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theoldlesbianwithcats · 7 years

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Remember that French TV show (Dix pour cent) I told you about, that made their lesbian main character sleep with a man? Now that character is pregnant with him of course, but the creator of the show Fanny Herrero (a straight woman) has a very good reason, don’t worry!

“Andréa is gay but she’s liberated enough to, on a one-night-stand, have sex with a man and not have a problem with it, because her sexuality is mature and fulfilling enough that she doesn’t ask herself questions. From the beginning, I knew that this character would have a very rich, complex and liberated libido, and for me that goes beyond sleeping with women. I think Andréa is more modern than that.”

Did you hear, ladies? A modern woman with a rich, complex, fulfilling sex life = a woman who wants to have sex with a man! How progressive!

Anyway, for once a Buzzfeed article about lesbians isn’t completely awful, so @sespursongles and I translated it in English :

Why movies and TV have to stop making lesbians sleep with guys

Marie Kirschen, Buzzfeed France, 14th May 2017

Like recently in the TV show Dix Pour Cent (Call My Agent in English), it regularly happens that characters introduced as gay or lesbian eventually sleep with a person of the opposite sex... to the gay fans’ great regret.

Andréa Martel is a small revolution. The main character of France 2′s TV show Dix pour cent, whose second season just ended, is charismatic, stylish, loudmouthed, beautiful, touching, badass, funny and... a lesbian. A lesbian main character in a prime time TV show on a big national channel ? It’s never been seen before in the French audiovisual landscape, so timid about LGBT themes.

There were a few made-for-TV movies about female homosexuality, often quite badly done, a few secondary characters, sometimes a bit clumsy. But nothing as exciting as this at peak viewing time. Andréa is a multidimensional, very well-written protagonist. Her homosexuality is there, without it being a problem, without being hidden. The icing on the cake, Andréa is wonderfully played by Camille Cottin. THE star of Dix pour cent, that’s her.

Like many lesbian viewers, hungry for visibility, I was hooked immediately. And then there was the third episode of the second season, broadcasted at the end of April. Andréa is competing with her boss, Hicham, to seduce a model. During a party at a castle, Hicham ends up winning the game : he enters a bedroom with the model. But that’s without considering Andréa’s hurt ego who, a bottle in her hand, decides to join them. Her catchphrase : “You didn’t think you’d have her all to yourself?!” But, as this improvised threesome begins, Andréa and Hicham forget immediately about the pretty blonde, kiss passionately and roll on the bed. Reaction of the abandoned model (and our reaction) : “Seriously ? (sigh)”

After loving women openly for eight episodes, Andréa abandons a blue-eyed goddess for her cruel, manipulative boss? Some viewers were a bit surprised, even disappointed.

[Tweets embedded in the article :]

@RomainBurrel (journalist for a cultural magazine and a gay magazine) It sucks to see one of the rare and best lesbian characters sleep with a dude... @PrincesseYuyu LET US HAVE A LESBIAN IN A FRENCH TV SHOW, DAMMIT, STOP SHIPPING HER WITH HICHAM. It depresses me.

@keedz75 Of course the gay character can’t be happy being a lesbian and must answer heterosexual fantasy by becoming bi

“I received a few harsh remarks”, tells Fanny Herrero, the creator of the show, to Buzzfeed. “There are gay women who took it badly. I can understand it because it’s quite rare to have a lesbian main character on TV, so we shouldn’t make her sleep with a guy, I get it. The relation to sex is quite liberated in Dix pour cent, there’s a freedom of tone, I thought that freedom of tone was enough and that it would let us play with the codes.”

Fanny Herrero clarifies that, if she’s straight, there are two gay women in the writing team. Visibly upset by those reviews, she concedes that :

“Maybe I took it too lightly. At that moment, we didn’t realize it could hurt. Maybe we should have been more delicate, but we write characters, we don’t write for a cause. From a writing point-of-view, we have a chessboard of characters that we animate and sometimes we exaggerate a bit for dramatization. Maybe we’re going to push characters faster to places where, in real life, they wouldn’t go, where it would take more time.”

Beyond Dix pour cent, if that little twist made people angry, it’s because it adds to the long list of films and TV shows where a main character is introduced as a lesbian (we’re not talking of bisexual or questioning characters, but characters clearly presented as gay) to make her have sex with a man a few minutes after.

The film lesbians hate the most

One film in particular embodies this trope: Chasing Amy wins the Oscar for Most Hated Film of the 90s in the lesbian community. The hero, played by Ben Affleck, befriends Joey, beautiful and liberated. He asks her a series of stupid questions about gay women and wonders how lesbian sex can count as "real sex" since, he reasons, there can be no real penetration without a penis. When - wait for it - he falls madly in love with Joey, she tries to make him understand that his advances are inappropriate and that he doesn't respect her identity… before jumping into his arms, in the rain, like in the worst kind of rom-com, and deciding that she’s found "the one".

One night, after some (obviously amazing) sex, she tells him why she ended up falling in love with him, because he "gets her". Ben reacts with a joke: "Can I at least tell people all you needed was some serious deep dicking?" Needless to say, after watching this film I felt like throwing my computer on the floor and setting it on fire. A few other examples? In The Kids Are All Right, a lesbian mother played by Julianne Moore, whose sex life with her partner has gone stale, indulges in an affair with Mark Ruffalo's character (and unlike the boring lesbian sex, their hetero sex scenes are muy caliente). In Gazon Maudit, Josiane Balasko's character decides that she must have sex with Alain Chabat in order to get pregnant. When it comes to TV shows - the only lesbian couple in Queer as Folk faces a serious crisis when Lindsay cheats on her girlfriend with a particularly unlikable jerk (and again, their hetero sex is very sexy while Lindsay — literally! — falls asleep while having sex with her girlfriend.) Same thing in the American Skins, in which the lesbian heroine falls for a boy right from the beginning, or in the Netflix show Dear White People, where we discover that the teacher who refuses to marry her girlfriend to resist "heteronormativity" is having an affair with a young male student. This plot twist applies to the boys as well. In The Wedding Banquet, a closeted Taiwanese gay man ends up having sex with his beard. More recently, in Toute Première Fois, the gay protagonist, about to marry his partner, has to come out "in reverse" to his family after meeting a beautiful Swedish woman. On TV, Clara Sheller's gay best friend ends up sleeping with her, just like Hannah's in Girls, who suddenly becomes interested in the group's hottie for no apparent reason. The list goes on and on… Viewers always complain: why add an all too rare gay character only to straighten them up, even temporarily? This kind of storyline is criticised as an overused trope. The "lesbian sleeps with a guy" plot line is one of the three major tropes condemned by the website "LGBT Fans Deserve Better", that listed 46 characters in this category. "Did we have to do that?" fumes lesbian website Autostraddle about Dear White People. "Haven’t we been fighting against this ridiculous trope for decades?" With this trope, screenwriters also contribute to making bisexuality invisible. The idea that one must be either gay or straight is an example of casual biphobia. Screenwriters, if you feel like the character you are creating could be attracted to both sexes, why not just label them bi?

A cliché that echoes homophobic remarks

Of course, we could oppose to disappointed fans the fact that, in real life, those kinds of stories can actually happen. Homosexuality is not only about desire, it’s also a question of identity. It can happen that a person identifies as “gay” or “lesbian”, because they think it’s the label that represents their identity the best, but one night, they end up with someone of the opposite sex in their bed. Sexuality is sometimes more fluid than cultural identities we identify with. It’s not about banishing those stories from our screens. But we can question their recurrence : why are those stories present so often in fiction when, in real life, it’s frankly not the most common?

Also, in real life, it also happens for example that straight men, drunk or not, end up sleeping with another man. Again, sexuality is sometimes more fluid than the labels we use to define ourselves. But this story is barely told. How can we explain that the gay-who-goes-both-ways cliché comes back so often in fiction, when its straight equivalent is so rare among the ocean of straight roles?

Above all, if that trope is so annoying to concerned viewers, it’s also because it echoes those old homophobic tunes we keep hearing all day, and that it seems to validate : “You’ll find the right man/woman”, “How can you be so sure that you’re not straight? Did you try at least?”, “It’s only a phase”.

With that bonus point for the lesbians : according to some people, a relationship between women can’t be considered “real” sex, so they will end up sleeping with a men at some point. I can’t count how many endless discussions I’ve had with straight people who wouldn’t imagine that I could be not interested by males, even though I’m a lesbian. When I mention my love story, some people can’t help wondering what I do in bed. Of “homosexuality” they only remember “sexuality”, and for them “lesbian” means porn. If you type “lesbian” in Google, the first results you’ll find will be many porn scenes where people of the opposite sex make an appearance. So dudebros think it’s legitimate to try their luck...

[Tweets in the article :]

@BabascoGueria 1 lesbian character out of 1000 and even she has to sleep with a guy. How original.

@BabascoGueria Some homophobes harass lesbian women and are convinced that they can convert them. Thanks for perpetuating that cliché.

What if it was that old idea that gay men and lesbians are above all hypersexual beings, free from norms, with wild sex lives, that made the writers do with them what they’d never do with their boring straight characters? Would it be easier for them to imagine a rock’n’roll Andréa surprising us with her conquests, rather than the boring Mathias Barneville ou the funny Gabriel Sarda— even if, in reality, there are many Mathias who can also have sex with men...

Beyond hetero sex, motherhood

“Andréa is gay but she’s liberated enough to, on a one-night-stand, have sex with a man and not have a problem with it, because her sexuality is mature and fulfilling enough that she doesn’t ask herself questions”, thinks Fanny Herrero. “From the beginning, I knew that this character would have a very rich, complex and liberated libido, and for me that goes beyond sleeping with women. I think Andréa is more modern than that.”

The writer highlights the fact that, on the other hand, she would have never written that same intrigue for the character of Colette, way more traditional. [Colette is Andréa’s love interest. Andréa slept with Hisham after Colette dumped her.]

In Dix pour cent, the hetero sex especially permits to continue with the question of motherhood, since Andréa gets pregnant. “I wanted to confront Andréa with that question, because she’s more rough with her relation to motherhood. I wanted to make a portrait of a woman who becomes a mother differently from what we usually see, I wanted her to be upset by that pregnancy.” For the writer, there’s no question of making her plan an ART (assisted reproductive technology), to make her take a train at Gare du Nord to go have an insemination in Belgium, between two appointments with JoeyStarr and Juliette Binoche. Not the character’s type. It had to happen to her. Hence the “threesome” option.

And that pregnancy is also used to make Colette come back, suddenly moved by Andréa who’s lost in that situation. And that’s where Dix pour cent makes a quite clever move, which puts it, in spite of a few mistakes, lightyears away from Chasing Amy. Hicham being particularly hateful and Colette being adorable, the viewer ends up wishing that Andréa wins the love of her ex-lover back and that the boss of ASK, the biological father, leaves them alone. “I found that interesting to tell myself what the viewers would think : ‘no she’s not going to sleep with a man, we want her to go back with Colette’”, says Fanny Herrero, amused. “I like tickling that kind of emotion.” A plot twist that, for once, we hadn’t seen coming.

#frenchbian #lesbian representation #lesbophobia

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