“I just walked up to her to give her like a friendly girly kiss, you know, as girls do.”
Katy Perry’s response to a “friendly” encounter with Miley Cyrus on stage during one of Cyrus’ performances in February 2014 reflects everything that is wrong with the portrayal of lesbian and bisexual relationships in pop culture.
It has become a trend in movies, television shows and advertisements for relationships between women to be highly sexualized and understated. Perry sustains this unrealistic social standard when she nonchalantly kisses Cyrus on stage and then later complains about Cyrus trying to “go deeper.”
She even made her breakout single “I Kissed a Girl” into a heteronormative experience by grinding on Lenny Kravitz at the Super Bowl halftime show. Thank you, Katy Perry, for letting us enter this absurd world where it is normal for all girls to just go up and kiss their friends on the lips. Where it is normal to sing about an exciting sexual experience with another girl while grinding on a dude.
Perry’s actions reflect the recently created social standard that relationships between girls are “hot.” Along with many other artists and influential people, Perry prolongs the assumption that, when two girls get together, they are asking for attention from the male gender. This turns a lesbian interaction into something unimportant, something that “girls do,” when, in fact, this type of self-identification is both unique and enormously significant.
When I told one of my guy friends from high school that I was bisexual, he paused for a second and then said with enthusiasm, “That’s hot!” I laughed and pretended I wasn’t offended, but in fact all I really wish he had said was “Wow, good for you!” because it made me feel he thought my own sexual identity was there to please him.
Lesbian and bisexual women feel insignificant when their sexual orientation is placed in the hands of the opposite gender. Although it is helpful for women to come out in a society that is more accepting of that orientation, this “acceptance” is created by a social standard that indirectly degrades those gay relationships. It’s difficult to be taken seriously as a gay or bisexual woman when there are all of these straight attractive women making out on TV.
The detrimental effect of this social standard does not show its face at Whitman College in full. The only demeaning reactions I have received toward my sexuality were from Southern friends in high school. Of all places, Whitman seems to take bisexual and lesbian interactions most seriously. That does not mean, though, that students should not be continually aware of the negative effects that pop culture has on gay women.
Do me a favor: If a woman ever tells you personally that they are gay or bisexual, take it seriously. Don’t act like it’s a phase. Don’t change the way you view them. Just say “cool” and ignore everything that Katy Perry whispers into your subconscious ear.