Leonie Taylor, in her essay Sex, ‘Race,’ and Betrayal: Kalinda Sharma and Bisexual Feminist Politics, gives an answer for why women-loving-women couples are asked “So, who wears the pants?” Taylor’s answer: phallocentrism. The idea of phallocentrism, coined by Ernest Jones in 1927, was created to combat Sigmund Freud’s idea of women being depressed creatures purely driven by penis-envy (Jones instead suggested that Freud’s belief was centered around castration anxiety, which Freud chose not to comment on). Phallocentrism was later further defined and debated by other male psychoanalysts before being picked up by second-wave feminists, who declared that the phallus was becoming “man’s identity with himself” (Ermarth, 172-173). Problematically, phallocentrism has become a barrier for lesbians and lesbian couples, as phallocentrism creates a barrier of misunderstanding between WLW and the rest of the world. Women-loving-women couples are mysteriously viewed as either sex starved or asexual, as many individuals believe that a woman cannot achieve sexual pleasure without a penis. This idea is further perpetuated through lesbian pornography, which is typically not intended for a women-loving-women audience, but instead for a male gaze, allowing men to picture themselves partaking in sex with the lesbian couple in question. Phallocentrism is undoubtedly anti-feminist, anti-lesbian, and anti-female sex as it reduces a woman’s sexual pleasure to a man’s penis, ignoring the diverse range of other sexually pleasuring practices that do not require a penis and are readily accessible to women.
Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0
