Lesbians can be cerebral

Director Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color won the 2013 Palm d'Or, at the Cannes film festival.

The story has a lesbian theme. It's about the developing relationship between two students, one of whom has her hair dyed blue. When she reverts back to the color blonde, the relationship is destroyed.

The film is based on Le Bleu est Une Couleur, a graphic novel by French artist Julie Maroh.

Maroh criticized the liberty the director took with her comic to reduce the love scenes into a spectacle of lesbian pornography.

In her blog, Maroh had to say the following of the controversial scenes:

[It was] a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling [...]The heteronormative laughed because they don't understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.

I am quite taken by the erotic quality of the scene above; the girls weave a gossamer web of eros around Sartre, Bob Marley and philosophy in general. The indication that the girl on the left is turned on by people who take a stand, is clear when she upholds Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up," as a signature song of commitment. I guess, the other girls reversion to being a blonde turns her off for that reason.

I feel like Maroh predicates lesbian love on something cerebral, so that the "heteronormative" don't get away with the notion that only grotesque sex binds same-sex relationships.

In Defense of Bisexuality

I remember reading John Irving's The World According to Garp in Kolkata in the 80s and a phenomenal book it had appeared to me then. I was especially awed by Jenny Fields, Garp's mother, because of her powerful eccentricity and self-determining journey through life.

Irving's most recent novel, In One Person, I hear is another tale of celebration of the power of self-determination and sublime eccentricity.

The story is of a bisexual Billy Dean and his desires and of their unequivocal expression and fulfillment. Billy enjoys women, but the best women in the novel turn out to be those who have had been men once upon a time. Such is Ms. Frost, a librarian at Billy's school. Billy is fiercely turned on by the sight of Ms. Frost every time he goes to check out a copy of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations from the school library. Ms. Frost suggests he try a variety of books.

In her younger days, Ms. Frost was Big Al, a 6ft 2 inches tall undefeated wrestling champion. Now he chooses to live as a woman. When Billy finally sleeps with Ms. Frost for the first time, he believes she is a woman. When he returns for more, he knows she is a magnificent woman with a male organ.

The novel is wide-ranging, almost natural, in its spirit of tolerance. Tolerance isn't=anything goes; it's what happens when we face our own desires and choices honestly, whether we act on them or not.

Ms. Frost says it well, when she replies to Billy's query about her sexual identity: Don't make me a category before you get to know me."