on women is not so much to show the lesbian community, but to titillate the heterosexual male.”

Barb’s explanation reinforces the idea that the male fantasy of two women together rests on a singular premise: the possibility of his participation. More boobs, more ass, more pussy, more of everything a man is supposed to find attractive. What self-respecting, red-blooded straight male wouldn’t want to jump in?

THE FANTASY OF TWO FEMALES TOGETHER DOES NOT TITILLATE THE HETEROSEXUAL MALE ALONE, NOR EVEN HETEROSEXUAL MALES AND HOMOSEXUAL FEMALES EXCLUSIVELY.

Conjecturing, Barb raises the possibility that this fantasy relies on the absence of a phallus, which the fantasizing male would be more than happy to supply. “Not having a penis, [female and female] is really about foreplay. That’s how men perceive it. It’s really all that play happening…. I don’t think the majority of men want to see a woman penetrating another woman, because that would take away their role.” Even if penetration were involved, it is possible that because the phallus is not really a man’s, the fantasizing male could mentally place himself (figuratively and literally) wherever it happened to be.

However, the fantasy of two females together does not titillate the heterosexual male alone, nor even heterosexual males and homosexual females exclusively. Numerous voices in Girls Kissing argued that sexuality is more difficult to categorize for women than for men. “Female sexuality is more fluid. There is a suggestion that lesbians ‘evolve,’” explained Scott Seomin. Women, according to Barb’s findings, were more likely to experiment with others of their own sex, or at the very least, were more willing to discuss their forays.

Maura, a bisexual woman who administers an adult website and whose relationship with her lover Dietrich is thoroughly explored in Girls Kissing, recasts her desire in artistic terms. “Sex is an expression of art,” she reasoned. Later Maura stated of her relationships with women, “[They are] a lot more personal than with men, not just bodies slapping in the night.”

While the woman on woman fantasy, and the images that cash in on the fantasy, might target males, the straight female community also appreciates images of women with women. Though not necessarily attracted sexually to the fantasy, women interviewed in Girls Kissing found the exploration of sexuality appealing in its own right. Perhaps females themselves seek experiences with other women, and all this male fantasy is simply a tangential side effect.

For many women in Barb’s documentary, however, the appeal of the fantasy did not outweigh their unwillingness to act it out, particularly when under pressure by the men in their lives. “With the straight females, the perspective that I got was that [the idea of two females together] was more artistic. They really appreciated the images ... but in a lot of instances, the men in their lives encouraged it, wanted them to experiment or try it.”

WHILE THE WOMAN ON WOMAN FANTASY, AND THE IMAGES THAT CASH IN ON THE FANTASY, MIGHT TARGET MALES, THE STRAIGHT FEMALE COMMUNITY ALSO APPRECIATES IMAGES OF WOMEN WITH WOMEN.

Nowhere was this tension between heterosexual male and female perceptions of two women together more clear than in Barb’s talks with adult entertainment professionals at Vancouver’s “Adult Expo ” last year. A Penthouse photographer spoke candidly on his magazine’s ability to popularize woman on woman scenes, all the while referring to them as “love sets.” Shortly afterward, “Dayton,” an adult film actress working with Vivid Films stated her reason for doing woman on woman in less romantic, more unequivocal terms. “I fuck girls for money,” she said.

When I question Barb, her eyes search upward, right, and it looks as though my inquiry has hit a chord. “I wasn’t really sure if I should leave that in. It was so harsh, but she really boiled it down to reality. She’s not bisexual. She’s not gay. She just did it because there’s a market, and she gets paid well. I think guys think, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if all women had this inclination? We’ll call them love sets,’ but she just said, ‘I do it for the money.’”

As Barb saw it, another serious issue was how all this talk about commodification and fluid sexuality was affecting young females who had to contend with these perceptions of idealized beauty and conferred sexuality at an impressionable age. “When I went into it, I was concerned about the young girls. I was concerned about girls wanting to do this because guys wanted it, because this would get a guy’s attention and get the guy.”

But to our collective relief, the overwhelming response from Barb’s teenaged focus group was that while media certainly did propagate particular notions of beauty and sexiness, and though it seemed that these notions were echoed by or even created by popular male desire, the decision to experiment with other females was ultimately one’s own.

The issue of sexuality, as complex as it is, doesn’t lend itself well to overly simplistic answers. Girls Kissing certainly doesn’t end that way, nor would it be very satisfying if it did. “Everyone has to find their own sexual relationship or the way they interact with other people,” Barb shrugged. “There’s no one type of relationship, I don’t think, for anybody.”

By Janet Yuen

This article appears in the RicePaper 8.2 Touch issue.
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