[For Lesbian Feminists, Liking Women Also Meant Liking The Whole Woman, Or The Less Coercively Modified

[“For lesbian feminists, liking women also meant liking the whole woman, or the less coercively modified woman. Accounts of this expansive lust for women can be found in lesbian feminist memoirs, in which body fat, cancer scars, power exchange, disability, aging, radical activism, self-love, years of sexual experience deemed “slutty” in the straight world, and various forms of embodied “ridiculousness” are all fodder for lesbian feminist arousal. I offer a few examples:

Audre Lorde, in Zami, reverently describes Ginger, her first lover, as “gorgeously fat, with an open knowledge about her body’s movement that was delicate and precise. . . . She had pads of firm fat upon her thighs, and round dimpled knees. . . . Loving Ginger that night was like coming home to a joy I was meant for.” Lorde later describes her lust for a different woman, Eudora, whose “pale keloids of radiation burn” were part of her irresistible body: “If I did not put my mouth upon hers and inhale the spicy smell of her breath my lungs would burst. . . . I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy nipple to her scarred chest. . . . I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar. . . . The pleasure of our night flushed over me like sun on the walls.” By contrast, Lorde describes sex with men in terms similar to those used by many feminist straight women of her generation; sex with men was “pretty dismal and frightening and a little demeaning.”

Dorothy Allison, illuminating her gleeful dis/identification with the phallus, recounts her pleasure in “fucking, fucking, fucking” Alix, a woman who wore a dildo named “Bubba,” a cock “fat and bent”: “[It] jiggles obscenely when she walks around the room. Obscene and ridiculous, still no less effective when she puts it between my legs.” Allison goes on to detail the shifting power dynamics between her and Alix, evoking her erotic identification with the vilified old woman, the crone: “She is ten years younger than me . . . sometimes. Sometimes I am eight and she is not born yet, but the ghost of her puts a hand on my throat, pinches my clit, bites my breast. . . . When I am fucking her, I am a thousand years old, a crone with teeth. . . . She is a suckling infant, soft in my hands, trusting me with her tender open places.”

Highlighting the lesbian feminist disinvestment in female sexual innocence and modesty, Jeanne Cordova recalls that her status as a handsome butch lesbian and high-profile radical organizer “brought dozens of women” to her bed, one of whom, Bejo, Cordova describes as “the most accomplished femme lover” she’d ever met. “Old-school bar femmes were far better lovers than newly coined lesbian feminists.”

Cherríe Moraga, too, desires a woman with age, accomplishment. Of Elena, the woman she lusts for, Moraga states, “I am ready for you now. I want age. Knowledge. Your body that still, after years, withholds and surrenders—keeps me there, waiting, wishing. . . . Willing. Willing to feel this time what disrupts in me. Girl. Woman. Child. Boy. Willing to embody what I will in the space of her arms.”

Lesbian feminist desire, in these accounts, is defined not purely by two women’s sexual attraction to each other but by a quality of desiring women in which the objects of one’s lust are women’s complexities and accomplishments, both corporeal and otherwise. The best women lovers have the scars, the hunger, the weight, the teeth, and the political and sexual experience that allows them to know and harness their erotic will. Through Lorde’s desiring gaze, physical features that are often cast as deeroticizing imperfections in the straight world are remade into sites of pleasure. In Allison’s writing, sex with women is transformative and dead serious in its intensity, but it is also an inevitable send-up to the phallocentric self-seriousness of heteronormativity. In Cordova’s retelling of her life story, there is no erotic without the movement, the revolution, and the battle scars and street cred earned by women at its helm. In Moraga’s account, her lust is shot through with desire for the fruits of her lover’s lived experience. I dare say that this way of loving women, this understanding of the erotic, need not be owned by lesbians but is among the basic requirements of deep heterosexuality, wherein men’s lust for women is triggered by women’s actual temperaments, bodies, and experiences. Men’s sense of being sexually orientated toward women must signal, as it does for most lesbians, an acute interest and investment in women’s lives and accomplishments because, within deep heterosexuality, attraction is measly and half-baked if it is not a synthesis of lust and humanization. From this viewpoint, the hyperstraight man possesses an unstoppable interest not only in women’s bodies but also in women’s collective freedom. To be into women, one must be for women.”]

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality