The L Word has never billed itself to be anything more than a lesbian soap opera; however, it looks like the promo staff of The L Word took a cue from MTV and fully embraced the “sex sells” doctrine.

As queer women, we are often in a bind as to how to react to overtly sexualized images of queer women in the media. We are sexual beings, so part of us may react with some level of excitement, yet we are also put in the position of wanting to portray to the general public that we are not the type of sex hungry deviants that right-wing muckrakers claim that we are.

The Gossip Girl promos also fall into the vein of salacious and sensational, yet no one would assume that all straight people are deviant nymphos — only the straight people in Manhattan. Kidding, of course. I think. But then again, it’s just television for crying out loud! Shouldn’t we just loosen up? Maybe?

This promo poster seems to be just a tad over the top. Of course, I find the thought of Shane and Jenny knocking boots to be rather abhorrent, so I may be biased.

Dearest California,

This is your love, New York. We know we're 3,000 miles away and that long-distance relationships are trying, but we just want to let you know how much we love you.

Sure, we have our differences. Sometimes we really don't understand why your residents insist on driving to the grocery store even if they live only a few blocks away. Plus, we really don't get the whole L.A. culture, which we find a bit superficial. Don't get us wrong: In New York City we're just as superficial, but at least we're tactful about it, although you may counter that "tactful" is just a euphemism for "dishonest."

We know that you’re a bit unstable, but we love you for who you are. Sometimes you shake uncontrollably, which you blame on some guy named Andreas, and sometimes, someone named Santa Ana causes you to spontaneously combust. Our suggestion that you take a cue from us and go to therapy has gone unheeded, but we respect your decision.

Of course, we admit that we may wear a little too much black, and you may laugh when we insist that Long Island has nice beaches, but when it comes down to it, deep down inside, we're pretty much the same. We're two sides of the same coin — the coin called the United States of America.

On Nov. 4, 52 percent of your residents let you down by passing Proposition 8. Believe it when we say that we felt your pain all the way over here.

Beyoncé Knowles has set her sights on playing Wonder Woman.

"I want to do a superhero movie and what would be better than Wonder Woman?" she told the Los Angeles Times. "It would be great. And it would be a very bold choice. A black Wonder Woman would be a powerful thing. It's time for that, right?"

Although a lot of people would agree that an African-American, Hispanic or Asian Wonder Woman wouldn't be a shock in this day and age and would probably be welcomed, many people voiced their concern about Beyoncé's skills as an actress. Here are some of the comments from the above-linked TV Guide article:

Oh hell no! Don't get me wrong, Beyonce is a beautiful woman and a very talented singer, but she's a horrible actress. And we seriously don't need another Catwoman on our hands. ::shudders::

Beyoncé is a HORRIBLE actress and should not be cast as Wonder Woman. This casting would be a disgrace to the character of Wonder Woman.

OMG NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Wonder Woman can be any race but she CANNOT be Beyoncé !! She has to be played by someone with ACTING talent!!!

So the election is over, leaving the American populace in election withdrawal and, in acute cases, with severe episodes of delirium tremens. Just look at your Facebook friends’ status messages. Some of them probably look like this:

“What am I supposed to post on Facebook now that the election is over?”

“Help! I don’t know how to fill this post November 4th void! I feel empty inside.”

“Now what do we talk about?”

Well, for starters, the markets are still behaving like a ride at Six Flags, and Suze Orman will continue to shriek in glee as she denies you all of your material desires. But we don’t want to yank away the warm fuzzy blanket of hope and change and shock you back to reality with a cold blast of gloom and doom just yet. Let’s instead look forward to January 20th.

On that day, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. Since Watergate, cynicism has pervaded national politics. Until Barack Obama’s campaign, no recent politician has inspired voters to believe in the political process or inspired musicians to create works of art in support of his candidacy. Even Obama’s detractors cannot deny that his campaign was historic and represented a cultural shift in the landscape of American politics.

And really, can you imagine Will.i.am or any other artist creating the “Yes We Can” song for John Kerry?

I didn’t think so.

It would only be fitting for an inspired and current musical act to provide the live soundtrack to Obama’s inauguration. Certainly, as the Chicago Sun-Times suggests, the band or artist should be from Chicago.

To mangle a line from J. Lo: “Don’t be fooled by the votes that he got, he’s just Barry from the block.” So which Chicago band or artist should perform at Obama’s inauguration?

Wilco

The way Wilco built their fan base by marketing their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on the internet may mirror the way the Obama campaign built its voter base, but that is where the similarities end. Lo-fi indie pop is appropriate for quiet conversations in coffee shops and getting into philosophical conversations under the influence of cannabis in college dorm rooms, but Obama’s campaign was an inspired movement that resulted in nothing less than a massive thumping of epic proportions.

Sometimes you just have one of those days. Perhaps someone cut you off on the way to work, then you catch your backstabbing co-worker saying disparaging things about you to your boss in a power play to get ahead. And when the dreadful day is just about over and you are 10 minutes away from being able to soak in the tub or sink into the couch, you step outside of your office building, and a bird flying overhead craps on your new jacket.

Suddenly, you start entertaining fantasies of recreating the scene in Fried Green Tomatoes where Kathy Bates screams “TAWANDA!” and rams her car into the car belonging to the insolent teenagers who cut her off in the parking lot.

Then you become giddy at the thought of slipping laxatives into your co-worker’s stash of Dr. Pepper. Finally, you muse that a variation of coq au vin called bluejay au vin may actually be quite tasty.

Although you may recall that tired phrase you learned in Sunday school — you know, the one about turning the other cheek — revenge can certainly be cathartic.

Yesterday, The Onion's AV Club published a list of films about vengeful women. You think you had one of those days? Many of the women in the films on the list have had one of those lives. No wonder some of them left a body count that rivals that of Genghis Khan’s rampage through Asia.

The reptilian Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis was a guest on The Tyra Banks Show yesterday, and he spent a some of his precious airtime dissing Samantha Ronson, claiming that he disapproves of her relationship with Lindsay Lohan because he genuinely "cares" about LiLo.

"(Ronson is) very jealous. Samantha tried to start a fight with me. I care about Lindsay — she's not gay. She's being controlled by this... wretched woman, this Samantha."

"Wretched," eh? Let's make this very simple. If you had a teenage or college-aged daughter, which of the following second tier celebrities would you trust around her: Joe Francis or Samantha Ronson? Which one is a more "wretched" specimen? Let's see how they stack up against each other.

Gays and lesbians often project their own experiences onto the experiences of characters in non-queer-themed televisions shows or films. Reading queer subtext into television shows or films that probably weren't intended to contain queer subtext is especially easy when such shows or films involve characters who, by no fault of their own, were born with or somehow acquired superhuman abilities.

Mainstream society feels threatened by these individuals, treats them as "the other" and persecutes them, often by passing laws that discriminate against them. For example, for most of Heroes, Nathan Petrelli chose to hide his ability to fly so he could blend in with the rest of society, even initially denying that he had the ability to fly.

When Petrelli finally scheduled a press conference to make his ability known to the public, hetero viewers probably thought, "Wow, do you think he will levitate in the middle of the press conference? That would be cool!"

Queer viewers probably thought, "Nathan Petrelli is about to come out of the closet to the public! His mom is going to flip out!" (And how many of those queers gasped when he was shot before he could make the statement, believing that he must have been shot by an anti-superhuman extremist or a self-hating queer — excuse me — a self-hating superhuman, who was afraid of the repercussions of revealing the existence of superhumans to the public?)

Another example is The Incredibles, where the government regulates the behavior of superheroes. Any objective interpretation of The Incredibles would reveal absolutely no queer subtext whatsoever, but that doesn't prevent queers from rattling off parallels to institutional oppression of gays and lesbians.

If the name had not already been taken, the show Heroes should have been renamed Lost, because that’s how I feel after watching any given episode this season: Why are there more alternate futures than there are members of the Wu Tang Clan?

Why do characters on that show rotate in and out more frequently than bleached-blond bunnies rotate in and out of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion? Why is uber-villain Sylar suddenly a good guy? Why is the fresh-faced cheerleader Claire suddenly evil? Why does Angela Petrelli have such a nice figure, even though everyone in the show seems to have sprung from her womb?

David Lynch must have been hired as a creative director, because nothing on that show makes sense anymore.

This is why I’m going to keep things simple. The one thing we can agree on is that having superpowers makes a woman just a tad bit sexier. (Wonder Woman, anyone?) However, superpowers come at a great cost, especially if you are an ordinary woman trying to date a woman with superpowers.

Here are some of the female characters on Heroes, and the pros and cons of dating each one based on a combination of their superpowers and temperament.

Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere)

Pros:
— Everyone has fantasized about the cheerleader. Yes, you too.
— If you save her, you save the world.

Cons:
— May get angry at you and purposely drive her car into a brick wall. She will walk away unharmed. You won’t.
— A father so overbearing that he makes Joe Jackson of the Jackson family seem like a lamb.
— Feels no sensation in her body, so you’ll know she’s faking it (she's of age in real life).

Evil-meter:
— Either Lucy Diamond before she met Amy Bradshaw in D.E.B.S. (evil-ish), or Lucy Diamond after she met Amy Bradshaw in D.E.B.S. (not so evil) — the answer depends on which alternate future you happen to find yourself. Hence, evil-meter inconclusive. (But either way Lucy Diamond is sexy, and who knows — you could be her Amy Bradshaw, and she will turn out nice.)

Dateability index:
— Decent, but watch out for random people who may break into her house during your alone time and attempt to cut her head open. That always puts a damper on things.

In 1963, Edward Gorey wrote The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a book that relays the deaths of 26 children (each representing a letter of the alphabet) in rhyming couplets, accompanied by black-and-white drawings representing their deaths.

This week, Jessica Szohr, who plays Vanessa on Gossip Girl, let it slip to TV Guide that someone in the cast will die later this season:

There's a lot going on. There's a love triangle between Vanessa, Nate and Jenny, there's a funeral — that's all I can say. We can't talk about it!

Today, I present to you The Gossip Girl Tinies, in which I speculate on the means of death suffered by certain main and supporting cast members of Gossip Girl.

Back in June, M.I.A. set off rumors of an early retirement by announcing that her show at Bonnaroo would be her last show ever. Many were skeptical, but in August, she reiterated that she had no intention of returning to the music industry:

[Bonnaroo] was my last-ever show. And it still is. I stopped touring after that and I didn't want to make music again. I was quite happy to just leave it all behind. I was happy with what I had achieved.

As their hearts sank into their scuffed Converse Chuck Taylors, by early September, fans and music industry bloggers alike finally blew out the torch for their darling M.I.A.

This past Saturday, however, M.I.A. came out of retirement for a brief set at the Diesel xXx Party in New York City, and she brought along a surprise guest, whom we shall call “Mini M.I.A.”

M.I.A. showed off her lovely new lady lump at the Diesel party in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, a show that also featured Franz Ferdinand, T.I., Chaka Khan and N.E.R.D.

When I first started this column, its purpose was to poke fun of celebrities who were a little too adamant in declaring their heterosexuality. In a time when Clay Aiken’s declaration that yes, he is indeed gay is met with a collective yawn, and when Ellen and Portia’s wedding is treated as nothing more than a typical celebrity wedding, there is no question that coming out as gay or lesbian in Hollywood is no longer a death knell or — in most circumstances — even considered scandalous enough to guarantee that the masses will whisper about you for more than five minutes.

But certain elements of the media never got the memo, and this time, we turn our attention to these stragglers.

Earlier this month, Eamonn Holmes (co-host of British television show This Morning) interviewed Salma Hayek. During the interview, Mr. Holmes mistakenly believed that Salma Hayek had come out of the closet, at least halfway. (And, no we do not mean by starring as bisexual artist Frida Kahlo in the film Frida.)

The 42-year-old Hollywood star had been trying to tell the This Morning presenter that she was half Lebanese. However, Eamonn misheard her and made an embarrassing gaffe, thinking that the Mexican-born actress had “outed” herself.

Belfast-raised Eamonn seemed to be struggling to understand the Ugly Betty star’s accent and thought she said she was half a lesbian after he commented on the origin of her surname. At the start of the interview he said: “Hayek doesn’t sound very Mexican.”

As she tried to explain that her father was Lebanese, Holmes quickly asked: “You’re a lesbian?” Seeing the funny side, Salma lent forward saying “Lebanese” very slowly. Mortified by his mistake, he replied: “Oh sorry. I thought you were half lesbian. Forgive me.”

What exactly is a “half lesbian”?

In a move that may prove way too meta for the Joe Six Packs and hockey moms of this country, rumors are swirling that Sarah Palin will be appearing on Saturday Night Live to spoof Tina Fey, who, as you know, was single-handedly responsible for reigniting the show's popularity by playing Palin.

Is your head exploding yet? What will happen if the two bespectacled giants do end up meeting at the offices of 30 Rock? Will the mavericky pit bull in lipstick approach her doppelganger with her trademark folksy candor, before threatening to crack her skull with a flying hockey puck or a hunting rifle?

Sarah Palin: "Hi, Tina. Can I call you Tina?"

Tina Fey: "Sure."

Sarah Palin: "Doggone it, Tina. Those impressions of me sure have those SNL ratings jumpin'!"

Tina Fey: "Say it ain't so."

Sarah Palin: "By golly, even as the Dow falls like a moose staring down the barrel of my rifle, SNL ratings are blowing up, kind of like what I'd like to do to Russia and Iran! And gee whiz, it's all because of you, Tina! You really aredoing heaven's work!"

Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf is no angel. Blair is not above acts of violence such as taking a field hockey stick to her frenemy Serena van der Woodsen’s leg, Tonya Harding-style; nor is she above canoodling with smarmy date rapist Chuck Bass. But this just proves that Leighton Meester, who plays Blair, is a talented actress. In real life, it appears that Meester is as far away from the twisted and destructive Blair as one can get. The only similarity is that both the actress and the character she plays are delicious and have impeccable style.

Whereas last Monday on Gossip Girl Blair attempted to torpedo Serena’s moment on the runway by handing her the wrong dress, last Thursday Leighton Meester took to the runway in New York City’s Union Square to raise awareness about domestic violence.

“I think it’s an issue that everyone can take part in because it applies to everyone,” said Meester. “You can be a victim or someone you love can be a victim. The more people are aware, the more it can be prevented.”

Keeping track of who has joined the Sapphic sisterhood (otherwise known as the sisterhood of the traveling cargo pants) and who hasn’t is just so difficult these days. Sam is with LiLo, Naomi Watts is perfectly straight, Megan Fox once schtupped a stripper named Nikita and Katy Perry is still a nuisance. And that’s just in the last month alone.

But wait — there is more! In the third installment of "Celebrities That Are Not Lesbians," we cover media reports of possible lesbian tendencies of various female celebrities or declarations of heterosexuality by certain female celebrities and ridicule them.

Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue defies the aging effects of time. She does not look much different than she did when The Locomotion was burning up dance floors — well, minus the gravity-resisting teased '80s perm. Another unchanging aspect of Minogue is that she was not a lesbian in the 1980s, and she is still not a lesbian. This may go without saying, but as usual, there is a back story.

In September, Ms. Minogue mentioned that she might "go gay." She was quoted as saying, “God knows I can’t get a man — so maybe I should cross over.” (Because, you see, women become lesbians when they cannot get a man. Well, gee, I’m glad that I finally got that memo.)

In 1959, a doll of anatomically impossible proportions named Barbie was introduced to the public. Although Barbie has been called an anti-feminist icon, blamed for causing eating disorders and was even called "filth" by a Christian group, there is no question that Barbie has become a cultural icon. (I suppose one hasn't arrived until one has been called "filth" by a fundamentalist Christian group, so go Barbie!)

Barbie is also about to turn 50, which means that even our mothers and some of our grandmothers used to perform amputations on her and giggle while placing her in dirty poses with Ken (or with other Barbies).

To celebrate this upcoming milestone, I have compiled some side by side comparisons of Barbie and other cultural icons who have recently turned 50. Enjoy.

Barbie vs. Michael Jackson

Barbie	Michael Jackson
Went to the moon	Invented a dance move called the moonwalk
Has had more than 43 pets including 21 dogs, 12 horses, 3 ponies, 6 cats, a parrot, a chimpanzee, a panda, a lion cub, a giraffe and a zebra	Ran a zoo at the Neverland Ranch
Made of plastic	Reconstructed with silicone
A plaything of little girls	I'm not going to go there