I am a Sexually Incorrect lesbian. For years I've hidden it, but now I intend to share my dirty little secret with the world. My favorite sexual fantasies have always been bisexual S/M fantasies, and although for years I refused to tell anyone else in the women's movement about this for fear some Women Against Pornography type would excoriate me for my retrograde thoughts, I've never really tried to repress them—frankly, doing so ruined my sex life—nor have I ever felt terribly guilty about them. On the other hand, I'm not yet prepared to march in the Gay Pride parade in full leather drag carrying a "No Pain, No Gain' banner, and thus the "new wave" of bold young lesbian sexual outlaws considers me hopelessly fainthearted and old-fashioned. I've always harbored a secret love of makeup and dressing up, even during the period in which I never wore any and let the hair on my legs grow I think it comes from the fact that I was such a failure at dress-up as an adolescent. On the other hand, I am aghast at the thought of calling myself a femme, in the manner of the new lesbian butch-femme liberation movement. As a woman who was married for many years and lived a heterosexual life in which everyone from my mother to my boss to my husband insisted that I be a femme, I must admit that this trend really does baffle me sometimes.

If this is not enough to convince you that I am truly S.I., consider this: I repudiate politically correct lesbian lovemaking. P. C. lesbian lovemaking, for the uninitiated, consists of the following: Two women lie side by side (tops or bottoms are strictly forbidden—lesbians must be non-hierarchical); they touch each other gently and sweetly all over their bodies for several hours (lesbians are not genitally/orgasm oriented, a patriarchal mode). If the women have orgasms at all—and orgasms are only marginally acceptable because, after all, we must be process, rather than goal, oriented—both orgasms must occur at exactly the same time in order to foster true equality and egalitarianism. (I'm not kidding about this orgasm stuff: A "feminist" critique of a paper I published in the journal Women and Therapy included the charge that my thinking was "male-identified" because I talked about treating anorgasmic lesbians. The critic charged that orgasms shouldn't be important to lesbians, only to men. I've given up a lot for the lesbian-feminist movement, but this is where I draw the line.)

I think my own struggles with my S. 1. nature, the fact that wherever I turned I could find little writing or thought about our sexuality either within the mainstream field of psychology or even within the lesbian-feminist movement, my observations of recent very interesting sexual trends within the lesbian community, and my (somewhat prurient) fascination with gay male sexuality led me eventually to do some theorizing and writing of my own. This essay is best viewed as a work in progress. I am an old-fashioned lesbian feminist from the school of thought that believed that the "personal is political." This concept didn't just mean that housework was oppressive to women. It really had to do with a methodology of political (and I would argue, scientific as well) discovery. The idea was that in any new, unexplored area of human (female) experience, the first stage of research must of necessity be self-exploration, and the next has to be a public sharing of that self-exploration in a forum wherein participants are nonjudgmental and noncritical (critical in the condemning sense of the word) while remaining critical in the Socratic, questioning sense. In my opinion, lesbian sexuality is just such an unexplored field, and so I write here in the spirit of "the personal is political." This work has come from my own personal ruminations about my own sexuality as much as it has come from reading, observations of clients and friends, and ideas of colleagues. I hope what I write can be a springboard for the ideas and self-revelations of others, and that our community can allow now for a nonjudgmental fact-finding stage in our discovery of our own sexuality. We simply do not know enough about lesbian sexuality, or about human sexuality for that matter, to reasonably do anything else right now.

Lesbian Couples and Lesbian Sex

Some of the most startling information about lesbian sexuality has come from a study by sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, published as American Couples' These researchers used a large and well-chosen sample and compared heterosexual married, heterosexual unmarried, gay male, and lesbian couples along a number of dimensions including sexuality. They found, for example, that lesbian couples have sex far less frequently than any other type of couple. Gay men have somewhat less sex in their primary relationships than do either type of heterosexual couple; on the other hand, gay males have the highest rates of extramarital sex. This means that lesbians in couple relationships are less sexual as couples and as individuals than anyone else. Only about one-third of lesbians in relationships of two years or longer had sex once a week or more; 47 percent of lesbians in long-term relationships had sex once a month or less. This is in striking contrast, for example, to heterosexual married couples: Two-thirds of these couples had sex once a week or more, and only 15 percent of long-term married couples had sex once a month or less.

Blumstein and Schwartz also report that the lesbians they interviewed preferred nongenital physical contact such as hugging and cuddling to genital sex. However, one-half of lesbians in couples with a low frequency of genital sexual contact said they are dissatisfied with their sexuality. (My guess is that this is the half of the couple that wants sex more than once a month.)

Lesbians in the Blumstein and Schwartz study seem to be more limited in the range of their sexual techniques than are other couples. For example, 61 percent of lesbian couples have oral sex "infrequently or not at all." This finding corroborates similar data from Karia Jay and Alien Young's The Gay Report." Lesbians have about the same rates of nonmonogamy as heterosexuals (28 percent report at least one extramarital episode), although they have far less "outside" sex than gay men, for whom nonmonogamy is the norm rather than the exception But lesbians, like heterosexual women and unlike both gay and straight men, are likely to have affairs rather than just sexual encounters. Moreover, both lesbians and gay men, as contrasted to heterosexual couples, are likely to be open with their partners about their extramarital activity. And lesbians who are nonmonogamous are more likely than gay males and even heterosexual men and women to be, at the same time, dissatisfied with their primary relationships and with sex in their primary relationships. Thus lesbian extramarital activity seems to be qualitatively quite different from heterosexual nonmonogamy, which tends to be furtive and not necessarily related to unhappiness within the primary relationship; and it is different from the nonmonogamy of gay males in that its form is affairs rather than "tricking," and may often be related to dissatisfaction within the primary couple.

And finally, as reported at an eighteen-month follow-up of all couples, lesbian couples had the highest rates of break-up of any couple type. Moreover, the pattern of breakup was that of nonmonogamy (in the form of an affair) followed by the nonmonogamous partner leaving for a new lover.

What are we to make of this? One conclusion, of course, is that lesbians clearly spend more time discussing the political correctness of sex than they spend doing sex. More serious is the fact that these findings fit a very common pattern that I see in my practice and in the community at large: Two women couple, often very shortly after each has decoupled from a previous relationship, and frequently move in with each other after the briefest of courtships. The women pledge undying love for each other, feel perfectly matched, and enjoy ecstatic lovemaking. Two to four years later, the couple's frequency of sex has dropped off drastically. One partner may complain, but often neither really complains, and usually they claim that the rest of the relationship is "fine." They may rationalize the lack of sex in their relationship with political ideology about genital sex being patriarchal and so forth. They may make a conscious and overt decision to "open up" the relationship, because "monogamy is patriarchal," or nonmonogamy may "just happen." In either case, what ultimately happens is that one partner becomes sexually involved with a new woman, "falls in love" with the new person, and the couple breaks up, with the nonmonogamous partner forming a new couple with the third woman.

What is happening here? I believe that lesbians, like heterosexual women, are essentially sexually repressed. We are at least as repressed as our straight sisters, perhaps even more. We have more sexual conflicts than do men, gay or heterosexual, lower sexual desire, and fewer ways of expressing our sexual needs. Our relationships represent the pairing of two relatively sexually inhibited individuals; thus it is no wonder that the frequency of sex in our relationships is less than in gay male or heterosexual relationships. Inhibited sexual desire is the most common clinical problem of lesbians presenting for sex therapy. Moreover, our sex is less diverse and varied than the sexual techniques of gay males and possibly even of heterosexual couples.

On the other hand, despite our rhetoric about sensuality versus sexuality, sex does matter to us, as individuals and as couples. For most people who are coupled, sex is a significant if not all-consuming part of the relationship. It can be considered for many as part of what holds a relationship together during those periods in which it seems that little else is going well with the partners. Genital, orgasmic sex is indeed important to us, and our sexual inhibitions thus interfere not only with our individual enjoyment of sex, but also with this significant aspect of coupling. When a part of a relationship is missing, the couple is more likely to come undone. And the way our couples often become undone, through nonmonogamy and one partner subsequently leaving the relationship for a new lover, is not accidental and is related to our sexual repression. We leave one relationship with an unsatisfactory sex life for a new relationship that promises better sex.

What are the reasons for our relative lack of sexuality, and how are our sexual concerns related to the recent debates in the lesbian feminist movement over sexual issues such as S/M, butch-femme roles, bisexuality, and nonmonogamy? Before exploring the answers to these questions, let me issue some caveats and make clear some of the premises upon which I base my thinking. First, I do not mean to imply that I believe that lesbian relationships dissolve only, or even principally, for sexual reasons. Blumstein and Schwartz feel that the legitimization of marriage is the primary factor involved in relationship longevity. Even though lesbian relationships had the highest dissolution rates at follow-up, the chief difference in couples was between heterosexual married couples on one hand, and all other types of couples on the other. Social sanction seems to be the strongest bond that holds relationships together. Aside from legitimization or lack thereof, surely other factors besides sex lead to the break-up of lesbian relationships. In fact, an alternate way to view the data I gave earlier is to say that the basic problems lesbian couples have is that they couple prematurely, and that the later falling off of sexual desire is a sign that the couple never should have been together in the first place-. I mean to point out only that sex is one powerful factor, and a factor that is almost never considered by lesbians themselves as a possible reason for relationship failure. Second, I do not imply that longevity in relationships is always desirable, or that all people should be permanently coupled. Certainly some lesbians will not want to be coupled at all, and others will consider serial monogamy to be preferable to a quasi-married state. But I do not hear many lesbians saying this. What I hear is lesbians professing to want to make their relationships work in a long-term committed way. Because this is what lesbians say they want, it is relevant to examine why they so rarely—more rarely than other couples—get it. My position concerning whether longevity is practical or useful in a relationship is that longevity combined with quality in a couple relationship of any kind is uncommon but attainable, and because so many of us lesbians seem to aspire to that combination, it is worth our while as psychologists and clinicians to figure out how to help our community achieve this goal for those of us who wish it.

There are some premises upon which I base my work, assumptions that I should make explicit for the sake of clarity and honesty, I quite frankly consider the average lesbian and gay male relationship to be generally more advanced than the average heterosexual relationship. In my experience, far too many heterosexual relationships become bogged down in the mire of sex-role conflicts and never transcend these conflicts to a point where both partners see each other as full human beings. I do not mean to imply that lesbian and gay male relationships are without conflict, simply that the conflicts are of a more human, universal, less gender-based order. And they are certainly much less likely to exhibit the vast power differentials that can be found in many heterosexual relationships; what power differentials do exist are most often psychological rather than real, that is, backed up by concrete power in the world such as financial or legal power. I am not saying that heterosexual relationships never transcend gender; surely some do. I only mean that depressingly large numbers of heterosexual relationships never get beyond this level to a more authentic and genuine intimacy. They may be perfectly good partnerships on a business or child-rearing level, but not necessarily very intimate or, as C. A. Tripp says, they are not very "finely tuned" relationships.'' Because of this, I believe that the study of homosexual pairings has great tutorial value for heterosexual relationships: To some extent, we represent what they would face were they not so busy dealing with sex-role conflicts.

Moreover, studying lesbian versus gay male relationships gives us a splendid opportunity to examine the "male principle" and the "female principle" as they are currently culturally defined and as they operate in pair-bonding. That is, gay men represent "unmitigated maleness," both alone and in couples, while lesbians represent "unmitigated femaleness." This is indeed a very useful thing; by comparing these two types of couples with each other and with heterosexual couples we can learn a great deal, for it is only by contrast that we discover constancies. It also can be useful to contrast the sexuality found in gay male versus lesbian couples. On the other hand, gay-man have more sex, both within their primary relationships and outside, than do lesbians. Their sexual forms are more diverse, more than any other type of couple, they manage to successfully incorporate nonmonogamy into their relationships. Thus in one view gay men have achieved the most advanced state of sexuality within the pair-bonding known to humankind. (I say this despite the knowledge that gay male sexuality has also brought with it sexual excesses with sometimes disastrous results, for example, AIDS, and that AIDS itself has modified gay male sexual behavior as described in Dan Bloom and Michael Shernoff's Work.S I vehemently disagree, however, with the line of reasoning that says that AIDS was brought about by sexuality. AIDS is caused by a virus, not by sex, and it is important that we not let the tragedy of AIDS reinforce sex-negative homophobic attitudes.) Lesbians, on the other hand, are very good at closeness and intimacy: Our pairings probably contain, in general, more closeness, sharing, and intimate contact than any others. These differences of course correspond to what Carol Gilligan and others have spoken of as differences between connectedness and independence, or expressiveness versus instrumentality* My view is that lesbians and gay men have much to learn from each other and teach each other about sex and relationships. Perhaps, together, we can create relationships with gay men's sexiness and lesbians' connectedness.

The Sexual Repression of Lesbians

Let us begin by considering, in no particular order, some of the reasons why lesbians might experience greater sexual repression than gay or heterosexual men, and perhaps in some cases even greater inhibition than heterosexual women. Some of the following forces affect lesbians as individual women; some operate in lesbian couples as a particular type of union.

On the simplest level, one thing that accounts for a relatively low frequency of sex in lesbian relationships is that lesbians, by virtue of socialization as women, are less likely to play an active role in requesting sex and are far less likely to pressure a recalcitrant partner. Thus to some extent the low level of sex in lesbian pairings is probably just a result of neither woman asking for it rather than a particular inhibition. As women, we are not only taught to wait for our partner to ask for sex although we may want it; but we are also taught not even to pay attention to our own sexual desires unless or until we are approached by our partner. In a sense, our sexual response is cued to our partner's request in almost Pavlovian terms. Two women together, each primed to respond sexually only to a request from another, may rarely even experience desire, much less engage in sexual activity. And this may all very well be completely unconscious.

Moreover, it is almost certainly true that we are less likely to pressure a reluctant partner to have sex with us, especially compared to men. In fact, we are likely to see sexual pressure as male behavior and thus assaultive and abusive. One of my first sex therapy cases was a couple who had been together for more than ten years and had no sex for the last seven. Remarkably, they had never once had a fight over this, even though for at least several of those years, one partner had been rather upset over the lack of sexuality. One is extremely unlikely to see this pattern in heterosexual, or even gay male, relationships that suffer from low levels of sexual intimacy. In fact, a common clinical issue with such couples is to get the unhappy partner to take some of the pressure off the other partner. We might reflect on the fact that, contrary to our feminist beliefs, perhaps a little pressure is good for a relationship; pressure can simply reflect the desires of one partner rather than be evidence of assaultive behavior.

Another consideration is that sex and love are fused for women in general and lesbians in particular. Sex and love may be even more fused for lesbians, who, again in the absence of male pressure, have no countervailing force attempting to get them to separate the two. When I speak to lesbian lay audiences, some women now bemoan the fact that they can rarely find other lesbians who are interested in purely sexual liaisons; these women find themselves accused of being male-identified for wanting such liaisons. I first got in touch with the power of this fusion when I realized that in all my sexual fantasies, even those involving "stranger sex," invariably I found myself saying, "I love you" as though this declaration were a necessary part of sexual enjoyment. I contrasted this to a gay male friend's sexual fantasies of making love to the image of disembodied penises; we seem at opposite ends of the spectrum of sexual stimulation. As another lesbian therapist I know puts it, "Lesbians can't fuck unless they are married." We are the last of the modem-day romantics, and although in some ways this is charming, it has some untoward effects. For example, it does help to explain our alarmingly brief courtship periods; we are just like the Victorians who married in part to have a legitimate source of sex. It certainly explains why our extramarital liaisons are affairs rather than the less relationship-threatening tricks. But it explains some of our sexual problems within relationships as well. Because sex and love are intertwined for us, our sexual desire is very vulnerable to interference from relationship problems. Few of us can keep the bedroom separate from the rest of our lives as a couple. Moreover, many of us have problems expressing anger. Again, this is because of female socialization to be nice, not to get angry, a deadly combination. In fact, I use lack of fighting in a lesbian relationship as a diagnostic clue to detect low-level sexuality when the partners have not directly told me of this problem, and I am almost never wrong. For us to enjoy sex or simply to feel sexual, our relationship must be going very well indeed. This dynamic can create problems in two ways: First, it is unrealistic to expect couple relationships always to function at a high level, and perhaps more significantly, sexual connection itself can at times improve a faltering relationship.

In addition, we are less "looks-ist" than are men or heterosexual women, another finding confirmed by the American Couples study. Often, as a reaction to the way men have defined us only by our looks, we reject ideologically and practically the reliance upon physical attractiveness to form pairings. Unfortunately, what may be good politics may make for bad sex. Human beings, like other animals, do seem to rely at least in part upon visual attractiveness to cue sexual stimulation. To the extent that we feel guilty about that reliance, to the extent to which we avoid cultivating our own physical attractiveness out of the misguided belief that to preen is to be sexist, we detract from our own sexuality. We need surely to redefine physical beauty in our own feminist ways, but we cannot simply reject physical attractiveness and our response to physical beauty as somehow politically incorrect.

Other sources of sexual repression derive from early female sex-role socialization. As women, we already have a built-in acculturated tendency not to recognize our own sexual arousal. From the earliest age, our organs of arousal are hidden from view, less easily seen and less easily stimulated. And the powerful cultural forces that teach us to deny our sexual impulses probably take effect ultimately upon a physiological level. Julia Heiman's classic study is perhaps the best illustration of this/ Heiman exposed both female and male subjects to sexually explicit audiotapes at the same time that she had these subjects connected to instruments that measure physiological arousal. She found no differences between men and women in the extent of arousal as recorded by her instrumentation. When she asked her subjects to report on their subjective experience of arousal, however, all male subjects who were physiologically aroused reported feeling aroused, whereas only half of female subjects who were aroused experienced this. It is as if the connection between our crotches and our heads have been severed; we are sexual paraplegics.

In addition to the forces already cited, lesbians may suffer acculturated inhibitions in the form of internalized homophobia. Betty Berzon, a lesbian psychologist who talks about the stage-wise development of lesbian/gay identity, suggests that at one point in its evolution, women who want to love and be loved by other women, but do not want to consider themselves gay, psychologically defend against this identity by eliminating genital sexuality from their female relationships. In other words, women can have loving, close, and intimate relationships with other women but pretend to be straight as long as there is no genital sexual contact. Berzon hypothesizes that lesbians may retain vestiges of these psychological defenses long after they have become unnecessary by virtue of our coming out to ourselves, just as neurotic conflicts are frequently the result of leftover defenses that were once, but are no longer, useful. Her view is worth considering, especially in the light of the almost uncanny resemblance between this description of early woman-to-woman contact and later lesbian relationships with sexual difficulties. She also suggests that gay males, at this early stage, defend against a gay identity by allowing sexual contact without intimacy, and again, this bears a strange resemblance to the intimacy difficulties gay men often experience in later life.

Lesbian sexuality is undoubtedly affected by lesbians' early experience with men. In a culture where an estimated 25 percent of all women will experience some sexual assault by men by age eighteen, surely all women have their sexuality somewhat damaged because of the unfortunate connection of sex with violence and exploitation. But lesbians experience additional troubles. The vast majority of lesbians have had some sexual involvement with men before coming out: More than 90 percent have had sex with men, and one-third have been married." For some lesbians, these sexual relationships have been pleasurable. For others, however, who experience no sexual desire for men but simply had sex in the interests of passing, sex was inauthentic, possibly painful, certainly distasteful. We have no reason to believe that negative conditioning to sexuality automatically disappears when women switch to female partners. Moreover, we are just beginning to explore the incidence and effects of incest upon lesbians as young girls; some studies report a higher incidence of earlier incest among lesbians." Virginia Apuzzo has suggested an interesting theory regarding incest: She suggests that incest may be perpetrated upon young tomboy girls (who are somewhat more likely to grow up to be lesbians, as reported by Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith) as a way of punishing them and "keeping them in line.""

According to Tripp and others, sexual desire requires a "barrier": some kind of tension, a taboo, a difference of some. sort, a power discrepancy, romance, the excitement of newness or the thrill of the chase—some form of disequilibrium." This hypothesis has some important implications for lesbian relationships. First, it helps to explain why our romanticism is a problem. Our romanticism can be seen as a type of barrier to create sexual excitement; that is, we are romantic because it is sexually exciting to be so. The problem is that this appears to be the only acceptable form of tension or barrier we have, and thus the sole method we have for creating sexual excitement. This explains why we must fall in love to be sexual: It is the only thing we allow ourselves to be turned on by. It also explains why our extramarital relationships are affairs rather than tricks: Casual sex doesn't excite us. Moreover, it explains why sex dies in our relationships; when the romantic, or limerant, first stage of our relationships passes, we have no other mechanisms to generate sexual tension. Only falling in love produces sexual desire, so we fall in love again, with a new partner, and the limerance of this new relationship revives our flagging sexuality. Clearly, we need to expand our repertoire so that there are more tensions or barriers available to facilitate sexual desire.

In addition, the barrier theory suggests that, paradoxically, intimacy may hurt sexual desire within a relationship. Lesbian relationships, in part because they are "advanced" relationships, sometimes suffer difficulties of overinvolvement, called fusion or merging. To some extent, intimacy involves the lessening of differences between partners; certainly it is more difficult to maintain a purely independent sense of self within a very intimate relationship. As intimacy increases and individual differences decrease, so may the very distance, mystery, and unpredictability necessary to maintain sexual tension. The softening or disappearance of individual differences may serve to decrease sexual desire in another, slightly different, way as well. Tripp suggests that one of the functions served by sexual intimacy is that of "importation" of the loved object's characteristics and "exportation" of one's own." One desires another who possesses characteristics that one either feels deficient in or would like to have more of. Sexual contact is a way of feeling that you have incorporated within yourself the desired characteristics of the love-object—importation—at the same time that you export to your partner characteristics of your own that are desired or admired. We can see immediately how this process will tend to happen less frequently as two partners become more similar and thus have less to export to the other. It is a truism within family and marital therapy that the characteristics that attract someone to a partner initially are precisely those that one tries to eradicate later in the relationship. This is another way of saying that differences not only initially attract and are in part responsible for sexual desire, but also make it difficult for people to live together. Paradoxically, it is to some extent true that the more successful we are in obliterating those differences, the more successful we are in creating wonderful roommates (people who can live together easily because they are so alike) but lousy lovers.

Heterosexual relationships exhibit such problems of fusion less often because the partners often have trouble being intimate enough. Those of us who are lesbians need, perhaps more than other couples, to find ways to introduce other types of barriers/tension/difference into our relationships. But as women we are more sexually inhibited and less free to experiment with our sexuality. The result of this bind may be loss of sexual desire.

To find such ways of introducing new barriers, we can look to our gay brothers. By experimenting with new sexual techniques, through the use of sex toys and props, through costume, through S/M (which maximizes differences between partners), by developing sexual rituals with our partners, by introducing tricking into our relationships, we may be able to find other barriers that enhance sexuality once limerance is gone.

Sexuality and the Contemporary Lesbian Community

What do the issues being debated and acted upon in the lesbian community teach us about our sexuality? First, although I make light of our endless discussions of the "political correctness" of sex, I also recognize the need for these discussions. In fact, for women in general and lesbians specifically, our sexuality is political: It has always been used against us to oppress us." Think of the major issues that feminists have fought over in the last several decades, and it becomes obvious that many of them, such as abortion, birth control, rape, incest, lesbianism itself, and clitorial versus vaginal orgasms, have involved our sexuality. Thus it is essential that we be mindful of the political implications when we talk about sexuality.

Second, the debates that have raged in the lesbian-feminist community over such sexual issues as sadomasochism make more sense if one keeps in mind the concept of a dialectic. This concept suggests that when two political ideas or forces are in apparent contradition, the answer to which of the dichotomy is correct lies in achieving a higher-order level of thought from which it is apparent that the dichotomous forces are not really in contradiction, but are merely two aspects of the same issue. Let us see if we can view some of the recent politic-sexual differences within our community in -just this way.

S/M versus Women Against Pornography. First, a summary of the two positions regarding sadomasochistic behavior. The forces against S/M, epitomized by the stance of the group Women Against Pornography as explicated in the book Against Sado-Masoch sm.'5 seem to see polarized role-playing in sex as leading to violence in other parts of the S/M participants' relationship. They believe the roots of S/M to be firmly ensconced in hetcrosexism and patriarchal modes of domination; they decry the addictive, cult-like aspects of S/M, at least as it seems to be developing among some segments of the lesbian community; and they particularly object to the view, promulgated by some lesbians within groups like Samois and the Lesbian Sex Mafia, that S/M liberation is a political cause comparable to lesbianism or feminism. WAP appears to view the entire emergence of S/M as an issue within the lesbian community as basically retrograde, reactionary, and a symptom of the Reagan eighties.

The viewpoint favoring S/M is best exemplified by the West Coast lesbian group Samois (named from a lesbian-run estate in The Story of 0) in the book Coming to Power." Lesbians who are proponents of S/M practices emphasize the consensual aspects of this relationship and point out that unlike the oppressive power relationships, control in a S/M relationship is really exerted by the "bottom" or masochist. They assert that S/M practices free sexual energy and allow the partners an almost spiritual transcendence of self through "power exchanges," that is, the voluntary giving over or taking of power from one partner to another. More than anything, S/M proponents emphasize the enhancement of sexual experience through S/M, apparently taking the view that as far as sex is concerned, the ends clearly justify the means. "But why do you do it?" asks a rhetorical questioner in "Reasons" from Coming to Power. "Because it is erotic" is the answer.

Let us examine this seemingly dichotomous view of lesbian S/M. First, it is clear that the points made in Against Sado-Masochism cannot be dismissed simply as puritanical ravings. Any clinician who has worked with clientele who engage in S/M practices knows that S/M can at times have all the worst properties of an addiction. Like drug or alcohol use, or for that matter like some other forms of sexual conduct, S/M behavior can become compulsive, out of control of the participants. People can develop a tolerance for certain pain levels as their thresholds get pushed higher and higher and can, if not careful, get to a point where only dangerous levels of pain excite. Moreover, the S/M movement as it is currently constituted within the lesbian community does have some cult-like aspects, and like all radical or fringe groups, has picked up some borderline personalities along the way. It is also certainly true that for some people sadomasochism can have deep and destructive meanings. A client of mine with a long history of self-destructive and compulsive behaviors that included self-mutilation, drug addiction, and suicidal gestures joined the New York-based Lesbian Sex Mafia group with disastrous results. At one point she told me she had "progressed" to staging "scenes" (pre-arranged encounters that, for her, revolved around being whipped) that no longer were sexual in content and that were so severe that she bore multiple welts for days afterward. Shortly after this, she hanged herself with a rope and came within inches of succeeding in her suicide attempt. Based on my own and others' experiences, I have no trouble believing that some people who engage in S/M do find inequality slipping into other aspects of their relationships, with unfortunate results. Moreover, I admit I find myself agreeing with the WAP group when they object to S/M liberation: I am hard put to see how the proponents of a particular sexual technique can really compare themselves to women, racial minorities, or gay people as a minority (can we next foresee anal sex liberationists or cunnilingus liberationists?). Although S/M enthusiasts understandably feel oppressed because of their preferences, I am inclined to see this as merely a special case of oppression that results from the generally sex-negative views that we all, especially women, hold in this culture. I also admit to being suspicious of anyone who defines herself solely or primarily in terms of her sadomasochism, as do some of the more visible and vocal proponents within the lesbian community. Finally, it is undoubtedly true that some portion of the power of S/M does derive from patriarchal roots. Some of the imagery of S/M is clearly heterosexist in origin; some of the force that makes so many of us sexual masochists is undoubtedly related to our powerless role in society.

But WAP fails to distinguish between the excesses of S/M and the normative practice of S/M. Although we do not know exactly what normative S/M practices are, we can guess that most S/M practiced by lesbians is practiced quietly, perhaps with some embarrassment, behind the closed doors of committed couples' bedrooms. Just as most drug and alcohol users do not become addicts, so it is also probably true that most S/M practitioners do not become compulsive, out-of-control self-destructive users. Among lesbians, there are probably more silk scarves, mild spankings, and fantasy being used than whips and chains, probably more talk than action. On a pragmatic level, the WAP people make the mistake of listening to those for whom S/M has created problems, and ignoring the vast majority for whom it is merely an interesting variation in their sex lives.

The theoretical level is more complex and requires a synthesis of both views and transcendence to the next level of analysis. Let us acknowledge the inherent heterosexism in at least some of the imagery of S/M. Does this mean we must discard and repudiate these practices? I have two objections to assuming that S/M should not be practiced or supported as a sexual variation. One is that I fear that at this point in our culture, so much of female sexuality may be contaminated by heterosexism and patriarchal oppression that if we reject aspects of our sexuality upon this basis we will have little left. I consider this serious because I think the larger issue of the wholesale repression of female sexuality is more important than whether some areas of our sexuality have been contaminated by patriarchal modes. That is, it is more important at this stage in history to support women being sexual, however they are sexual, than to judge which aspects of their sexuality are non-patriarchal and which are male-identified. But beyond that, I object on the basis that we do not yet understand sexuality sufficiently to make pat pronouncements on the origins of various types of sexual interests or drives.