Lesbian Bed Death

Psychologist Pepper Swartz in her 1983 book American Couple, asserted that lesbians have less sex and intimacy than other couples. Although her results and mythology were later challenged, the idea of lesbian bed death has taken on a life of its own.

Sex in our culture is based on the intensity of the beginning of a relationship. No one talks about the middle or later stages. Lesbian sex is not something wild that needs to be controlled nor is it the asexual mirror-image of horndog gay men. The truth lies somewhere in between. Lesbians who have been sleeping together for decades can manage to keep their love lives spicy. All couples who are in long-term relationships must work at not getting tired of marathon sex.

After the beginning infatuation phase dwindles it is more about setting a date for sex as opposed to letting it fall by the wayside. That's why you see people break up: the sex got monotonous or needed work, and neither knew how or were willing to work on it.

Lesbian bed death can happen to any couple. Daily life and personal wounding can add to difficulities in any relationship. It more often than not has to do with lack of communication, holding onto resentments, and not taking care of the needs of the other. Sex and money are the main two reasons couples break up.

To take care of our partner's needs we must first take care of ourselves. Being healthy individuals makes for a healthy relationship makes for a gratifying sexual life. Taking care of each other's needs grows out of this harmony.

Lesbians, unlike gay men who seem to have a whole cornucopia of sex choices from sex parties to leather clubs to outdoor cruising spots, rarely stray outside of long-term relationships to find sexual satisfaction. Our desire to live our lives together as partners requires that we don't lose sight of intimacy and passion.

The myth about lesbian sex--whether wild or dead--serves to appease those heterosexuals who are experiencing "straight panic" over LGBT visibility and power. Increasingly, the country is coming to recognize that there is not a big divide between gay and straight relationships--except what's inscribed in our legal system.

What makes it harder for us is a lack of role models with that mixture of tenderness and passion that heterosexuals take for granted. Talking about sex with your partner can be invaluable. Simply talking about it opens up possibilities that make a good love life happen.

We need to nurture our relationships and work to keep the flame going. Negotiating monogamy is hard work but with communication and talking with our partners about our sexual needs, lesbians can avoid the myth of bed death.

The Life of Aphra Behn

"all women together should let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the rights to speak their minds." Virginia Woolf

Women throughout history have often wondered "what hope do I have of ever being remembered?" That sense of disappearance extends across the great, the successful, from those who obeyed society's dicatates, to those who ignored them, to those who were ordinary. Not only do individual women disappear but the models for whole groups of women, the archetypes of history...the real women as opposed to the martyrs, madonnas, and witches of fantasy, are all made to disappear. In order to have just a taste of the experience of having real models we can look at the life of Aphra Behn. Sadly, few women know of her existence at all.

Aphra (or Eaffray) Behn was born July 10, 1640 near Canterbury, England. She died in 1689 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Below the inscription on her tombstone read the words: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be/Defence enough against Mortality." She was quoted as saying that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poverty."

Behn was very political in her early writings. She was sympathetic to Catholics during anti-Catholic fevor of the 1680's. She was firmly dedicated to King Charles II. She was a Tory supporter who believed in absolute allegence to the King, who governed by divine right. She was distrustful of Parliament and Whigs since the Revolution and wrote propaganda in support of the restored monarchy.

By 1666 Behn had become attached to the Court, and was recruited as a political spy by Charles II. Her code name for her exploits is said to have been Astrea, a name under which she subsequently published much of her writings. During the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665 she went to the Netherlands as a spy. When she returned to London, King Charles didn't pay her for her services or expenses and she ended up in debters prison. In 1669 an undisclosed source paid Behn's debts and she was released. Starting from this point she became one of the first women who wrote for a living.

She was an adventuress who traveled to the West Indies and became involved in a slave rebellion. She was an early abolitionist who's novel "Oroonoko" contained the first widely read account of the horrors of slavery.

She wrote 17 plays which were all performed within 17 years and she also found time to write 13 novels and a collection of poems and political pamphlets. Her most popular works included The Rover, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, and Oroonoko. Writer Virginia Woolf thought that Behn's total career was more important than any particular work it produced. Woolf wrote, "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

Her writings reflected her relationships with women and included many references to this which made her popular in the writing and artistic communities of the 20th century and present day. In an age of libertines, Behn undertook to proclaim and to analyze women's sexual desire, as manifested in her characters and in herself.

After a hiatus in the 19th century, when both the writer and her work were dismissed as indecent, Behn's fame has now undergone an extraordinary revival. She has become a favorite among sexually liberated women, particularly bisexuals and lesbians, who proclaim her as one of their most positive influences.

Why has Aphra Behn, and all that she could have taught us about women of the past, all but disappeared? I feel a sense of outrage that such an important element of herstory is not actively taught to all girls. How many years do we spend listening to supposedly "great" deeds of warriors and armies? How hidden are the real heroines?