The XX Factor: What women really think.

Not With a Bang but a Wimpout

Margaret and Marjorie, we're framily and all, but yikes do I disagree with you about the finale of The L Word. My feeling? Thank Sappho that's over! I hate to quote a man right now, but I'm with James Wolcott: The episode "set lesbianism and the art of storytelling back about fifty years."

Coming into this final season, you'd think I would have learned not to expect basic narrative cohesion or even entertainment from The L Word, but Season 6 failed to meet even my barely there standards. It was, in short, an utter abomination.

Yes, Jennifer Beals is magnificent (the suit she wore in the cast's final strut across the screen almost made the whole nightmare worthwhile), and Laurel Holloman can act, as can the gorgeous Rachel Shelley (naturally, she was given nothing to do all year except drink and stare into the middle distance), but I feel certain I could've gotten just as much out of this season if I'd watched the whole thing with my finger on the fast-forward button.

But you know what really annoys me? The final season of The L Word failed to obey the fundamental law of Showtime. Showtime is the poor woman's premium cable channel (actually, the rich woman's, since it's truly elective—HBO is what you get if you can afford only one premium option), but it long ago came up with a winning formula: Don't worry so much about a script, just cast a bunch of attractive people with nice bodies and have them go at it on a regular basis. (I stuck with Showtime for five seasons of Soul Food, and believe me, it wasn't for the story lines.) The final eight episodes of The L Word might as well have played on network TV for all the skin we saw—it was as if they were pre-censored for their second run on Logo.

Many people have observed that network television's gay and lesbian characters never get to have sex, but I didn't imagine that their cable siblings would be similarly deprived. Thank heaven for Bette and Tina's final-episode bedroom scene. It was over in an instant, and we viewers glimpsed nary a nipple, but at least it was there, and at least they enjoyed it.

A Fond Farewell to the Lovely Lez Girls, Indeed

Margaret, like you, I will miss the gal pals of The L Word and loved spending Sunday nights with them. Although I've read about the show's straight male fans (no surprise there; we all know that watching beautiful women make out is the ultimate cliché guy fantasy), I wondered how many straight women like me watched the show and found the characters entirely relatable despite our differences in sexual orientation. Not that a world of only beautiful, perfectly coiffed, no-body-fat-having, lipstick lesbians actually exists anywhere outside of Hollywood, but their heartbreak over relationships gone wrong, their struggles to find respect and equality in male-dominated workplaces, and their quest to find love and meaning in their lives are things that most women understand.

I admit, though, that I never got into Max's transition from female to male, and unlike you, I found the baby shower scene entirely unbelievable. No strongly self-identified man as the bearded Max, who was clearly distressed about his pregnancy and abandonment by his scared-off lover, could stomach such a silly, girly, frilly baby-shower. And it seemed out of character, and a bit insensitive, for the highly sensitive lez girls to subject Max to an event so closely linked to female identity—birth and motherhood. Still, I wished the finale might have had Max giving birth and turning the baby over to Tina and Bette.

I, too, was happy to see the infuriating but sometimes sympathetic Jenny get her comeuppance, but I'm not sure she was killed off. (Alice seemed too genuinely upset to be the murderer.) I wondered if Jenny offed herself as the ultimate expression of her narcissism. The way she signed off on the video she made for Tina and Bette was very ominous, don't you think? And her character had always been self-destructive and sometimes highly emotionally unbalanced. (Wasn't she a suicidal self-cutter early on?)

The L Word, like Queer as Folk before it, was a pleasant antidote to the stereotypical one-dimensional depiction of gay people we sometimes see on the small screen. I liked and accepted the girls and I want to believe that they would have felt and done the same for me.    

So what's a committed cable-watcher like me to do now that my favorite lez girls have gone the way of Sex and the City's Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte? Wait for the movie?

Cable's Loveliest Lesbians Say Goodbye

As Butch as She Wants To Be

A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:  

"After Maddow,” Michael Calderone’s post on Politico this morning, talks about a new program being developed for the MSNBC time slot following Rachel Maddow’s hugely successful 9 p.m. show, but the headline got me thinking about where we are as a culture “after Maddow.” In other words, how has Maddow changed the way lesbians are portrayed on TV?

Every night she enters homes no lesbian has before, and does so as a self-described "butch dyke," albeit with a slight coating of eye shadow and lip gloss to help the medicine go down. On the one hand the mere existence of her show indicates a continuing trend toward putting women on camera who aren’t what Maddow once called "Barbie girls," and that’s awesome. But there’s also a strong possibility that Maddow’s adoring viewers will think she is what all lesbians look like, or at least the smart, successful ones. Through no fault of Maddow’s, other than the visibility her talent and success have brought her, she is perpetuating the idea there’s no such thing as an out lesbian who looks more, well, like a girl.

Sure, the L Word has provided a counter-image, but an extreme one—you’ll never find that many smokin’ hot femme lesbians in one community (if you do, tell me where). There’s also a counterpoint in the simultaneously lovely and badass Portia de Rossi. She played a feminine lesbian acupuncturist opposite Joely Richardson on Nip/Tuck’s 2007-08 season and also appears regularly in the home movies her wife Ellen Degeneres airs on her show, which I admit to finding totally awww-inducing. Still, I wonder how long it will be after and because of Maddow before we see more out female journalists on television, especially any as feminine as Maddow chooses not to be.