Cartoonist Miriam Libicki wrote for HU for a while…but this comment was from before she’d come on board. She’s commenting here on my review of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls. I’ve left punctuation as is.

wow. i was reluctant to read another review of yours, cause so often they just make me feel lousy. but you were so spot on on the points of lost girls which disappointed me, some of which i hadn’t realized myself.

i went in expecting to like it, as moore is responsible for one of my most reliable sexual fantasies (invisible man ravishing his way through the girls’ school? hot. & i never thought of it before, but it could be seen as a perfect mixture of a common hetero male fantasy (lots of sex with lots of interchangeable nubile young chix) & a common hetero female fantasy (sex with a faceless/invisible partner, so that it is all about your body & sensations)), but i was vaguely annoyed &… bored through lost girls, a lot more often then i was turned on.

i knew some of what i didn’t like was the interchangeability of all the parts, & the fact that the characters were so secondary to their sex scenes. i didn’t put my finger on the “women’s porn is about relationships” (to totally overgeneralize), but i think it’s true.

i don’t read romance novels, cause the ones i was exposed to were badly written & had gender roles that were distasteful to me. i am occasionally & guiltily a big sucker for chick-flicks of the romantic comedy type, & i’ve really enjoyed some slash fic.

much of slash fic is about relationships. even if it’s gonzo fucking, the fact that you’re supposed to know who the characters are & how they interact in canon, makes it emotional. & my favourite slash author happens to be a sexually frustrated lesbian, whose stories are all about straight guys longing with great longing for their straight best friends.

so i think you’re also right, & i hadn’t considered before, that unrequited longing is a big turn on (for women, or at least women who are me). that’s why i started off really liking alice, when she seemed like an elderly dyke who could only look at young women & verbally seduce herself. when she started having sex with everything, she became a lot more boring.

the lecturing got me down, too, but it wasn’t as frustrating as why i was so often bored by the sex stuff (yes, it was pretty male-y in the way that penetrative sex was the only sex worth having… i actually dig girl-on-girl, but, you know, more of the dykes to watch out for variety). now i feel like i understand it all better.

so after all that tmi, thanks!