Sex, Gender and Pop Culture

I have to admit, I love Sarah Silverman.  I think she’s hysterical.  On a recent episode of the Sarah Silverman Show, she explores her sexuality.  Sarah meets a friend of her sister, Tig, who is a lesbian.  After revisiting the ends of past relationships,  Sarah decides that she is a lesbian.  After raiding her sister’s closet for “lesbian clothing,” and performing an angry folk chick song wearing flannel and a mullet, Sarah has the opportuity to kiss Tig.  However, right before contact is made, Sarah turns aside and makes a face (She did this same thing when she was about to kiss a man, so her actions here are not homophobic).  At the end of the episode, Sarah concludes that she is not a homosexual or a heterosexual (noting that she has failed at both), but a ME-mosexual, someone who is in love with herself. 

 What I find most interesting at Sarah’s identity struggle is that she feels that she has “failed” at being homosexual and at being heterosexual.  What does it mean to fail at a sexual identity?  Is it that she doesn’t feel attracted to men or women?  Or is it the acts themselves that she cannot perform? 

 Sarah’s struggles with her sexual identity reminds me of many of the discussions we have had in class about who is and who is not a lesbian.  Sarah’s insistance that she is, in fact, a lesbian even though she has not kissed a woman begs me the question: can lesbians have close friendships/attractions towards women that they have not acted upon (I mean, here, never having been with a woman).  If we can claim a lesbian identity as a political identity, then does it matter what we do in bed?  If we claim a lesbian identity, as Andrea Dworkin did, and then have a relationship with a man, will it affect our political identity as a lesbian?  Some of our classmates seemed to think that if a lesbian has sex with a man, she is no longer a lesbian, but, to me, that is policing an identity that we don’t need to police — someone else’s. 

Then again, if we are not going to police identity, what does it mean when heterosexual men claim that they are “lesbians trapped in a man’s body?”  Is that mocking and problemmatic or does it lend more support to gay and lesbian rights?

 For more on The Sarah Silverman Show:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Silverman

http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_sarah_silverman_program/index.jhtml