After seeing the movie black./womyn.:conversations with lesbians of African descent–movietickets.com invited me to write a review. This is what I originally wrote:
Most mainstream ideas of who black lesbians are and what they are like come from images/media NOT created by black lesbians themselves. That’s why black./womyn: conversations… is such a breath of fresh air. The documentary contains interviews with a wide variety of black lesbians who discuss a multitude of topics.
I would say that the overarching theme of the movie is: How do you exist/survive in a world where everything that you are (black, female, lesbian) is NOT valued–if not downright despised?
Though people are frank and honest, it’s not a depressing film at all and has quite a bit of humor.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t post it because it is laden with profanity. It took me a few minutes to realize that the offending, profane word was “lesbian”.
According to it’s review guidelines, movietickets.com reserves the right not to post a review that contains “Obscenities, discriminatory language, or other language not suitable for a public forum.” Yet, Movietickets.com had no problem with showing the word “lesbian” in the movie title, selling me tickets to the movie, or sending me confirmation and review invite emails with the word “lesbian” out there for all innocent eyes to see.
I bet–and I can only guess at this because customer service for movietickets.com hasn’t responded to my email–that the site’s only goal is to keep knuckle-heads from using “lesbian” in a degrading manner. Having the word scrubbed from acceptable language does not solve the problem….
Just to experiment, I replaced the word “lesbian” to see what substitutes the comment box would take. What got flagged as profane: queer and gay. What was acceptable: carpet-muncher, lezzie, and muff diver. (I opted just to use “not straight“.)
So, good job movietickets.com–who needs words like lesbian, gay, or queer mucking up a public forum when carpet munching, muff divers will do just fine?
[Yes, I know that people can “report” comments with those other words–but it’s a sad day when “lesbian/queer/gay” is automatically assumed profane but “lezzie” is open to peer review.]
Tawanna Sullivan 