Lesbians seem to be everywhere in our contemporary media: in teen movies, in new TV shows, and even in the musical artists we listen to. Post Barbie-summer, it feels like we are living in a modern-day renaissance where women finally get to tell the stories they want to tell – but it hasn’t been an easy trek to this point, and we definitely haven’t reached the summit yet. Lesbian representation especially has been subject to the widest range in depictions since lesbians first started gaining attention in mainstream pop culture.
The hypersexualised lesbian is a familiar trope to anyone who grew up watching early 2000s Western media: whether it was straight pop stars kissing for the bit or straight actresses playing straight characters also kissing for the bit, all of these interactions were pointedly fabricated for an audience. This use of lesbianism as a gimmick to get more viewers is entrenched in a long history of how women’s bodies are objectified to benefit male audiences. Female actresses have historically been degraded to just the sex appeal they offer in front of the camera, all the way from Marilyn Monroe to Megan Fox. Male directors are often to blame for many gratuitous sex scenes that posit women as objects of desire, simply to service the male viewer without driving the plot further in any way. So if straight women already lack agency in mainstream media, it is even harder for lesbians. Lesbian relationships are one of the few places where men have no role to play, which threatens the patriarchal ideology that governs most popular media. As a consequence, the lack of men onscreen manifests itself through the male gaze behind the scenes, reducing lesbians to no more than passive sexual objects and trying to curb their threat.
Take the example of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010): the movie is almost universally praised for its uncensored depiction of the twisted relationship between Nina (Natalie Portman) and Lily (Mila Kunis), centring on Nina’s eventual descent into madness. Though it is rarely described as a defining “lesbian movie,” it is a movie that hinges on the homoeroticism between the main characters as a driving narrative point. Nina and Lily’s relationship embodies the trope of doppelganger lesbians: when lesbian lovers are visually represented as doubles of each other, often in the interest of responding to male fantasies. Not only is the “lesbian double” a common genre in porn, it is also a common plot device used to vilify lesbians or paint them as predatory. Think back to the murderous lesbians in Basic Instinct (1992), or lesbian obsession as portrayed in the more recent The Roommate (2011). These representations tend to harm real-life perceptions of lesbians by portraying them as inherently aggressive or psychotic.
While Black Swan is less explicit in its villainization of lesbians, Nina fits almost perfectly into this trope of the “psychotic lesbian”: her sex scene with Lily represents a turning point in her transformation into the titular Black Swan, succumbing to her dark side and ignoring all inhibitions. It conflates lesbian desire with a death drive, seemingly concluding that Nina’s desire to have sex with Lily is a manifestation of her self-destructive tendencies. Not to mention the sensationalism of the scene itself: two straight actresses having sex onscreen, as choreographed by a male director, lends itself to the age-old tradition of exploiting lesbian sexuality for viewer entertainment.
We know that sex sells – and lesbian sex even more so. Female homoeroticism has been used to sell countless products, from Miller Light beer, to Nikon cameras, to even Canada Oil Sands. Promotional material for TV shows isn’t immune, either: take a look at Leighton Meester and Blake Lively in this Rolling Stone photoshoot for Gossip Girl. These portrayals turn lesbianism into a commodity in the same way that movies and TV shows often rely on lesbianism as an eye-catching novelty to attract their audience’s attention. All of these examples point to a long history of lesbians onscreen being reduced to nothing but objects of desire, completely stripped of their sexual agency and unable to exist as well-rounded characters.
The only “solution” that seemed to be a possible response to these early hypersexualised lesbians was completely desexualised representation in the years to follow. The past few years have seen a rise in the popularity of “cottagecore” lesbian culture: by celebrating simple rural living, women and lesbians are able to construct their perfect utopia without the structural sexism or homophobia of modern city life. At its core, there is nothing wrong with idealizing countryside living – but the concept of cottagecore is problematized by its deeply Eurocentric understanding of rural life. It is a fantasy that largely only Western white women can dream of by romanticizing the American agricultural dream and inadvertently celebrating “aesthetics” drawn from settler colonialism. Even in the context of lesbian sexuality, the cottagecore aesthetic comes with its downsides when searching for realistic lesbian representation: instead of being reduced to sexual objects, lesbians are now reduced to symbols of hegemonic femininity whose only option is to live in a world of imagined fantasy without any active reclamation of sexuality.
This phenomenon can be observed through the rise of lesbian period pieces that take a large leap away from early 2000s depictions to instead focus on the tension between women that arises from a lack of proximity or sexual contact. Recent movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Vita and Virginia (2018) were well-received by lesbian audiences since they filled a historical gap in queer representation after decades of erasure. While this form of censored lesbian sexuality is definitely an improvement from explicit lesbian sex scenes made for the male gaze, it is still aimed at making lesbian representations more palatable for straight audiences. At the same time, these period pieces alienate a large majority of lesbian viewers by being set against pastoral backdrops that were historically occupied by a specific kind of woman: white, upper-class, and femme-presenting. Not to mention that the actresses behind the scenes remain as straight as ever. It seems to suggest that lesbian representation is only acceptable in the mainstream when it is not stepping on anyone else’s toes.
This idea of lesbians as “digestible” queer representation has also led to them becoming more popular in recent kids’ cartoons. Since The Legend of Korra ended with its main female protagonists starting a romantic relationship, shows like The Owl House and She-Ra have followed in its footsteps with their female main characters being in explicitly queer relationships. Once again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this – in fact, lesbians being normalized in children’s media is definitely a landmark moment in the history of queer representation. As an inadvertent consequence, though, the association of lesbians with children’s media has led to the infantilization of said lesbians in pop culture. There is a lack of adult lesbian representation that doesn’t fall under the aforementioned period piece genre, which soon becomes frustrating since one ends up having to resort to cartoons for lesbian representation even as an adult. Even in popular teen shows like Never Have I Ever, where all of the other teen characters are sexually active or at least expressing interest in sex, the token lesbian character Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) is never shown in any remotely sexual context. Her romantic relationships also receive the least amount of screentime and attention – which just goes to show how deep this new desexualised misrepresentation of lesbians goes.
As with all tropes and traditions, the tide will eventually turn against the status quo, whether for better or for worse. The recent success of Bottoms (2023) suggests a wider success for lesbian representation universally – it goes to show that people are interested in seeing lesbians onscreen just as they are, without catering to non-lesbian audiences. We might still have a long way to go to escape all the stereotypes still associated with lesbians in modern media, but more queer women are stepping up to write the stories they want to share with the world than ever before. After all of the bad porn and cottagecore aesthetics of the past few decades, lesbian voices are finally being heard as they should be — uncensored.