With Valentines Day coming up, its time to talk about the reality of being a single queer with sexual needs just in case you don't have a special someone to celebrate with.
Being single can be especially hard for gay women. It seems like the lesbian population—especially in the small college town of Huntsville—is that of myth or legend; the gays are either hard to find, hard to approach, taken, or just not your type.
When that's the case, it's natural to turn to pornography until the right person comes along to relieve those desires.
By now, the benefit of masturbation is widely recognized by health professionals. It can be useful for discovering and accepting sexual preferences, aid in falling asleep or reducing stress and can even relieve some types of pain.
The stigma surrounding female masturbation and sexuality—especially that of a homoerotic type—has roots in the Puritan societies that re-founded the country, when, by law, they only defined homosexual sex to be between two men, as they could not conceive of two women having sex without "the use of the offices of a husband."
To make matters worse, the United States has typically conformed to conservative ideologies of modesty which prefer women as thoroughly non-sexual beings.
These origins, paired with the ineptitude of sex education, mean that the general public does not have a comprehensive understanding of lady-on-lady lovin'. The result is painfully evident in lesbian pornography today.
In fact, the genre started off exclusively for the indulgence of male fetishes.
Even now—as I nostalgically remember being told in high school—a common myth is that watching lesbian porn is not a hint that you might be gay because it's aimed at heterosexual men.
Any gay woman who has ever tried to self-satisfy with the use of porn can attest to that. Unfortunately, it hasn't gotten a lot better since its inception.
Nowadays, lesbian porn channels are flooded with perverse interpretations of what the industry thinks should be distributed. Anything from step-mom and -sister role play, and even underage videos and images, far outnumber quality, healthy content.
As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, accidentally stumbling upon these can be irreparably triggering—sometimes turning me off from sex entirely for weeks at a time.
At best, users can expect 10 minutes or less of two obviously straight women cringily fondling each other's breasts after a pillow fight.
While major providers like PornHub give users the option of filtering out certain phrases and categories by upgrading, and some sites have been created specifically by lesbians, for lesbians, each option doesn't come without an unreasonably high one-time or monthly price.
Feminist and LGBT+ rights movements throughout the 20th century were instrumental in reducing the stigma attributed to women and queer folks expressing their sexuality. Apparently, this almost-decade-long fight for acceptance still isn't enough for PornHub to recognize and respect these parts of their customer base.
Considering that the adult toy industry accumulated a staggering $15 Billion in 2015 alone with the help of their female and LGBT+ clientele, you'd think the site would at least be smart enough to clean out all the pedophilia masquerading as gay sex. But alas, it still hasn't occurred to them.
Unfortunately, this type of reformation, like so many others nowadays, would be a massive overhaul and only come from the efforts of many different groups coming together to achieve a common goal.
With the current state of things, that doesn't seem likely to happen for a while. It's admittedly at the bottom of the list for things that need fixing.
Until then, queer women and femmes are still going to be excluded from the same desire that helps connect a community, which isn't the perverted sphere that Victorians, our grandparents and modern pornography producers set it up to be.
But one still can't help but hope that one day soon, one of the big-wigs in the pleasure industry might throw us a bone—or flick us a bean, as it were.
