SEXUALIZING LESBIANISM

Growing up in the Midwest in a homogonous heterosexual culture it never occurred to me to think of the couple’s living in our community in terms of their sexuality. My attention centered on awareness of their children and families, their farms and crops and their religious affiliations.

I remember being "put off" when my girlfriends began to flirt and date boys. I thought something must be wrong with me. (I knew something was wrong with them!) To fit in I "dated" (or more honestly, became close friends with) a boy. He was the only one in my high school of 100 students who had any interest in psychology, feelings, and esoteric spirituality.

I knew our "relationship" was only a friendship and how it looked to other people was different than it actually was. The safe part of the sham was that it was not sexual. It was the perfect arrangement for me by making me feel like a participant while keeping myself intact.

Then I muddled through the heterosexual mind field trying to find positive feelings for men in my relationships. It was no use. My identity as a lesbian couldn't contain itself any longer. Looking back on my first 30 years I can see that I always loved women. I liked their way of relating, the connectedness I felt, the emotional intimacy our friendships offered. I admired women’s strength and their beauty (inner and outer).

Realizing this made me take a different perspective on the women in my life at that time. They were all identified as heterosexual and had varying relationships with men. But I felt deep love for each of them in my heart. I never thought of our relationships as sexual, because there was no biological element to our connectedness.

I began to want to meet other lesbians to see what my feelings would reveal. I found the same warmth, inclusion and emotionally intimacy in them that I had with straight women. My sexual liaisons grew out of friendship and had a highly charged biological element to them. Still, that was only a part of these relationships. In fact, being sexual sometimes jeopardized friendship. I lost more than one “friend” after the sexual element was introduced.

I was very open with my friends and the world about my love for women and never once got a negative reaction for my choice. Everyone accepted it as a natural expression of my being. I still didn't think of myself as a lesbian, although I was definitely woman-identified gender oriented. I was simply being my true self.

It was a shock to me when I started my psychotherapy practice to find many lesbians who felt people, both straight and gay, thought of their lifestyle only in sexual terms. This was unsettling to me because of my distaste for myopic thinking and labeling. Once people have you pigeonholed, they won’t let you change your mind.

I felt it was a shame they had to divide people up, divide love and friendship into sexual and non-sexual. How could they let such an intimate, personal and spiritual choice be reduced to biology? How did it happen that homosexual desires were taken out of the realm of the ‘ordinary’ to be perceived as existing only in people who are classed as ‘other’ and ‘different’ from the rest of the population? Had our culture’s fear overtaken their perspective?

I began to do some research on this matter and found out the first use of the word ‘homosexual’ was around 1869 and the fifty years that followed was brought under the jurisdiction of the legal and medical professions, and pathologised. The first sexologists tried to explore homosexuality from what they believed to be a humanitarian perspective. They were seeking to find out the ‘truth’ about what makes a homosexual.

Sexologists and reformers from the 1890s onwards tried actively to reform both laws and public opinion. Through links they made with the medical profession they were able to translate into medical terms what had been thought to be a social problem.

This information explained the idea of thinking of lesbians only in terms of biology instead of an integral part of the culture in which we live. I kept on looking for answers and discovered there were many attempts in the late 1800s to criminalize lesbianism. This failed because there were strong feelings of not wanting the matter to be brought to the attention of women who had never heard of such a thing. Thank you Patriarchy!

By this time it was the mid-80s and we had the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 70s shoulders to stand on. The 70s had seen the beginnings of a public unapologic and fun face of homosexuality. Within a mood of great optimism, those involved in gay liberation began for the first time to define themselves, rather than being defined by others.

Still, society tried to control people’s sexuality by boxing them into categories of acceptable or unacceptable, the same or other. Even today, mainstream society often views homosexuals in terms of sex. They see “other” gender choices from their own as either ‘wrong’ or as sad victims that cannot help their sexual orientation, and therefore deserve compassion and understanding.

I have the understanding of same-sex relationships based on many more levels than simply sexual. I know that the experience of being with women brings with it friendship, companionship, equality in love and partnership and the experience of being understood. Sexuality is only a small part of a healthy lesbian relationship. Not to minimize the importance of a good sexual component in a lesbian relationship, it is only a fraction of a mature partnership.

Maybe that is what was modeled to me when I was growing up. I saw partnerships that were mature and weathered the good times and the bad. I have known the rollercoaster ride of serial lesbian relationships based on lust and eventually not much else. Now, in my more mature years, my identity as a lesbian isn't fooled anymore by sex. I am much more focused on how I work together with my partner, how we respect our differences and similarities and the flow of our friendship and relationship.

I refuse, as a lesbian, to be identified by sexuality alone. Our culture needs to be educated about gender and the many varieties of relationships and choices there are. Perhaps through knowledge and having the experience of knowing people who have made a “different” choice from them, there will be less fear and more real understanding.

Historical Views of Women and Sex

The historical influences on western women’s views of themselves and their sexuality still affect women today. The predominately heterosexual bias reflects patriarchal dominance and is steeped in the viewpoint of what a ‘man’ needs. Women’s sexuality has been considered unimportant. Throughout history this has made being a heterosexual woman difficult let alone those who consider themselves to be lesbians or bi-sexual.

In ancient times, and until the industrial revolution, women’s autonomous sexuality was something men were afraid of and therefore had to be strictly controlled. Many of the fears were focused on ideas about women who lived independently. Men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went so far as to accuse women of witchcraft. Many women lost their lives during this period of time.

In the nineteenth century, popular fiction and the Church presented women as sexless. Women were to submit to sexual intercourse only in order to conceive or for the sake of their husband’s satisfaction. There was little chance for women, although sexual feelings did of course exist, to express their sexual feelings. Women were perceived as mothers, virgins or whores.

As the twentieth century progressed, perceptions of women’s sexuality continued to be challenging. Women were seen as having no autonomous sexuality and sex was considered something they had to be taught to enjoy. Their sexual feelings were believed to be only a response to a man’s and could only be awakened by him. The heterosexist and sexist assumptions behind these theories were not challenged for many years.

The first sex manual by and for women was written by Helena Wright in 1930. (http://www.star-dot-star.net/si/004984.html) Even though this was an attempt to publicly find a way to express women’s plight, she could not find a way to get beyond it being a wife’s duty to enjoy sex.

The so-called ‘sexual revolution’ in the 1960s greatly changed women’s expectations and behavior around sex. Pre-marital sex, “trial marriages, “sleeping around” and the emergence of homosexuality became visible.

Women began to expect to enjoy sex. One theorist who was influential by considering that women needed to be liberated was Wilhelm Reich, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich) a pupil of Freud. His ideas on sexual freedom remain radical today, even though they deal only with heterosexuality. Even though Reich’s views were ahead of his time, they still were strongly based on the so-called ‘double-standard’ for men and women.

Such myths were designed to keep women sexually and emotionally dependent on men. For many, these ideas still persist. Men and women are still considered sexual opposites, and the sexual revolution is widely seen as having failed women by encouraging them to have sex on men’s terms.

While the 1960’s encouraged women to behave more like men by actively seeking out sex (usually within some kind of relationship), it did little to change men’s behavior or level of understanding. (http://www.amazon.com/Surpassing-Love-Men-Friendship-Renaissance/dp/0688133304) It was seen by many to be a sexual revolution for men but not for women. Women were criticized by both men and women for sexual behavior which was considered traditionally male. This was true of the attitudes of men and male behaviors in many other areas of life.

For many people, the period of the sexual revolution was as repressive as any other. The freedoms of the 1960s and 1970s were profoundly questioned and reassessed in the 1980s. Sexual liberation, and women’s liberation seemed to some women to be undermining women’s traditional place without giving them a positive alternative. Hedonism and sexual ‘permissiveness’ as well as sexual choice reached only a small part of the population, while others actively campaigned to counter it.

It is unlikely that we will ever go back to the ‘age of innocence’ and heterosexual exclusivity that has been encouraged throughout history. For women, both heterosexual and homosexual sex is an idea that is still promoted as wrong and dangerous, and monogamous marriage between heterosexual partners is still considered as the only option.

It is no wonder that finding our way as lesbians has had its difficulties in the social climate that comes from such a dominantly heterosexual background. We can only hope that women will be able to find and express their sexuality in the future with more support than in the past.