Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to see people I’m attracted to — really attracted to, people who I’d be attracted to in real life — on my television. Regularly.
The screen is a step away from reality for all of us; TV and movies are vehicles for our fantasies. But my guess is that most people’s responses to those fantasies conform, for the most part, to fundamental real-life truths. Straight women I know will sometimes use entertainment media to flex their homo-curiosity or aesthetic appreciation of other women, but at the end of the day their screen crushes are mostly male.
For me? Entertainment media is an alternate universe in which I am pretty much only attracted to people of a gender I’m not attracted to in real life.
My real-life sexuality is a bit complicated. I purposefully identify as queer, not as gay or lesbian. With my closest friends, the sum of my partners and crushes and flirtations speak for themselves. For the purposes of this discussion, suffice to say that I’m butchsexual: I’m primarily attracted to butch lesbians.* That means I almost never see my real-life partners or crushes or flirtations represented on-screen.
Before I came out to myself at 18, I felt some attraction to men on-screen, but I knew those attractions weren’t as strong as what my straight female friends were feeling. After I came out, those times I’d thought, “All girls sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the man in those Romantic Comedy Kisses, right?” suddenly made a lot more sense. I stopped expecting myself to identify with female romantic leads and feel attraction towards their male counterparts. But since I’m not oriented towards feminine women, I never really started feeling attraction to the women I saw on-screen. I was still more likely to want to be them than to do them.
In college I discovered queer masculinity and realized that I’m really, really into it. I started looking at male romantic leads again, but now I played with mentally genderswapping them, projecting my own burgeoning butch-femme romantic orientation onto everything I watched.
With a couple of my friends I’ve developed an inside joke about Men Who Would Make Good Butch Lesbians. I try to be careful about this, because I’m pretty sure most men have no desire to be butch lesbians, and I respect that. Furthermore, some men have to fight through a lot of bullshit from people thinking they are butch lesbians, and that is not a narrative I want to perpetuate. That’s why it’s an inside joke. Because what we really mean is, “I’m responding to these men as though they were butch lesbians,” or sometimes, “my pantsfeelings would be a lot less confusing if these men were actually butch lesbians.”
I love how subversive that feels. It took me a long time to realize I wasn’t straight, and even longer to realize just how central butchness is to my sexuality. That’s my history, I can’t change it; but I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I believe that mainstream media’s erasure of — indeed, disgust for — masculinity that doesn’t come in a straight cis package helped keep me ignorant of my own sexuality. If I had seen more representations of queer people when I was younger, it might have been easier for me to consider queerness as a possibility for myself. If I had ever seen butches presented as attractive, maybe I would have recognized my attraction to them. Cheese could be your favorite food, but how can you know whether you like it if you’ve never tasted it? Is it any wonder that in the absence of the masculinity I wanted, I gravitated towards the masculinity I was offered? Now that I know what I like, mental genderswapping helps me fill a void. You won’t give me butches? Fine, Patriarchy, I’ll just pretend your men are lesbians. How do you like them apples?
Recently, my screen attractions have taken yet another turn. I’m not sure when it started, but I first noticed it with David Tennant. I thought Christopher Eccleston was absolutely fantastic and I was really, really sorry to see the Ninth Doctor go, but when he regenerated into the Tenth it was like a punch in the gut. Or, you know … lower. As I’ve grown more secure in my queerness and my attraction to queer masculinity specifically, I’ve started developing straight-up attractions to men on-screen.
I freaked a little at first. Did I need to rework my whole understanding of my sexuality? Again? But my absolute disinterest in unqueered masculinity persists in real life, unshakable and unfakeable. So after a couple of weeks of what the fuck, I decided just to embrace it. I do what I do. I like what I like. I have screen-crushes on people who would skeeve me out if they touched me in real life. Whatever!
Which still leaves me with very few representations of people I’d be real-life attracted to. Still leaves me with a major disconnect between my sexuality as I project it onto the fantasy of entertainment, and my sexuality as I experience it as a human being in the world.
The stories we tell each other through entertainment give us alternatives: wanting men or wanting women, being gay or being straight. But the realities of our lives and loves are simultaneously so much more varied and so much more particular than that. When we look to media as a mirror for reality, it can shape us and constrain our power of choice in ways we don’t always see.
This is what happens when the mirror lies. And this is one of the many ways that we, as cultural and creative creatures, adapt.
*This sentence originally read, “I’m attracted to transmasculine folks, especially butches.” The edited version is clearer and more accurate.
Hi Brigid. I really like this piece. It is going to take me a while to engage it fully, though.
My first reaction is that I wonder how common being attracted to visual representations of people you probably wouldn’t be attracted to in real life is. I know that I have been.
I identify as a femme queer woman and often as gay. I’m preponderately attracted to women. I’m usually attracted most strongly to femme women.
The few on screen guys I tend to feel attracted to are not very feminine. Hugh Jackman, for example, is pretty, but would usually qualify as a masculine individual. Also, attractions to people in the media don’t really correspond to real life.
I haven’t met men I’d want to fuck. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist…but it does make it hard to claim I’m attracted to men :) I’ve met lots of women I’d want to fuck.
I wonder if I smelled and had other sensory interactions other than just hearing and seeing people in movies and tv whether the occasional attraction I have towards some men in these media would hold up.
I’m fortunate in that media present plenty of representations of who I’m attracted to, but along the lines of Ginny’s comment I thought it worth mentioning that I also find what appeals to me in media/fiction/fantasy only partially overlaps with what appeals to me in real life, and who I’m inclined to identify with in media/fiction/fantasy overlaps even less with who I think of myself as being or would want to be. I realize that’s very different from being forced to find alternatives because what you really want isn’t there, which certainly sounds unpleasant, but regardless of the reason I don’t think it’s at all strange in general to have different attitudes toward media people than seemingly similar real life people.
I know quite a few trans women who faced that issue prior to transition when they were living as ostensibly heterosexual men — not only on-screen but in real life — in the sense of finding it very difficult to separate the extent to which they were actually attracted to any particular woman, as opposed to wanting to be like that woman. (Some of them are now attracted exclusively to men, some still to women, some have gone back and forth, some now identify as bisexual, pansexual, asexual, etc. It’s impossible to predict what will happen, really.)
Personally, I’m still not sure. The hottest person I’ve ever seen on-screen was probably Marlene Dietrich in that famous nightclub scene in Morocco. Whatever that means!
This strikes me as being on a continuum with finding famous people attractive in general, particularly actors, because they’re not…actually people insofar as we know them, you know? Like, I had a huge crush on Johnny Depp for a while in a couple movies, and OK, he’s good-looking, but…I don’t know him. He might be a real pain in the ass to spend any time with and he came out in defense of Roman Polanski. So I’m not actually attracted to him. I…want to sleep with these imaginary characters who look like he does. But they’re not him, because they don’t exist. So I find the issue of attraction to imaginary people–including people one knows of but doesn’t know, to be difficult to parse in general, before we even throw in gender difference between screen crush-objects and real-life objects of desire.
I think it means you’re sentient!
This post brings up so many things for me. I’m not sure how well this relates as it sort of goes into the specifics of certain fandoms (and gets into a notes from my clit thing), but here we go…
I still have trouble figuring out what to call myself. I like to say queer, but sometimes it’s easier to say lesbian, and the truth is, that I’m lesbian in the sense that I’m attracted to what is female. Genitals don’t matter to me; what is important is that the person has a strong female identity. Although, this doesn’t mean that I’m exclusively attracted to girly girls. It’s hard to explain what I mean by female identity because people assume that means feminine, but it’s more important to me how the person sees themselves and then how they present that. Because this gets into what I’m attracted to in media, which usually aren’t female characters are presented in a patriarchal media. I’m attracted to many of the characteristics given exclusively to male characters. Also, I’m not really attracted to the body type most women in media have.
So this usually means my attraction in media runs towards men with more feminine qualities as they generally have more of the build I’m looking for and those characteristics that I like in a person. If I met them in real life, I would love to be best friends with these men, but I would not want to have sex with them even if I find their characters sexually attractive.
And this can become…problematic in fan culture. Because often, in my head, I like to exaggerate the female characteristics of these characters, and I love believing they’re secretly gay because those struggles and issues in relationships are something I identify with. But in fan circles, this usually comes up as a slash/yaoi fangirl stereotype. And that type of culture is problematic because it brings so much to the table about what type of men are gay and gay sex written for the female gaze, etc. I’m not saying my sexuality isn’t shaped by those problematic assumptions either. But I do relate to how you need to sort of twist characters in media when you find the people you like aren’t really there.
I had a similar problem when I was a teenager of not seeing people I found attractive represented on-screen… weirdly, anime initially solved that problem. It has a very different male aesthetic than Western media tends to, and one much more in line with my interests. Ditto a lot of films from East Asia in general.
(konkonsn, I totally get what you mean about fandom.)
I will say that at least I no longer have to parse out whether I want to “be” a woman I’m attracted to. I suppose I still sometimes feel something akin to envy with respect to women who are younger and more conventionally attractive than I am, but it’s not the same thing at all. In terms of on-screen romantic scenes, I’ve never been able to insert myself in my imagination as either party in a heterosexual pairing, at least not with any enthusiasm. Even though I find men more attractive in real life than I used to.
In some ways I’m fortunate that women I’m attracted to tend to be represented a lot in the media. So I don’t have the same problems that a lot of people have. However there are not many tv shows with queer relationships. Most of the queer relationships I see on tv don’t mirror relationships I find sexy or might encounter in life. It is also problematic because I tend to find rougher sex sexier, but queer women on tv are almost never shown having the kind of sex that turns me on. So, even on shows that have queer women in couples like Buffy or Grey’s Anatomy, I usually find women in heterosexual pairings sexier …. which is odd.
Nothing particular to add at the moment, but I really enjoyed this post! Also, totally with you on the on-screen only crush thing. I’m not into hypermasculine guys IRL, but damn if my teen self didn’t carry a huge torch for Wolverine.
This is maybe not quite the same thing, but one of the things that pushed me to come to terms with myself as a trans woman was the realization that I strongly preferred playing female characters in video games. At first I felt guilty because I thought that this was just a matter of me being attracted to female characters (as a lot of straight male gamers put it, “if I’m going to stare at my character’s ass for hours I’d rather she be a hot woman). It took me a while to realize that I was identifying with female characters in a way that I could not with male characters.
I don’t know to what point this is on point, but it seems to me one of the main problems is the dearth of genuine representations of “feminine” and “masculine”, in all their variegated glory, especially in female characters. We get very few models of kickass women as heroes, for instance, who don’t look like Angelina Jolie (comes in standard brunette or blonde, with big pouty lips, weighs only 90 lbs!) and therefore quite feminine. Rosario Dawson is maybe the only remotely close model I can think of who breaks the mold, and actually she doesn’t. There may be a greater representation of desirable masculinity out there, which would explain the attraction to men who don’t fit the macho mocel.
sorry – model, not mocel.
Oh, you’re just Tenant-sexual then. Happens all the time, and is possibly one of the most dominant sexualities in the world :p
Dear LORD, the first time I saw that clip…
I also spent long periods of adolescenthood confused as to why I was always staring at boobs. I knew I was into guys so I explained it to myself as gosh, I want (to grow) boobs like that, or I just appreciate her beauty and want to be her friend.
I’m into more butchy women as well, though I tend to crush on soft butches who you see more often on TV. I don’t mind femme woman (they’re women, afterall), but I could never imagine myself being in a relationship with someone as or more femme than I am.
I guess if gender presentation (sorry if this isn’t the right word) was a type of cuisine I’d be into…food from mascu-land. Whether I want to eat a mascul-land hotdog or a mascu-land cupcake? That depends on my mood.
I love that Hugh Jackman/Wolverine has already come up twice in comments! He’s one of my all-time biggest screen crushes. THAT SWAGGER.
EG:
YES. Celebrities are definitely “imaginary” in the way the most of us interact with them, and I think that plays a major part in my ability to be attracted to celebrities in a way I wouldn’t be attracted to those same people IRL.
GinnyC:
That happens to me, too. Usually it’s that I’m identifying with those women, not being attracted to them, but it’s a similar thing. I think it mostly comes down to the fact that mainstream media shows a a wider range of straight sexuality than lesbian sexuality, and that the f/f sexuality that’s shown is usually very safe, very tame, very don’t-scare-the-soccer-moms. It’s not just vanilla, it’s often less overtly sexual than the m/f sexuality we get to see.
I agree that GinnyC that there’s not much representation of passion between queer women on screen. There are loving relationships, but passionate sex is rarely depicted (the Canadian buffy-esque fantasy show Lost Girl breaks this pattern). I think that this extends to the portrayal of gay male relationships — they’re often portrayed as loving but fairly asexual. It’s interesting in this respect to contrast the subtext between hyper masculine straight characters with the actual text between gay male couples.
I don’t have much knowledge of the genre, I’m going on the Kurt/Blaine relationship on Glee and the almost asexual and effeminate GayBestFriend trope from romantic comedies.
Among celebrities and other quasi-imaginary figures I might see in glossy magazines or on movie screens, I tend to find gender rebels the most compelling — it sounds cheesily 80s of me, but David Bowie, Annie Lennox and Grace Jones remain some of the most sexually compelling people I’ve ever seen depicted in media.
In my daily life, however, I find myself attracted primarily to personalities over appearances, and what I prioritize has less to do with gender rebellion (tho I dig long hair on dudes and short hair on the ladies) and more to do with an open-minded, compassionate and curious attitude in life.
Is there a word for a bisexual* person predominantly attracted to other bisexual people, by the way? Because by far the people I’ve enjoyed sleeping with most, of any sex, have been people who sleep with people of multiple gender orientations. I’ve often wondered – idly – why that is; maybe because I get awful sick of explaining to people how it’s possible to be monogamous and bisexual, and I don’t usually have to do that with other bi people.
*sub in pansexual or omnisexual or whatever you prefer… I sometimes refer to myself as polymorphously perverse!
I totally identify with this and it explains a lot for me. In reality I am most often attracted to men who rebel against gender rules but in TV I am attracted to both men and women who do this, perhaps because they are so rare.
@Bagelsan
Yup! This for me as well. I’d seen a few anime before, but the first time I saw Kurama from Yu Yu Hakusho on the television screen, I was like, “Whoa. Is that a guy? Men can be that pretty? Where do I find more of this stuff?” It was also my first exposure to gay characters in a non-print form.
Right now, though, I’m in an anime lull and have been reading more American comics, which has been causing some difficulties. Because I grew up with Batman and love the series, but even the teen boys are given these hyper-muscled bodies. I find it easier to crush on them when they’re wearing their suits rather than the actual cheesecake moments.
THANK YOU for writing this. I am a fairly femme lesbian who is almost exclusively attracted to women whose presentation is more on the masculine end of the scale. And I have long listed media representations of women as one of the many things that kept me closeted – even to myself – until I was in my late twenties. And I’m from a city in the South where until very recently, there haven’t been all that many of my “type” in my real life, either. It’s comforting to hear that I’m not the only one who cites this as a problem for those struggling to understand their own sexualities.
I think there’s been a bit of a move towards more pretty men in American culture, or at the very least I am seeing them more now. And I’m getting better at spotting prettiness in general, or focusing on what’s pretty. Like, have you seen The Avengers movie? GARBLE.
What I find is that my attraction to TV-people is predominantly to characters, not to actors, and it differs between characters played by the same actor. It’s not so much about the body as it is about the character, the personality, the attitude, the style, the minor or major differences in physical appearance.
For example, Captain Jack Sparrow is pretty much the only Johnny Depp character I go for, and I’d even go so far to say his attractiveness was strongest in the first movie and diminished to almost nothing by the third, due to comparatively-minor changes in appearance and persona. Will Turner was a non-starter for me despite being played by the same Orlando Bloom I had a crush on as Legolas.
When a friend told me that Edward Cullen from Twilight was played by the same actor who played Cedric Diggory from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I exclaimed disbelievingly, “But Cedric is attractive!” (in a restaurant-ful of Twilight fans getting dinner pre-and-post-movie-viewing, no less).
With women, it’s the same. Jessica Alba was glorious in Dark Angel but I haven’t found her all that attractive in anything else; Rihanna had more attractiveness to me in her music video for “Shut Up and Drive” than she has had in the rest of her career put together. There’s an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager” where Kes, who is shy and unassuming and very pastel and sweet in appearance, is possessed by the spirit of a (male) alien warlord, and the result was an attraction that I’d have bet real money on that that actress was completely incapable of inspiring in me.
It might be that I am attracted to confidence, strength, and the sort of unconstrained expression of dramatic personal style that is often the province of the villains, and these things are not often written into female characters. There is a lot of flamboyant freedom to Jack Sparrow, for example, and he’s presented as more competent in the first movie and more and more of a flailing joke in the second and third. When Kes’ actress played the warlord, she was playing an imperious, incredibly competent male role in a female body and I really wished she’d been cast more in that direction from the get-go.
In cartoons, my favorites are Megatron from Transformers: Beast Wars (despite that TFA Optimus is voiced by the same actor, Megatron’s voice is his sexiest quality among many sexy qualities, while that Optimus is just . . . meh), Princess Jasmine from Aladdin only in the episode “Forget Me Lots” when she believes herself to be the Scourge of the Desert and goes around in a black dominatrix outfit with a whip, and Thailog from Gargoyles (despite being a color-reversed clone of Goliath, he’s way sexier).
What I do notice is that I have strong attractions to fictional characters who would be very bad news in real life. They’re also more often male (IRL I am attracted to about 90-95 women for every five or ten men) and mostly they are the ones not originally designed to be the romantic interest of female audiences. You get the rugged, short-haired and clean-shaven and standard-non-metrosexual-masculine-clothing-wearing heroes/protagonists for that, and they almost never interest me. I watch Star Wars and entertain fluttery feelings for Darth Vader or Darth Maul when everyone around me is dreaming after Luke or Han or Obi-Wan or Anakin. Severus Snape and Lucius Malfoy weren’t designed to be the focus of so much audience lust, and they are considered attractive by a whole load of fans.
There’s a style to many of these characters—they’re larger-than-life in their presence, grand in their appearance, in a way normal average humans don’t really try to pull off. Especially men seem to shy away from it. If I see a man with long hair and eyeliner, dressed in something truly stylish and working it well, there is generally some instant, major attraction from me. But I’m orders of magnitude more likely to see that on a screen than in real life.
I have a friend whose major crush in her youth was Adam Ant, who was not necessarily the sort of person she tended to be attracted to in her real life. (She’s planning to come to New York just to see him this fall.)
@Bagelsan
I have seen it, but everyone in that movie was still just too beefed up for me. Though I think that in the movies, the characters are far more pretty (and younger, not that that’s a good thing) than the comics.
I do have a small crush on Agent Coulson (who doesn’t) because of his fangirlish reaction to Cap (and I got real excited for a moment, thinking he was gay, because he’s a beloved character and they ALWAYS have a romantic interest but he didn’t, and I missed the pronoun for the cellist and thought, “It’s Joss Weadon. He’s slipping a hint in there!” But second time around I heard the ‘she’ and got a super sad).
And RDJ can be very pretty in certain scenes, but his “I want one,” line in the second Iron Man movie grossed me out so much that I have a hard time with the character now.
I know this varies, but can some people here give me a definition of “pretty” vs just handsome? Very muscular not pretty? Skinny is pretty, few muscles, no six pack, softer physique, like Johnny Depp? Is it having more “boy” like attributes? I take it pretty is not rugged, so Tom Selleck (younger) and George Clooney not pretty? How does Jackman qualify? He’s rugged, macho, and totally ripped. Curious minds want to know.
I think there may be gender presentation issues involved whether people call men pretty or not. I’m not the one to ask, though. I called Hugh Jackman pretty in my first post :) But to take the example of Jackman, is he prettier as Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz than as Wolverine? He’s acting different types of masculinity in each.
I think this is why as a kid I was pulled more toward music than movies and TV. Unfortunately given my limited resources (aka MTV), this usually meant — and I’m really showing my age here — glam metal bands, who maybe stylistically subverted gender norms but produced some of the most misogynistic music of that era.
Ms Konkonsn – Thank you for [And that type of culture is problematic because it brings so much to the table about what type of men are gay and gay sex written for the female gaze, etc.]. I did eventually reach “it is what it is” terms, but it took much longer than I thought it ought to do so.
Ms Alexandra – [Is there a word for a bisexual* person predominantly attracted to other bisexual people, by the way?]
I knew someone once who presented as “bi-by-bi” but I’m not sure if it was serious.
[I’ve often wondered – idly – why that is; maybe because I get awful sick of explaining to people how it’s possible to be monogamous and bisexual, and I don’t usually have to do that with other bi people.]
I’ve thought, about equally idly, that your preference ought to be much more prevalent than seems to be the case. Why not want such a connection? When I was romantically active, a couple of times I ended up not dating someone identifying as bisexual or pansexual out of the feeling that sooner or letter he’d probably hold it against me that I wasn’t in some way or other.
@Kathy, my adolescent pretensions toward rebellion were mostly set to the soundtrack of Guns n’ Roses, and I still love me some Twisted Sister (though I can’t say I’ve ever found Dee Snyder terribly sexually attractive… the hair is a bit much!).
Judas Priest is pretty great too.
@DouglasG,
Hey, I actually prefer if you don’t use a title. I understand they are associated with politeness, but it feels like more of a status thing to me (like, you call your boss or elders with a title, but your friends and co-workers by their name).
When you say you reached an ‘is what it is’ terms, do you mean you’re involved in one of the fan communities that has these types of fans? Which one?
@Joe from an alternate universe
For real life actors, I’m mostly about the face. Long eye-lashes (this is the big one), boyish features, and narrower jaws, usually. Examples would be: Cilian Murphy, Sheldon Cooper, and Don Cheadle. I wouldn’t have sex with them if I met them, but I would stare at their eyelashes for hours if they let me.
Also, I should say that I’m probably not using the language as standard. I like to use pretty for men and handsome for women that I find sexually attractive because I find that bit of androgyny extra sexy. Using those adjectives actually makes the person more attractive to me because language is funny like that…handsome has no attractive connotation for me when used for men. It’s just a generic descriptor that I mostly use to mean, “dressed in a tuxedo and well groomed.”
To clarify, I do think there are times it’s appropriate to create a space that excludes men, both cis and trans. I don’t think a breastfeeding group is one of those times given the demonstrated fact that trans men can breastfeed, too.
Wrong thread, sorry.
Konkonsn – I shall respect your preference (it’s actually a tribute – universally applied barring requests to the contrary – to the late Quentin Crisp, modifying his universal “Miss” to “Ms”. Two weeks before he died, Mr Crisp and I were both friends of a rising singer/actor then living in California. On learning that I was accompanying a friend to Manhattan for a day, he asked me to phone Mr Crisp with news of his landing his biggest role to date. Mr Crisp was an absolute sweetheart on the telephone. When he died about two weeks later, it seemed the thing to do to keep up a little ongoing remembrance).
The “is what it is” was mainly coming to terms with feelings of appropriation or being bent out of all recognition for squickyish purposes. (The closest comparison I can draw is the way Emma felt when her little idea to go to Box Hill with Mr Weston, Harriet and one or two others ended up with Mr Weston’s agreeing behind her back that their group would join forces with and thus be overwhelmed by Mrs Elton’s exploring party.) I’ve only been involved in a couple of very small groups of friends, nothing that would really rise to the dignity of a recognized community. I was grateful to see your attitude of consideration.
[...] Brigid, on feministe, writes about trying to find a butch lesbian character to heart on in the mainstream media. She freaked out when David Tennant hit close to the mark, but personally, I think you would have to be made purely of dried, autumn leaves to not get a wee bit steamy over the Tenth Doctor. Share this:ShareLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. This entry was posted in Weekly Roundup by IsBambi. Bookmark the permalink. [...]