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In the French TV show
Dix pour cent [Call My Agent], the lesbian main character had sex with a man and got pregnant, which naturally angered a lot of fans. The creator of the show Fanny Herrero (a straight woman) spoke about the shocking plot twist with BuzzFeed France.
The main character of the France 2′s TV show
Dix pour cent, the second season of which just finished airing, is a breath of fresh air. Andréa is multidimensional, charismatic, stylish, outspoken, beautiful, caring, badass, funny and ... openly lesbian. A lesbian main character on a prime time TV show on a big national channel is something completely new for France.
![andrea.gif]( "andrea.gif")
Andréa played by Camille CottinIn the third episode of the second season, Andréa is competing with her boss, Hicham, to seduce a model. During a party at a castle, Hicham ends up winning the game and leads the model to his room. Not to be outdone, Andréa decides to join them. "You didn't think you'd have her all to yourself?!" she asks. Andréa and Hicham immediately forget about the pretty blonde, kiss passionately and roll on the bed.
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@RomainBurrel: It sucks to see one of the few and best lesbian characters sleep with a guy... #DixPourCent@PrincesseYuyu: LET US HAVE A LESBIAN ON A FRENCH TV SHOW, DAMMIT, STOP SHIPPING HER WITH HICHAM. It is depressing. #DixPourCent@keedz75: #DixPourCent Of course the gay character can't be happy being a lesbian and must prop up heterosexual fantasy by becoming biIn an interiew with Buzzfeed, Fanny Herrero, the creator of the show, said: "I received a few harsh remarks. There are gay women who took it badly. I can understand it because it's quite rare to have a lesbian main character on TV, so we shouldn't make her sleep with a guy, I get it. The attitude towards sex is quite free in
Dix pour cent, there's a freedom of tone, I thought that freedom of tone was enough and that it would let us play with the codes."
Fanny Herrero pointed out that while she was straight, there were two gay women on the writing team."Maybe I was too thoughtless. At that point, we did not realize that it could be hurtful. Maybe we should have been more careful, but we write characters, we do not write for an agenda. From a writing point of view, we have a chessboard of characters that we bring to life and sometimes we exaggerate a little bit for dramatic effect. Maybe we will push the characters faster to places where, in real life, they wouldn't go, where it would take more time to get."
@BabascoGueria:
1 lesbian character out of 1000 and even she has to sleep with a guy. How original.
Some homophobes harass lesbian women and are convinced that they can convert them. Thanks for perpetuating that cliché.Dix pour cent joins a long list of films and TV shows where a character who is clearly introduced as a lesbian soon ends up having sex with a man (e.g.
Chasing Amy,
The Kids Are All Right, French
Gazon Maudit,
Queer as Folk, American
Skins, Netflix show
Dear White People). (Some more examples
here.) Similar plot twist applies to gay men as well (see,
The Wedding Banquet,
Toute Première Fois,
Girls, French television series
Clara Sheller). And we could go on and on...
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A scene from Chasing Amy (1997)This kind of storyline is often criticised as an overused trope.
With this trope, the screenwriters also contribute to the invisibility of bisexual people. The idea that one must be either gay or straight is an example of casual biphobia.
Of course, we could argue that, in real life, these kinds of stories can actually happen. It is possible that a person identifies as "gay" or "lesbian," because they think it's the label that represents their identity the best, but one night they might have sex with someone of the opposite gender. It's not about banishing such stories from our screens.
But we should question their popularity: why do these stories appear so often in fiction? Why are gay people above all seen as hypersexual beings with wild sex lives? Why don't we see any straight male characters occasionally sleeping with other men?
Above all, this trope is so annoying to the viewers because it also echoes the same old homophobic refrain we keep hearing all the time: "You'll find the right man/woman,""But how can you be so sure that you're not straight? Did you experiment at least?", "It's only a phase." Moreover, according to some people, a sexual relationship between two women can't be considered "real" sex, so they will eventually end up sleeping with a man at some point. If you Google "lesbian," you'll soon stumble upon many porn scenes where people of the opposite gender make an appearance. So annoying dudes think it's a good idea to try their luck…
According to Fanny Herrero,
"Andréa is gay but she's free enough to have a one-night-stand with a man and not have a problem with it, because she is confident in her sexuality and self-fulfilled enough to not ask herself questions. Right from the start, I knew that this character would have a very rich, complex and unfettered libido, and for me that goes beyond sleeping with women. I think Andréa is more modern than that."On Andréa's pregnancy: "I wanted to confront Andréa with this question, because she is more rough in her attitude towards motherhood. I wanted to paint a portrait of a woman who becomes a mother differently from what we usually see,
I wanted her to be upset by this pregnancy." Andréa would've never agreed to become pregnant on her own volition, so it had to happen in a threesome. On the dubious upside, Andréa's ex-girlfriend Colette comes back because she sees how lost Andréa is in that situation. "I found that interesting to tell myself what the viewers would think: 'no she's not going to sleep with a man, we want her to go back with Colette'," says Fanny Herrero. "I like causing this kind of emotion."
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Andréa with ColetteSources:
BuzzFeedYTTwitter 12345![]()
