Where once there were fishnet stockings and cloudy-lensed pillow fights, now there are wistful feminine dreams of sharing shoes. Has the heterosexual man's lesbian fantasy been overtaken by the heterosexual woman's?

While The Kids Are All Right (the family comedy in which Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play a lesbian couple with two teenage kids) gathers excellent reviews, and celebrities such as Mary Portas, Jane Lynch, Alison Goldfrapp and Portia de Rossi are increasingly pictured looking blissfully happy beside their female partners, the image of the gay woman is finally going mainstream. Britain, therefore, is duly amending its fantasies.

No longer do lesbians just exist in the minds of the Nuts reader, but in the real-life world of pap shots, society pages and telly – BBC3 is even screening a gritty Scottish lesbian series starring the one with all the hair from Hollyoaks. As they fade from the masturbatory male dream, their exoticism paled by the proof of proper, grown-up ladies who rarely have the look of someone yearning for the touch of a boy with back acne, lesbians are appearing more and more in the fantasies (occasionally sexy, more often domestic) of straight women. Their glamour has shifted. Women have reclaimed the lesbian.

Instead of the one-note "And I'll just watch" fantasies of yesterday's men, or the icky, over-sexy imitations in pop videos, women are imagining the lingering, complex bliss of both them and their lover enjoying the same TV programmes. Of being able to extend best-friendships into marriages, advising each other on non-frizz hair products, eventually bringing up well-balanced children in a brilliant, bookish house and chuckling on leather sofas at late-night BBC4.

While it's unlikely that straight women will be furtively crouched over their laptops of an evening, searching for videos of kindly looking girls with intelligent eyes asking about your day, their minds are certainly clackering away. Is theirs as patronising a fantasy as those developed for men? Maybe, but it's so much cosier. And less oily.





BEAR-FACED CHIC



"The most important piece of furniture in a house," he says, "is the garbage can." When he reads a paperback, he rips out the pages as he goes. When his desk gets a bit messy, he buys a new one. He matches his gloves to the colour of the French daily sky and, after losing mountains of weight on a diet that sees him fasting between the hours of 8am and 8pm, he sprinkles dark chocolate around his house like potpourri, there for the smell alone.

This month Steiff launches a limited-edition teddy bear in Lagerfeld's image. As autumn draws in, with its white-suede skies, I can't think of anything I'd rather cuddle up to.



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