Our own fashion magazines show that this hasn't necessarily changed all that much. Women can look at sexualized images of women all day every day-just as men can look at superheroes in spandex and have that be part of a heterosexual identity. Same-sex desire didn't form the basis for a queer identity-it was just taken for granted. To us, this may look like submerged lesbian desire, but at the time, women's interests in other women were assumed to be typical for all women. She points to Victorian fashion plates, where women were often drawn staring at other women's breasts or to debates about birching, in which female readers wrote in to magazines describing in loving detail how other women should be whipped and chastised as punishment. Sharon Marcus, in her book Between Women, argues that during Victorian times, female-female erotic interest was seen as a standard part of heterosexual female identity. Women's magazines are filled front to back with female bodies arranged and commodified for women consumers. On the contrary, female bodies are objectified and displayed for a female gaze almost as commonly as they’re displayed for a male one. This isn't to say that the video is somehow breaking boundaries.
