Symptom of Man: Why is it so hard to express desire as a lesbian?
Is this mostly a long form complaint? Yes, but I'd like to invite you all into this breakdown of the politics of lesbian desire.
Hi readers!
Before I get into this essay, I just wanted to address why I’ve been gone so long without posting. Goddamn, it’s been a minute. My hectic school schedule is not letting up any time soon (thanks a lot, senior year).
However, after talking to many hot girls at a party and discussing my love of theoretical writings about sex, gender, and desire, I felt a need to come back here and write a full treatise about this weird phenomenon I’ve began to notice after diving headfirst into the midwest lesbian dating sphere again. I want to include a much more polished version of these thoughts in my passion-project breakdown of modern lesbian experience - feel free to treat this as an open forum and let me know how applicable this feels to you.
Anyway, please subscribe if you like how rambly I can get. Higher ratings boost my ego and encourage me to spit into the void just a little bit more often.
Why is it so hard to express desire as a lesbian?
Whether I like it or not, I love being someone’s lover. I love the mystique and intrigue of coming back from a dark alley with lipstick on my face yet remaining a mildly unknown figure once rejoining the group. I love being able to care for someone so intimately and have few people know who it is I care for. I love letting myself like people and I can’t help but show that I do want them.
Sometimes I catch myself hesitating to show that I want the girl I accidentally ogle at a party. What if the woman in the platform shoes wearing a harness with a moth tattoo isn’t queer, or what if I just alienated myself from her by showing her too immediately that I can’t help but picture her arms around my waist pinned against the wall?
Jaques Lacan’s signature phrase rings through my head as I try to break out of these oddly gendered boxes: “Woman is only a symptom of man.” This thinking properly aligns itself with the cultural consensus: Eve was only made from the rib of Adam, after all, seemingly an afterthought from God himself. If woman and subsequently femininity only exists as a response to the barbarous nature of man, then good women are directly opposing the idea of bad men. If lust continues to be seen as the motivating factor for the actions of bad men, then the outward admission of experiencing sexual desire can often be seen as a cringey, fratty male action.
This might seem like a large jump to conclusions, but most language within sexuality studies reduces to the evergreen dichotomy of woman versus man, femininity in opposition to masculinity. When arguing for a more genderqueer existence (like most lesbian ones), this argument folds in on itself, either forcing the participants into a heterosexist dichotomy or attempting to create a new, more convoluted way to wind up at the same conclusion (see amab versus afab).
A large swath of this essay is influenced by Lili Hsieh’s 2012 essay “a queer sex, or, can feminism and psychoanalysis have sex without the phallus.” After printing it out and reading it over and over this summer, I couldn’t help but agree with and want to expand her arguments surrounding the politics of the phallus. Her opening arguments from Freud on femininity continue to frame my thinking process whilst writing this piece:
“The phallus is introduced to account for the taming of aggressivity in women: if the little girl as the little boy is libidinally active/aggressive, something more has to be added to the process of becoming a woman. It is the lack of a penis - or rather the awareness of it - that initiates the little girl’s digression qua progression from the petty pleasure from the clitoris to the ‘authentic’ source, the ‘truly feminine vagina’ (Freud, 1933: 118). ‘The little girl is a little man,’ Freud famously says, but this androgynous paradise will give way to a relentlessly sexed life in which ‘the anatomical distinction [between the sexes] must express itself in psychical consequences’ (Freud, 1933: 124).”
Hsieh, 2012, page 100.
Hsieh later notes that Freud never separates the idea of the phallus from the reality of the penis, forever drawing a direct line between the two objects. The logical conclusion drawn from this must be that the aggressive lesbian is donning the phallic persona, attempting to “tame” the feminine object of desire.
Freud’s limited thinking of clitoral and vaginal pleasure will always circle back to his Oedipal phraming1 rather than acknowledging another version of sex life. Freud and Lacan might not agree on much, but their central focus will always be on the male quest for love and desire, something I am not interested in placating or exploring. As Hsieh points out, his female patients seem to always come to analysis hoping that she could still gain a penis (Hsieh, 2012: 100). Even Judith Butler seems to agree vis a vi the sexualization of certain body parts:
“Freud then proceeds to communicate as already accepted knowledge ‘that certain other areas of the body—the erotogenic zones—may act as substitutes for the genitals and behave analogously to them’ (Freud 1914: 84). Here it seems that ‘the genitals,’ presumed to be male genitals, are at first an example of body parts delineated through anxiety-neurosis, but, as a ‘prototype,’ they are the example of examples of that process whereby body parts become epistemologically accessible through an imaginary investiture. As an exemplar or prototype, these genitals have already within Freud's text substituted not only for a variety of other body parts or types, but for the effects of other hypochondriacal processes as well. The gaping hole in the mouth, the panoply of organic and hypochondriacal ailments are synthesized in and summarized by the prototypical male genitals.”
Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and The Morphological Imaginary,” Bodies That Matter, page 60.
Butler here is arguing that the overly sexualized aspects of the female body, like the lips, breasts, and ass, are only sexualized in conjunction with the presence of the penis. Specifically in this quote, Butler notes that genitals are used exclusively for the penis, while the vulva is simply reduced to the erotogenic zones. Could you tell me whose sexual pleasure is valued more in this realm of psychoanalysis? Why is the penis allowed full ejaculation powers while anything else is simply an erotic zone?
Let’s refocus on the main point I’d like to make: if woman is in fact a symptom of man, then what do I become in the eyes of the hot girl I’m hitting on at the party?
In Freudian terms, this is what the breakdown looks like of me, a non-binary lesbian, attempting to show a girl that I like her:
Non-binary, in this case, suggests the mixture of two sentiments: awareness of a lack of a penis as well as desire for the possession of one
Adopting the “aggressive” aspect of male sexual desire through the obtainment of a phallic object (or just a great case of BDE)
Maintaining that androgynous reality; “anatomical distinction between sexes” renders itself void as genitalia of any sort can also be presented as an asexual object (think sex toys)
Woman is inherently the sexed object of desire since I am, in fact, hitting on her. She is likely to take this one of two ways:
Reciprocal: this sometimes confusing reality of queered sexual encounters is a mutually agreeable object; she does not see me as a phallocentric male-adjacent lover
Non-reciprocal: while she may be gay, she is not familiar with the queered sexual encounter presented before her; she could see me as trying to tame her, objectifying her because I have shown that she is my object of desire
Obviously, romance and courtship aren’t all about sex and fucking. Sex and fucking just so happen to be a large part of it when you’re a flirt in college.2
In a heterocentrist society, it’s quite easy to equate forwardness and witty flirting to manliness. The phallus is derived from the penis after all; to me, the phallus and the penis are two separate objects.3 I don’t think I have to explain to the general public that reposting those “need strap” posts are not equivalent to lesbians needing the “right dick to save them.” It is not heterosexist to experience sexual desire in ways that aren’t just scissoring and muff diving.
What’s that? You thought that you could get through one essay about lesbian desire without mentioning Chappell Roan? Fuck you, here’s my Chappell Roan paragraph:
She Gets The Job Done, all with a light pink hanky hanging out of her back right pocket. The same week, she graced the purple carpet for Olivia Rodrigo’s tour movie premiere. As per usual, Twitter zombies were up in arms about her setting reasonable boundaries with one specific pushy, rude paparazzo. Roan has done nothing but maintain her place as a strong queer lesbian while the public has called her manly, rude, uncouth, and ungrateful. She experienced her queerness in a very relatable way to me at least (while dating a man) and online 14-year-old pansexuals try to pry the term “lesbian” from her to claim her as only queer, not lesbian. Roan’s absurdly fast rise to fame has revealed what the public wants to do to lesbians: call them men, or invalidate their non-men-loving identity. In terms of sex and sexuality, it is exceedingly hard to not involve men, especially when theorists of yore are all dead men. If a lesbian posts about wanting a beautiful butch to dick them down with a shiny new strap, men will somehow spin that to wanting dick itself rather than the phallic sexual object. The dildo is attached to not a man, not a woman, but that aforementioned “androgynous paradise” that Freud neglected to look into. Not every kind of couple has the luxury of quickly fucking in the bathroom when they go to dinner with their parents at the table.4 The reality of lesbian sex is much more intricate, intimate, and complex than the traditional Freudian structures allow. Notice how Chappell Roan said She Gets The Job Done. Her phallic object of desire is a woman; checkmate, bitch.
Of course the whole point of this essay would boil down to the obvious: expressing desire as a lesbian runs the risk of being misconstrued to acting like a man.
Not every queer person I’ll hit on will perceive me as such. Notice the language when discussing the non-reciprocal option: unfamiliar with the queered sexual experience. I argue that sex is a lot more fun once you stop thinking so straight man PornHub-y about it. Those that I can get down with will see me for what I am; I just need to get over my fear of rejection and misconstrued language.
Phraming here is used to draw attention to the centering of the phallus in most Freudian conversations about sex. Removing the phallus or finding another substitute changes the focus to female desire rather than Freud’s manly habit to draw attention to the penis.
And what’s wrong with seeing desirable qualities in strangers? What we don’t know will never hurt!! You’re a stranger so you’re perfect!! Listen to “perfect stranger” by fka twigs, you’ll get it.
I should probably expand on this in another essay but I stand by this.
“Casual” by Chappell Roan bridge, in case you were wondering on the paraphrasing.