On a typical February morning I plucked my newspaper from a snow bank and kicked back with the New York Times. (2/25/05) How would Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s lifestyles newspaper “make gays look good” today?
That day, the Times offered up a one-two punch, using extremely untypical lesbians as a ploy to curry favor for homosexuality. The Arts & Leisure section (p. E28) featured a full-color, one-fifth-life-sized photograph of nine perfectly coiffed and buck-naked “lesbians.” They were artfully posed in a full-body-contact clutch against a gunmetal-grey background, the stark contrast making their warm hummock of flesh pop off the page. Every one of them was a “lipstick lesbian,” altogether perfectly airbrushed and totally untypical of lesbians in general. It was a paid advertisement for Showtime’s “The L Word.” The “newspaper of record” is not above shilling for pornographers.
Above the fleshy knoll were nine carefully clipped quotes from critics on the two coasts; the San Francisco Chronicle was quoted twice: “worth paying for. . .confirms the channel’s fearlessness.” Since when is pandering to the prurient tastes of voyeurs who are eager to reduce lesbians to the status of walking pornography “fearless”? Entertainment Weekly is also quoted twice: “jaw-dropping, button-pushing, sex-fueled” and “The L Word unspools like a gorgeous sales pitch for a much cooler life.” (Emphasis theirs.) Indeed it does if you’re a dowdy lesbian who can’t relate emotionally to the male half of humanity. Voyeuristic programming is crafted for the love starved and the emotionally inept, for people like the critic for the New York Daily News who panted “libido with a capital ‘L’. If there’s a sexier show on television. . .point me in that direction.” What a lazy loser. Watching other people enjoying sex is so much less demanding than forming relationships with real people. “The L Word” is several layers of abstraction removed from reality: it’s a fictional tale featuring fictional relationships between cosmetically-enhanced actresses who are pretending to be lesbians, a human variation distinguished by neurologies so untypical as to place them outside our commonly accepted culturally-rooted definition of what is meant by the word “woman.” The whole production so bent on scripting sexual encounters that the human actresses, who pose as woman impersonators, might just as well be replaced by well-crafted automata. The show could be renamed “The Stepford Dykes.” The critics would love it, so would all those sorry beta males who prefer their porn to be male-free because the sight of alpha males having intimate relationships with real women is for them an unwelcome reminder of their beta-male lack of social skills. For those betas who haven’t already worried their male members raw while ogling this season’s lesbian hijinx, the Times ad helpfully discloses that The L Word’s first season’s masturbatory prompts are now available on DVD.
Nine Lesbians Are Not Enough
Flipping to page E3 of the same edition we encounter Patrick E. Healy’s adoring profile of 24-year-old actress Eden Riegel, “a daytime television pioneer,” who portrayed “the first lead character on a major daytime drama to be a lesbian” as Bianca on the ABC soap opera “All My Children.”
To juice up ratings, Bianca revealed her lesbianism to her mother, Erica Kane, back in the year 2000. Mr. Healy characterized the mom, played by Susan Lucci, as a horrified “hyper-heterosexual.” The script writers then did their best to make Bianca a sympathetic character, which they managed to do by making her a preposterously untypical lesbian. According to Mr. Healy, “the character eventually became hugely popular as she braved the sudsy perils of the soaps: she survived a rape that left her pregnant, had her baby stolen in a kidnapping, and navigated months of teeth-gnashing plot twists that kept her daughter just a DNA test away.”
Building sympathy for a female character by beating her up is as old as drama; this ploy became visual with such silent-screen flicks as “The Perils of Pauline”: just set a woman and her baby adrift on an ice floe and everyone turns sympathetic. Making Bianca a rape victim achieved two much-needed objectives: first, it made Bianca an object of sympathy by revisiting the ever-popular theme of Men as Beasts. Women love this theme; that’s the reason The Silence of the Lambs is in constant heavy rotation on Lifetime, the women’s channel. The second objective of the rape-victim ploy was to avoid altogether the morally-suspect business of lesbians becoming mothers through artificial insemination or as a consequence of marrying some unsuspecting heterosexual man and then shattering an established home life by suddenly revealing a secret homosexual persona. About 35% of lesbians play this dirty trick. Other lesbians employ what they themselves call “sperm trapping” stratagems to make themselves pregnant, in a sort of assisted parthenogenesis. So in a sly way Bianca’s fictional rape was intended to sanitize her motherhood; it was a way to make her a mom without also making her a home wrecker or a selfish self-inseminator. Making her child a daughter also dodged anticipated viewer resistance to the notion of a boy being deprived of healthy male role model by a mom in the throes of a same-sex fixation.
But Bianca is departing, says Mr. Healy, she’s “wrapping up one of the most noted and notorious story lines in an industry that strives for shock-and-awe melodrama.” The Times tells us that gay-power activists “celebrated when Bianca came out, and cheered her highly-publicized romantic kiss with a woman in 2003, considered a daytime landmark.” Considered by whom? A landmark is something considered worth preserving, which suggests the bias of the New York Times.
Joan Garry, the executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says that “You cannot underestimate the power of Bianca being in homes across America every single day. Bianca is the lesbian that many American television viewers want to spend time with.” On other words, Bianca is a first-rate fictional propagandist for the radical gay social agenda. Left unsaid is that if Bianca were a more typical lesbian, then she would also be far less likeable. If Bianca were a more typical lesbian mother, one who had popped out of her psycho-sexual closet after duping a man into marriage and then run off with some lesbian lover, leaving a father without his child and a child without a father, then enormous numbers of viewers would have hated Bianca’s guts. They’d want to see her almost-certainly heterosexual daughter returned to her heterosexual father and her father’s (hopefully) heterosexual future wife.
Back in 1983 “All My Children” did introduce a more realistic lesbian character, a child psychiatrist, “but the ratings foundered and the story line was shelved,” according to the New York Times. Said the Times, “…ABC executives grew concerned that Bianca’s story line was too narrowly focused on sexuality, culminating in the lesbian kiss of 2003, making her less popular.” In other words, in order to make Bianca likeable it would be necessary to distract viewers from the true essence of what she really was. The Times then quoted Brian Frons, president of ABC Daytime, to the effect that “some people” find characters with fringe sexual tastes to be a “roadblock” to “full viewer commitment.” How insightful! This man is way underpaid.
Mr. Healy concludes his gush piece by disclosing that “When she leaves the show today, Bianca will head for Paris with her baby, a new job and the potential love interest.” How convenient. If ABC Daytime were truly fearless they’d keep Bianca at home in Pine Valley so we could all witness how Bianca and her lesbian lover(s) and their extended circle of homosexual friends try to cluelessly model a romantic relationship for a heterosexual child in a fatherless, husbandless, household founded on lesbian values, lesbian perspectives, and a truly queer lesbian sub-culture. Once viewers understood the true implications of Bianca’s homosexuality for her daughter, her approval rating would plunge into the dumpster with an audible thud. No doubt the left-wing utopians would characterize such a stark reality check as “gay bashing.”
More Good Stuff on the Homepage, Click Here!
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2005
February 28, 2005