There is a particular kind of compliment that isn’t one. It arrives uninvited, usually from a man, and usually directed at two women who were simply existing together in public. That’s so hot. Sometimes it’s a look. Sometimes it’s a comment. Sometimes it’s just the unmistakable feeling of being watched—not seen, watched—like something is being consumed that was never put on the table.
Lesbian relationships, in the cultural imagination, have a problem. Not a problem with being lesbian. The relationship itself is fine. The problem is the audience that showed up without being asked, pulled up a chair, and decided the whole thing was for them.
This did not happen by accident. Nothing like this ever does.
Ask most people where they first learned what desire looks like, and the answer, if they’re honest, is media. Film, television, advertising, music videos, the whole glittering machinery of culture that runs in the background of growing up, quietly teaching everyone what is beautiful, what is desirable, and crucially, who is doing the desiring.
And the lesson, delivered consistently across decades of content, has been the same: the one who desires is male. The one who is desired is female. The audience, the protagonist, the eye behind the camera, all assumed, by default, to be a straight man.
This is what film theorist Laura Mulvey, named the male gaze in 1975, and what culture has been confirming, contesting, and quietly rehearsing ever since. Women on screen exist to be looked at. Men on screen exist to look. The camera moves like a man’s eye would. The audience is taught to inhabit that eye, whether they wanted to or not.
Lesbian relationships enter this system, and something strange happens to them. Instead of disrupting the male gaze — two women, no men, a dynamic that seemingly has nothing to do with male desire — they get absorbed by it. Reframed. Repositioned. Suddenly they are not a love story. They are a spectacle.
The numbers make this uncomfortably concrete. Studies on pornography consumption consistently show that lesbian content ranks among the most-watched categories for straight male viewers.
Content featuring no men, ostensibly about female desire, built around women’s intimacy with each other — and the primary audience is straight men.
It would be easy to file this away as a strange statistical footnote. It isn’t. It is the male gaze with its cards on the table, finally done pretending.
Because what that statistic reveals are that even the apparent absence of men does not mean the absence of the male gaze. The gaze doesn’t need a body in the room. It has already decided what female intimacy looks like, what it sounds like, what it is for — and it has decided, as it always does, that it is for him.
This is what happens when a culture spends long enough telling one story. The story becomes the only grammar available. Even for experiences that were never about that story in the first place.
So, when a man watches two women in a relationship and his first instinct is not recognition, but appetite, that instinct did not come from nowhere. It came from every film that framed female intimacy as decorative. Every television show that introduced a lesbian character through the reaction of the men around her.
Every piece of media that taught its audience to consume women rather than understand them — to treat female love as an aesthetic experience rather than a human one.
Fetishization is not a personality flaw in a handful of men. It is the predictable product of a culture that has never learned to see women as subjects of their own story.
When you are taught to look at rather than with, when female desire is always framed as something to be viewed rather than inhabited, the leap from watching to objectifying is not a leap at all. It is a single, small, well-rehearsed step.
What gets lost in all of this — what has always gotten lost — is the actual thing. The real relationship, between real women, that exists entirely outside of what anyone else makes of it.
The culture hasn’t fully caught up to that yet. It is still, in so many ways, arranging women for the best possible angle. Still teaching desire as something that flows in one direction, toward one kind of eye.
But the first step to unlearning a lesson is knowing it was taught to you. And once you see the architecture — once you recognize the gaze for what it is and where it came from — you cannot quite unsee it.
Which is, depending on how you look at it, either the beginning of the problem or the beginning of something much more interesting.
