>
>Isn't this more a straight girl rather than a straight boy thing? You
know, four-year lesbians, LUGs? I even read an article in the Village Voice
about it.
>
>Josh
this is an overlimit but I rilly rilly don't care at this point. this shitty little comment needs to be addressed. while i'd agree that there are some women who do this LUG thing, which means go through a period of exploring or talking about lesbian desire while undergraduates and who do so in an attempt to claim some sort of oppressed identity, i rilly rilly don't think that it's quite the same thing.
Firstly, most of the LUG phenom is about feeling that, in order to become a 'good' feminist one must learn how to love women in a variety of ways. Secondly, there is a LUG phenom associated w/ a rejection of het men. thirdly, there is the good old 'i'll be a lesbian during the week' so's I can get laid and go out with some guy at the frat party this wkend so I can fulfill the expectations of middle class femeal heterosexuality and play at least a little bit hard to get.
These examples are all, btw, from my students' journals.
when I brought this up on another list, Katha Pollit and others noted that this wasn't new. As Frances noted there is a kind of political lesbianism going on here where women actually fuck other women and DON"T fuck men because they want to explore their capacities as a woman-identified-women in all senses of that continuum that Adrienne Rich once wrote about.
Anyway, when white uppermiddle class guys run 'round embracing their queerness but don't actually fuck other men and publically but just confess their desires it's rilly rilly not quite the same sort of risk. Sure there's a big risk, but uuuhhh when they tell mom and dad about it, their employers, and others who might not like then I'll agree that they're putting something on the line AND when they do this in the relatively safe confines of Berkeley and among activists friends then it's pretty stupe and pathetic. A friend of mine from Berkeley just noted re a discussion of SNAG (sensitive new age guys) that the only way to get taken seriously as a SNAG in Berkeley was to seriously and publically consider castration; anything short of that and you're a poser. Obviously a bit hyperbolic, but surely not completely unmoored from any reality of Berkeley's rather liberal social milieu.
SnitgroWl