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	I want to be a lesbian I’ve never seen lesbian sex on film look so much like REAL lesbian sex." The woman who wrote these words, a reporter for GayWired.com, would appear to know what she’s talking about. And if she does, then pity us poor heteros. There are times when the women on The L Word seem unable to pass a breath without groaning in orgasmic ecstasy. But it’s not the frequency of the sex that’s worrying, it’s the quality. The proficiency. You may as well ask a baboon to build an Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks as ask a man to emulate the ease with which these women navigate each other’s erogenous zones. This unhappy truth is stated most clearly by a walk-on character in the show, a creepy traffic cop describing a porn flick he once watched: Two women are getting it on and a guy comes in. He’s gonna give it to ’em, he’s gonna fuck ’em good. We think that’s what those chicks want, meat. That’s not it. They’re having a good time without it. They’re going down on each other, you know, they’re up there licking everything, and this guy comes in ready to unload, and that’s not what they want. Their eyes squinted up like someone poured gasoline on them. That’s why this country’s homos are so dangerous — you got two people, they got the same equipment, and they both know how to treat it. How can anybody of the opposite sex compete with that? Precisely. How can anyone of the opposite sex compete with that? Earlier, we had been treated to an equally revealing visual juxtaposition: a character, ostensibly straight, experiencing woman-on-woman oral sex so profoundly gratifying that she sees demons. Demons! Minutes later, we witness this same woman trying and failing to rally the abject penis of her male lover. No need to take a course in gender semiotics to fathom the subtext of these two scenes. In another episode, we meet a guy who calls himself "lesbian-identified" — meaning, I think, that he sleeps only with lesbians. And why not? After a few episodes of The L Word, I wanted this, too. No. I wanted to be a lesbian. You can’t blame me. The only significant male character on the show is, frankly, a bit of a clod — the guy whose penis blinks in the face of his newly lesbianized lover. Again, not a man-friendly message. Even when one of the women gets pregnant, this is achieved with only a cursory nod to the Y chromosome. A guy whacks off into a cup and he’s gone. Then there’s the father of a happily married — um, unioned — character, who makes a fleeting appearance to heap scorn on her relationship. The implication of all this seems to be that theirs is a club from which we men are irredeemably excluded. My own envy of the L Word girls goes beyond sex. I want the courtship, too. The fledgling romance between the gorgeous tennis player and the gorgeous sous-chef — the innate understanding, the heightened appreciation — I want that. But I’m a man, so aspiring to this degree of feminine sensitivity — sensitivity squared — would be like trying to dance ballet in steel-toed boots. Even more troubling is The L Word’s heavy-hitting couple, Bette and Tina, who, after seven years together, seem to have achieved the "lesbian urge to merge." How the hell do I compete with that? I ask television historian Louis Chunovic what he thinks of the show. "I enjoyed it," he says. "You see these wonderfully shadowy, beautifully lit naked female bodies doing what naked female bodies do together." Right. But where does that leave us? "I don’t take it as reality," Chunovic continues. "I lived in Los Angeles for many years, I lived in all the hip hotbeds of LA, and this is a wonderful fantasy version of the things that go on there." Oh. Still, I wouldn’t mind giving it a try sometime. — CW

If serious television has sometimes been given license to venture into the realm of the pube and the penis, mere entertainment has been expected to mind its manners. Even as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s — supposedly a period of unprecedented sexual expression — pickings remained slim for the cathode-ray-tube voyeur. Take Mary Tyler Moore. She may have been a heart-stopper, but you’d have needed the imagination of a Márquez or an Asimov to get any real idea of what was going on under those business clothes. And while The Bob Newhart Show’s Suzanne Pleshette occasionally donned a Maidenform-hugging sweater, she nonetheless seemed content to forgo sexual relations in favor of swapping one-liners with a bald, bloodhound-faced shrink. Gidget and Gilligan’s Island, of course, dripped with raw, terrible lust, but these were the exception.

The ’70s were better. No one can say the girls in Laverne and Shirley weren’t getting laid. The same goes for Herman and Lily Munster. The ’70s also gave us Charlie’s Angels and The Benny Hill Show and — oh God — Daisy Duke. And the ’70s gave us The Love Boat, which not only featured sexually fraught storylines, but also hired cute extras to traipse past the camera wearing swimsuits and thigh-baring sarongs. Then there was Happy Days, wherein the youngest of the Cunningham clan occasionally ran around in flouncy cheerleader skirts; hence the phrase "Having a Joanie."

This era seemed to mark the dawning of a new consciousness among TV producers. It was as if they realized, simultaneously and with a blinding flash, that you didn’t have to portray sex or even sex chatter to get people’s pulses racing; all you needed was to show a little skin and let the viewer’s imagination do the rest. And not even skin. Look at Suzanne Pleshette’s sweaters beside Jennifer Aniston’s. See any difference? Ping. This show-me trend proved to be a durable one, carrying over into the 1980s and ’90s, culminating in the bikini-waxed public-safety officers of Baywatch, the hip-grinding, lip-licking videos of MTV, and, unfortunately, David Caruso’s puckered ass on NYPD Blue.

Today, we take partial nudity on prime-time TV for granted. In her "Dirrty" video, Christina Aguilera is about three square inches of cloth from appearing on the Spice network. The daytime soaps seem more determined than ever to merit an R rating. The Style network features more exposed skin than your average Russian steam bath. For the patient, keen-eyed observer, even early-morning exercise programs offer tantalizing possibilities. But it’s at night that the gloves — and so much more — come off: E!’s Wild On shows, Howard Stern, and the looped advertisement for the Girls Gone Wild videotapes: "Our most depraved, get-you-locked-up-if-you’re-not-careful videos yet!"

But there are limits. Television’s endless quest to show more and more skin has given rise to the somewhat melancholy innovation of bush- and breast-obscuring pixelation. This, in turn, has engendered a community of visual cryptologists — people who, I’m sure, could spot a nipple in a brick wall. An unadorned, unpixelated breast, however, is still not quite acceptable — as Janet Jackson discovered to her peril. And yet, even as Jackson stood before the cameras and offered up her somber mea culpa, even as penitent MTV execs announced they would from now on confine their naughtiest videos to late-night slots, you could detect a distant, guttural scraping sound — the shifting plates of propriety. Someone, somewhere, will go further.

But Howard Stern and Brooke Burke, take note: you are being watched. The Parents Television Council, the Culture and Family Institute, Morality in Media, Citizens for Community Values, and other arbiters of public morals remain ever vigilant, ready to fire off a shrill letter to whomever might be inclined to take notice. Not that this matters. What really keeps Howard from having three oiled-up porn stars sexually assault a sheep is that he is beholden to those who hawk their wares on his station. This is why subscription television — namely HBO and Showtime — is on the vanguard of dramatized sexual content, why The L Word can show us a woman with her face buried in another woman’s crotch. No advertisers to answer to.

Without the watchful gaze of Sony, Johnson & Johnson, and Campbell’s Soup to contend with, cable TV stations have adopted an anything-goes mentality in relation to sex. Over the past few years, we’ve had the brandished penis on Queer As Folk, boobs galore on Sex and the City and The Sopranos, homosexual rape on Oz, and a rather painful masturbation scene on Six Feet Under. Then there’s Showtime’s Family Business, a reality series about a family-run porn-production company in LA, whose combination of documentary-like gravity and cable-TV laissez faire constitutes a double whammy, allowing it to show us things we’d normally expect to receive in a plain brown wrapper.

Television is the perfect voyeuristic medium. In this sense, it is the perfect medium for men. The L Word, meanwhile, seems tailor-made for women. The interpersonal intrigue, the emotional explication, the complete lack of car chases — you can practically smell the estrogen. But if The L Word is a chick show, how to explain the ooh-la-lalalalala factor? Undoubtedly, many women will be fascinated and even aroused by the canoodling on display. Yet there’s no getting away from the fact that, when it comes to getting worked up over televised T&A, men win hands down. And up. Repeat as necessary. We, far more than women, are lookers.

So maybe the saving grace of The L Word — its ace in the hole, as it were — is that the show features a few lookers of its own. That is, it observes what might be called the Baywatch Principle. As anyone who has been saved from drowning must surely know, your run-of-the-mill lifeguard does not look like Pamela Anderson. Similarly, the average gay woman — without resorting to hairy-underarm, chunky-leg, spiky-hair stereotypes — is a far cry from the lesbian lovelies who people The L Word’s chic LA streets.

But will this be enough? In light of some of the other stuff on cable TV, The L Word does start to look pretty tame. Certainly, the nudity doesn’t take us places we haven’t been before. For women, it may be enough that the sex is so passionate, so apparently gratifying to its participants. But when it comes to copping an eyeful, men will always value quantity over quality. Perhaps this will be the show’s ultimate downfall. As Steve Almond’s friend put it, "Where all the titties at?"

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com