Being a good, God-fearing, church-going Catholic, I decided to spend yesterday’s holiday drinking and watching the season finale of Showtime’s The L Word. I can’t think of a better way to commemorate the second coming of the biggest of all L words: The Lord. Honestly, if you think about it, it makes about as much sense as painting eggs and dressing as a rabbit.

First of all, I must say that I am a guy, and that I haven’t seen the entire series. Since moving to New York, I’ve either lived with women who enjoy the show or have been friends with women who enjoy the show. Actually, use of the word “enjoy” might be inaccurate. While my friends will tune in every week without fail, they spend  most of the episode talking about how they hate every single character. How Jenny is a superficial bitch, Bette is selfish and annoying, Shane will fuck (and fuck over) anything that moves, Max doesn’t get any respect, and so on. Hell, even Alice can be a jerk.

It is also worth noting that I am usually (with a couple of exceptions), the only man at these viewings and represent what has affectionately been named The Penis Section. It is an interesting thing to watch steamy lesbian sex scenes (and for serious, there are a lot of steamy lesbian sex scenes) surrounded by your female friends. Is this totally hot? Am I allowed to say that? Or, despite all of the sexiness, do I wish that Shane wasn’t cheating on someone? That she had kept her clothes on and tried to maintain a stable relationship with the latest sweet-natured, loving person that she has decided to fuck over? Wait a minute, why do I want Shane to keep her clothes on? What is going on here?

Last night’s episode is a perfect example of why the show confuses me. There is a movie being made about the gals, and it was being directed by Jenny (cold, heartless, egotistical, possibly the lovechild of Josef Stalin and a really hot, fashionable, mean lesbian) but was taken over by Adele (cold, heartless, egotistical, possibly the lovechild of Augusto Pinochet and a really hot, fashionable, mean lesbian) who blackmailed the production team with a sex tape of Jenny and some young actress who then ends up hooking up with Jenny’s good friend Shane (crazy hot, sexy, other synonyms for crazy hot and sexy, possibly the love child of Aphrodite and Helen of Troy – yeah that’s right, they had a kid) who is caught in the act and feels bad. This is a story line? What are we, twelve?

And this brings me to the conclusion I reached last night. While I have looked up The L Word on IMDB, and it says that the show is written by mostly women who have worked for various other shows and movies, I have concluded that this is false information and that the show is actually written by twelve year-old boys. How else can you explain an episode from three weeks ago where the group sat around a campfire, told shitty ghost stories and then played a game of Never Have I Ever (which brough about the major dramatic tension of the episode)? How do you explain that no matter what is happening on the show, there is a sex scene of some kind every 4.5 minutes? Josef Stalin and Augusto Pinochet could rise from the dead as fire-breathing monsters with the sole purpose of destroying the Los Angeles community in which all of these women live (and maybe reuniting with their love children), and Shane would still have sex with a flight attendant on the wing of a fighter jet plane while her current girlfriend watched angrily through the plane’s thick plastic window.

Despite this, I will probably continue to watch The L Word when it returns in 2009. But why? It is an oft-poorly written, mainstream soap opera about successful, wealthy women in Los Angeles who like to lie, cheat on each other, fuck over their friends, humiliate each other in public, drink, do drugs and have lots and lots of sex. Oh wait, I think I just answered my own question.