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  A Farewell to Girls in Heat

  Posted Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:03 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Margaret, Marjorie, I've been studiously avoiding reading your posts on The L-Word finale until now. My prosecutor recorded it and—tell me this isn't love—waited until I could watch it with her last night. Finales tend to be disappointing; this one was as well. (And how disappointing that we didn't get to see more of Lucy Lawless as the butch detective, a little wink to her longtime role as lesbian icon in Xena.) But gosh, the show was fun while it lasted. In the last season I enjoyed watching them turn Jenny (possibly the least believable lesbian on the planet, except maybe Erin Daniels as a tennis god—yeah, right) into an all-out bitch who hurts every last friend. I kinda enjoyed how much fun they had making everyone into Jenny's potential murderer; I'll vote for Bette. But the sixth season didn't have nearly enough sex. The fifth season included Tasha and Alice going at it with some excellent hungry heat, which they didn't have this season. And aside from them, there was all kinda kitschy sex: sex on a movie set! Sex in a movie trailer! Prison sex! Car sex! Bridesmaid sex! Adulterous sex! Shane, that hounddog, racing away from angry girls who've just had the best orgasms of their lives! Oh lordy, I laughed so hard at it all. And I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to watch girls do it the way girls really do it—not with long nails, like a porn movie for men, but down and dirty. Straight folks get this in their dramas and comedies all the time—realistic, well-shot heat—but I've never before seen it depicted well so consistently for lesbians. Just that deserves some awards.

  And oh, how I loved Pam Grier being rescued from the purgatory of the blaxploitation bin. She should have a show all to herself, somewhere, somehow.

  But you both should know that the biggest surprise audience—bigger than straight men, who didn't watch as much as expected—was straight women. They ramped up the clothes in the second season into goofy-looking femme wear specifically to appeal more to that Sex in the City-missing demographic. Thank god for Tasha and Shane, who provided at least a minimum weekly requirement of butch girls, one for whom I could pine. I got more good dyke hit off Rachel Maddow most weeks than off most of The L-Word. Not that I'm complaining! I could have gone on watching dyke drama with those femme gals for years to come.

  Filed under: pop culture, lesbian, Lucy Lawless, L-Word, Pam Grier, sex on screen

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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