Lesbianism and the effects of the male gaze in the porn industry

BY JORDANNA GARLAND
Staff Reporter

At the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, Madonna and Britney Spears shared a kiss on live television. 

“Sexy,” commented Spears’ ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake. 

Timberlake’s comment exemplifies the male gaze, a portrayal of women that sexualizes and diminishes the woman while simultaneously empowering the male. His comment also highlights how lesbianism is often an object of the male gaze.

“[The male gaze is] very real and very insidious,” Gene Yoo, a senior anthropology major and member of the Lavender Programming Board, a student-run LGBTQQIA organization, said. “It reflects a lot on our own internalized misogyny.”

According to Fight the New Drug, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness on the harmful effects of porn, the porn industry fetishes lesbians and lesbian relationships through the male gaze. Some common storylines seen on mainstream porn sites involve a man seducing a lesbian couple and lesbian women trying to seduce their straight family members. 

Fight the New Drug states that porn often sells the “fantasy” that lesbian women can be seduced by the “right guy.” 

Unhappy with how the porn industry depicts lesbians and women in general, feminist filmmakers are offering a new perspective: the female gaze.

According to Vulture, the female gaze in cinematography seeks to empathize as opposed to objectify. Cinematographer Ashley Connor describes the film technique as a frame of mind where the approach to the subject matter is more emotional and respectable. 

“Centering women and the pleasure of women within pornography I think is very important,” Yoo said. “It would be better for bringing back the agency of women within the stories that have been depicted.” 

According to Adolescent, an online publication devoted to amplifying young people’s voices, through the male gaze’s insistence that lesbians aren’t actually attracted to women, lesbians may find themselves falling victim to compulsory heterosexuality, or “comp-het,” in wanting to seek out male validation. 

As defined in the “Am I a Lesbian Masterdoc,” “comp-het”  refers to how culture forces straightness onto queer individuals. 

The “Am I a Lesbian Masterdoc” is a thirty page document, created by Anjeli Luz, that discusses topics such as compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity. It was first published to the social media site Tumblr in 2018 and has since risen to popularity, amassing over 30,000 notes before it was removed from the website for violating Tumblr’s terms of service. Despite its removal from the site, the document can still be viewed on other social media platforms such as Twitter and Reddit. 

The phrase “comp-het” was first used in writer and lesbian Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” According to Cosmopolitan, comp-het is mostly studied among women due to sexism that forces women’s sexuality to be defined by men.

According to a research study conducted by Just Like Us, an LGBT+ organization, society has cast stereotypes such as lesbians being “man-haters” or “unattractive,” which perpetuates negative connotations surrounding the word “lesbian.” The study found that 68% of lesbians in the U.K. have delayed their coming out experiences due to these stereotypes. 

“For women, it’s isolating because …the world is catered towards men and therefore it is not catered towards women, which in a subconscious way will automatically make people think, ‘Oh, we are other, we are different,’” Yoo said.

In 2020, reporter Miranda Stephenson wrote an article for Varsity, an independent U.K. newspaper, where she interviewed 120 women-loving-women with the intention of discovering how many of them felt comfortable referring to themselves as a lesbian. Stephenson found that just one-third of surveyors felt very comfortable calling themselves “lesbians,”  while 70% of the women felt very comfortable identifying as gay. According to Stephenson, one woman even expressed the word “lesbian” sounds “a bit slimy” and many of the other women expressed that the word “lesbian” evoked a sense of disgust.

Students at the University of Delaware are similarly familiar with the stigma that seems to surround the word “lesbian.”

“It’s a word that is kinda used like it’s dirty sometimes,” Morgan Oliver, a sophomore plant science major, said. “Like it is synonymous with … a woman that is dirty or too masculine or something scary that people don’t want to think about.”

JoJo Siwa, a dancer, singer and actress, came under fire on multiple social media sites after a July 21 interview with Yahoo Life where she revealed her displeasure with the word “lesbian.” Siwa expressed that while she identifies as a lesbian, the word itself is not one she likes to use. She prefers to describe herself as gay.

“I don’t like the word itself,” Siwa said. “It’s just like a lot. But I mean, at the end of the day, that’s what I am … It’s like the word moist. It’s just like … ugh!”

After receiving backlash and many comments on TikTok that accused Siwa of describing the word “lesbian” as dirty, Siwa decided to make a TikTok response video to clear the air. In the TikTok, she clarified that her qualms about the word “lesbian” were exclusive to the word itself and not the meaning behind it. 

“It is not a slur, and it especially is not a word that I am ashamed of saying or ashamed of identifying as by any means,” Siwa said. “It’s not a word that flows off the tongue for me if that makes sense.”

Mary Grace Lewis, a former editorial intern for Advocate, suggests the reason why the word “lesbian” has become villainized in media is because of the lack of women directors and show-runners in media. This absence of women in directing can lead to male show-runners creating shows that uphold the male gaze through their representation of lesbians. 
“Empowering women, specifically empowering those who are marginalized is very important in bringing in this perspective that can critique the larger, patriarchal system at hand,” Yoo said.