If there is one stereotype of lesbians I’ve always hated, it’s the vegetarian one. I am very, very proudly not a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian all through high school (though primarily used as a dieting technique, not really a stance on animal rights) but quickly went back to my meat eating ways after my first rugby match in college. Also when I realized that if I wanted to eat in my college’s dining hall and didn’t want to eat tofu, it was going to be time to start eating meat again. After depriving myself for four years, I realized that meat was glorious. I made a few attempts to stop eating meat after that, but I would just quite literally forget that I was a vegetarian.

When I was a freshman in college, one of my friends on my hall made me an Ani DiFranco mix CD. I guess this was because I was the lesbian who had never listened to Ani; but for whatever reason, she decided it was imperative that I listen to her, and listen to her right then. I tried my best to get into the CD, but could never get past (or through, really) the fifth track. The only songs I could enjoy were “Little Plastic Castle” and the silliness of it, and “Gravel,” which is, let’s face it, is kind of a pretty great I-love-you-even-though-I-shouldn’t-song. Needless to say, I was never an Ani fan. When it comes to things I’m generally not a fan of, it’s folk music that involves feelings.

I know. Gay Face? What is Gay Face?
Gay Face is a very real thing. It is when someone just has a gay looking face.

During the Superbowl build up, there was one thing I noticed this year, which is that, apparently, the Super Bowl is not for girls.

A few weeks ago, in a great piece about femininity/masculinity, Jean mentioned that an interest in cutesy handbags is one of those clear delineators of feminity, which is something I find to be true. Like shoes, handbags are the territory of the hyper-feminine, image-concious woman. And, as the general stereotype would go, this doesn’t include lesbians.
It’s a stereotype that I think fits, for the most part. While your fashion lesbians may waltz around with frilly purses, from my unscientific observations, most lesbians go for utility over OMG! CUTE BAG ALERT! when selecting their bag of choice.

And while I’ve never been someone that really falls into these stereotypes, when it comes to the anti-purse bandwagon, I’m totally there.

A few weeks ago, Scholastic announced it was bringing back one of the most amazing children’s series ever: The Babysitters’ Club. The BSC books were completely ridiculous, but also amazing, and were my primary interest from the ages of 6-11. I’m not kidding: I had every book (except the mysteries, those were too scary), I had dolls, I had computer games and I had movies. It was borderline creepy, and my obsession with these girls probably should have been what made my mother realize I was a giant lesbian, because even at the age of 10 I realized I kind of wanted to make out with Dawn Schaefer a little bit.

Magazines seem to be pretty great at creating content that manages to make ridiculously broad (and oftentimes offensive) generalizations about lesbians. This week’s offensive-generalizations-special comes from Details magazine, which brings us not one, but two questionable articles about lesbians. The first, “The Lure of Dating an Ex-Lesbian” explores what happens when men date women that identify or have identified as lesbian or bisexual. The tone of the lede makes the overall tone and maturity level of the article pretty obvious: “So-called hasbians are going for straight guys just like you!”

So it turns out that it’s a new decade. This fact didn’t really occur to me until I noticed that all the blogs I read were starting to do “best-of-the-aughts” lists. And then I realized, right. 2010. New decade. It was almost as bad as when I asked a British person if there was some big soccer championship that was equivalent to the Super Bowl. Oh, right. Of course. The World Cup. Anyway, in honor of the new decade beginning, I decided to create a list of things I would like to see in the next decade, rather than trying to recap the last one.

The holiday season is upon us. Seriously, tomorrow night is Christmas Eve. And as so like many of us are thanks to this economy, I’m pretty much broke. This leaves little money to spend on gifts for those you love, including your significant other. And if you, also like me, are terrible at planning ahead and tend to wait until the very last minute to buy gifts for your the one you’re with, I’ve created a list of some on-the-cheap holiday presents that go beyond the realm of coupons for backrubs, sexytimes, etc.

Right now, there seems to be three main types of lesbians in Hollywood: the closeted kind, the ones that seem to have their lives together, and the ones that are just plain batshit crazy.

Recently, Casey Johnson (the heiress of the Johnson & Johnson fortune) and Tila Tequila, the star of A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila (everyone’s favorite bisexual dating show) got engaged. About two weeks before they announced their engagement, they both showcased some pretty bizarro behavior. Johnson apparently broke into her ex’s house, stole some of her possessions and then left a used vibrator in her bed. Tila Tequila came out as a lesbian in an all-caps Twitter rant, and then developed some sort of bizarre alter ego. Why does it matter that two crazypants lesbians got engaged? Because the media keeps referring to them as being “engaged.” With the quotations.

Now, I follow my fair share of celebrity gossip. And by fair share, I mean I follow a lot of it. And I’ve never seen a straight couple, no matter how crazy either of them maybe, referred to being “engaged.” I realize that the main reason for the qoutations here is because of the fact that both women appear to be so out of it, and that it seems odd that so soon after Johnson’s vibrator-gate, they are engaged with a 10 caret diamond ring on Tequila’s finger. And while that’s true, the quotations still seem unnecessary.

The usage of the parentheses in the New York Post’s Page Six was probably the most egregious–the validity of the engagement didn’t seem to reside on the fact that both of them are crazypants, thus their behavior is suspect–but that it is an “engagement” because gay marriage isn’t legal. Putting engagement in quotations takes any sort of validity from the relationship and thus makes homosexuality and gay marriage suspect, not their behavior.

Do I think that the relationship with Tila Tequila and Casey Johnson will last? No, not at all. Do I really respect them or their relationship? No, but I didn’t really respect the relationship between Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman either. But when you put a word like “engaged” in quotation marks just because it’s a couple of crazy lesbians are together, that’s not okay. I’m not going to tell gossip columnists to start respecting the loony pseudo-celebrities they are forced to cover–but at least respect their sexuality.