The Straight Gaze and The Fetishization of Queer Relationships
Perhaps one of the most well-known lesbian or WLW (women loving women) films is Blue is the Warmest Color, a romance movie about a relationship between a teenager and an art student in Lille, France. While this foreign film is critically acclaimed and has won multiple awards such as the Cannes Film Award, Blue is the Warmest Color serves as a pressing reminder of the profound damage of fetishization onto queer relationships, especially WLW and lesbian relationships. With excessive erotic scenes that viewers have reported come off more like porn rather than genuine sex scenes, it is almost as if the movie and its depiction of lesbians was meant to cater not towards the WLW community, but to the rather frighteningly large group of straight men who ravenously consume such scenes and representations.
Unfortunately, fetishization of the queer community is all too common, even 8 years later. The male gaze is deeply pervasive in perceptions of lesbian depictions and perceptions–– not only on the screen, but off of it, too. WLW identifying members of the community are objectified in this gaze; seen not as normal people but as something to feast on, or as a novelty.
MLM (men loving men) relationships aren’t excluded from such transgressions either, and if you need any evidence, take a brief look at the thousands of young straight girls shipping “Larry Stylinson,” or the abundance of yaoi fanfiction on the internet (a genre/niche within anime of MLM relations, strongly geared towards women viewers rather than male).
Despite this, fetishization is often conflated with acceptance of the community–– of some sort of warped (yet still tolerable) form of inclusivity–– but the reality could not be farther from this. Merriam-Webster defines fetishizing as “to make a fetish of,” indicative indeed of how LGBTQ+ people are viewed–– not as people, as well-rounded individuals––but rather as an object “to make a fetish of”–– often nothing less, and nothing more.
To put it simply: the LGBTQ community does not exist for your entertainment, for any of your sick fantasies, or to be commodified. Even casual behavior that engages in such fetishization is incredibly toxic, and the ignorance is simply a slap in the face to the existence of trauma that hundreds of thousands of queer individuals have experienced, and will continue to experience.
Did you know that LGBTQ people are more than 4x as likely to be victims of violent crimes (UCLA School of Law Williams Institute)? Or that LGBTQ youth are nearly 5x as likely to have attempted suicide than their straight counterparts (The Trevor Project)? That transgender women are 1.8x more likely to experience sexual violence (NCAVP)?
The truth remains that fetishization is unacceptable, no matter to what degree it is. The LGBTQ community faces senseless violence, commodification, fetishization, and exploitation–– so whether you are an ally or not, we all have a duty to call out fetishization and to do better.
