Today I worked many hours spreading compost, and the hours flew by because the entire time I listened to the podcasts of "Lesbian Soup."
Jules and Tera are lovers in their late twenties. As they themselves describe it, each podcast is mostly the two of them talking about sex, eating, and shopping for about 20 minutes. They try to keep to Tera's rule not have sex before recording the show, and that means that after talking about their lives--the mostly lesbian parts of their lives--they have to stop the recording and have sex.
Perhaps some people think this show is pornographic. Perhaps some people do get off by hearing two lesbians wonder about what you would do if you were making out with a woman and when you took her shirt off she had areolae that were unattractive to you. Some people might be turned on by two lesbians discussing whose butts they watched at the professional women's football game, or how they are completely grossed out by women who don't shave their legs, or wondering how it is possible for two lesbians to experience bed death but still stay together. ("Does that mean no more cuddling?")
The Lesbian Soup podcast is just two lesbians having an authentic conversation with each other. Even though these lesbians aren't like my lesbian friends, either as we were in our twenties or as we are now, I makes me so happy hear two lesbians sitting on the floor of their room, having a normal conversation, and being heard by lesbians everywhere--and others. What a miracle of technology, for us to listen to lesbians talking to each other, on their own terms, unmediated by anyone else.
Jules and Tera often say that they think they are bad lesbians because they don't fit certain stereotypical types of lesbian, and they think that they don't like what other lesbians like. (Astrology, for instance.) But what they don't appear to realize is that all lesbians say that about themselves. There are no lesbians who aren't unique, and all lesbians invent themselves.
This ability of lesbians, to invent ourselves as lesbians even when we don't think we fit in with the lesbians we know, is our particular miracle. Perhaps the days are fading fast where a young lesbian or young lesbian couple think that they are the first and only of their kind. But even when young lesbians know of other lesbians, they usually know that they don't fit in. All they do know is that a woman's body is paradise, and it is our common desire to spend as much time in there as we can.
Lesbian Soup is like eavesdropping on a never ending slumber party and I'm addicted to it now. I already know that I fall in to several of their categories of lesbians Jules and Terra don't like: I like to read, I'm old, I don't shave my legs, I'm political, and I wear clothes from the thrift store. I probably couldn't even fit Tera's description of the San Franciscan lesbians: "L-Word gone bad."
When I was in my late twenties, I wasn't just like Jules and Tera, but I was enough like them to wish today that we had had podcasting back then just so I could hear my own hubris and wonder and innocence. Not because I would want to return to who that woman was when I was younger, but so that I could even more deeply savor who I am now, and better sense, even more than I am right this minute. The heat of sex and love and passion and love and excitement and adventure in our twenties burns away so much of us that is not ourselves. Now I'm in my mid-forties, and can expect quite a few more adventures ahead of me. Lesbian Soup, so innocent and true, so passionate and private, so funny and silly, helped me appreciate with joyful expectation the changes in me yet to come.
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