omg i had sex with shane!!!!!!!

Now that it’s in its final season, and I’ve decided to at least make an effort at not being the world’s worst lesbian, I’ve caved and finally started watching The L Word. On my other group blog, Anne McCarthy did a post on literary identification. What literary characters, Anne asked, do you identify with, and why? Onto whom do you project yourself? My answer was typically perverse and not altogether facetious:

Sometimes I feel like my inner Jekyll and Hyde is like Cynthia Kirkpatrick and her mom [of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters]. And when I first read Wuthering Heights, I first thought that I was like Catherine, but by the end of the novel I realized that I was really mainly like Linton Heathcliff. And in case I haven’t revealed too much of myself already, I really identify with The Clown in The Tragedy of Sir Richard Calmady [I bet the only way you’d know what book I’m talking about is if you’ve ever taken a class with Talia Schaffer]. What can I say–my strongest identifications have been with characters in Beckett novels and Breillat films–which is a good reason why I should be studying mid-Victorian novels…

Isn’t the whole point of literature to show you that everything you hate is merely a projection of yourself? When I was a silly undergraduate who actually enjoyed reading, I only got into a book if I felt it was about me — not just something I related to, but something that described a side of me to myself that I had not quite verbalized or narrativized. Now I have more fun with self-projection, and make it into something like an experiment. What if I acted as if some character were really me in the gushy adolescent kind of identification, but that character really wasn’t like me at all?

If you watch The L Word, you probably hate Jenny, and have perhaps been traumatized by last night’s episode. (My co-chair informs me that straight girls are more upset than lesbians, since sleeping with crazy roommates is par for the course for us.) I haven’t met anybody who hasn’t hated Jenny. So, contrarian that I am, of course I have to identify with her. And whenever I hear somebody talk shit about Jenny — played by Torontonian-by-birth Mia Kirshner — I have to say “That’s just because you’re prejudiced against Mias from Canada!” Self-projection is so much more fun when it’s based on something totally meaningless. And it’s even more fun with you get to sleep with the hottest chick on The L Word! And everybody else in your incestuous circle of friends gossips about your sex life! I guess you’d have to be a poor misunderstood Mia from Canada to know what I mean…

~ by Mia Chen on February 3, 2009.