I know not what to do, my mind is divided. – Sappho
As I’ve said several times already, I am bisexual. I suspect many more women are (to one degree or another) than let on even in these comparatively liberal times; we do, after all, tend to be creatures of the mean rather than of the extremes as men are. When talking about women of my own personal acquaintance, it’s easier for me to name the women who are in no way bisexual than to list the many who are! But most of these are more “bi-curious” than anything else; they enjoy looking at pictures of other women or fantasizing about them, and they may even have occasional lesbian encounters, but they’ve never been in love with another woman and probably never will be. I, on the other hand, am about as bisexual as it’s possible to be; I’ve been attracted to both sexes since childhood and have had more relationships with women than I have with men (though my number of actual sexual experiences with men is far higher for reasons which should be obvious).
As I’ve already described in my column of July 16th, I respond differently to the two sexes:
I’m attracted to men below the waist and women above the waist. In other words, my reaction to men is primal and visceral, but my reaction to women is aesthetic. I feel the attraction to a man in my guts, and I can’t tell from a picture whether I will be attracted to him or not; I have to see and talk to him. Women, on the other hand, appeal to my appreciation for beauty; I feel the attraction in my mind and heart rather than my guts.
Because of this, it was inevitable that I would eventually settle into a long-term committed relationship with a man rather than a woman; though I feel differently today, back then I didn’t think aesthetics were as sound a basis for a relationship as what I considered biological and neurological complementarity. But that view certainly didn’t evolve overnight; I had my first girlfriend in my senior year of high school, less than a year after losing my virginity, and since it illustrates a few points I think it’s worth a paragraph.
I’m going to call her Mae, because she was curvy and sultry like her idol Mae West. She had black hair and her skin was even fairer than mine; some girls called her “Snow White” for that reason. We had very similar eyes and were almost the same height, so when we went places together people often took us for sisters. But there was nothing sisterly about our feelings for one another; we had been friends for two years and often joked about lesbian love in front of our schoolmates, but nothing had ever come of it until one day in September of 1982 when we were sitting on her couch after school. We had been talking about the 1920s and the conversation had ranged from F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Dillinger’s legendary penis, and at some point the conversation just lapsed and we sat staring into each other’s eyes. And then I kissed her, and she responded with great passion; a few days later I stayed overnight (in those days nobody thought anything of two teenage girls sharing a bed) and we went much farther. The secret relationship continued until May, when she sensibly broke it off on the grounds that we were both going to different schools and her boyfriend just would not understand any more than anybody else would. I don’t think she was ever in love with me, though I certainly was with her; consequently, I felt hurt and upset and depressed and all the other things one feels when a lover breaks up with one. We talked a great deal that summer and even fell back into bed together once, but it was over; Jeff did his best to distract me and with the resilience of the very young I was largely OK by a month into my first semester at UNO.
Now, I’ve never been sexually aggressive; I have never consciously “come on” to a man in my life, and the very idea of actually suggesting sex to someone I’m not already involved with fills me with horror. Honestly, I have no idea how men manage it! But with other women the aversion to starting things isn’t quite so pronounced, so with Mae (and a few other girls over the years whose body language absolutely assured me of their interest) I was able to suppress my natural tendency toward receptivity enough to allow nature to take its course. My first lesbian relationship also set another pattern which was never broken: Every such encounter I’ve ever had was with a bisexual woman, and either she or I or both always had a separate relationship with a man. To my knowledge, I’ve never been with an exclusive lesbian; I suspect the very fact of their exclusivity (not to mention the odd grooming habits so common among them) turned me off to the idea.
The one characteristic of my first lesbian relationship which did not continue in my others was its secretiveness. I decided it was too stressful, and since I was now a young adult interacting with other young adults in a sexually tolerant environment I made no secret of my bisexuality. I was delighted to find that not only was this generally accepted in the circles in which I moved, but also that it tended to inspire invitations to participate in threesomes. Now that I think of it, my several years in that lifestyle may have helped to become more comfortable with the reality of prostitution, not only because people were calling me specifically for sex (without the trappings of dating), but also because I was the “other woman” many times over, even if the wife did know about it.
All that of course changed when I became involved with Jack; when we first started out I told him my philosophy of acceptable dalliances: Fooling around with girls is cheating for neither, but fooling around with guys is cheating for either. He claimed to be fine with that at first, but soon became so jealous of my then-current girlfriend that I stopped seeing her. For the rest of our relationship my only lesbian encounters happened during our frequent breakups, and even those were rare because of the emotional turmoil inherent in the on-again off-again situation; when he finally left me in January of 1995 I was in no state to become involved with anybody, male or female. Aside from one encounter with an old girlfriend in November of 1996, I had not been with another woman in the better part of a decade when I started doing two-girl shows while working as a stripper in 1998.
By that time I was living with Grace, who is absolutely heterosexual: As she used to say to me when I tried to talk about two-girl calls, “Maggie, if you wanna rub muffins with somebody that’s your business, but I don’t wanna hear about it!” This of course did not stop neighbors from making stupid modern assumptions; once when I one my way to a multi-hour dinner call one of them asked where I was going all dressed up.
When I told her I was going on a date (which was true; she didn’t need to know it was a professional one) she seemed surprised and said, “But I thought you and Grace were…”
“Lesbians?” I finished after she trailed off. “No, not at all! I’m bi, but she isn’t my type, and besides she’s only interested in men.” She of course apologized profusely, but I was far more amused than offended.
For the next seven years I had plenty of lesbian activity; since many of the wives in couple calls were attractive I usually enjoyed them, and since I hand-picked my partners for two-girl calls I made sure they were desirable to me whenever possible. I’ve already mentioned Cynthia and Dawn, both of whom were pretty, bisexual, as attracted to me as I was to them and great kissers beside. But between and after them there were a number of other girls I found attractive, and though I could never bring myself to make advances on any of them I didn’t have to; I would simply offer the “Flavor of the Month” a two-girl call with me and observe her reaction. Some were uninterested in such calls, and others accepted but were clearly just putting on a show. But a few were themselves bisexual, and in such cases the client got more than his money’s worth! “Flavor of the Month” was my husband’s term for such girls; many of them were just passing through town, or decided the business didn’t really agree with them, so they rarely lasted very long. The title was therefore appropriate if not precise. Unlike Jack he was not jealous of such girls; he knew I wasn’t going to become emotionally involved, and beside that he knew he was in for a really good time whenever I arranged a three-way for him with one!
In all that time, I only went on two calls in which a lone woman (unencumbered by a man) was interested in paying for sex with another woman. The first such case was otherwise unremarkable; except for her gender it was really a lot like the typical call with a male client. But the second was completely different; she was a few years younger than I was and very attractive, and she spoke frankly to me about how much she missed having a girlfriend. It turned out she and I were in much the same space mentally; though we were uninterested in being unfaithful to our husbands with men, both of us liked having a girlfriend as well. Unlike my husband, though, hers was too conventional to be turned on by such an arrangement. I truly enjoyed the sex with her, and she called me several times that weekend; she was actually quite sexually aggressive and got both very vocal and excitingly rough when she was nearing orgasm (for example, she’s the only woman I was ever with who slapped me on the rump as men do). It turned out that she was from a city not very far from my country place, so I suggested she try to sell her husband on the idea of a three-way, timed during one of my visits to the country. She promised to consider it, but alas nothing ever came of that. It would’ve been nice to have a regular girlfriend again, and think of the benefits to both of our husbands!
On top of your observations, there is now scientific evidence that female sexuality is fluid, effectively meaning that for women, bi-sexuality is most common as opposed to strict hetero- or homosexuality:
http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2008/04/sexual-fluidity-understanding-womens.html
“Diamond argues that women’s sexual responsiveness is situation-dependent, or fluid, making it possible for women to desire either men or women under certain circumstances. A model of fluidity helps us understand how women of all orientations may experience variations in their erotic and romantic feelings. She does not argue to eliminate the concept of sexual orientation, but rather to acknowledge that fluidity acts in tandem with orientation – and that all women may experience different degrees of fluidity.”
I’ve heard about that; but that’s the report that claims women’s sexuality is actually more open than men’s (in the sense that more situations — including e.g. monkeys copulating — turn women on, as compared to those that turn men on). But this should in principle lead to women wanting more sex than men — unless of course the drive itself is sufficiently weakened…
Not at all. If I like more foods than a man does that doesn’t make me hungrier or more gluttonous. The two characteristics are apples and oranges.
Hence my “unless of course the drive itself is sufficiently weakened…” 🙂
Thanks, Ingrid! That certainly fits in with my observation that every exclusive lesbian I’ve ever met has serious issues with men, while on the other hand I’ve met plenty of homosexual men who like women just fine in every way except as sexual partners; Doug (whom I’ve mentioned many times in this blog) was like that. In other words, my experience is that exclusive homosexuality in men is due to nature, while exclusive homosexuality in women results from experience or trauma.
There are a few blogs by “lipstick lesbians” who claim to be woman-only. Do you think they are fooling themselves?
I think they’re turned off to men for some social reason which has nothing to do with sex; I’ve known a number exactly like that. Unfortunately, the homosexual “party line” discourages them from admitting that.
So you think women-only lesbians are always the result of previous history — i.e. their preference is psychological? Unlike male homosexuals?
That is interesting, and it is not the first time I hear this idea. (I think Dan Savage said it once at some point in his blog.) This suggests, I suppose, that it should be possible to ‘de-program’ lesbians — i.e. re-interest them in men — more easily than gay men. (Categories like ‘LTG’ – ‘Lesbian Till Graduation’ – that harken back to college times would tend to support this idea.)
Except in the rare “exceptions that prove the rule”, yes. And research supports that opinion.
In my Anzu James story, Anzu and her best friend Botilda refer to themselves as “lesbians of convenience.” They’ve been friends for a long time and know each other better than they know any boy, so they practice sexually with each other until they work up the nerve to try it with boys. At least, that’s what they claim.
Then there is this other girl, who is disgusted by anything even vaguely lesbian. Anzu… well, not exactly rapes her, but…
Men get pretty fluid too, but it is in very unusual situations, like rolling on ecstasy or being in prison.
In fact, from what I read it’s even more subdivided than that. Ecstasy sometimes causes straight men to be cuddly and romantic with other men, but not so much sexual, while prison is infamous for male-on-male rape. Unfortunately, messing with ecstasy can land you in prison, so I’m sure there are men familiar with both version of male sexual fluidity.
I’ve never taken e nor been in prison, so I can only recount what I’ve heard or read.
That’s not at all the same thing, though; messing with the brain’s biochemistry can induce all sorts of weird sexual reactions (as I discussed on July 14th), and conditions of severe psychological stress are nearly as bad. 🙁
I also remember thinking, when reading some sex-advice blogs — Dan Savage’s, Violet Blue’s, and a couple of others — that there is a bit more fluidity in male sexuality than meets the eye. There seem to be surprisingly many straight-identified guys who are willing to go a little on the gay side — like taking a blow-job from a man — without going much further. As if they were 90% straight, 10% gay. Others would go a little further — let’s say they’re ‘bi-curious’; others even further (a bisexual who is predominantly women-oriented but also does men; or the other way round) and further (an ‘equal-opportunity’ bisexual).
The difference with women seems to be that they can move from one point to another on their continuum more easily and more frequently than men, whereas men tend to stick to the point on their continuum where they think they belong.
That’s called “horniness-induced desperation”, and it’s no more an intrinsic part of such a man’s psyche than any of the other shit he comes up with in such a state. Every whore has seen this syndrome more times than she can count.
I meant ‘100% straightness’, not ‘gayness’, of course. Ah, that’s what I get for having several windows open at the same time!
These are, however, also the conditions under which a stronger impulse can be weakened, and lower-order factors can begin to play a more visible role…
I’m sure you have, Maggie; I myself have seen some such men, and I’m not even a prostitute… All in all, I’m sure there are men who do this out of desperation, probably even many men, but by far not all. Maybe your clients didn’t tell you the whole truth in every case. Sometimes the claim that they did what they did ‘because of desperation’ is a cover for something he had been thinking about for a while, desperate for sex or not, but never had the courage and/or opportunity to try. (A man may want to ‘defend his male honor’ against any suspicion of anything other than 100% gayness — the horror! — even if his audience is only one professional that he’ll never see again…)
A few (three, actually) men I’ve known here in the Netherlands told me they kissedI other guys — on several occasions — just for the hell of it, to see what it was like. (Mostly they had gay friends and had seen gay friends kiss before.) Sometimes liked it, and did it again, and went further. But they all remained straight-identified, not because they were afraid of being openly gay (in the Netherlands it’s mostly not a big deal), but because their interest wasn’t high enough; they just stopped kissing when they thought.
I myself remember feeling a surprisingly sexual interest in only one guy (and at the time I wasn’t desperate for sex; much the opposite). I didn’t act on the erection I was getting, so nothing happened; but sometimes I wonder…
The only rule to which there are no exceptions is the one which states “Every rule has exceptions.” 🙂
I don’t either, and I’m a man. I can even feel like jumping on some woman, but I simply can’t do it. I have to start with something else instead.
Frankly, I think it’s an acquired skill.
Thinking back to my teen and young adult years, i don’t think that part is any different in men… except that we’re (both) culturally conditioned to think of the male role as the instigator, the aggressor, and the woman passively waiting to be approached so she can respond. And conversely there is the patriarchal-based idea that if a woman initiates or approaches (however tastefully) she is immediately less desirable? Too wild? To wanton?
I think this REACTION is something like 90% stone dead now (God I hope so, or I’m in trouble T_T) but the enough of the concept of “good girls wait to be asked” is still there to keep that girl in her figurative seat.
Or to put it another way, both sexes can be shy, but the buck gets passed to the guy to suck it up and risk the terrors of self-esteem-crushing rejection!
No, I don’t think men are inherently any “braver” with this sort of thing; it’s just understood that if he doesn’t be the first one to break the ice, odds are she won’t at all, so nothing’s going to happen (sex, relationship, first date, etc)
I really don’t think there isn’t a teenage boy who wasn’t mostly crippled by shyness and indecision the first time he tried to approach a girl he crushed on. I just think, like about anything else, the more you force yourself to do something scary, the easier and easier it gets for you until you actually enjoy it! Same as with public speaking.
A player is just a formally shy guy who’s taken the plunge 20x as many times as the still-shy man and has had some success behind him to boost his confidence.
time to talk to the Young ladies out there! High school girls, Jr. High girls! If some clearly nervous, stammering, fumbling, fidgeting boy shuffles up to you and manages to squeak out a request to “go out sometime, somewhere… maybe… if ya wanna…”
I don’t even care if you’re interested or not; through the poor first-timer a bone for the sake of his future! Just say yes, be nice about it, go out on one, maybe two casual, semi-platonic daytime dates, give him a little peck of approval on the cheek at the end to say thanks and, if he STILL has no appeal to you, just don’t arrange another date with him in the future. That’s it. You’re done.
Was that so hard? You had a nice time out he was probably happy to treat you to, cost you nothing, and ended it with some class. Thanks to you, he’s got more confidence, some success behind him to prove to his self esteem that, yes, asking a girl out DOES work sometimes. You may be indirectly responsible for the birth of his future children someday! Bravo! Didn’t hurt much, did it? ^_^
(People are so quick to dismiss or discard others people these days. No wonder we got social issues up the wazoo! I’m teaching this shit to any daughter or niece I ever have!)
I’ll be your flavor of the month anytime Maggie 🙂
Tease. 😉
I still remember the day I found out that my ex-gf (Jen) had cheated on me with another woman.
I was chatting to Casey, a friend of Jen’s that I had always found very attractive – I had never made any advances out of respect for Jen, but by then Jen and I had been split up for about a year and Jen had since moved away and married some other guy.
Anyway Casey was telling me how she and Jen had fallen out and it seemed they were having a pretty nasty feud, then out of the blue Casey mentions that she and Jen had made love one time when I was out of town a couple of years ago. I was stunned and didn’t believe it at first, but Casey was able to convince me it was true.
Thinking back over our relationship it suddenly dawned on me that this was probably not an isolated incident – whenever I was out of town or otherwise busy it seemed Jen always had a female friend sleeping over – she claimed that she was afraid to stay in the house alone and I had never thought anything of it.
I must admit I felt hugely disappointed and somewhat betrayed – not because I was jealous but because I would have been very turned on at the time if I had known what was going on. Maybe I could have even talked Jen into a threesome, or at least been allowed to watch, but such things seemed to me to be impossible fantasies that only occurred in Penthouse Forum or erotic fiction. But by the time I realised the potential for experimentation it was all too late … and to this day I kick myself for not being more switched on … 😉
Anyway, Jen and I remain fairly close (I think her husband is a great guy and she’s lucky to have met him) but I have never let on that I know about her bisexuality. I know that Casey was just trying to stir up trouble and that Jen does not want these things widely known.
Since then I have always looked more closely at female relationships and been alert to the possibility that things are not exactly platonic – and I have concluded that it is actually quite common for women, no matter their declared sexual preference, to sleep with other women. For some women it is just youthful experimentation, for others a recurring pastime interspersed between heterosexual relationships, and of course for others an exclusive preference.
I think it’s easy for some women to experiment sexually with other women, while being neither bisexual nor lesbian. There is something about the exchange which is easy to shrug off.
This passage:
“I’m going to call her Mae, because she was curvy and sultry like her idol Mae West. She had black hair and her skin was even fairer than mine; some girls called her “Snow White” for that reason. We had very similar eyes and were almost the same height, so when we went places together people often took us for sisters. But there was nothing sisterly about our feelings for one another; we had been friends for two years and often joked about lesbian love in front of our schoolmates, but nothing had ever come of it until one day in September of 1982 when we were sitting on her couch after school. We had been talking about the 1920s and the conversation had ranged from F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Dillinger’s legendary penis, and at some point the conversation just lapsed and we sat staring into each other’s eyes. And then I kissed her, and she responded with great passion; a few days later I stayed overnight (in those days nobody thought anything of two teenage girls sharing a bed) and we went much farther.”
Completely convincing and beautifully done. The passage obviously opens a novella perfectly.
There’s so much feeling here. And almost 30 years gone. Looks like a deep well, a gusher.
Thank you, N/a. Oh, yeah, there’s still feeling there; once I fall in love with someone I never really stop loving him or her. I still think of Mae quite often, despite the distance of three decades and uncountable lovers.
Maggie, this is an awesome anecdote out of your life to share with us. Even if you found it a touch personal to post online for all to read, i think if even ONE teenage girl who’s conflicted, confused, and distraught about her changing feelings reads this and, CLICK, suddenly it all makes sense to her…
That’s worth a lot!
It’s funny, but at first the personal stories were a bit harder to write than the professional ones; I’m mostly over that now. 😉
And if any of your reading this IS a teenager, then for Heaven’s sake don’t tell us! You’re probably not technically supposed to be here, but if we don’t know then it’s OK, ‘kay?
Every lesbian I have ever encountered tended to be at least fairly miserable… A close acquaintance that claims to be exclusively lesbian was traumatized in early adulthood by a man and is still clearly conflicted by her sexuality.
As for males being nervous in approaching females; it’s possibly a relic of
prehistoric times when population was small and reproductive chances were limited. This undue concern makes no sense in modern times, since the population is so enormous that the consequence of failure is almost zero; and practice improves the likelihood of success.
It’s also fear of rejection, and an understandable fear of stigmatization in a culture which validates a woman’s right to label as a “creep” any man who expresses an interest in her which she doesn’t reciprocate. I have this talk with my daughters a lot – what is, and is not, actual “creepy” behavior. Liking you is not creepy just because you don’t like him back.
But in the modern American workplace, asking a woman out can get you hauled to HR on harassment charges if she doesn’t welcome the request or if being asked makes her “uncomfortable.”
“As I’ve said several times already, I am bisexual. I suspect many more women are (to one degree or another) than let on even in these comparatively liberal times; we do, after all, tend to be creatures of the mean rather than of the extremes as men are. ”
Sexually men are not of the extreme either/or .. either.
It is not uncommon for males to experiment sexually with each other when young. Nor is it uncommon for men to carry on sexually with each other until they get married to women in countrires that do not have a developed dating culture or are arranged marriage cultures.
Then you’ve got the same sex boarding schools which have always been notorious for same sex sexual activity, men at sea, etc.
Most do not identify as “gay” but are circumstantially bi-sexual.
Human sexuality is on a spectrum and depending on circumstances and oppurtunities, various areas of that spectrum will get “expressed”.
That was an interesting read, thanks for sharing.
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