I got applauded for kissing my girlfriend this weekend.Â
Halloween is one of my favorite times of year, and this year, I was lucky enough to be able to drive to see my girlfriend over Halloweekend. As we celebrated Halloween that night (dressed as Lois Lane and Clark Kent), I kissed her in the middle of a party.Â
I didn’t see anything wrong with this. I love my girlfriend, and I was excited and having a good time at a very liberal college — a place I thought was safe — so I didn’t think I needed to be careful with my show of love.Â
I was wrong. Someone standing next to us immediately started clapping and shouting something unintelligible for us to do it again. I stared at him for a moment, wholly confused about what was going on, before I realized that he was applauding for us kissing. I yelled something back, filled with expletives, and turned my back on him, a little shaken.Â
This was quickly forgotten in the excitement of the night, but revisiting that memory now feels oily and uncomfortable. He wanted us to kiss again: for his sake, for his pleasure.
I have always thought of myself as a fairly brave person. I know what I believe in, and I’m never ashamed to be who I am. However, I am well aware of the danger that comes with being a queer person in a public space. I’ve never had to deal with the effects of being a queer woman before, and I can only feel blessed that it wasn’t something with a more foul intent, only the fetishization of us.
But that doesn’t excuse it. And it’s upsetting that my knee-jerk reaction was just to be grateful that it wasn’t something worse. The fact that my response was gratitude, relief that it wasn’t something violent, is an issue within itself. It’s a quiet conditioning that queer people carry with them to be relieved when a boundary is only pushed against, not broken.
That man’s applause isn’t an isolated event. It’s a social epidemic that has gotten rolled into the experiences of WLW relationships everywhere.
This is a cultural event, stemming from the objectification of women. Fetishization of lesbian relationships has been around since the first woman kissed another woman. From female characters in TV getting the overdone lesbian sex scene to the popularity of lesbian porn, men are constantly sexualizing lesbian relationships for their own gratification.
I can think of so many examples without doing any research, of moments in TV or movies where two girls kissing, or lesbianism in general, is over sexualized or purely to appeal to men. In Gilmore Girls, Paris kisses Rory to get the attention of the boys at a party. Friends is fraught with Joey and Chandler’s constant sexualization of lesbians. The relationship between Lorraine and Delphine in Atomic Blonde feels marketed to put men in the seats. These depictions invite men into the intimacy, instead of showing realistic relationships.
I can guarantee that one of the most popular searches on any porn site would be “girls kissing” or something along those lines. Men exploit lesbian relationships and warp them to fit into their hypersexual guidelines to please them.Â
And they’ve been doing this forever. There are repeated calls of “Oh, I’d love to watch,” and “Well, two women are better than one.”
There is a difference between a man being excited and welcoming expressions of love between two women, non-predatorily, and a man getting gratification and pleasure out of it. Trust me, we aren’t waiting for a man to come and liberate us from our relationship. We aren’t being stolen away from you, and I am not an object for your fantasy.
If men want to support and help to create a safe and respectful environment for women, that’s amazing. There are ways to be inclusive and accepting without preying on lesbians. Go watch a real, representative depiction of a WLW relationship (Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a good one) and accept that we are not there for your gratification.
I should not have to be wary about kissing my girlfriend in a public space. I wish that I could say that I won’t be, but now that I’ve had an experience with this, I’m sure that it’s going to live in the back of my mind for a while.
But I refuse to live in the shadows. I will keep kissing her. And I will keep yelling back at men who think it’s okay to sexualize us.