Edit: The uncut Patreon version ended up having to be...a bit cut. But it is still a little bit longer and has more bad words in it lmao.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/lesbian-gaze-74968923

I'm writing a lesbian love story at the moment. Someone told me "if your characters have to kiss to seem like they're in love, they're not in love." Trying to generate non-sexualised love and intimacy that isn't just 'gals being pals' is tricky.

Fun fact: The reason Jennifer's Body bombed- even tho it's fucking amazing and a classic- is because they decided to portray it in a feminine gaze *for the horror aspect to make the male viewers uncomfortable*. It succeeded. The boy was never important, it was a story of two girls- friendship, love, and betrayal.

"Um sir. You may wanna zip up, your male gaze is hanging out." This is gold

Abdellatif Kechice and Park Chan-Wook really said: "Lesbians are so cool. If only there were lesbians, but for men."

that whole "invisible male spectator" concept is why i thought i was straight for so long despite being a woman who was relating to male POV characters being attracted to women

In defense of Director Park's "The Handmaiden": I'm a queer woman who was born, have grown up, and is living in South Korea, And I can SURE that if this movie hadn't ended up with that awkward sex scene, most of the viewers in my country could not recognize their relationship as that of lovers. (Even though there's another sex scene in the middle of that film!) S.K. has extremely conservative and patriarchal social standards, so a lot of people just can't even imagine the same-gender relationship is a possible thing-and just not a passing confusion. Thus you must push the hardest and farthest to make people latch on to a queer representation. You can argue that then it didn't have to be a form of reenacting, but I think it needed to be like that in this circumstance. Because the scene made it undeniable that they were doing sex in the context of the movie's own story, as self-referencing. I also agree that there were some better ways to do that, wholeheartedly, but it feels too harsh to portrait it as the result of a pure male-gaze.

How often I heard men openly COMPLAINING that lesbians dont usually look like and act like in the movies!! Its almost like sapphic people are still PEOPLE not just a liveaction porn genre
Im a bisexual woman with a gay relationship and I dont owe any man to be the embodiment of his fetish, I JUST WANNA LIVE

Listen - I do want to mention this. The Handmaiden is THE go to liked movie for all my bisexual and lesbian friends in Korea. Not defending it, just mentioning how it is seen in the country it was made. Also, I think it is important to understand how taboo homosexuality is in Korea still. There were people, who watched that movie, and were convinced thar the two main characters WEREN’T lesbians or bisexual. Yes, I know how impossible tjat sounds. They liked the movie, but are himophobic, and somehow convinced themselves of some insane thinfs about “they were just individuals who loved each other outside of sexual preference” or some crazed reasons like that.

I just think comparing The Handmaiden to any other film in the West needs rhe context of how hard it is to make media with queer charactes in Korea. Maybe those sex scenese, as vulgar as they were, helped the movie get made. I don’t know, I just know queer women love that movie here. My partner’s favorite actress is Kim Tae-ri (my partner is a Pansexual Korean woman) and with the exception of the Nightmare Before Christmas (she loves Tim Burton), it is probabluy the movie we’ve watched rhe most. I feel like “The Handlaiden” being a landmark film in tbe country it was produced in…needs to be taken into account. Anyways, I am done lol.

years ago i hated calling myself a lesbian, only to realize i was looking at myself from the 3rd person's pov with male gaze 💀

As a bi cis woman, for so long i was worried I was just fetishising other women, just like men did, because that was all I could see in media around me ( pg or not pg) It took me forever to feel like I belonged, that I wasn't stealing other people's space, and that it was just who i've always been ( not someone else's fetish) Thank you so much for your videos, you always manage to articulate with so much precision the turmoil I've felt my whole life.

i really like the handmaiden but this is a great video that helps me understand why some parts of the movie make me uncomfortable

One thing that frustrates me so much as a woman and as a lesbian is that so many of these “artsy” directors say their films are art but it’s just full of objectifying and violating women.

For THE HANDMAIDEN, I feel like you could interpret the final sex scene as Hideko reclaiming the stage that she was forced onto by reenacting that scene with her lover on her terms. I feel like when you're forced to pander to the male gaze as a woman, it means something to take it for yourself.

as a bisexual, I can now identify the reason why I didn't watch or partake in Sapphic media because it always seems like I was objectifying them by watching, like I felt dirty even though I did want to see what WLW looked like because I was afraid of approaching women in the real world, and now I realize it was because even though I was a woman, a queer woman, I was assumed to be apart of this male gaze as part of the audience. So many WLW live action uses a male gaze camera view that it felt dissonant from the way I viewed women in real life, with their faces and their spirit and other things that made them women, and not just lesbian pornstars.

19:02 I remember watching Blue when I was a teenager and exploring my sexuality. I remember feeling gross somehow, like I was being creepy and at the time I think I attributed the feeling to my desire to watch a "lesbian" film and not that I was not the intended audience despite being a queer woman.

We should also talk about the Gay Gaze. That is "male homossexuality for women". It is very interesting how much gay-centered media can be divided into "gay media for women" and "gay media for gay men". Think the difference between yaoi and bara, lol

As a queer, trans woman who does want to write stories about sapphic intimacy, I do often worry that anything I create will inevitably be tainted by my socialization growing up being taught to be a man. That I will never truly be able to view women as being “like me.” That my attraction to them will always be in some way heterosexual. Videos like this help to ease my fears. Thank you very much. ❤

You can tell when something is for the characters VS. when something is for the audience.

I remember a scene in the Queen's Gambit where the main character was in a hotel room with the chess reporter and they were just discussing playing a game of chess. There was no overt innuendo, no nudity, they were fully clothed several feet apart but the tension in that conversation and the way the scene was filmed made me blush.