Martha Stewart, my hotsie totsie dream girl
July 2004
I don't understand why so few lesbians want a naked Martha Stewart in their beds, complaining about the low thread count in their cheap sheets.
The gay men are gaga, the straight men and women have written up their naughty confessions ad nauseam (just try a quick Google search). But the lesbians? Brrrr.
I have a massive crush. I treasure a Christmas card a Martha employee sent me 15 years ago, knowing that Herself would have personally picked out its bucolic scene, and ordered all staff to mass-mail her aesthetic to the great unwashed -- on pain of dismissal.
The size of the signature would have been mandated from above, the placement of the inked postage mark stamped upon the envelope by a machine calibrated just so. Mmmm.
Who could remain untouched by such an obsessive need to control?
I can see through it all. Martha needs a good spanking.
I plot Martha's subjugation. My girlfriend rolls her eyes.
In fact, my girlfriend is cold to my need. Incomprehensibly, she refuses to say "It's a good thing" to me in bed. We've had rows over it.
Yet I ask for such a small thing. Some people play all sorts of sexual games they find marginally unappealing for the sake of keeping a lover happy! Not mine.
She's begun surreptitiously throwing away the National Enquirers I hoard. The ones filled with the vitriol of former friends who discovered they couldn't live up to Martha's standards. The ones with pictures of a devastated and bloated up Martha trying to cope with the guilty verdict that will send her to the hoosegow.
The ones featuring photographs of Martha's probable jail cell, with talk of how she'll need a prison protector, whom Martha will repay with sexual favors hidden behind a simple blanket hung by the cell bars....
A-HEM. Apparently, all this sexy beast-liness is related to my newfound domesticity.
"In today’s home-interior design and decorating magazines, photographic logic becomes erotica," writes Kim Golombisky, a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida. "At a time when U.S. working wives still do 70 percent of the housework, these magazines allow women to turn a system that exhorts them to be neurotic about housekeeping into a sexy vision of the house wiped clean of the family who makes housework."
"Designed magazine rooms are void of the family’s everyday living that disrupts the ideal of a perfect house, and so these pictures appear to be submissive to the homemaker’s will. In magazine rooms, readers take symbolic control of the home."
I dream of control, all right.
Gotta love academics, who need stereotypes to survive. What follows is that lesbians are culturally disconnected from that petty bourgeois pretty house mumbo jumbo. Many of us have rejected the paradigm, and the "proper" family with kids that leads into this deep-set need to regain control.
Which in turn makes me an original, a free thinking iconoclast and trail blazer. Ooooo.
Something weird is happening, though. My girlfriend is now sitting in front of the TV set every Sunday night at 6 P.M. Supper is eaten mere inches away from the glowing screen.
We keep watching a cooking show, starring a vaguely plump, dark-haired Brit named Nigella Lawson. Nigella is the opposite of Martha, a laissez-faire cook who enjoys her food -- and she enjoys making it easy.
Honey? Is everything okay? You want me to... WHAT?