In a faraway land, there exists a queer woman who is in a stable relationship with the girl of her dreams. She’s sitting at the bar when she’s approached by a hopeful suitor, a young man, who asks if he can buy her a drink.
She politely declines — “Thanks for the offer, but I have a girlfriend!” — and she watches as, counterintuitively, he’s not discouraged; he’s delighted. His face contorts in glee as he launches lewd comments at her in an onslaught that seems to never end.
But this isn’t a fictional story. It’s the everyday reality for queer women across the country. From brazen commentary by complete strangers to violations of privacy and respect, the sapphic community is suffering the impacts of hypersexualization and fetishization.
The entertainment industry has played a major role in facilitating this. “Lesbian” was the most searched word on the world’s largest pornography domain in 2022. Only approximately 50 percent of the most popular global movies in the last 40 years passed the “Bechdel test” — a standard where a scene depicts a woman talking about a subject not related to a man.
It’s clear that, culturally, we have not collectively come around to the idea of women existing for anything but male pleasure.
Fetishization is not the only difficult reality to face. Every queer woman I know has experienced some form of rejection from a community — whether it be their family, their churches or their social circles. A study from the National Institute of Health revealed that bisexual and lesbian women are more likely to experience generalized anxiety disorders, as well as significantly more likely to meet criteria for more than one mental disorder. Instability still marks the community, regardless of mass movements toward social progress.
Thus, when we find “safe people,” those who inherently understand the difficulty and danger of existing as ourselves, we are drawn to them with intensity, both platonically and romantically. I have witnessed in my own life, many times over, queer women flocking together, united by mutual solidarity and understanding.
In a romantic setting, this intensity has the potential to lead to a biological phenomenon called limerence. Coined by 1970s psychologist Dorothy Tennov, it describes a type of manic love and infatuation that impacts women at higher rates than men. The cliche “What does a lesbian bring to the second date? A U-Haul” is a cultural representation of this with more emotional weight than one might realize. This culmination of hyper-sexualization, fear and apparent biological functions imbue us with the ability to move through a single relationship at an ultra-rapid rate — and I’d argue, not in a healthy way.
Though healthy lesbian couples are less often forced to societally reduce themselves to “roommate” status anymore, sapphic culture as a whole is left with intense emotional volatility, born from that same history of fear and reduction. This should not be an embedded part of queer culture, a rite of passage nor an inescapable experience — it is not who we are.
