#lesbian rant

1. All our friends lead male-centered lives. My wife and I, two people who are admittedly probably in the minority of lesbians who don’t engage with men and male-focused media, feel like we can’t contribute much if anything to general conversations and our every attempt to introduce women or fem-leaning characters, actors, or ideas into a discussion is always, without fail, met with a lukewarm response. This has caused a sense of isolation for us, after several years, obviously

2. We are constantly reminded of the lack of wlw and sapphic media that is taken seriously by the general public, and in turn further feeds our sense of isolation not just in our friend group but in the world we live in.

Neither of these points are the fault of our friends, bi people, or even male-centered media as a whole. It’s a multitude of problems. Media misogyny. Lesbiphobia. Some genuine reasons like women being disinterested in watching other women have to suffer any more than (or even as much as) we have to in real life. The reductive answer of “wlw simply doesn’t sell” which obviously has more sinister root causes in big media projects.

That is to say, I’m not trying to solve anything here. My wife and I are isolated in a world entirely revolving around men, and we’re just tired of it. Fucking exhausted, honestly. We prefer to sit alone at home most weekends than go out with anyone. We’re scared to go out in public because being seen as the obvious lesbian/sapphic couple makes us easy targets. The way people perceive us is so hostile and alienating, it’s no wonder a lot of us in the lesbian community consider the term an expression of gender as much as we do sexuality, because our experience of being perceived is so entirely different to every other label of sexuality by virtue of being the only one not involving men that it puts us in the crosshairs of mass ridicule. Hey everyone, look at these dykes that think they can just pretend men don’t exist! Quit living a fantasy where you can just pretend to ignore patriarchy!

But we do. Almost every book, show, movie, game we consume is sapphic in some way or at least leaning, and we’ve managed that with no difficulty. And the ones that aren’t, we consume mostly for the sake of our friends who love those things and we do so out of mutual love and community for the people we care about. But it is in no way reciprocal when it comes to sapphic subjects. It’s as easy for us to solely consume women-led and wlw-focused media as everyone else seems to find cishet or even mlm material and I really don’t see why it’s so hard for everyone else. Genuinely. Give it a try. Confront your biases. Do some self reflection on why it feels so hard for you to de-center men for a bit because maybe it’s a deeper problem than just effort. And something tells me if more people thought to engage with wlw media with the same enthusiasm and respect that they do mlm or literally everything else, we might just make a better world for women and non-men in general in the process.

And guess what? The exact same process applies to people of color. Ethnic minorities. Multitudes of cultural subsets. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, apply some media literacy to your daily life and start thinking about this stuff more. I’m begging you. Think about what it must be like for the people close to you to never get to see their own cultural identity be represented or consumed in meaningful ways, or even taken seriously by their own friends. It fucking sucks.

idk i just dont seriously consider that men and women have feelings for each other in my daily life, and my first reaction when hearing about it is to kind of dismiss it.