That lesbianism or the suggestion of it on Ally McBeal is designed to attract the male audience is unabashedly asserted by the series, as the writers explicitly state when Ling and Ally decide to dance together suggestively in order to excite a group of men. "You know what arouses men and frustrates them at the same time?" Ling asks Ally. "Two beautiful women--into each other" (Season 3, Episode 7).

In fact, most of the lesbian kisses on Ally McBeal were engaged in by the heterosexual female characters in order to elicit a specific response from a man--such as when Ally kisses Elaine (Jane Krokowski) in an attempt to convince an unwelcome male suitor that she’s really a lesbian (Season 2, Episode 7), then kisses Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith) in another episode for the same purpose (Season 2, Episode 9).

In the world according to Ally McBeal, lesbianism is just another weapon in the war between the sexes, a tool for heterosexual (heteroflexible) women to use to manipulate or supplement the affections of men.

But at the same time, the show also deliberately implies that the women themselves enjoy the experience. After Ally kisses Georgia, she accuses Georgia of "[using] tongue"--i.e. enjoying it--and when Ally and Ling kiss, both women cautiously agree "that didn't suck" and want to do it again.

Even Nelle (Portia de Rossi), one of the only women at the law firm whom Ally doesn't kiss at some point on the show, confirms the idea of heteroflexibility when she reassures Ling "You think you're the first heterosexual woman to fantasize about kissing another woman?" (Episode 2, Season 3).

Of course, believing that (heterosexual) women really do enjoy lesbian encounters is a necessary element of heterosexual male fantasy, so on one level there is nothing subversive about suggesting this on Ally McBeal. But it opens the door to the possibility, however slight, that the women might actually like it too much, which is where it gets really interesting.

If, as Adrienne Rich writes in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," what men really fear is "that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional…access to women only on women’s terms" (p.236), then the increasing frequency of lesbian lip locks on Ally McBeal should make male viewers increasingly uncomfortable, because some of these heteroflexible women might actually discover they're bisexual (or even lesbian), instead of heteroflexible.

Fortunately for most straight male viewers, there is never any real danger of that happening on Ally McBeal: the sexuality of recurring female characters are always heteroflexible (or heterosexual), never bisexual or lesbian.

The series clearly exploited lesbian sexuality for ratings--it prominently featured most of the lesbian encounters in promos for those episodes and it almost always scheduled those episodes for 'sweeps' periods--and the storylines and characters on Ally McBeal reinforced negative stereotypes about lesbians and bisexual women for a laugh just as often as it challenged them.

But taken cumulatively and in the context of a lack of sexual encounters between women on other primetime television shows during the same time period, it is arguable that the sheer number of scenes on Ally McBeal showing or discussing same-sex encounters between women contributed to desensitizing the American public to the topic (and images) of lesbian sexuality.

It also laid the groundwork for characters like Jessie on Once and Again, Lena on All My Children, and Jenny in the upcoming series The L Word--television characters who had previously only had relationships with boys/men, but for whom the collision of curiosity and opportunity causes them to realize not that they're heteroflexible, but that they're lesbian or bisexual.

In normalizing heteroflexibility, Ally McBeal inadvertently helped to normalize lesbianism and bisexuality, as well, and in this way the show is at least partially responsible for the sharp increase in lesbian characters on television in the last few years.

Despite its efforts to paint heterosexuality as the norm, Ally McBeal has actually achieved the opposite--which may turn out to be one of the show's greatest, if most ironic, legacies.

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