Where have I been the last six years?

The title of this post is not a hyperbole about my extended absence from my own blog. It's a reference to the fact that I'm finally watching The L Word in its' entirety. I have thoughts. So many thoughts! Largely regarding how annoying some of these characters are, but also about the groundbreaking representation of lesbians and bisexual women on television (granted pay cable).




Before I started really watching this show, I'd seen a couple clips of episodes, either on line or on TV late at night. I had seen people tell Alice "when are you going to choose between dick and pussy" and right about then I said to The L Word "Hey, The L Word, you can go fuck yourself right in the ear!" I had no interest in Shane the uber-dyke with her greasy hair and her properly dykely promiscuity. Those were my two big problems.

I finally gave in. Circa episode one, I was all "oooh, Jenny Schecter is so artsy and cool!" She was a pre-hipster, with big gigantic doll-eyes and her whispery little voice and her struggle to deal with the fact that she's obviously in love with Marina in all her Amazonian glory. Alice was insufferable, irritating, grating, annoying, pretentious, all that good stuff. Dana was a self-hating lez and Bette and Tina were just kind of boring.

Throughout the show I've watched so far (halfway through season two) Jenny becomes this deceitful, shameless, cheating, creepy liar, retaining the physical charm she always had (I'm assuming why she was cast) but it's impossible to ignore that she's (Word of God) the producer's favorite character, which is why she gets to waste so much screentime with her hateful bullshit and constructed drama and terrible writing. Shane's character gets some actual development and you learn about her past as a drug addicted street kid who turned tricks posing as a guy. She's also a loyal friend and actually gives a shit about the other characters we're suppose to be so involved in. Alice actually becomes a human being who's less self obsessed and defined by her "top ten lists". She still gets told to choose between men and women, but hey, we're just being honest, right!? Bette cheats on Tina, and claims "she couldn't help it", so obviously she's blameless. Charming! So she and Tina break up, because lesbians don't have successful relationships! That's for straight people, silly! Lesbians just have loads of sex with other lesbians! Like, all the time! They fall in love a ton, but then they still just have loads of lesbian sex, while falling out of love and fucking loads of strangers and friends and stuff.

This is the lesson I've learned about lesbians from The L Word. Lesbians are mostly either tricksy, cheating, deceitful wenches (later Jenny, Marina, Bette, Tonya, Helena, etc) or naive, wide eyed, and lost (Jenny early season 1, Tina until the new job and still sort of after that, Dana). A couple of them are generally human but they mostly have hard tragic pasts (Shane).

Season two is already well on its way to becoming its own in-joke about itself. The endless "dyke drama" and bed-hopping is often punctuated with some version of the show's theme song sung in a different language or played in a different style or tempo, but it's always there in your face. Irritating. The song itself says that "this is the way that we live and love". You know what, L Word? Speak for yourself. I'm not a huge fan of the idea that the show represents the lifestyles of lesbian and bisexual women when they all do exactly the same thing and their dramas are practically indistinguishable from each other. Also, all queer women are skinny and pretty and there aren't many women of colour among us. This omission was most notable at the Gay Pride parade in season two. I just watched that, and the older, fatter lesbians and women of colour are background interest. They don't get lines, they don't get to do anything other than swan around in their boas, on their dyke-bikes, being stereotypical. Then we go back to focus on Dana's family drama with her newly out gay brother. Of course, he outs himself by going to a club and grinding on a stranger, because that's how we do in the LGBT community!

To be honest, those are the women I would like to see a show about. Some diverse fucking women who don't have to be traditionally attractive, young, rich and mostly white for their audience to give a shit about their lives and their loves. Oh, and maybe they could be defined by something other than who they fuck? Maybe...Probably not, though.