Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  One explanation for the relative infrequency of lesbian sex may simply be physiological. Because there is no visible erection that must be dealt with between two women, affectionate holding or petting is easily substituted for more demanding sexual performance once the first heat of passion has subsided. But the relative paucity of sex between lesbians is certainly aggravated by socialization. Since both individuals in the couple have been raised as female, there is no trained sexual initiator who will automatically make the first move over a period of time. Often each woman waits upon the other to initiate. Female sexuality has been socially constructed around reacting rather than acting, and lesbians as women have generally not been able to transcend with ease what they have been taught.

  Lesbian sexuality within committed relationships is further complicated because, according to various psychological studies, relationships between women are stronger when background, status, and commitment are approximately equal between them. When one partner feels that her lover holds more power, her capacity for intimacy is diminished. Yet sexual desire requires some kind of “barrier”—some taboo, tension, thrill of conquest, or disequilibrium. A difficulty is created because two women who are “well suited” to each other tend to merge in an intimate relationship; barriers that are often present between men and women break down between two women. While such fusion promotes affection, it diminishes sexual excitement. It leads to what came to be called in the 1980s “lesbian bed death”—the oft-observed phenomenon of the disappearance of sex in ongoing lesbian relationships.4

  Not all lesbians have been disturbed by the fact that lesbians tend to have less sex than heterosexuals or gay men. Lesbians who are cultural feminists and believe that women’s culture and values are different from and better than those of males usually minimize the importance of sex in their realtionships with the conviction that men have exaggerated its importance. Their views are not unlike those of romantic friends of bygone eras. Pam, who has been a lesbian for twenty-three years, says “sex doesn’t have much to do with it.” She explains that “the emphasis in lesbianism is being in a mutually nurturing relationship that permits both of you to be the best you can be, functioning comfortably, accepting success.” Its advantage over heterosexuality is that a woman can work up to her potential as a human being instead of concerning herself only with her husband’s potential and success. “I have a good sexual relationship with Joan,” she says, “but it’s definitely not the glue that keeps it together.”5

  Cultural feminists insist that women’s capacity for shared intimacy is preferable to the disequilibrium that men contribute to relationships, which may perhaps stimulate sexual excitement but also brings intolerable problems in its wake. Lesbians who are cultural feminists may be saddened by the quicker diminution of passion in their intimacies, but they would be leary of any sexual exploration that seemed to emulate male sexuality, even if its putative goal were to improve lesbian relationships. In the lesbian community, the 1970s was dominated by cultural feminists—especially lesbian-feminists and middleclass lesbians—who generally shared a mistrust of masculine/feminine roles, sexual “violence” (whether real or in play), and pornography, which they saw as a manifestation of the misguided male sex drive.

  But by the 1980s the views of these cultural feminists were being called into question by a small group of women—some who emerged out of lesbian-feminism, others who had kept apart from the movement because they felt it denigrated the sexual expressions that were important to them. They believed that it was time that lesbians took up arms to fight the most neglected battle for equality. They were determined to overcome the sexual repression suffered by lesbians, who had been left out of the socially sanctioned pursuit of sexual pleasure in the 1970s. They wanted to find ways for lesbians to claim their sexual selves, just as heterosexuals and gay men had been doing. To that end they were willing to borrow those groups’ time-tested techniques such as the use of pornography and sexual role playing to stimulate sexual appetite.

  Their goals were twofold, addressing lesbian sexuality in terms of both long-term and more casual relationships. They wanted to increase the duration and intensity of lesbian sexual pleasure, and they wanted to liberate lesbians from the sexual limitations that had been imposed on them as females. Such limitations, they felt, hindered women from asserting a boldness that was necessary for true social equality. The battle lines were thus drawn between lesbian cultural feminists, who believed it necessary to fight against what they saw as the harmful objectification of women through male sexual habits, and lesbian sexual radicals, who believed that such “habits” had too long been a male prerogative and needed to be adopted by lesbians for their own personal and social welfare. These tremendously divergent views led to still another internecine war within the lesbian community.

  Lesbian Sex and the Cultural Feminists

  Lesbians who were cultural feminists were very uncomfortable with the “sexualization” of America in the 1970s, because they believed that it served men’s cruder appetites and put pressure on women to behave in ways that were not intrinsic to them. When the Supreme Court declared in 1970 that not only was pornography not harmful and not a factor in the cause of crime but was actually beneficial because it served to educate and release inhibitions, cultural feminists drew the first of their battle lines. They maintained that the “liberalism” of supporters of pornography was only a mask for sexism that permitted even those who were supposedly sympathetic to women’s rights to consider women’s exploitation and suffering as “titillating.” They formed groups such as Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media, and Women Against Violence Against Women, which staged Take Back the Night marches and conducted angry tours of places such as New York’s Times Square to expose the thriving pornography industry and ignite women to fight against it. Their efforts led to the drafting of a model law that was adopted first by Minneapolis and then by other cities (though later it was found unconstitutional), declaring pornography a form of sex discrimination and making traffickers in pornography legally liable.6

  And so, when some lesbians at the end of the decade began encouraging lesbian interest in pornography and even strip shows and certain forms of violent (albeit consensual) sex, cultural feminists felt betrayed and furious. It was to them as though the enemy—male-identified perverts in dyke clothing—had all the while been living in their own camp and were now attempting to weaken the ranks by disseminating propaganda in support of everything the cultural feminists most despised: pornography, sexual role playing (including s/ m “violence” and butch/femme relationships), and even public sex.

  The cultural feminists were unimpressed by the argument of lesbian sexual radicals that until women are free to explore their own sexuality any way they wish, they will never be truly free. Such freedom came at too great a cost, cultural feminists said. They believed the sexual radicals’ pursuit of ways to “spice up” lesbian sexuality, such as pornography and the sexual role playing of s/m or butch/femme, validated the system of patriarchy, in which one person has power over another or objectifies her. They insisted that such pursuits were counter to the vision of the world that feminists had been striving to create and that it was the responsibility of lesbians to help build the new world upon a model of equal power such as is, anyway, the most “natural” to lesbian relationships.7

  Cultural feminists believed that lesbian sex must be consistent with the best of lesbian ethics. They acknowledged that images of domination, control, and violence, which have been men’s sexual stimuli, have become a part of everyone’s cultural environment and thus have shaped women’s sexual fantasies and desires. But they also insisted that lesbians should permit themselves only those sexual interests that reflect superior female ideals. They wished to deconstruct harmful desires that were socially constructed, instead of giving in to them by wanting to “explore” them. They feared that the lesbian sexual radicals were not only making a big deal out of sexuality, which should be inc
idental to lesbianism, but were also deluding themselves and other women into believing that male images, fantasies, and habits were desirable for women, too.8

  The cultural feminists were particularly annoyed at the sexual radicals’ argument that their sexual pursuits were feminist because they encouraged women to fight repression by examining sexual feelings that had been taboo for women. Feminism must be about more than exploration of feelings, they declared: feminist thought stresses analysis of the political significance of feelings, which the sexual radicals had failed to do in their enthusiasm for “improving” lesbian sex lives. They accused the sexual radicals of refusing to consider where those feelings originated and the ways in which they perpetuated the values of the patriarchal ruling class.9

  These issues became so heated in the 1980s that they even led to public confrontations and protests such as the one at a Barnard College conference, The Scholar and the Feminist, in which cultural feminists handed out leaflets objecting to the lesbian sexual radicals because they constituted a “backlash against feminism.” Cultural feminists declared that sexual radicals had internalized the messages of the enemy by advocating those very sexual practices that were the psychological foundations of patriarchy.10

  Under presssure from the cultural feminists, some of the women’s music festivals adopted what they called a “pro-healing policy,” forbidding the sale of sexual paraphernalia and public displays of s/m techniques because, as the organizers of the New England Women’s Music Retreat claimed, a number of women had “experienced psychic damage” as a result of such exposure. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival exploded with ugly confrontations when two Chicago women attempted to organize a group interested in publishing a lesbian porno magazine. Cultural feminists demanded that the festival producers draft a “code of feminist ethics and morality” that would put an end to such activities. The issue continued to tear the festivals apart throughout the 1980s. At the 1987 Midwest Women’s Festival, s/m was the hottest topic on the agenda. Seminars were disrupted as some women wanted to run off to s/m talks and scenes while cultural feminists wanted to keep them focused on “serious business.” Violent debates erupted that further splintered the community, and the following year festival attendance was cut in half because many cultural feminists refused to go when it was advertised that s/m was to be a topic of discussion.11

  The cultural feminists were able to get the massive power of the National Organization of Women behind them when NOW passed a resolution reaffirming its advocacy of lesbian rights but condemning other issues such as pornography, public sex, and sadomasochism, “which have mistakenly been correlated with Lesbian/Gay rights by some gay organizations.” Those are issues of exploitation and violence, NOW wrote, and NOW must oppose them not only because they have nothing to do with lesbian rights, but also because they violate feminist principles. The cultural feminists who were behind that resolution and in the forefront of other attacks on lesbian sexual radicals simply could not take seriously the assertion that more and better sex would help in the fight for liberation. They saw the sexual radicals as provocateurs who threw out the red herring of wild sexuality during a conservative, repressive era—or worse, as idiots who were removing their attention from truly pressing issues that affected women in general and lesbians in particular, in order to waste their energies on the triviality of sex.

  The Struggle To Be Sexually Adventurous

  In response to what they considered the antisexual censoriousness of the cultural feminists, the lesbian sexual radicals were happy to create a public debate around the issue of lesbian sex. They criticized the cultural feminists for reinforcing traditional concepts of gender instead of encouraging women to try to gain access to what has historically been a main bastion of male privilege—freewheeling sexuality. They compared the cultural feminists to the nineteenth-and early-twentieth century puritanical females who had vitiated the first feminist movement by misdirecting their energies—axing saloons and making the lives of prostitutes more miserable, instead of attending to the business of wresting more freedom for women. Those earlier women also had prudishly tried to depict the world in simplistic terms of male vice and female virtue, the sexual radicals said. Feminism should by its very nature be a radical movement, they insisted, scoffing at the contemporary feminists who were attempting to turn it conservative by promoting the old notion of universal differences between men and women.

  The lesbian sexual radicals of the 1980s believed that too many women who loved women had been deluded by the movement into suffering boring, “politically correct” sex. They sought to create an alternative to the tame sexuality of lesbian-feminism, which denied lesbians those experiences that heterosexuals and homosexual men had claimed as their right. Politically correct sex they characterized as being obsessively concerned with not “objectifying” women and with promoting humdrum “equal time” touching and cunnilingus; they found absurd the “politically correct” notion that any kind of penetration was heterosexist. Such dogmas produced “vanilla sex,” the sexual radicals said. They insisted that there neither is nor should be any automatic correspondence between lesbian-feminist political beliefs and lesbian sexual practices and that it was time that lesbians freed themselves to enjoy sexuality without any of the restraints inculcated in them as women or imposed on them by the movement.

  However, they met with only mixed success in the 1980s. Many lesbians were curious about their ideas and briefly excited about the novelty of the notion that they had a right to the same kind of carefree sexuality that men have always claimed for themselves and were at least pretending to let heterosexual women claim in more recent times. But those lesbians were seldom able to maintain an interest in constructing a sexuality that departed too much from their socialization. The lesbian sexual radicals who could do so over a period of time remained a small minority within a minority. And by the end of the 1980s the AIDS scare had discouraged many women from attempting greater sexual experimentation that would challenge their socialization.

  The sexual radicals considered themselves revolutionaries and contrasted their own sexual revolution to that of the 1970s. That earlier revolution they saw as a “rip-off of women,” since it did little other than make women more available to men, whether through counterculture gang bangs and groupie sex or pressure to “put out” in more conventional heterosexual relationships. They wished their own sexual revolution to be by and truly for women. They wanted to convince lesbians of the importance of enjoying the most imaginative and exciting sex their minds and bodies could construct. In their conviction that lesbians have a personal right to complete fulfillment of sexual desires and that women’s sexual liberation is a crucial component of women’s freedom, they created a panoply of new lesbian sexual institutions: pornographic videos and magazines, clubs devoted to sexual practices such as lesbian sadomasochism, stores that specialized in products intended to promote female sexual enjoyment. They saw lust as a positive virtue, an appreciation of one’s own and others’ sexual dynamism.12

  Their success was limited primarily because lesbians are raised like other women in this culture. They are taught that what is most crucial about sexuality is that it leads to settling down in marriage. Not having the official heterosexual landmarks of engagement and wedding, lesbians create their own, often telescoping those events in time toward the goal of establishing a home. Joann Loulan, a lesbian sexologist, jokes: “The lesbian date is like an engagement … [and] once you have sex with her you get married.” Despite the 1970s’ ideological push toward nonmonogamy in the lesbian-feminist community, most lesbians continued to idealize monogamy, although the pattern tended to be serial monogamy—that is, relationships last for a number of years, break up, and both women get involved in a new monogamous relationship. In their approach to sexuality they have been much more like heterosexual women than homosexual men, who historically and statistically have many more brief sexual encounters. When both parties in a couple are female, it appear
s that the effects of female socialization are usually doubled, lesbianism notwithstanding. While a few lesbians have been able to overcome that socialization, most have not yet been able to.

  Typically, in a 1987 survey among lesbians in Boulder, Colorado—a liberal, trendy university community—fewer than 10 percent had ever experimented with sexual activities such as s/m or bondage, 75 percent said they had never been involved in sexual role playing, and only 1 percent thought casual sex was ideal for them.13 Clearly, in the midst of such sexual conservatism, lesbian sex radicals could not have an easy time promoting their theories about the path to equality and happiness.

  In the late 1970s, when a handful of lesbians who wanted a more radical sexuality first began to surface, they found their best allies among gay men. Before the impact of AIDS became known, the sexual explorations of gay men, which surpassed even those of heterosexuals in the “sexualized” ’70s, seemed very enviable to those lesbians who had managed to (or wished they could) transcend the sexual constrictions that had been imposed upon them as women. In big cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, they had been witnessing gay male sexual freedom, as exemplified through public cruising, sexually explicit ads in gay newspapers, and flamboyant styles in dress that advertised sexual tastes. Those were exciting concepts, especially to lesbians who remained outside the constraints of cultural feminism, and the gay male example allowed them to feel more self-permissive about their own sexuality. They observed that while many women were busy in the 1970s building lesbian-feminist alternative institutions such as women-only living places and women’s music, their male counterparts were exploring revolutionary sex; and they were convinced that it was an area that the lesbian subcultures, especially lesbian-feminism, had neglected to their own detriment. The women who saw themselves as lesbian sexual radicals thus went about the business of modifying gay male sexual customs and institutions—which represented the essence of liberation to them—for a female community.