Last week, Mel Bclaimed - in an interview with Piers Morgan - that she once slept with bandmate Geri Halliwell. “We were best friends,” she said. “It just happened. Have you ever done that?” Revealed in the papers on Sunday, it's old news now; the headlines about Scary and Ginger’s ‘secret sex’ have been splashed everywhere, and it’s become a topic of conversation for Piers on Good Morning Britain. While it’s debatable whether Mel has only just admitted what, supposedly, happened just in time forThe Spice Girls’reunion tour (all publicity is good publicity, even if it has apparantely infuriated Geri and thrown the tour in jeopardy!) what isn’t up for debate is that some of the language surrounding their encounter should stay in the decade the group thrived in: the Nineties.
“Mel B says she ‘spoke at length’ with Geri Halliwell yesterday after lesbian sex bombshell,” The Sun Online shouted today, in an attempt to move the story on, citing a chat that Mel had on Australian radio. Other articles have claimed they ‘enjoyed a lesbian fling’, called it ‘saucy’ and a ‘steamy one night stand.’ The MailOnline, meanwhile, said it was a ‘shock sex confession’. However, it’s not just the papers who are continuing to blow what Mel said out of proportion.
It is 2019. In this context, we do not need the word lesbian as an adjective before sex, because, hello, it is obvious that both Mel and Geri are women. Using it seems like it just there to titillate, make more of a point that two women - who were incredibly close friends - happened to have sex. Whatever happened has been turned into something more salacious, catering more for the male gaze. The fact we are all finding it so ‘shocking’ only fetishizes what happened even more, which is pointless - it happened twenty years ago, and it wasn't sex performed for anybody else.
And, really, we need to ask ourselves, is it shocking for two women to have sex? No, of course it isn't. And it's hardly suprising that these two women have - supposedly - had sex: Mel is openly bisexual, and Geri even said she would shag Mel in an unearthed MTV interview. Geri even said she’d had sex with a famous woman in an interview with Howard Stern in 2003, where she is now believed to have been referring to Mel. Does that really merit this being dubbed a 'lesbian sex bombshell?'