There's an astonishing exchange in Chapter XIV of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which Mellors reveals to Connie the short and unhappy history of his relationships with women, beginning with a schoolmaster's daughter who was pretty and romantic, but sexless; and ending with Bertha Coutts, his wife, who enjoyed sex, but could only achieve orgasm by grinding her own coffee.
Mellors is contemptuous of the first type; the idealistic women who love everything about love, except fucking. But it is the latter type whom he really hates and seems to fear; the active type like Bertha, that like to bring themselves off by wriggling and shouting and clutching at themselves. These women, says Mellors, who dare to seek clitoral stimulation and require more than vaginal penetration by the penis in order to come, are mostly lesbian:
"'And do you mind?' asked Connie.
'I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'
'But do you think lesbian women are any worse than homosexual men?'
'I do! Because I've suffered more from them. In the abstract, I've no idea. When I get with a lesbian woman, whether she knows she's one or not, I see red.'"
- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), p. 203.
This passage - one that has long troubled and rightly angered many female readers and critics of Lawrence - demonstrates why we are justified in using the term lesbophobia as something distinct from the more commonly theorized phenomenon of homophobia.
Clearly, there is an added component of sexism in lesbophobia and, indeed, a violent element of misogyny. I think the only admirable thing about this passage is that it doesn't seek to disguise the latter. Rather, it explicitly demonstrates how quickly misogyny turns murderous.
Sadly - shamefully - lesbophobia seems to be something that is increasing in our society; or, at any rate, something that it is increasingly OK to articulate. The fact that many gay men and straight women are also guilty of directing abuse or acting in a prejudicial and discriminatory manner towards lesbians is doubly sad and shameful.
Thankfully, this is not Southern Africa and we do not witness the horror of corrective rape in the UK. But such vile hate crime flourishes when good people do and say nothing. Or when writers and intellectuals who should know better, appear to aggressively enforce heteronormative values and condone the gang rape and murder of women who don't wish to submit to male sexual power and phallic authority (women who want none of that).
