A lesbian is a homosexual woman. Lesbians are sexually and romantically attracted to other women. One might argue that one is not a lesbian (as a noun) but lesbian (as an adjective). This can depend on self-identification and varies among most lesbians/lesbian women.
Etymology
The word lesbian originally referred to an inhabitant of Lesbos, an island in Greece where an ancient Greek lyric poet named Sappho lived. Some of her poems concerned love between women. Whether Sappho was a lesbian in the modern meaning of the term or a poet who described lesbians is not known. While she did write poems about love between women there is some dispute as to how far her writings can be interpreted. Sappho's literary association with love between women led to the term sapphism as another term for lesbianism.
Other words have been used to describe lesbianism over the past 200 years such as amor lesbicus, urningism, tribadism and others.
There are many slang terms for lesbians including dyke and bulldyke. Both are almost always intended as pejorative when used by outsiders but many within the lesbian and queer communities have reclaimed their usage.
The law
In Western societies, explicit prohibitions on women's homosexual behavior have been markedly weaker than those on men's homosexual behavior. In the United Kingdom lesbianism has never been illegal, unlike male homosexuality which was criminalised in the late 19th century, occasionally produced a prison sentence and was only legalised in England and Wales in 1967. There are various apocryphal stories about why lesbianism was not criminalised in the UK. One relates that Queen Victoria refused to sign a bill outlawing it, insisting, "ladies did not do such things." Jewish religious teachings condemn male homosexuality but are more lenient towards lesbianism, ruling it to be acceptable in an unmarried woman if this prevents her from premarital sexual relations with a male.
Reproductive and parenting rights
In some countries, the right of lesbian women to have access to assisted birth technologies such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in order to have children, has been the subject of debate: in Australia for example, the High Court rejected a Roman Catholic Church move to ban access to IVF treatments for lesbian and single women. However, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, had sought to amend legislation to prevent the access of these groups to IVF, raising indignation from the gay and lesbian community.
Many lesbian couples seek to have children through adoption, although this is not possible in every country.
Sexuality
Sexual activity between women is as diverse as sex between heterosexuals or gay men. Women in lesbian relationships may themselves not identify as such; they may be bisexual. Like all interpersonal activity, sexual expression must be seen within the context of the relationship between the people involved. Lesbians, like any couples regardless of sexuality, can be promiscuous or committed; ashamed or proud. These generalizations form a spectrum in which most lesbians fall somewhere between. Therefore, it is impossible to generalize accurately about lesbian behavior. It is true, however, that recent cultural changes in Western society have enabled lesbians to more freely express their sexuality. This change resulted in new studies on the nature of female sexuality.
There is a growing body of research and writing on lesbian sexuality, bringing with it debates over the control that women have over their sexual lives, the fluidity of female sexuality, the redefinition of female sexual pleasure, and the debunking of negative sexual stereotypes. One example of this last case is "lesbian bed death", a term coined by sex researcher Pepper Schwartz to describe the diminution of sexual passion supposedly inevitable in long term lesbian relationships. Schwartz's published findings indicate that lesbian couples have less sexual contact than couples of any other sexual orientation, including gay male couples and opposite-sex cohabiting or married couples. As critics have pointed out, however, this does not necessarily reflect a lack of satisfaction with the relationship. Furthermore, the methodology of Schwartz's survey format has been called into question: several researchers have contested Schwarz's results, claiming that the question "How often do you have sex?" is ambiguous when applied to sexual behaviour in lesbian couples, and that it is this ambiguity, rather than any actual paucity of sexual relations, that accounts for the finding of low frequency of sexual behaviour among lesbian couples. The lesbian community, for the most part, also rejects the notion of lesbian bed death, pointing out that passion tends to diminish in almost any relationship and that many lesbian couples enjoy happy and satisfying sex lives.
Culture
Lesbians such as Gertrude Stein and Barbara Hammer have been important figures in the avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century.
Media depictions
Lesbians often attract the attention of the media, particularly in relation to feminism, love and sexual relationships, marriage and parenting.
Mainstream broadcast media
In television, the number of lesbian couples portrayed is generally less than the number of gay male couples - notable lesbian couples in television include Tara Maclay and Willow Rosenberg in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lindsay Peterson and Melanie Marcus in Queer as Folk, Lana Crawford and Georgina Harris in Neighbours, lesbian subtext between Xena and Gabrielle in Xena: Warrior Princess and Dr. Kerry Weaver and Sandy Lopez in ER. Also of note is the 1989 BBC mini series Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (based on lesbian writer Jeanette Winterson's novel of the same title). Additionally, the casted pop-group t.A.T.u from Russia was quite popular in Europe in the 2000s, gaining attention and TV airplay for their pop videos because they were marketed as lesbians when, in fact, they were not.
However, the trend may be changing, for example, see The L Word, which is primarily focused on the lives of a group of lesbian friends. Also see Ellen Degeneres' talk show.
Mainstream cinema
Since the mid 1990s there have been a stream of notable mainstream theatrical-release movies sympathetically portraying lesbian characters and/or lesbian leads. Perhaps the most widely known is Kissing Jessica Stein (2001). See: List of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender-related films.
Pornography
Reactions of heterosexual men
It has been noted that the attitude of most men toward lesbian sex and its depiction in pornography is usually one of tolerance, or even of arousal, in sharp contrast to widespread aversion to the image of male gay sex.
Nominally positive reactions of heterosexual men to "lesbian" pornography, however, should not be taken as evidence of acceptance of lesbianism in general. Lesbians frequently suffer bashing, including rape.
Much so-called lesbian porn is really produced by straight men, for straight men.
Reactions of heterosexual women
Many heterosexual women also have a more positive attitude to depictions of lesbian sex than most heterosexual men have to depictions of male gay sex. It has been suggested that this is because heterosexual women are "more bi-curious" on average than heterosexual men. Many people, especially in the younger generations such as college students, claim that bisexual women are far more common than bisexual men. However, this is a controversial theory: many other heterosexual women have attitudes to lesbianism that range from mildly to extremely negative.
Reactions of homosexual women to heterosexual women and men can be just as negative, but large majority of lesbians are willing and able to be friends with both gay and straight women and men.
Related groups and movements
Feminism
Lesbians have been historically involved in womens' rights. Late in the 19th Century the term Boston marriage was coined to describe romantic unions between women contributing to the suffrage movement and living together. Continuing this tradition of inclusive acceptance, in 2004, Massachusetts became the first American state to legalize same-sex marriages [2].
In relation to modern feminism, and arising in relation to the radical feminism movement, lesbian separatism became popular in the 1970s and 1980s: groups of lesbian women coming together and living in communal societies together. Some lesbian women found this sort of society to be liberating; however others, such as Kathy Rudy, in Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory, remark that stereotypes and hierarchies reinforcing those stereotypes developed in her experience of living in a lesbian separatist collective, which ultimately led her to leave the group.
In the 1990s, dozens of chapters of Lesbian Avengers were formed to press for lesbian visibility and rights.
Transgender and transsexual women
The relationship between lesbianism and transgendered and transsexual women who identify as lesbian has been turbulent, with negative attitudes prevalent in history, but this attitude has changed somewhat in more recent times.
Some lesbian groups openly welcome transgender or transsexual women, often welcoming "any member who identifies as lesbian", however a few groups still do not welcome transwomen.
Reactions to the definitions of the term "lesbian", and the restriction of lesbian events and spaces have been numerous. Some who hold a non-inclusionist attitude often make reference sometimes to strong typically second-wave feminist ideas, such as those of Mary Daly's who has described post-operative transsexual women as merely "constructed women", attribute transsexualism as a mechanism of patriarchy, or do not recognize identification as female and lesbian from a transsexual woman, and based on these views define lesbianism and defend the non-inclusion of women of transsexual or transgender background.
However, those who hold an inclusionist position (which includes both non-transgender and transgender women), maintain that the attitudes described above are inaccurate and have their grounding in fear, distrust, or that the motivations and attitudes of transgender or transsexual lesbians as not well understood, and defend the inclusion of transwomen into lesbianism and lesbian spaces. Today, many hold more inclusionist views, though non-inclusionist views are not uncommon.
One example of the divisiveness of inclusionism arose in Australia. In the early 1990s, the wider lesbian community raised money to purchase a building devoted to lesbian women and for a uniquely lesbian only space, entitled "The Lesbian Space Project". Whilst the organisation was successful in buying the building, a debate over the inclusion of transwomen polarised the lesbian community. The building was later closed and moneys moved into the "Pride Centre", a lesbian and gay community centre in Sydney.
Another very notable example amongst the transgender and transsexual communities is that of the Michigan Women's Music Festival, a well-known primarily lesbian event which was restricted to "womyn-born womyn". Camp Trans, an organization oriented towards rights of transwomen, was started as a result.
See also
External links
- "Lesbian Health" from plannedparenthood.org
- Criticism of Lesbian Bed Death
- Australia backs lesbian IVF treatment - BBC News Online
- Lesbians protest IVF ban plan - BBC News Online
- Lesbian couples raise well-adjusted teenagers
- The National Center for Lesbian Rights
Media depictions
- AfterEllen.com Lesbian and Bisexual Women in Entertainment and the Media
- The Encyclopedia of Lesbian Movie Scenes Warning: contains explicit pornographic content
- It's February; Pucker Up, TV Actresses The New York Times, February 10, 2005