Avril Lavigne has released the video for ‘Rock N Roll’, the second single from her upcoming fifth studio album, writes Stephanie Davies. The song itself is extremely dull – sort of a Ke$ha meets Taylor Swift thing – but the video is relevant to your interests because of the following reasons:

1. It features a lesbian kiss

2. See 1.

Don’t get too excited though, it’s still more Katy Perry than Joan Jett. You know, less rock n’ roll and more of that famous lesbian sexploitation that sells pop music so well.

The video opens with Lavigne picking up her phone and chirping: “Oh, my new Sony phone is ringing!” She proceeds to chat to the caller, making light reference to her previous hit ‘Sk8r Boi’ – a song which some of you may feel sick to realise came out 11 years ago.

At this stage you might be forgiven for thinking this is one long mobile phone commercial. But then the music starts. Aren’t you glad you waited?

According to some graphic novel-style captioning, ‘Rock N Roll’ is set in a post-apocalyptic world where “The human race is dwindling. Shark attacks on land are on the rise. And the fate of rock n roll is in jeopardy…” In strides Lavigne, channelling Tank Girl in camo gear and war paint. We then see Danica McKellar in the role of Lavigne’s BFF.

After their drunk dog crashes the car they’re in and dies (yeah), the music halts long enough for the pop punk starlet to lock lips with the former child-actress.

And there we have it: the kiss. It could have been a tender, touching or even sexy moment, but the whole video is slightly mocking, so one can’t help but feel that maybe they’re making fun of… us. Especially when the kiss comes directly after the line: “No one could lick his own balls quite like he could.”

Lavigne says in a voiceover: “It was the first kiss for both of us, we never really talked about it afterward but I think about the events of that day again and again, and somehow I know, that Winnie does too.” This quote refers to McKellar’s character on The Wonder Years, Winnie Cooper. In fact, it’s an exact quote.

And then they have a funeral for their dead stuffed dog, who turns into a chainsaw guitar. Typical.

The ‘Complicated’ singer has been notoriously anti-girl in her previous videos, so maybe it’s a good thing that she’s included this suggestively Sapphic scene.

Heck, maybe even the part when she hits a baby with a baking pan is a coded rejection of the maternal and domestic roles thrust upon her by the kyriarchy? And when she slashes up the waitress’ clothes? That’s a precursor to wanting to see her naked.

And maybe, just maybe in ‘Girlfriend’ video when she pushed bespectacled version of herself in a pond, that was really internalised homophobia projecting itself?

Either way, I feel like her and Miley Cyrus should get together and compare notes.

Watch the video and tell us what you think:

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My girlfriend and I have a dog. He’s great and we love him, but he’s definitely a dog, not a baby. He’s not even a child replacement; he’s just a dog. We’re clear on the issue, but other people seem confused and insist on calling us his ‘mums’. Or, in the case of some of the dog walkers in the park who aren’t sure if we’re just housemates or something more, his “mum…s?”.

Widget as a baby (dog)

Mind you, I can see how people get confused with the whole dog/baby thing. When Widget was a puppy, I bored work colleagues endlessly with how tired I was.

“He just keeps crying!” I would wail. “He wakes every three hours! Apparently he won’t grow out of it until he’s 11 weeks’ old, maybe even 12!” I didn’t get much sympathy from the working mums of the office.

Another similarity is the ability to talk earnestly and at length about our little one’s toilet habits. We can discuss frequency, colour and consistency with no shame whatsoever. Perhaps that’s inevitable when you pick up another creature’s excrement every single day.

But despite the similarities, Widget is definitely not our son. I’m pretty sure that neither one of us, or any other human female for that matter, pushed that dog out of a vagina.

Other dog owners disagree with the semantic separation and actively prefer to be known as ‘parents’ not ‘owners’. They make their ‘children’ wear dog-shaped human clothes. They give them their favourite human names (and then later, when they have human babies too, have to give them second-best names). They kiss them on the mouth.

I know children can be disgusting too, but at least they don’t lick their own bums and eat cat poo. (Do they? I admit I don’t know much about kids.) Kiss your dog on its mouth and you might as well just miss out the middleman and… well, yes. You know what mental image I’m going for here.

Recently, while on holiday in Dorset, I saw a man casually share his ice cream with his spaniel. “A lick for you, son, and a lick for me.” Before the ice cream was finished, the dog coughed up a puddle of frothy yellow vomit. Exactly, I thought. Exactly.

Let’s say you are a man and you spot a woman in the media getting a little too big for her boots, proposing outlandish things such as Jane Austen on the UK ten-pound note. You feel that this woman (journalist and feminist Caroline Criado-Perez) ought to be put in her place. You (and many other men in the same position) wonder how this might be achieved. Your resolve to threaten her with rape seems the most appropriate given the circumstances, choosing Twitter as the best medium for your threat. Or perhaps you are casually seeing what is “trending” on Twitter:

“KISS YOUR PUSSY GOODBYE AS WE BREAK IT IRREPARABLY”. (Note correct spelling of “irreparably”, certainly not a Daily Mail reader…)

“This Perez one just needs a good smashing up the arse and she’ll be fine.”

You figure that, much like a petition, many threats of rape are better than a few. So you add your own, in between playing World of warcraft and telling your Mum not to come into your bedroom without knocking. Maybe you do it because you feel that, on the internet, you can do it with impunity. Like those who looted during the 2011 London riots, maybe you do it just because you can (or think you can). Maybe you do it because you are bored. Or maybe you are consciously aware of your desire to undermine a feminist with a reminder that, even a powerful, successful woman is vulnerable to rape from the weakest, most pathetic man. You seek to redress the power dynamic that a feminist sought to equalise.

And guess what?

It doesn’t work. Not only does it not work, it backfires completely. The trouble with feminists is that they don’t just shut up when you tell them to. This seems like an obvious thing to say because feminists, by definition, won’t take shit from men. They actually do the opposite to what you intended. They stand up, speak out, and speak up! And then you really look like the cowardly excuse for a man that spends his evenings masturbating furiously in his bedroom while his Mum makes his tea downstairs.

Something good came out of this horrific episode: we decided that, as a society, we are not going to tolerate these threats. Many studies of rape have concluded that what really makes a difference to incidents of rape is the way rape is viewed in a society.

Jill Filopovic wrote a brilliant piece in the Guardian last year stating that: “Researches have found that cultural opposition to rape myths makes men less likely to commit assault, and acceptance of those myths makes sexual assault more likely.” Some examples of rape myths are: women lie about rape, there are sometimes “mixed signals” or a grey area of consent, or a woman’s behaviour was partly to blame for the rape.

In other words, the way that we as a society react to these rape threats will have a direct effect on the number of incidents of rape. These threats are not something that should be dismissed as an “occupational hazard” of using Twitter, and thankfully, it seems as if they will not be. But Twitter needs to (wo)man up and take some responsibility; they only acted after a petition of 11,000 signatures put pressure on them to include a ‘report abuse’ button on every tweet.

God knows what Jane Austen would have thought of this. I’m sure, however, that she could have expressed it in 140 characters.

You can legally marry your wife now, but do you really want to?

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Lesbian and bisexual women have a somewhat paradoxical relationship with geek culture. The realms of science fiction, fantasy, comics and gaming are typically associated with a particular kind of reclusive heterosexual man. However, many LGBT people proudly describe themselves as geeks.

Does this mean that geeky stereotypes are simply untrue, or are there issues with queer representation at the heart of geek culture?

LGBT fandom is being put in the spotlight at the inaugural Nine Worlds Geekfest, which takes place in London from 9th to 11th August. The organisers – who include Lesbilicious contributor Ludi Valentine – hope that their convention will eventually be as “massive” and “cool” as well-known American events such as ComicCon and DragonCon, but also hope to draw upon intersectional feminist ideas of representation and inclusivity.

Hoping to understand more about the contradictions and challenges for lesbian and bisexual women in geek culture, I interviewed author Tori Truslow, who is organising the Queer Fandom strand for Nine Worlds.

Ruth: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Tori: I’m a writer of fantasy and sci-fi, editor of the experimental art/lit zine Verse Kraken, freelance creative writing tutor and event organiser, and big geek. I’m bi and genderqueer, which informs a lot of my work, from my short stories and poetry to the projects I get involved with.

R: How did you get involved with running the queer stream at Nine Worlds?

T: The organisers got in touch with me around the end of last year, with this amazing plan for a new convention, and said they were looking for someone who could put a programme of geeky queer-focused content together and that my name had come up. I’ve always wanted to see more content aimed at LGBT audiences at sci-fi events so I jumped at the chance.

R: Why have a queer stream at Nine Worlds? Do you feel that there is a dearth of LGBT content at sci-fi conventions and other “geek culture” events?

T: I wouldn’t say a dearth – there are often panels that discuss gender and sexuality at existing conventions, but I think there is room for a lot more. There is a huge queer audience for geek media in the UK, and we show up in force for events like the national sci-fi convention Eastercon, so why not dedicate an entire programming track to that audience? That way we can go beyond Sexuality in Sci-Fi 101, and delve into all sorts of subjects that interest us.

R: That makes sense – it’s great to have the opportunity to explore such things in more depth! It’s interesting that you highlight the large queer audience for geek media though – why do you think this is? And is it just a UK thing?

T: I don’t think it’s just a UK thing – it’s similar in the US, as evidenced by the fact that they have an annual feminist SF convention (Wiscon) that also has a high amount of content looking at LGBT and race issues.

I think there are a number of things going on – geek audiences are just very diverse anyway, despite the perception that being a geek is a boy thing. There are also obvious ways that I think science fiction appeals to a lot of us – particularly the utopian element in imagining future worlds where society might treat gender and sexuality differently. And then there are subsets of geek culture, like online fanfiction communities, that are increasingly populated by queer women and offer a way to take popular narratives from mainstream media and turn them into platforms for telling our own stories.

R: Can you give a couple of examples of interesting fictional worlds where gender and/or sexuality is treated differently?

T: There are some classic sci-fi novels, like Samuel Delaney’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains Of Sand, where there are alien planets with a number of biological sexes, and where definitions of gender in human societies varies wildly from planet to planet – or Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, set on a planet where everyone is the same sex. In Iain Banks’s Culture novels, advanced genetic technology means that physical sexual characteristics can be reversibly changed.

On the TV side of things, you’ve also got the Doctor Who universe, where our favourite bisexual time-travelling action hero Captain Jack is from the 51st century, where it’s implied that bisexuality is much more the norm.

However, there’s a disparity between the potential for such worlds to be written and the frequency with which they actually are. The examples I’ve given are often held up as ‘the’ queer-positive fictional worlds, when they aren’t perfect and were mostly written decades ago. There are some new writers who are producing really interesting queer sci-fi, my favourite example being Benjanun Sriduangkaew, but it isn’t written or published as much as it should. I’ve put a panel called ‘Why is the Future so Binary?’ on the Nine Worlds programme to address just that issue.

R: How well do you feel queer women are represented in science fiction and fantasy?

T: In popular SFF, not nearly as well represented as queer men. We had Willow and Tara, but Buffy ended ten years ago, and where have the story-centric lesbian relationships been since then? Doctor Who has lesbian characters but they don’t get a spin-off show like Jack did. Even in fan fiction and fanart there’s less representation – and these are stories largely being written by women. Which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of women writing queer female characters, but it tends to get noticed less.

There are wonderful editors publishing fiction by and about queer women though, and anthology series such as Heiresses of Russ, which showcases the year’s best lesbian SFF, and the Steampowered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories books.

R: On the subject of fan media – do you think queer representation within geek culture is more likely to come about through fans “queering” existing characters, rather than through authors creating new queer characters and queer worlds?

T: I’d say it’s both, and not always mutually exclusively. There are wonderful writers creating new queer characters and stories – to name some who’ll be at Nine Worlds: Roz Kaveney, Hal Duncan, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Alex Dally MacFarlane, and Zen Cho – and also fan writers who write queer narratives for their favourite characters. For better or worse, a lot of writers, filmmakers and showrunners have noticed this, and that does seem to have led to a greater awareness of queer audiences who want to see queer characters, but also to the rise of queer-baiting, with queer subtext heavily implied or used as a punchline, to keep queer audiences hanging on without putting off homophobic viewers.

R: Why do you think it is that fiction written by women with lesbian/bisexual/queer characters is less likely to get noticed?

T: It often gets pigeonholed as ‘lesbian fiction’, rather than ‘science fiction with lesbian/bi/queer characters’. In the sci-fi short fiction market, magazines that publish the occasional story featuring queer women sometimes get accused of publishing “too many lesbian stories”, which begs the question how many is too many, and why no one seems to be complaining about too many straight stories?

R: Why do you think it’s important to have queer women in sci-fi?

T: It’s partly about having characters to identify with, but not wholly. Science fiction is about many things, but for me, at heart, it’s about the awesomeness of the universe, and what it means to be human. If there isn’t a place for all identities and experiences in a genre that explores fundamental questions of possibility and identity, what’s the point in having it at all?

R: You’ve said that you feel that being bi and genderqueer has informed your own work as a writer – is this because your personal experiences give you a unique perspective from which to explore the awesomeness of the universe?

T: That’s an excellent way to put it, haha! I suppose you could say that. I want to write stories where gender is as individual a part of characters’ lives as their personalities. I also want to do it because it’s a challenge. We consume a lot of heteronormative media, and it can be hard to break out of the tropes it teaches us, even when we want to. I actually decided to run a workshop on writing queer perspectives at Nine Worlds, because it’s something I’ve struggled with myself.

R: So, a final question – what event at Nine Worlds are you looking forward to most?

T: Ooh. There’s so much on – and one of the things that makes me proudest to be working for them is the across-the-board diversity policy, which for one means that it’s not just the Queer Stream that will have LGBT content: the Video Gaming, Literature, Game of Thrones, Geek Feminism, Academia and Vampire tracks (there are a lot of tracks!) all have great stuff about sexuality lined up. So it’s hard to choose. But if you pushed me it would probably be the Queer Cabaret and Disco on the Saturday night, which will be headlined by the awesome Lashings of Ginger Beer Time, and (can I pick two? please?) the roundtable and signing event we’re hosting for the anthology Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It.

 You can find out more about Nine Worlds on their website, and about the Queer Fandom strand on their tumblr page.

Lesbilicious were backstage at Brighton Pride on Saturday 3rd August. The theme of Pride was ‘icons’. We decided to ask some of our favourite lesbilicious performers who their icons are.

Hosted by Ali Adolph (of Short and Girlie Show fame) we spoke to Lucy Spraggan, Charlie and Sim from MK1, Greymatter, Lara A King, Mel from Kenelis, Amity and many more acts. Watch the video to hear what they had to say.

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Brighton Pride has received mixed reviews in recent years. A particular issue has been how entrance to the park is managed as the queuing system has caused delays for many park go-ers. Despite this being an issue again this year, the new Brighton and Hove Pride team put together an amazing event against the odds (so rumour has it). This Pride of 2013 definitely points to great things in the future and we imagine it will only get better. Well done to everyone involved and keep up the good work.

Were you at Brighton Pride? We would love to hear your thoughts. Leave comments below.

The Lovely Ladies of Orange is the New Black

Unless you were out of the country last month (like I was) you have inevitably heard (and most likely watched) the new Netflix series Orange is the New Black. I can’t remember the last time a new series has sparked so much instant fandom or the last time a show had everybody talking from my 30 year old co-worker to my teenage niece to my 50 something client. After so many people exclaimed, “What?? You haven’t watched it yet!? You must. You have to. Tonight. Do it!” I overcame my aversion to joining the trendy masses and sat down and watched the show.

So, here I am, telling you to give in to the newest phenomenon that “everybody’s talking about”. This is not Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, though it can be quite titillating, because it is actually good. The creator, Jenji Kohan, is the woman behind Showtimes’ Weeds (it ran for eight seasons, people) and is no slouch in the Emmy department. The show is based on the memoir of the same name, written by Piper Kerman, who is also a contributing writer to the series. It is based on her experience in prison after she pled guilty to money laundering and drug trafficking, a crime she committed in her past life while hopelessly in love with a drug-dealing lesbian. The show portrays her as an upstanding successful citizen of New York who has to break it to her boyfriend that not only did she get involved in a drug smuggling operation, but yes, she used to be a lesbian.

The opening song is a catchy new tune by Regina Spektor. And did I see Jodie Foster’s name in the credits? Yes, I did, as she directed one of the episodes. In fact, she directed one of my favorite episodes, “Lesbian Request Denied”, that highlights transgender actress Laverne Cox and her backstory. Is actress Laura Prepon smoking hot as the guilty, bespectacled ex-girlfriend? So hot, even if she glares and stares and plays with her glasses more than she actually appears to use them.

Clearly, by now, the case has been made. But if all of the aforementioned evidence is not enough to persuade you, then let me remind you that there are very few popular television shows that portray lesbians, transgender characters (played by a real life transgender), realistic looking lesbians, butch lesbians, imprisoned lesbians, and emotionally layered lesbians. And of course there is a smattering of heterosexuals, and “straight” women dabbling in ladies while in prison, male guards and a range of supporting characters, but the variety and realistic portrayal of lesbians is not to be overlooked. Don’t get me wrong, I loved The L Word and Lip Service as much as the next gal, but isn’t it refreshing to see some lesbians that don’t look like they just finished up a photo shoot?

The writing is great, with intricate story lines weaved in, the acting is excellent, and the sex scenes are fun and sexy and certainly better than what we would see on just regular television. You can watch all 13 episodes on Netflix Instant Watch now, and Season Two is in the works, which means you have time to jump on the bandwagon.