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I don’t relish the thought of an edited Angelina Jolie, Penelope Cruz, or any actress, for that matter. I enjoy watching Angelina’s mouth move and glisten with every L word that slides off her tongue. But surely Angelina is aware of the real problems lesbians face today. Would asking her to be more thoughtful and responsible really be a bad thing, especially when there’s more than enough irresponsibility to go around?

We can always count on desperate newcomers like China’s Bai Ling to confuse sex with sexuality on a regular basis ("I love beautiful women … Since I've been in the United States, many women have approached me … I've gone past my fear and have gone forward to feel and have experiences with women. But I always tell them I prefer men.").

Likewise, we can depend on the women (I use that word loosely) of The Real World and Road Rules to drink way too much alcohol and amuse their male teammates with sloppy, wet, lesbian (again, word used loosely) kisses that serve only to perpetuate the lesbian-as-entertainment model that helps make MTV so popular with young men.

But at what point, and to whom, do we say, “Knock it off, already!”? Should we care that a star is bi today and straight tomorrow? Should we be bothered that the definition of bisexual is constantly up for grabs? Do we—real, everyday, run-of-the-mill lesbians and bisexuals—forgive these immature folks for desperate acts of self-promotion in the name of good entertainment?

Hell, I don’t know. Maybe.

Entertainers are entertainers; they’re not activists, politicians or linguists. And they, like the rest of us, aren’t perfect. We all know someone desperately in need of an internal edit function, after all. Besides, if we were to raise the Hollywood-opinion bar to meet a higher standard, I’m not sure where we’d put it. There’s really not that much space between the rails that mark comments made by Jessica Simpson and those made by our not-so-great but powerful leader George W. Bush.

Poor Jess, the concept of an unexpressed thought is foreign to her. And President Bush? Let’s just say that if a reporter from Access Hollywood were to corner him on the White House lawn and ask his honest opinion of The L Word and Queer as Folk, he’d probably say something like, “Gay men are promisculess and lesbians do nothing to fertilizate the popularity of the country.”

Give that man a gold Rolodex when he retires! He deserves it.

That said, until this nonsense gets out of hand let’s have some fun with the Hollywood lesbians, bis, and Bais. With our tongues firmly planted against our cheeks let’s watch these beautiful people who speak without thinking or who misuse words they clearly don’t know the meaning of and create new words by combining portions of the words they don’t know the meaning of with popular suffixes.

Maybe if we imagine a world wherein all people—in and out of Hollywood, gay and straight or somewhere in between—mean what they say and say what they mean, we’ll one day live in a happy and logical place, wherein every word spoken means, well, something.

Kim Ficera is the author of Sex, Lies and Stereotypes: An Unconventional Life Uncensored. Email her at kim@kimficera.com

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