Female desire is complicated.
Lesbians know this. We know it because of “lesbian bed death” — that phenomenon that makes long-term couples sink into acting like roommates.
And we know it because all of us have friends who have come out late in life, or who have gone back to men, or who say that they’re “attracted to a person, not to a gender.”
Now we have research that — well, if it doesn’t quite explain what’s going on — at least confirms our intuition that female desire is messier and perhaps more expansive than that of men.
Men, say researchers, are easy. A New York Times story on female desire looks at the studies of Meredith Chivers at Queen’s University in Ontario.
When gay men are shown films of gay sex or a man masturbating, they get aroused. And they know it. With straight men, it’s similar — show them heterosexual sex or female masturbation, and they get excited and know it.
But women are different. Show women film of heterosexual sex, gay male sex or lesbian sex and women, lesbian or straight, get hot.
What is interesting, however, is that even though their bodies are responsive, women don’t always know they are feeling desire — so, a woman who calls herself straight will say that she is only responding to the heterosexual sex videos, even though she is actually responding in the same degree to everything; and a lesbian will think that she is only responding to lesbian sex, even though she has the same degree of physical arousal when it comes to films of gay male sex or heterosexual sex.
Other researchers say that although men with the highest sex drives have a “more polarized attraction than most males” — meaning if they’re gay they’re really only attracted to men, with women, “the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both sexes.” The article, though, adds the caveat, “This may not be so for lesbians.”
Female desire is complicated indeed.
Researchers are divided over whether this male/female difference is due to biology, hormones, culture or a confluence of the three.
What they do know is that women feel desire in the mind, no matter what is happening in the body. Some women can think themselves into orgasm (lucky women!). Some women are more turned on by the idea of unfamiliarity, of sex with strangers (thus lesbian bed death); others find their desire dictated by intimacy and emotional connection (hence the women who are “heteroflexible”).
These things are independent of physical arousal, since physical arousal for women happens all the time.
“Fluidity is not a fluke,” sexologist Lisa Diamond told the Times. Of the women who told Diamond that they were lesbian, only one-third reported attraction solely to women. The other two-thirds felt genuine, periodic attraction to men.
This means that, if we were all honest in our labeling, the majority of women would need to call ourselves “bisexual” or “queer,” instead of “straight” or “gay,” as we do. The research says that there are far more women attracted to people of both sexes than there are women who are attracted to only one sex. If only one-third of lesbians are completely women-centered when it comes to desire — and only 2 percent of the country is lesbian — then that is a tiny number, about 2 million.
Yet despite all our focus on processing and intimacy, we need to remember that lesbians — and all women — also have an expansive sexuality. We underrate ourselves by focusing on “lesbian bed death” instead of all the ways we are sexual. Thank goodness for the surge in queer burlesque shows, sexy lesbian club nights and the last season of “The L Word,” all of which remind us that lesbians are sexy, and sexy is fun.
Female desire is complicated; how we experience lust is complex. Here’s to more sex for women, however we label ourselves.
Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning syndicated columnist. E-mail her at [email protected].