Which L Word Character Are You?

It’s hard to live every day without knowing which L Word character you are. I mean, we all think we know, but there’s only one way to know for sure if you are a Jenny, Tasha, Bette, Tina, Max, Helena, Alice, Dana, Carmen or Shane. It’s taking this quiz.

Which L Word character are you?



































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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3279 articles for us.

105 Comments

  1. Helena Peabody! This is so unexpected! I have SO many questions for my mother, the inventor of Lesbianism Until Graduation, Peggy Peabody!

  3. I got Bette, and then took it again to get Alice, because I feel like I’m a mixture of both–funny and forthright, but also an over-emotional art snob.

  4. i took this quiz twice, and put different answers each time, and both times i got jenny, and we are in a fight

  5. Alice! I’ve only seen the first two seasons plus a handful of episodes from Generation Q… but somehow, I expected this, and I’m not mad about it!

  7. Never have I experienced such an intense level of creeping dread with every answer!

    Was pretty convinced that I would end up as Max because gotta fix that internet, but fortunately got Dana!

    Now I will systematically retake to see if Peggy Peabody is a result because she is the only acceptable character.

    • Sally my favorite thing is when Max talks internet, he’s like “I wrote a web-page, you’ve gotta go with a 128bps modem” and I giggle like a schoolgirl

      • Well if you don’t have a 128kbps modem how are you going to handle all those internet searches?!

    • I was like “Oh no, I have to pick novelist, but oh no” but I also ended up with Dana.

  8. I got Alice – so yup, it picked up the ADHD*. I don’t have much else in common with her, though, so I’m kinda curious about the more granular breakdown of my all-over-the-map answers.

    (Seriously, if you recognize to the way Alice thinks, particularly around her “who’s indirectly slept with who” chart – ADHD is wildly underdiagnosed in women and usually doesn’t look anything like the stereotypes – particularly in women. I have no idea if the people who created the show realize they created an extremely accurate ADHD character).

    While I don’t think any fit perfectly this is likely the most accurate of the available options. I’ve only seen part of the original L word, so can’t comment on the more recent one.

    *I do not know if the show creators realize they created a dead accurate ADHD character – but they did. And If someone recognizes the way Alice thinks in themselves – particularly the way she makes connections between information – it may be worth looking closer at ADHD. It’s wildly underdiagnosed in women and usually looks nothing like the stereotypes (or the name) would imply.

    • I got Bette, changed all my answers and got Bette again, and then my girlfriend came over and got Tina… terrifyinh

  12. “Oh no” was my first thought when I saw this quiz. But then I got Carmen.

    I wish I was a very good dancer.

  13. Helena?!?!?! I don’t know how to interpret this… hot rich girl makes good I guess, except for I’m not rich ;)

  14. I feared it from the first answer onwards and it has happened… Jenny! Well, my partner is Bette, so that is also happening :D

  15. Does “Welcome to the dollhouse” inevitably leads to Jenny? So be it. My girlfriend is still laughing.

    • hahaha no the test just counts the number you got of each person and if there’s a tie they pick the result randomly I guess, which i DO wish we had more control over BUT

      i will say when i put “welcome to the dollhouse” (one of my favorite films of all time!) i was like, ok this is so niche that whomever picks this and gets jenny has only themselves to blame

      • I saw Welcome to the Dollhouse, thought oh wow that’s both excellently unusual for a nineties film list entry *and* the one on the list that fits best, went for it, and yep, Jenny… I accept that I am the one to blame here ;)

        I cut school to go and see Welcome to the Dollhouse on the huge full screen at the Odeon West End during the LFF back when it first came out and I was profoundly in the midst of the black clothes, ripped black tights and occasionally purple lipstick phase of my youth and did mildly rebellious things like skipping school but always in order to like see more art that my parents wouldn’t have let me go to, so a bit of a geeky rebellion all in all…I hadn’t thought about any of that in ages and oh my heart aches gently! but a thank you from this complicated person for the excursion down memory lane

      • I knew it was Welcome to the Dollhouse that did me in! You baited me into being Jenny and you’ll be hearing from my lawyer!

    • I got Alice, I love her but I don’t think I’m like her, I’m not a funny and cute person like her and I don’t gossip too :/ I love her the most thought :3

  19. I got Tina, which is…okay, I guess, officially? Please tell me I’m not the secret villain of the piece…

  20. ok so real question for y’all as doing these quizzes is pretty new to us and we’re still sorting it out: this quiz was hard to make because there were so many characters that you could get a result based on answering for the same option 2-3 times. but also i know online personality quizzes tend to be pretty short so i wanted to keep it tight, so i narrowed down my 20 questions to like, 13. so the question is how many questions is too many questions for y’all? how many is ideal?

    • Now I’m disappointed we didn’t get your original 20 questions! More questions isn’t a problem when all the options are fun references like this.

    • I’d say 15-ish is enough for me? But I wouldn’t be upset if it was closer to 20.

      These quizzes are kind of silly, but they’re very entertaining, and we can all use some silly lighthearted fun these days.

    • I personally would answer 20 if it means having more options! The 13 felt like they went by really fast!

    • the funner the questions, the less you notice length. the number doesn’t matter to me if i feel like the result is accurate or i cracked up getting to there.

    • I don’t think 20 questions is too many, the choices are always entertaining. I’ve been enjoying the quizzes. Sometimes I don’t have the mental energy to engage with full articles or heavier topics but I can take a few minutes mental break to take a silly quiz.

    • 15-20 is probably more than fine for AS folks, but may be a bit much if the quizzes are also designed to bring in new readers.

    • I think the tiring part is not too many questions, but having too many options for answers because choosing an answer takes up mental bandwidth.

      I don’t know the solution for this because you’ve probably got to have an answer for each character…unless you had less characters, or streamlined the answer flow to a few broad categories of character like “Bette and Shane would both choose coffee over tea, booze or juice/Bette, Shane and Jenny would all cheat on their partners but tell their partner about it in the most dramatic way possible” and then differentiate between those broader categories at the end to narrow down to a single character? idk

      • My partner said the same thing about too many answer options on a couple of these quizzes. But I’ve also seen plenty of AS comments complaining when there’s not an exactly perfect option to every question for the specific individuals taking it. So good luck figuring out that balance! I like Maria’s suggestion above.

        • i think question fatigue also results from not having options that you like/fit you. perhaps a way to solve is to have fewer required questions, which allows participants to scale back effort and accept less accuracy? so as many questions it takes, but core 10-20 required, and you’d need good ux to diff – *s are common, but easy to miss. i like color: bg color is easier to notice, but text color cold also help.

          btw, super loving this crowdsourcing/brainstorming. autostraddle people are the best!

      • yeah sadly our quizzes don’t have functionality to let more than one result match with any given answer — there are actually a few questions i had to ditch because two characters would’ve had the same answer!

    • I would also agree that for regular AS readers, we’d be fine with more questions, but that might not be appealing to new readers.

      Also I just feel like (and I have no data to back this up) that more questions usually means a more accurate test result, because each question has less weight that way, so one outlier won’t determine the whole thing.

    • ok i added a few of the questions i scrapped (it’s at 19 now) and we’ll see how it goes!

  22. I got Jenny, it’s probably the red dress and the novelist (the only job that would be kind of quiet and without a lot of people there).

    But I wonder who I would have gotten if the hiking/Alaska glacier thing would have been the decisive answers.

  25. I got Helena and later seasons Helena makes sense in an “if I was in a soap opera” kind of way. I always related to a mix of Helena and Carmen (if I’m remembering right. Haven’t seen L Word in a long time.) Just glad not to get Jenny after picking novelist.

  26. I got Jenny the first time then took it again with mostly different but equally plausible answers to get Max. I didn’t watch the L Word past Season 2 (just couldn’t do it) but I have a feeling both Jenny and Max are more or less fitting for me. Enjoying listening to “To L and Back” even for eps I haven’t seen :)

    • And I totally picked “Welcome to the Dollhouse” so that movie doesnt necessarily lead straight to Jenny, lol!

  30. I took it TWICE and got Max both times.

    My only objection: for the “when people meet you for the first time” I feel like “adorkable nerd” should be an option, and also under the crush question there should be one for “assumes the crush has no interest even on a date right up until told to kiss her” because well, you’d think by 40 I’d be decent at reading women’s signals, but you’d be wrong.

  31. i’m laughing that i got jenny because i was like “wow probably i am jenny but with these answers i’ll get alice or maybe even dana or something” but NOPE here we are, this is my truth

    • Can only try to address the first question. (And I couldn’t keep watching after season 2 so I’m barely qualified to do that.)

      Tina is so annoying. It’s so painful to watch some of the acting that you end up on the side of whoever she’s mad at even when Tina has perfectly valid reasons to be upset. It’s unfortunate. And she’s missing the (questionably) redeeming quality of being so absolutely bonkers that at least one person was happy to get Jenny.

  34. This quiz is really well done because I did not pick any of what I thought would be Dana answers, but it dug the Dana right out of my soul. #RIPDANA

  35. I took this quiz twice with wildly different answers on every question and I got Shane both times.

    …I don’t know how to feel about this.

  37. First time I got Alice, now with the new questions Carmen… Not sure what that means.

    I was wondering which caracter is “I create all this f*cking labyrinth-like drama that I’m so good at creating”? If it’s jenny, a more fair statement would be “I have disorganized attachment”

  39. i almost passed out trying to pick one of those horrendous christmas outfits…but at least i got helena so its fine i guess

  41. I got Bette in both versions of the quiz. Maybe it’s the combination of red wine and Carol’s dress for Christmas. Or maybe it’s my real life job in the art world.

  42. The first time I took this I got Carmen, the second time I got Shane which made me very happy as it’s the closest thing the L word’s got to (slutty) butch representation lmao

  43. i have only seen like 8 episodes of the l word but i know enough to be really sitting on my floor wondering who i am, because i got shane

    shane??????

    (to be fair my only reference really is that i know shane leaves carmen at the altar and there is no way id do that so thats mostly why im opposed)

  44. I got Bette and I think this is highly accurate, except “everyone has a crush on you.” They do not.

  46. Took it once, got Alice, took it again just to ser, changed 95% of my choices, got Alice again
    Guys… i feel like I might be alice lol

  50. I got Dana!! I’m so happy because I felt like I had a connection to her. From the struggle to be out and proud to her passion of love, to the snappiness and confusion she had about things.

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