“This was never the way I planned, not my intention. I got so brave, drink in hand, lost my discretion.” Or so go the first two lines of pop diva Katy Perry’s breakout single. The song was catchy, fresh and even a little bit risqué. But why was a good Christian girl singing about hitting the tequila too hard and hooking up with one of her mates? She sings about her boyfriend in the song, so it’s not a case of ‘single and ready to mingle’, nor is it a case of pining after her gal pal, so what’s the go?
We begin our timeline in the colourful year that was 2003. In the music world, a middle-aged Madonna was staging a comeback and teen idol Britney Spears was yet to shear off her locks and smash up an SUV with an umbrella. During a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, the two pop starlets locked lips as the camera panned to Brit’s ex, Justin Timberlake. It rocked the tabloids, sent shockwaves through the music industry and undoubtedly took much needed exposure away from more serious world events, but two girls kissing? On national television?
Though homosexuality has travelled a less than smooth road to acceptance, some of us seem to be quite at ease with it and willing to rally for gay rights. Have all the wrong people caught on to our liberalism though? Where there’s interest, there’s a market, and where there’s a market, there’s a sneaky music exec looking to get in on the action. The stint at the MTV VMAs marked lesbian culture’s descent into the mainstream: it appealed to the masses (both gay AND straight) and it became a product. It may have once been hip to be square, but it’s far cooler to be queer, or at least give off the impression that you are, says Billie*, a Sydney Arts student.
“That’s really what it is,” she suggests. “It’s not sexual experimentation. I wish it was. If it was that, it’d be awesome, but it’s not. It’s about being ‘edgy’, which is sad. What does that say of our perception of homosexuality? I think we see it as a novelty, not something which is necessarily positive. It’s all about the image more so than the sexual state.”
In this sense, ‘barsexualism’ can be seen as a mockery of homosexuality that makes it seem like a choice. In a world where LGBTs are still fighting an uphill battle, how is this behaviour from straight females perceived by their homosexual counterparts?
“It does kind of annoy me when straight girls make out with straight girls just for male attention, because I don’t think it’s really doing anything to help bisexual and lesbian acceptance,” tells a friend. “The guys who stand there and faun at girls doing it in clubs are the guys who verbally and physically abuse real lesbian couples when they see them making out. I feel like to them it is all a big joke.”
If having a quick hook up with your gal pal at a club is so damaging, why do we do it? Enter the male fantasy. In a world where women wax, shave, primp and preen every inch of their bodies in the hopes of male adulation, it’s hardly a stretch that women would use their sexual exploits for the same purpose.
“I know girls who have hooked up with other girls in a public setting, like a club, just to make other guys lust after them, and coming from someone who is guilty of having employed this tactic, it works,” admits Lily*.
“I once kissed a friend at a sleepover in high school,” tells Alison*. “It was mostly-YOLO fuelled curiosity, as there were only girls there at the time, but we later carried on about it at school to get the guys’ attention.”
Feminists may have fought for women to get out of the kitchen and break through that glass ceiling, but are women still just too eager to please? One does not have to be an expert on X-rated films to figure out that guys aren’t likely to say no to a little fraternising of the girl-on-girl variety.
“It’s very attractive. It’s a fantasy for the guy because he envisions himself getting with those two girls,” quips Darren*, a mate. “If I saw it happening, I wouldn’t look away,” suggests another.
Is porn culture, then, slipping into the mainstream? For an answer, we turned to The University of Sydney’s senior lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies, Dr. Kane Race.
“There is a long tradition of faux-lesbian activity in pornography designed for heterosexual male consumption, and so it’s highly possible that some of these current practices [by straight girls] are being influenced by and adapting this tradition,” Dr. Race says.
“While in some instances being gay and lesbian is more publicly acceptable than it once was, and those people who are same sex attracted may feel both entitled and comfortable to show affection with their partners in public, there is also the idea that some women are putting on a show for the male heterosexual gaze à la Madonna and Britney. I imagine some people would see it as a thrilling transgression intended to attract male attention.”
As far as Marie* is concerned, porn culture has not only slipped into the mainstream, but it’s donned a uniform, sidled into high school and taken a seat up the back.
“When I was in year ten, two girls in my grade made a video of themselves hooking up and it was spread all around the school,” she says. “It was definitely the sexy and cool thing to do, for those who had the guts and could handle the attention. Hilariously, they were named and shamed in a school assembly in an effort to stop the video from spreading and they were both suspended as they were in school uniform when they filmed it.”
Perhaps our elders don’t quite get it and maybe they never will, but with a growing acceptance of homosexuality and gay culture, being simply gay or straight just doesn’t cut it anymore and we’ve kissed our sexual boundaries goodbye.
“In this day and age, sexuality is notably more fluid, especially for girls,” believes Lily*. “I don’t think that everyone who purports to being ‘just a straight girl havin’ some fun’ is really all that straight to begin with.”
Today it’s not completely unheard of to refer to yourself as a heteroflexible demi-romantic with pansexual tendencies. We want to live and we’re doing it the only way we know how: disregarding all rhyme and reason in the name of ‘you only live once’. Not only are we living by our own rules, but we sure as hell want everyone to know about it. While indulging in the countless over-shares that have made their way onto various social media news feeds the world over, somewhere along the line it became okay to publicise even our most intimate moments.
“All these so-called ‘daring acts’ are being performed publically,” explains Dr. Jennifer Wilkinson, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Sydney. “In modern Western societies, sexuality and intimacy were traditionally believed to be private and exclusive, whereas in the example of straight girls kissing one another, everything is being displayed and performed publically for others. Here, the public and private spheres are merging together. Although there may well be some sort of public renegotiation of gender norms going on, modern intimacy and the privacy norms to which they are attached are also being challenged.”
So regardless of where women sit on the spectrum between living in the name of YOLO to testing the waters, barsexualism seems to be a sociological phenomenon in an age where the boundaries between sexual norm and transgression are shifting. Who would’ve thought we could gain so much insight from a three-minute pop song?
*Names have been changed.
Fast Facts
- The science of kissing is called philematology.
- Kissing for one minute burns 26 calories.
- The average person spends about 15 days kissing throughout the course of a lifetime.
- The first onscreen same-sex kiss happened in 1922 between two women in Cecil B. DeMille’s silent drama, Manslaughter.
- On March 8th 1564, Naples prohibited kissing in public under penalty of death.
Emily Swanson 