In the Guardian today - Why more and more straight women are fantasising about lesbians claims "the image of the gay woman is finally going mainstream. Britain, therefore, is duly amending its fantasies". Once I'd started to rant it was too long for a tweet, so here goes:
No longer do lesbians just exist in the minds of the Nuts reader [phew, because that made life really complicated - I don't know how lesbians survived when they only existed in the mind of other queer women], but in the real-life world of pap shots, society pages and telly ... Their glamour has shifted. Women have reclaimed the lesbian. [Straight women, that is. Because queer women don't actually have opinions of their own, even in the Guardian. At least they exist here, unlike the late departed Observer 'Woman' magazine.]Instead of the one-note "And I'll just watch" fantasies of yesterday's men, or the icky, over-sexy imitations in pop videos, women are imagining the lingering, complex bliss of both them and their lover enjoying the same TV programmes. Of being able to extend best-friendships into marriages, advising each other on non-frizz hair products, eventually bringing up well-balanced children in a brilliant, bookish house and chuckling on leather sofas at late-night BBC4. [We've seen this elision before, haven't we? Lesbians make great girly best mates, it's just a shame they might want sex in their relationship. Cosiness is lovely, that doesn't make a relationship. (OTOH, that striving for cosiness - apparently not possible in normal friendships between straight women - might explain a lot of the embattled world view of women as their own worst enemies that put me off the Sunday Times Style mag world of writing. Just be nicer to other women, surely it's not that hard?)]
...Is theirs as patronising a fantasy as those developed for men? Maybe [yes], but it's so much cosier. And less oily.
[Update, now that I've thought about it again: the weirdest thing about this view and the thing I've never understood about the lads' mags view of lesbians, is that they both seem to completely forget the defining characteristics of lesbians - women who are attracted to other women. So straight men wouldn't get a look in, and unless straight women put out, they're kinda useless in a lesbian relationship. (Sure, there's 'lesbian bed death' but you do have to go through a 'bed life' stage to get there, you can't skip straight to the watching TV bit.)]