We’ve all been asked the awkward question: “So how do lesbians have sex, anyway?” Our lovemaking might just be the most misunderstood type of sex in the world. But as a lesbian with many lesbian friends, I realized something interesting: straight people aside, even we cannot seem to come up with a standard definition for sex. With that in mind, I took a video camera to the girl bars of West Hollywood and Long Beach in search of answers. One girl told me: “Gay [male] sex and straight sex are so well-defined [read: penile penetration], but lesbian sex is so undefined that people think we don’t have sex, or that we can’t have sex…they discredit it.”
Unsurprisingly, every woman I interviewed gave me a different answer when asked to define lesbian sex. They were, however, in agreement about lesbian porn: they all hated it. Every girl (out of 20) resoundingly denounced lesbian porn as the worst thing she had ever seen. Even more intriguing is that many actually prefer gay male porn, simply because it is so visually stimulating (i.e. the opposite of lesbian porn). So why is girl-girl porn so bad and why do lesbians despise it so much? Well for starters, it isn’t even made for us; its target audience is clueless straight men.
By its very definition, lesbian sex should involve females interacting sexually with each other of their own accord, but “lesbian porn” is recast through the scrutiny of the male gaze, resulting in women acting to fulfill a male viewer’s idea of “girl-on-girl action.” We are left with simply a reworking of what fails in straight porn, that is, the inability to visually show true female sexual fulfillment (read: orgasm). Straight porn’s solution to this problem is the “money shot,” or the shot of the man ejaculating on the girl, which masks whether or not she is climaxing too. In lesbian porn, this is compounded by the need to reassure the guy at home with the beer and the hard-on that he still matters, rather than acknowledging the (unsettling) fact that a man is not required to get a girl off.
In my porn odyssey, I started with a series of films called, Women Seeking Women, made by Girlfriends Films, which is representative of mainstream lesbian porn. Although there are of course lesbians who identify as femme, there is a huge difference between a femme lesbian and a straight girl in disguise. The cover of the DVD depicts two young women, a blonde and a brunette, hair and makeup done, naked, with one leaning over the other one. They are both looking at the camera directly, the brunette on top has her well-manicured hand on the blonde girl’s head, while giving the camera a coy stare, as if to say, “come watch us play with each other, we don’t mind if you look.” Known in their scene as “Lena” (the blonde) and “Zoe” (the brunette), these two girls demonstrate exactly what is wrong with mainstream lesbian porn.
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After welcoming Lena into her house -- they are friends who have gotten together to work on a project of some kind -- a lengthy dialogue ensues in which we find out that Lena is straight and Zoe is into women. I’m not even going to use the word lesbian because neither of them ever actually say it in the scene.
When Lena asks Zoe if she has had any crushes in a while, Zoe replies that she has but that she’s looking for something new. Zoe then asks, “Why, are you offering?” to which Lena quickly replies, “No, you perv!” Zoe follows this with, “You shouldn’t be so freaked out by lesbians. At least I don’t have to go make out with some stinky, hairy dude.” An interesting twist here, this could potentially offend the straight male viewer, but could also just make him laugh considering how Lena is “straight” and Zoe looks just like her. At this remark, Lena stands up, pulls Zoe up by the hair and says, “just for your benefit, I’m going to give you a demonstration today” and leads her into Zoe’s bedroom.
When I showed this film to one of my interviewees, she remarked at this point, “Wait, isn’t the girl who’s talking supposed to be the straight one? Why is she taking charge? What could she possibly teach the “lesbian” in the scene? This doesn’t make any sense.” When these two undress each other with their acrylic-tipped fingers in Zoe’s room (which is entirely pink, by the way), they reveal matching underwear sets along with perfectly cropped triangles of pubic hair over vaginas that are just a little too tan. Where are the laidback butches, tattooed tomboys, spike-heeled sassy femmes, and girls in basketball shorts that we see out in the clubs? The women I interviewed called the girls in these films: “unrealistic,” “staged,” “straight,” and “boring.” One girl pointed out, “If you’re a lesbian, you do not have long fingernails,” the reason for which is self-explanatory. Long nails and lesbian fucking is a dangerous combination.
The girls I spoke with could not articulate exactly why girls like this seemed fake to them, they just “knew” somehow. My theory is that this comes from our ability as women to interpret both visual and verbal cues. In her book, The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine explains that baby girls are born interested in studying faces because it allows them to gather meaning about themselves. Girls read faces for clues of social approval and signs of sincerity and hone these skills as they grow up.
The same goes for sound: “girls can hear a broader range of emotional tones in the human voice than can boys.” We engage in a process called “mirroring;” A woman can match her breathing, posture, and facial expression to someone she is looking at and literally feel how they are feeling. If someone’s tone and posture do not match, for instance, if the person is shifting uncomfortably around but speaking in a cheery voice, the woman can tell that they are lying. This is precisely why we don’t trust the girls in lesbian porn (and why straight men do).
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One girl I interviewed very pointedly said:
"When you’re fucking a girl, you’re not down in her pussy and looking up to see if someone’s watching you. You’re into what’s in front of you and that’s how you can usually know [that it’s fake]. She’s licking or sucking something and she‘s making sure the camera can see her expression, letting out over-exaggerated moans. It’s like, the bitch isn’t even doing anything, what are you moaning about?"
Another glaring problem is that the girls continually talk about what they are doing or what they are about to do to each other, saying things like: “Why don’t you put your pussy over here and get on your back so I can eat your pussy while you eat mine,” followed by them performing the sixty-nine just described. I believe that this obsessive need to explain their pleasure verbally is the mainstream lesbian porn version of the “money shot:” an attempt to cover up the failure to truly depict orgasm. When Lena says, “Well I just came twice, so I think it’s only fair if I make you come again, how do you want it? Want me to rub my wet pussy all over yours?” who are we to question the veracity of the “orgasm” we just saw? (Note the sarcasm). And of course, Zoe “comes” from this pussy-rubbing almost immediately. This is followed by soft kissing and touching, and after what feels like an eternity, the scene fades to black. So did Lena and Zoe just have lesbian sex? One girl responded, “If I was gonna say that I slept with a girl, I would’ve gone down on her, she would’ve gone down on me, or some intense fingering, but it has to be the essence of it. It can’t just be the physical penetration…you know when you had sex with someone.”
Speaking of penetration, did I miss something? There is only one shot that could be called “penetration” in the entire scene, and this occurs 15 minutes into it with Zoe sticking one (always only one) finger inside of Lena and making a gentle come-hither motion.
The girls I spoke to always stressed that two fingers is the lesbian “standard” and that one finger is absurd; you can’t even feel it. Mainstream porn lacks the intensity, lust and passion that makes lesbian sex fantastic. This is not to say that we don’t appreciate the sensuality of lesbian sex, but porn should weave together the softness of female sexuality with the excitement of fierce fucking. The interviewees emphasized characteristics such as “hard,” “fast,” “horny,” “aggressive,” etc, all of which are male-associated traits in our culture. One lesbian porn star remarked, “There’s just something to be said for the fact that girls like to fuck, and girls can fuck each other, so I think it’s really important to show that the sex women have together is just as real as any other sex.” So, I bet you’re wondering now if there is any hope for lesbian porn. It turns out that there is, but to find out more, you’ll have to stay tuned. 
