IT WAS over twenty years ago that a major sex study disclosed what was then a rather startling finding: lesbian couples engaged in sexual activity significantly less frequently than did both heterosexual and gay male couples (Blumberg and Schwartz, 1983). This study was followed by a spate of others that documented the lives of lesbian couples whose genital sexual contact had over time become nonexistent. One large survey found that 78 percent of her 1,500 lesbian respondents were currently celibate (Loulan, 1984). Historian Lillian Faderman traced the historical precedents for what she called “romantic friendships”—intimate, non-genital relationships between two women—going back to the 19th century.
The impact of these studies on the perception of lesbians, notably by lesbians themselves, was enormous: in a word, lesbians came to be seen as less sexual than other women. By the beginning of the 1990’s, the term “lesbian bed death” had become well-established in the gay community as a source of jokes, consternation, and intense debate. Two explanations for the phenomenon were commonly advanced. First, inhibited sexual desire was seen as a result of “internalized homophobia”—the acceptance of society’s anti-gay attitudes—and a concomitant shame and disgust with sex. Alternatively, “hyperfemale” behavior was seen as a function of the “unmitigated female sexuality” of a lesbian couple. Two women together were theorized to be less sexual than a heterosexual couple because of the absence of a “male force” to drive sexual contact. A large body of research emerged indicating gender differences such as lower libido in women, lower rates of sexual activity in general, and less assertiveness around sexuality (see Peplau’s 2003 summary).
Another version of this explanation was the idea of “merging” or “fusion” in lesbian couples (Burch, 1987). The “urge to merge” was already stronger in women than in men, so two women in a relationship would result in an overly close connection, one so familiar that sex would come to resemble incest, thus inhibiting its expression. This formulation was elaborated by one researcher in the following way (Hall, 2001): “Lesbians, went our refrain, hadn’t escaped female conditioning. The result—a relentless focus on nurturing—would increase exponentially when two women coupled. This forfeiture of individuality … created a relational greenhouse effect which suffocated passion.”
Another aspect of lesbian sexuality that has been of interest to gender and sex researchers is that of sexual fluidity. By the end of the 1980’s a new phenomenon had emerged in the gay and lesbian subculture: a bisexual movement led by women, many of whom had formerly identified as lesbian. Bisexual women declared that they were not “afraid to be gay,” not “in transition,” and not “confused about their sexuality.” They maintained that their sexual orientation was tied less to gender than to characteristics of the person or the relationship. Because there appeared to be no parallel in the experience of gay men, some sexologists began to speculate that women had an inherently more fluid sexuality than men.
Challenges to the Paradigm
Some observers have recently questioned the concept of “lesbian bed death,” linking it to a mainstream sex therapy that’s excessively pathology-oriented, phallocentric, and heterosexist. One researcher, with some embarrassment, “wondered if my colleagues and I, in our earnest attempts to write about lesbian bed death, were also authoring a new genre of lesbian self-doubt. In previous eras, lesbians had been sick when they were sexual. Now, compliments of lesbian affirmative therapists, they were sick when they weren’t” (Hall, 2001).
Some of these critiques focused on the definition of healthy sexuality and of sex itself. Why, for example, did behavior only count as sexual when it included genital contact with the goal of orgasm? Why shouldn’t it include forms of physical contact that were mutual and sensual without being directed toward orgasm? Why should it exclude such activities as, say, masturbating with a partner while watching pornography? Shifting away from frequency as a measure of sexual activity, some research has shown that the duration of sexual encounters between lesbians is on average greater than that of heterosexuals (Iasenza, 2002).
Another view of lesbian bed death is that it’s a myth based on insufficient data, and that sexual frequency in lesbian couples is in reality comparable to that of heterosexual couples (Iasenza, 2002). One study found no differences in the rate of sexual frequency between heterosexual and lesbian women (Matthews, et al., 2003), while an older study found that lesbians were more sexually arousable and more sexually assertive than heterosexual women (Iasenza, 1991).
Meanwhile, over the past two decades the lesbian community itself seems to have experienced a change in attitude about sex and a greater willingness to experiment. While old-school lesbian feminists had argued that pornography could never be other than degrading to women and considered it “looksist” for a woman to care about her physical attractiveness, younger lesbians view sex in less political terms. Lesbian-oriented erotic magazines, toy stores, and video studios abound. Clubs like Meow Mix in New York advertise “Pussy Galore” and “I Love Pussy” evenings, and boast of “action” in the bathrooms. Gender-bending has become an erotic art in the gay women’s community. “Trannie boys”—women who take male hormones and often have double mastectomies but usually keep their female genitals—have become a fixture in the lesbian community. So too have “bois,” lesbians with completely female bodies but who dress and comport themselves like men and often appear in public “packing” a strap-on dildo under their pants.
Transgender activists are springing up on college campuses, and most are bois or female-to-male transsexuals who have come from within the lesbian community (Bernstein, 2004). This is in sharp contrast to the professional literature on transvestitism and transexualism which usually cites vastly more males than females in these categories. Either the professionals have always been wrong, or lesbians are experimenting with the expression of more fluid gender identity. Lesbian BDSM (bondage/discipline, sado-masochism) organizations and clubs exist in most major U.S. cities, and polyamory—a lifestyle of multiple, concurrent, loving relationships that involve some degree of commitment—is beginning to thrive among lesbians.
Bisexual women have come to be better received in the lesbian community, and bisexual women as a category tend to be more sexually adventurous. As bisexuality has become more acceptable, a greater fluidity in sexual orientation has come to the fore, especially among younger women. The phenomenon has become common enough to be named on college campuses; such young women are jokingly called “LUGs” (Lesbians Until Graduation).
The idea that women may have a more changeable sexual orientations than men is not new. The very first survey of lesbians, conducted in 1959 by the Daughters of Bilitis (a lesbian homophile group) and published in The Ladder, showed that 98 percent of their members had experienced heterosexual encounters in the past. A more recent study (Kitzinger and Wilkinson, 1995) found not only that the vast majority of self-identified lesbians had had heterosexual experiences in the past, but also that a large proportion—perhaps as high as 46 percent—continued to have occasional sexual encounters with men even after coming out as gay.
What’s novel about this is the multidirectional nature of the movement between lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual identities. A study that tracked college-age women who described themselves as lesbian or bisexual over a five-year period found that one quarter moved away from those identities, with half of these referring to themselves as heterosexual and half refusing all labels (Diamond, 2003). Interestingly, none of her respondents described their lesbian experiences as “a phase”: all were open to the idea that their orientation might change again in the future. Contrary to our cultural model of sexual identity, these women were viewing this facet of their sexuality as an indicator of their current lifestyle rather than an essential biological component of their being.
Physiologically-based research has supported these findings. Chivers et al. (2003) showed gender differences when looking at the sexual arousal patterns of gay men, heterosexual men, heterosexual women, and lesbians. Men were found to be specific in their arousal, that is, gay men were aroused by gay erotica and straight men by heterosexual videos. In contrast, women showed equal arousal to both lesbian and heterosexual erotica regardless of their sexual orientation. This kind of result has led some health professionals to theorize that sexual orientation has different meanings for men and women. For women, romantic love and sexual desire are more widely separated than for men, while both are less closely linked to the gender of one’s partner. In other words, women are more bisexual but also can fall in love with people to whom they are not strongly attracted sexually.
The IPG Female Sexuality Survey
The Institute for Personal Growth (IPG) is a New Jersey-based private practice agency specializing in work with sexual minorities. In an effort to obtain data not based on a clinical sample, IPG recently began conducting anonymous surveys, both “live” and Internet-based, to collect information from lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women about their sexual feelings, problems, and behavior. The first group of surveys compared 104 self-identified lesbians and 89 heterosexual women. The data accumulated by IPG to date support the idea that women’s sexual attractions are frequently bisexual. Fifty-two percent of the heterosexual women surveyed reported being attracted to other women, and eighteen percent had had same-sex sexual encounters. Seventy-five per cent of self-identified lesbians said they were sometimes attracted to men, and eighty percent reported having had opposite-sex sexual experiences. (That more had sex with men than were attracted to men suggests that social pressure played a role for some women.)
The concept of “lesbian bed death” is not supported by IPG survey data on sexual frequency, although same-sex female couples do have sex slightly less frequently than do mixed-gender couples. Sexual frequency data were analyzed in two ways: all respondents were asked about their sexual frequency in the last year, and the same was asked for those currently in sexual relationships. Data were grouped by the gender of the current partner rather than by self-identification. About three-quarters of the respondents were in relationships and one-quarter were single.
There were no significant differences in frequency between lesbians and heterosexual women (though single women in general did have slightly fewer sexual encounters than those in a relationship). Among those currently in a relationship, those partnered with another woman were slightly less active sexually than those partnered with a man, with both groups having sex an average of once a week, plus or minus. A slightly larger proportion of woman-partnered women—seventeen versus twelve percent for those with a male partner—said they had sex once a month or less. Other IPG data suggest enhanced sexual robustness on the part of lesbians, who reported significantly fewer sexual problems than heterosexual women, including fewer orgasm problems (ninety versus 73 percent), less trouble lubricating, less pain with vaginal entry, and, interestingly enough, less guilt about sex. A typical same-sex encounter lasted an hour, versus thirty minutes for a heterosexual encounter. Women with other women kissed more, engaged in more non-genital touching, more digital-vaginal entry, and greater use of sex toys.
THE DATA AT HAND argue for viewing female sexual orientation differently from male sexual orientation—as more fluid, more changeable over the life cycle, probably less tied to gender and thus more “bisexual.” But it also suggests that even a uni-dimensional continuum of sexual orientation, such as the widely used Kinsey Scale, is not complex enough to explain female orientation. If women can change their sexual self-identification without negating their earlier sexual behavior or orientation, then we must rethink the essentialist position suggested by the very word “identity.” Diamond’s model proposes that orientation in women is an interaction between sexual desire and romantic love, which she sees as independent of each other. Women tend to define their sexual identity based on the gender of their current romantic partner, regardless of their lifetime sexual experience.
In addition, the burgeoning gender experimentation in the lesbian community forces a reconsideration of the interaction between gender and object orientation. Author-activist Pat Califia went from being a self-identified butch S/M lesbian, to a butch who defined herself by her “kinky” identity more than by her sexual orientation, to an FTM (female to male transsexual), coupled with another former lesbian who is now FTM, yielding what is technically a gay male relationship. Examples like this expose our current models of sexual identity and orientation as simplistic, a crude beginning to our understanding of a complex and ever-evolving interplay of social, personal, and biological forces.
Meanwhile, the new discourse on lesbian relationships is intriguing from a number of perspectives. Earlier clinical and research portrayals of lesbians described a warm and cuddly, but not a very hot, sexuality. While there’s good reason to question whether lesbian bed death actually occurs, it is still unquestionably true that those of us in clinical practice have seen many lesbian couples who are not sexually active. But what does this mean? I used to joke cynically that “lesbians have sex about as often as straight women would if they thought they could get away with it.” The reality under this quip is the assumption that sexual frequency is something that matters to men but not women.
The earlier focus on lesbian bed death has seemingly distorted the bigger picture of sex between women. Lesbian sexual activity may exemplify sex that is more tailored to women’s sexual needs—longer in duration, more likely to include non-genital acts and a greater variety of behaviors, and more reliably resulting in orgasm. If this is true, then one might reconceptualize the female sexual response as slower out of the gate, so to speak, requiring more time, variety, and imagination—but ultimately full of passion.
Why, then, did the notion of lesbian bed death catch on as it did? Several explanations are possible. First, it may be that twenty years ago it corresponded to a social reality that has since dissipated, as younger lesbians are less constrained by inhibitions and feelings of shame about their sexuality. If an earlier generation still bore the mark of their “hyper-female” socialization, a later one may have received a much smaller dose of it. Second, it is possible that asexual relationships are, in fact, fairly widespread in the lesbian community without being the norm. Finally, it may be that in the past, clinicians saw more clients who described an asexual lesbian relationship than other kinds of asexual relationships simply because lesbians are overrepresented in psychotherapy.
Lesbian sexuality has the potential to shed considerable light upon our understanding of female sexuality in general. Examining the sexual repertoires of lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women, and by seeing how they intersect, we can learn much about women’s range of sexual response. Acquiring insight into the elements of sexual versus romantic partnerships in lesbians can contribute to our understanding of sexual attraction, preferences in mate selection, and the maintenance of healthy sexual relationships in the human female.
References
Bernstein, F. “On campus, rethinking biology 101.” New York Times, 3/7/2004.
Blumstein, P., and Schwartz, P. American Couples: Money, Work, and Sex. Morrow, 1983.
Burch, B. “Psychological Merger in Lesbian Couples: A joint ego psychological and systems approach.” Family Therapy, 9, 201, 1982.
Chivers, M., Rieger, G., Latty, E. & Bailey, J. “A sex difference in the specificity of sexual arousal,” in Psychological Science, 2003.
Diamond, L. “Was it a phase? Young women’s relinquishment of lesbian/bisexual identities over a 5-year period.” Psychological Review, 84(2), 2003.
Faderman, L. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present. Morrow, 1981.
Hall, M. “’Not tonight, dear, I’m deconstructing a headache’: Confessions of a lesbian sex therapist,” in E. Kaschak & L. Tiefer, eds., A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems. Haworth Press, 2001.
Iasenza, S. “The relations among selected aspects of sexual orientation and sexual functioning in females.” Dissertation Abstracts International #9134752, 1991.
Iasenza, S. “Beyond ‘Lesbian Bed Death’: The passion and play in lesbian relationships.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 6(1), 2002.
Kitzinger, C. & Wilkinson, S. “Transitions from Heterosexuality to Lesbianism: The discursive production of lesbian identities.” Developmental Psychology, 31(1), 1995.
Loulan, J. Lesbian Sex. Spinsters Ink, 1984.
Matthews, A., Tartaro, J., and Hughes, T. “A comparative study of lesbian and heterosexual women in committed relationships.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 7(1), 2003.
Peplau, L. “Human Sexuality: How do men and women differ?” Current Directions In Psychological Science, 12(2), 2003.
Margaret Nichols, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Personal Growth (IPG) in Highland Park, New Jersey, has published numerous articles on lesbian psychology. The IPG research described in this report was done in collaboration with Susan Menahem, Deborah Williamson, and Cheryl Langfeld. This paper was adapted from one that will appear in the Journal of Marital and Relationship Therapy later this year.
