December 8, 2004

LESBIENVY (via Rick Turley):

Jill and Jill Live on the Hill, but One Must Boil the Water (TZIVIA GOVER, 11/28/04, NY Times)

MY straight male friends don't believe it when I tell them, but it happens. I'll be lunching with some women who are grousing about their husbands: perfectly nice guys who will never just listen to their problems but always have to solve them, who won't write a thank-you note — even to their own mothers — and who give their child one bath and think they deserve a medal. At some point these women look wistfully in my direction and say, "I'd be a lesbian too, if I could!"

I wallow in their Lesbian Envy for as long as I can. But eventually I want to blurt, "Look, it's not a male-female issue; it's about testosterone overload, and a person of any gender can have that."

Granted this isn't a scientifically proven point. But what else could explain the fact that I find myself living, with my lesbian partner, in a gender-bent Ozzie and Harriet reality? How else to explain the fact that every time my partner and I get into a car she sits in the driver's seat and that I cook the dinners but she handles the barbecues? Or that while I chauffeur my 16-year-old daughter to and from endless pointe classes and spend hours hanging out rows of her pink tights to dry, my partner listens to the Red Sox game and cleans the gutters? How, I wonder, did I fail so miserably at my goal of becoming a liberated woman?


Because you're mentally disturbed?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2004 6:30 AM
Comments

What does she think being liberated is? She cleans the gutters and wrecks her knuckles fixing the car?

The day I see a woman fixing a hydro line in the middle of an ice storm, then I'll believe that women understand what being liberated is all about.

Posted by: Randall Voth at December 8, 2004 6:32 AM

Yes, she is.

Posted by: erp at December 8, 2004 6:55 AM

I wonder -- If her partner is sitting around after the barbeque watching football on Sunday afternoon and close-up shots of the cheerleaders come on, does she make any comments about how hot they are or remark about their cleavage? And given the circumstances, could you call those comments sexist?

Posted by: John at December 8, 2004 7:38 AM

John,
Good point. Also, in the same vein, what if her partner starts to ooh and aah over those big muscular football players. Would it cause her anxiety?

Posted by: AllenS at December 8, 2004 7:43 AM

Having read both John and AllenS comments is pretty clear to me that the producers of Desperate Housewives missed an important demographic in Wisteria Lane. May be bext season...

Posted by: Moe from NC at December 8, 2004 9:51 AM

Is she more mentally disturbed than a woman married to a man and voicing the same complaints?

Posted by: creeper at December 8, 2004 12:24 PM

This reads like the beginning of one of those late night vignettes on Showtime, right before she decides to take up with the butch type doing a roofing job across the street.

Posted by: Bart at December 8, 2004 12:37 PM

At least one thing missing from her whine is that "her partner" always leaves the toilet seat up.

Posted by: Raoul Ortega at December 8, 2004 2:06 PM

Some questions:

What was her taste in men before she crossed over to the other side?

Have they sought marriage counseling?

Who locks the doors at night?

Would she consider a "divorce" to be liberating?

Posted by: jim hamlen at December 8, 2004 3:06 PM

Why is this revolting?

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at December 11, 2004 12:31 AM
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