Lesbian Mean Girls Meet Hot or Not

At the conference this weekend, I presented at the Fat Studies panel. My research is on body weight and heterosexual romantic relationships. Someone in the audience commented that fat phobia exists among some lesbians as well and told us about this website: Nonuglylesbians.  It is a livejournal site that mostly revolves around rating whether applicants are not ugly enough to be part of their “ugly-dyke hating beautiful-lesbian community”.  Lesbian and bisexual women post myspace-esque and sometimes nude photos of themselves and the already “stamped” members vote in the comments “yes” or “no” and often provide commentary as to why they made their decision. It takes 2/3 yeses to become part of the community.

I have been reading through some of the applications and it is terrible how mean they are for rejecting those girls (but it can also be terribly entertaining). I’m not a lesbian, but as I was trying to look at this site in an objective, social science kind of way, I found myself mentally voting yes or no, too.  I think that we have all been trained to evaluate attractiveness to some extent even when it is separate from sexual desire.

It is an absolutely superficial site, but it is also an interesting testament to countering the old stereotypes about the physical appearance of lesbians. There should certainly be room for the so-called lipstick lesbians who are very feminine, but why does being beautiful have to equate to being a vapid, superficial bitch? And in the absence of competing for men, does a certain kind of lesbianism just worsen the pressure of female beauty? Who better to judge female beauty than women who are already slaves to it?

Someone should do a research study on these girls.