Last year saw the appearance in the mainstream media of a new catchphrase: “lesbian chic”. Madonna let herself be fondled by dykes for photographs in her book Sex, Sandra Bernhard posed naked with another woman for Playboy and k. d. lang had a close shave with Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair. Is it a phase the media is going through or does lesbian chic represent a genuine shift towards greater visibility and acceptance of lesbians by the world at large? DIVA offers a selection of quotes on the matter
TILLY MCAULEY, writer for the Evening Standard and the Guardian: “I suspect it’s largely a media invention, just headline jargon. But I remember reading a piece by Julie Burchill about ‘designer dykes’ years ago and, I admit, feeling vaguely delighted. If I am going to be stereotyped and trivialised I would rather it be as something which at least sounds glamorous and enviable than as something pathologically dowdy. But then, as someone once said, deep down, I’m shallow. All that late-Seventies radical feminist stuff left me lukewarm. It’s not that I didn’t understand or sympathise with the intellectual raison d’être; it’s just that I really don’t think generously proportioned girls like me should wear flat tops and horizontal stripes. If men also happen to find ‘chic’ lesbians attractive, so what? Why do we keep using men as a reference point when defining ourselves? Why don’t we see the mythology of ‘lesbian chic’ for what it is – an opportunity to shed the old stereotype for a new, more sexually enticing stereotype? Why should all the gay boys have all the glamour and, therefore, all the fun? Why does it matter how straight men perceive us? Aren’t they irrelevant? Oppression is never overcome by a victim mentality. There may be those of us who crave nostalgically for a time when butches were butches and femmes were femmes but I, for one, am relieved that the days are gone when I am chatted up by some tattooed bulldyke with a pint of lager in her hand, wishing I was home in bed with Julian Clary.”
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April 2019
 
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