My wife and I watch “My House is Worth What?” and “House Hunters” every night, plus random home improvement shows every now and then. It seems to us that gay (mm) couples are adequately represented (in proportion to their presence in non-TV society), but that lesbian couples are hardly ever shown in these shows.
Is there a reason for this perceived bias? Is this bias real or just imagined by us? Are they numerically less present? Do they not own homes? Not appraise them and resell them daily? Not want to show them on TV?
please don’t shoot. Notice that this is CS. I call that humor. Read the whole post before grilling.
One couple lives next door to me. But they aren’t out house hunting.
Seriously, the number of male-male couples is tiny and the tiny of female-female couples even tinier. They in total consisted of 1% of households in the 2000 census. Even assuming they’ve doubled that’s still a small number.
If you’re seeing enough male couples to notice, then maybe they’re overrepresented.
There’s two lesbian couples on my block, and I see a lot of lesbian couples and very, very butch women at the nearby dog park. I’m in a middle-class inner ring suburb of Cleveland.
There’s really not lesbian neighborhoods to the same extent that that there’s gay neighborhoods. Lesbians may be concentrated in some parts of a city or region, but generally not to the extent of gay men.
Here in Northeast Ohio, if you’re a gay man, you’re going to live in Lakewood, or else be very, very lonely. Lesbians, on the other hand, are really scattered around the region. There’s more in denser, more liberal and more white collar inner ring suburbs, and fewer in the loop-and-lollypop sprawl beyond, but there’s really no lesbian neighborhood.
One of the reasons for this is that it’s more acceptable for two women to live together long-term than it is for two men, and that goes back a LONG time. Two “spinsters” living together, even with some amount of public affection, doesn’t attract as much attention as two men living together long-term, especially if they don’t cover for obvious affection for each other.
Of course, nowadays, it’s not so much of a huge risk for two men to be “found out”, but in the old days it was.
Boston marriages. There were a few on my block even when I was a kid.
Crunching Census data, I’ve noticed that there’s more female same sex couples sharing a residence than male same-sex couples. I know two straight women that bought a house together, and from what I understand it’s not that uncommon of an occurrence.
Lesbians in general are a lot less socially visible than gay men. My personal theory is that our society doesn’t take female sexuality seriously. So we look at lesbians as just women playing around till the men get home- not really something significant enough to have public dialogue about.
Seriously though, the 2nd poster had it right: lesbians couples generally don’t have as much money as gay men couples. That makes them “less interesting” for those kind of shows.
