Lesbian posture

Just back from seeing The Kids Are All Right, the lovely new American indie hit starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple struggling to deal with the reappearance of sperm donor Mark Ruffalo in their and their children's lives. It's been getting rave reviews all over the place and pretty much lives up to them, in an American indie not much happens but people spend a lot of time talking about it sort of a way. The magic is in the performances. Ruffalo is disarmingly charming as essentially a bit of a clueless jerk, and you can see why everyone falls for him and is disillusioned by him in turn. And Bening and Moore are utterly believable as the lesbian couple who've been together for so long that they're like a pair of old socks - and then like old socks, they start to get holes. Anyway, it's a film well worth seeing. But that isn't the point of this post.

There's an arch reference in the script to lesbian porn casting straight women to pretend to be gay and of course that's exactly what's happened here. Bening and Moore have clearly worked hard on their lesbian-ness (Bening more butch, Moore more femme) which stretches to costume, hairstyles, make-up (or lack thereof) and posture. Posture? Yes posture. Did you know there was a lesbian posture? No, neither did I. I have met many lesbian women in my time, from a paralympic sports coach to a Grace Kelly-lookalike filmmaker, and I have never noticed that they had a particular kind of posture. But I couldn't help but notice that Moore in particular affected a kind of slump-shouldered slouch that seemed to say "Look how I am not interested in traditional feminine ways of holding myself!" Yes, that might just have been the character. Except that I have also been watching the BBC3 lesbian drama 'Lip Service', which is terrible, by the way. Of the three main leads, all are played by straight women, two make no concession whatsoever in appearance or body language to lesbianism (except when they have sex, during which the body language is pretty conclusive, although the angles of the heads and hands are all slightly off but that's another story) - and the third, "butch" one, has choppy hair and slouchy, affected posture.

Who knows, maybe it is just coincidence. But to experiment, if those of you who are not lesbians will just take a moment to "act lesbian" at your seats... Did any of you do anything weird with your shoulders? Are you sure? Because I'm starting to wonder if we have all internalised some kind of odd belief about the way lesbians stand (or sit, I suppose) which only emerges in straight-acted lesbian dramas.