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Early in the pilot episode of The L Word, the viewer watches two young women strip and plunge into a backyard pool, romping amorously in a scene that would not be out of place in soft-core girl-on-girl pornography aimed at heterosexual men or couples. The voyeuristic framing of the scene is even accentuated: We observe it mainly from the point of view of the fascinated woman next door as she crouches behind a fence. And when she re-enters her house, we see her in turn join her boyfriend in a sexual scene that is structured by their slow, shared, relishing narrative and re-enactment of the lesbian scene she has just viewed.
That orgy of specular expropriation would seem to represent both a dream and a nightmare of The L Word, Showtime's long-anticipated new series that begins January 18, the first on television to place at front and center the lives of a group of women, most of whom are lesbian. In the demographic calculus that lay behind the decision to underwrite the series, Gary Levine, Showtime's vice president for original programming, told the New York Daily News its potential appeal to nonlesbian viewers rested on the understanding that "lesbian sex, girl-on-girl, is a whole cottage industry for heterosexual men." Even Scott Seomin, the entertainment media director of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, sees the porn connection as a smart crossover move. "If they pull them in and they get hooked on the titillation factor," he told the Daily News, "that straight male is going to learn about the lives of lesbians." At the same time, less pragmatic or opportunist activists are incredulous that lesbians can be empowered by becoming, as Winnie McCroy writes in the Washington Blade, "pud fodder for Joe Sixpack."
Yet the actual spy in this scene is, after all, a woman, not the Neanderthal straight guy who seems to haunt the imagination of The L Word's advance flacks and detractors alike. Jenny Schecter (Mia Kirshner), a young fiction writer newly arrived to join her swim- coach boyfriend, Tim (Eric Mabius), in his West Hollywood bungalow, seems poised in these earliest episodes to offer an invitingly unformed conduit for the lesbian fixations of a variety of viewers - - but...