The Effects of Misrepresentative Sapphic Music

Existing music about women loving other women fetishizes sapphic relationships, and it took me years to come to terms with my own identity because of it.

Written and Illustrated by Minnah Zaheer

When I first started writing this article, I intended to make a playlist called “Pornographic Sapphics.” The title was meant to grab your attention, and the playlist was going to be filled with songs about sexual sapphic relationships. I planned a playlist centered around sapphic artists being explicitly sexual. But when I started digging through my own playlists and searching for new sapphic artists, I realized just how rare it is to find a song about loving women by a woman who actually loves women. Straight artists are the ones primarily producing songs about engaging in relationships with other girls, and they tend to fetishize the existence of lesbianism.

Growing up surrounded by this music shaped me in ways I never thought were possible. As I grappled with my own sexuality, I found myself discouraged by the lack of songs about gay relationships between girls. The few that did exist felt dishonest and incredibly exploitative.

One of the first songs I remember hearing about a relationship between two women was Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” It was also one of the first times I had ever been exposed to the idea of two women interacting in the same way heterosexual couples do. I was barely 10 years old when the song came out and gained chart-topping popularity, and it shaped my early perception of girls kissing girls as a fad, or an act done to attract male attention.

So when I started questioning my own sexuality, I immediately felt a wave of shame surrounding my attraction to women.

This experience continued well into my teenage years, from when I started identifying as bisexual to when I realized that I’m, in fact, a lesbian. I watched the music video for Christina Aguilera’s “Not Myself Tonight,” in which Aguilera sings the lyrics “I’m kissing all the boys and the girls / Someone call the doctor ‘cause I lost my mind,” over and over again just because of my fascination with its explicit depiction of Aguilera in bondage gear dancing with another woman. The music video for “Telephone” by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé depicts the two women in a relationship: they take bites out of the same cheap packaged snack food, call each other “honey bee,” and hold hands as a heart transitions between the final scenes and the credits. In the video, Gaga is released from jail and then the two of them poison an entire diner of people.

Although the anger came later, I initially didn’t think much of this narrow-minded depiction of women’s sexuality. In my mind, I genuinely thought all relationships between women were purely sexual in nature, and I didn’t even realize that women can experience romantic connections with one another. Only as I grew older — and did more frantic 3 a.m. Googling as a result of several sexuality crises — did I realize that girls don’t have to feign attraction to one another for men’s viewing pleasure. We can be attracted to each other in a romantic and sexual way the same way heterosexual couples can.

When I learned that women can love each other the same way a man and woman do, I remember feeling like my entire life was clicking into place. I was so relieved to think about possibly ending up with a woman, and I eventually realized that I wasn’t attracted to men at all. Years of self-doubt and intense self-reflection later, and I’ve started to come to terms with who I am.

But I’m incredibly lucky. Not all sapphics have made it through their journey, and it’s a very difficult path to traverse. And it’s only made harder by music’s sexualization of sapphic relationships bombarding us every day.

As I’ve grown up and ravenously consumed music throughout my teenage years, I’ve hunted for more sapphic artists. Hearing girls who openly like girls sing about their sapphism was something I didn’t even know could exist, and it opened up a whole new world of representation in music for me. I began to feel comfortable with myself, and my shame began to slowly melt away. But I suffered through years of self-doubt, and I had to claw my way through it before I was able to find happiness.

It’s critical that we start promoting the work of sapphic artists who sing about being sapphic, like St. Vincent, Zolita, Hayley Kiyoko, Janelle Monáe, Halsey, and tons of others who haven’t yet achieved the levels of fame and acclaim they deserve. Bisexual and lesbian women are woefully underrepresented in all forms of media, and the importance of putting our voices at the forefront of discussions of and art relating to our own sexualities cannot be understated.