True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships

Product Information

In the contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan, the phrase is used in a way which suggests all women can participate in the “girl crush”. An interview with Zooey Deschanel in the July 2013 edition of Australian Cosmopolitan asks the actress to name the celebrity she has “a total girl crush on”. This eroticisation of women’s same-sex sexuality appears to have ebbed somewhat in contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan from 2013, replaced instead by the frequent use of the term “girl crush”.

This seems like it shouldn't be a victory. And yet, the list of movies who've accomplished the same feat is painfully abbreviated. Don't talk to me about Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie made famous for its extended, impractical sex scenes and allegations of harassment by its director, Abdellatif Kechiche. Kechiche reportedly bullied the two female protagonists as well as his staff, forcing them to work 16-hour workdays under extreme pressure. Critics further accused the director of creating "voyeuristic" sex scenes intended to solicit the male gaze.In women’s magazines from the early 2000s, the “lesbian chic” of the 1990s evolves into what feminist researchers have dubbed “ heteroflexibility” – or the performance of lesbian eroticism to garner male attention. Straightening up same-sex desire

She points to a few high-pro- file recent examples, including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert left her husband for the writer Rayya Elias, with whom she had been close friends for many years. The two were together until Elias died of cancer. Gilbert’s next publicly disclosed relationship

Routsong, in other words, is an unsurprising person with whom to begin a history of gay liberation in America. Gutterman starts her own book not in 1969, however, or in 1972. She begins almost a decade earlier, when Routsong is a writer of heterosexual novels and is married to a man. This is a far cry from references to lesbianism in the magazines from the previous two decades. Earlier references are steeped in the politics of social change and are often located in social commentary articles or advice columns. She hit dissertational gold only after her adviser suggested she look into the genre of post-war lesbian pulp novels, bodice-rippers that masqueraded as morality tales. She began reading, and reading about, the novels, becoming fascinated by the recur- ring figure of the “lesbian wife,” who was both an erotic fantasy and a cautionary tale, an object of desire for the readers and a symbol of the supposed moral decadence of the post-war affluent society. If complexity is the dominant melody of Gutterman’s book, its counterpoint is compassion. She writes compassionately of husbands and children who suffered when their wives and mothers left for other women, as well as of lovers who suffered when wives chose to stay in their marriages. There is compassion for lesbian feminists who were struggling to figure out how to exist and act in a transformed world. Above all, there is compassion for the struggles of married women with lesbian desire, torn between romance and obligation, committed to exploring their same-sex desire but not ready to wholly reject their more conventional families and communities.