Five years after Sarah Warn wrote about "TV's Lesbian Baby Boom," examining the way that television used motherhood story lines to desexualize lesbian characters and keep them firmly within normal standards of womanliness, the trend has not only continued, but has gone one step further.

On television shows such as ABC's Cashmere Mafia, Showtime's The L Word, Logo's Exes & Ohs and Showcase Australia's Satisfaction, story lines about lesbian mothers focus excessively on acquiring sperm, and present the process of lesbians becoming mothers as being at odds with happy lesbian relationships.

A recent example of this can be seen in Australian series Satisfaction, which is set in a brothel and includes among its characters lesbian sex worker Heather (Peta Sergeant) and her girlfriend, Ally (Jesse Spence).

Peta Sergeant (top) and Jesse Spence

No indication is given that Heather, the brothel's fetish specialist, is a lesbian until the third episode, the disturbingly titled "Jizz" (written by Matt Ford), which opens with Heather having sex with her girlfriend, Ally. Moments later, Ally's donor friend Garry shows up for an insemination (of Ally), and Heather and Ally's interactions thereafter are limited to brief scenes where they are mostly fighting about donors and pregnancy.

Garry's planned donation quickly falls through due to a homophobic girlfriend, thus allowing the narrative to refocus on TV's favorite element of lesbian motherhood: the search for sperm. Soon afterward, Heather is at work and calls Ally, telling her to meet her in the brothel's bathrooms in half an hour. Heather then has sex with an elderly client, fishes his used condom out of the rubbish bin, and meets Ally in the bathrooms, proposing to inseminate there and then.

Ally is disgusted by this proposal and upbraids Heather for the idea. But Ally's repulsion has no effect, and Heather later has unprotected sex with a client (whose fetish is to be a baby and considers Heather his "Mummy") in order to get pregnant, without Ally's knowledge or consent.

That a woman who should be well-versed in the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases would be perfectly willing to inseminate her partner with the sperm of an untested 60-something-year-old, and then have unprotected sex herself, seems farcical. The story line is evidence of the way that the hunt for sperm seems to drive television's lesbians to do strange and reckless things.

Similar behavior took place during the first episode of The L Word, when Bette (Jennifer Beals) and Tina (Laurel Holloman) invite a male stranger to have unprotected sex with Tina in order to get her pregnant. And this is after hosting a sperm-hunting party where the couple desperately trawls for any male donor. The idea that the desperation for sperm is so intense that it overrides one's sense of dignity — or even fears of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases — is more than troubling. In a world full of sperm banks, it is unrealistic and seeks to place men at the center of a scenario that does not, by definition, involve them.

A few weeks after Heather's unprotected sex on Satisfaction, she joyfully announces to Ally that she is pregnant. As one might imagine, Ally is not at all happy that Heather has done this, especially without communicating with her about it. This is the beginning of the end of their relationship.