Many alternative explanations of the origins of sadomasochistic sexuality, for example, have nothing to do with patriarchy, or are even positive ways of coping with patriarchy. Tripp points out that on a cross-cultural level, there seems to be little relationship between sadomasochistic or violent sexual practices and violence in the practicing couple. He uses as an illustration a Pacific Island tribe noted for its peace-loving ways and gentle relationships, whose sexual practices include biting one another on the ear until blood is drawn. There appears to be a universality to the fusion of sex and aggression, to the sexiness of power differentials, that is completely unrelated to the aggressiveness/oppressiveness of the practitioners. If this is true, then perhaps heterosexism determines in a somewhat arbitrary way some of the content of S/M erotic fantasies, but not the form itself. One can imagine that the conditioning for S/M eroticism takes place in childhood in ways that might explain this difference in content or form. Bernie Zilbergeld and C. R. Ellison have suggested that, particularly in childhood, sexual arousal is virtually indistinguishable from other arousal states, including physical activity arousal, anger, or fear.' This is particularly noticeable in young boys, who have penile erections under many circumstances that could be considered sexual only by great stretches of the imagination, but we have no reason to believe it is not also true of girls. Thus a frightened child, or a child receiving a spanking, may also be experiencing sexual arousal, and it is quite easy to imagine a classically conditioned response to this type of stimuli becoming entrenched at an early age. If this is true, than the root of S/M is the parent-child power differential, and only incidentally the male-female power differential. Even if this is not precisely how S/M becomes conditioned, it is useful to remember how similar physiological arousal states become. If we keep this in mind, it is not hard to see how some people could find pain (a heightened stimulation that increases general body arousal) an enhancement to sexual arousal. In this sense, S/M can be seen as a means of pushing the body's limits rather than unpleasant pain. Most of us can instinctively sense how this might be true. If we have ever engaged in rough sex, if we have ever scratched, clawed, or bitten our lover in moments of passion, if we have ever enjoyed unpleasant stimuli during sexual arousal (e.g., the scene in Rita Mae Brown's In Her Day during which the young heroine places an ice cube on her lover's clitoris just before orgasm)," then we have used pain for pleasure and can understand this connection. We can see that this aspect of S/M, at any rate, has little or nothing to do with sexism but probably has more to do with the physiology of sexual arousal, an aspect of biological functioning that we are only just recently beginning to understand.
But the aspect of S/M that involves physical pain is only one part of the picture that is disturbing to many feminists. Perhaps more upsetting is the connection between S/M practices and shame and humiliation. Much S/M, at least as practiced by lesbians currently, seems to involve humiliation and subjugation more than it involves actual pain. These aspects of S/M seem more connected to patriarchal conditioning.
This may be so, but it is useful to remember that patriarchy is not the only source of shame for a young girl growing up. Shame is a fairly typical concomitant of certain stages in the development of a moral conscience, or superego in young children. Shame is a concomitant of many types of religious upbringing, particularly religious teachings about sexuality; for example, the Catholic term for masturbation is self-abuse, which itself suggests a type of S/M activity. It may be true that many people who practice the types of S/M that involve ritual shaming, humiliation, and subjugation partially rework and psychologically overcome early, frightening experiences of shame, guilt, or domination. And these earlier experiences themselves may have become "sexualized" in childhood through the connection between fear-arousal and sexual-arousal.
Intuitively this explanation makes some sense. In therapy, we recognize the value of ritually acting out old, frightening dramas in our lives; we call it revivification, catharsis and abreaction, psychodrama, and so on. We also recognize the extent to which neurosis itself involves the playing out of ritual scripts and scenes, sometimes from very early childhood. Why should not our sexuality, the origins and functioning of which we understand so poorly, also make use of some of the same kinds of ritual reliving and undoing? If so, we can begin to understand, for example, the observation of an old therapist of mine that it seemed her female clients' S/M fantasies became stronger the more assertive they became in their everyday lives, as though confining their subjugation to the bedroom allowed them to "work it out" there and overcome it. Another therapist commented that a masochistic client avowed that he always felt guilty about sex and had to punish himself afterwards until he figured out that he could punish himself before, get it over with, and then enjoy the sex.
There are four points I want to make about this. First, although it may be true that S/M eroticism is, in part, fueled by sexist power differentials and subjugation of women by men, it is also just as likely to be fueled by sex-negative religious messages or memories of subjugation of children by parents. Second, such eroticism may very well represent, at least for some people, a healthy working out of such early traumas rather than an unhealthy giving in to them. Third, it is quite likely that much of what we find sexually erotic has reached the status of functionally autonomous behavior by the time we reach adulthood. Fantasies and objects that may have become eroticized in adolescence or earlier for whatever psycho/social/sexual reasons—whether to work out conflict, because of familiarity, or however else things become eroticized in the first place—tend, often through repeated masturbation, to become solidly entrenched in our psyches as erotic material long after the relevant precipitating causes have ceased to be salient for us. This explains why humiliation, shame, or pain could be erotic to someone who is no longer religious and is an assertive, feminist adult. It is also likely that such functionally autonomous erotic material is not easily changed once we reach adulthood, and that attempts to eliminate such material from one's sexual repertoire will more likely constrict rather than liberate sexuality.
Fourth, although I have no pretensions to having thoroughly explained sadomasochistic eroticism, I do hope that I have demonstrated that S/M fantasy and behavior, and indeed human sexuality in general, is too complex to defy simplistic analysis, and that attempts to condemn any such type of sexuality in the individuals who practice it result more frequently in sexual constriction than in liberation. If this is so, then the ultimate truth about the S/M controversy within the lesbian community at this point may be that although its roots may be partially in patriarchy and it may carry the danger of excess, it may represent a freeing of our sexuality, an attempt to open up, expand, and embroider our sexual technique and erotic potential, and as such, it may be just what we need right now. Even those lesbians for whom S/M and its variants hold no interest may eventually benefit from the sexual openness that this trend in our community may portend.
Butch-Femme Roles
Along with the rise of publicly advocated (as opposed to privately practiced) sadomasochism has come the advocacy of butch-femme roles. The advocacy of such roles appears to be a throwback to the fifties, when heterosexuals and homosexuals alike were busy polarizing men and women (and, more important, masculine and feminine). At first glance, butch-femme lib makes the average feminist's hair stand on end.
But a closer look at butch-femme advocacy shows that it is not so much a throwback to past times as it is a reaction against the lesbian-feminist clone look of the past decade. Most of us know the style: work boots or Frye boots, jeans, work shirt or flannel shirt, man-tailored vest (with or without tie), short hair, no makeup, preferably unshaved legs and underarms, perhaps even facial hair that is emphasized rather than bleached or removed. In an attempt to reject male-defined concepts of women's beauty, many of us ended up looking like teenage boys. Like many other things in our movement, a concept that started out being liberating for many of us ended up being just one more confinement.
In addition, it was sexually boring. Marge Piercy, in the novel Woman on the Edge of Time, pictures a feminist society of the future that includes concepts of costume and body adornment, not as means of objectifying one class of people or as ways of physically confining that class (the intent of much of women's fashion throughout history), but as methods of play-acting, variety, and sexual enticement." The butch-femme proponents seem to recognize the importance to sexual desire of physical attractiveness and diversity of physical looks created by costume and adornment.
They also recognize an age-old concept of limerance, that which is popularly known by the truism "opposites attract" C. A. Tripp would characterize this as an aspect of the "import-export" theory of sexual attraction, and it indeed probably has been used historically to promote heterosexual attraction. That is, we can speculate that one of the functions of polarizing gender roles—assigning some personal or physical traits to one sex and others to the other sex—has been to reinforce heterosexual attraction along the lines of the import-export, "opposites attract" principle of sexual attraction. If we are male, for example, and are not permitted to be emotional, tender, nurturing, or "weak," then we may need a stereotypical female to provide us with those traits. If we are stereotypically female, we may need a male to provide us with the strength, emotional control, or aggressiveness not allowed by our role. Along the same lines, lesbians and gay men, although clearly not attracted to the opposite sex, may sometimes be attracted to the opposite sex role. That is, a butch lesbian, one whose gender-role identification has never been with stereotypically feminine interests or traits, may be drawn consistently to a femme lesbian, or one whose gender-role identification has been more traditionally feminine. The butch-femme advocates instinctively recognize this and address it in their rhetoric.
This is a very sensitive topic politically. Lesbian feminists have not wanted to acknowledge that there are some differences within our community in the extent to which women have identified with a traditionally male or female roles, and that lesbians may be attracted to each other on the basis of these differences. We have been afraid to look at these issues, I think because of the heterosexual stereotype of us that we are all divided into butch or femme, and because in our not-too-distant past we ourselves enforced those rigid roles upon ourselves.
The politically correct lesbian feminist line has been that butch-femme roles were essentially imitations of heterosexual culture, and that once we liberated our thinking through gay pride and feminist thought we rejected those roles and discovered that we are really all alike, that there are no roles. There is a good deal of truth to this. Certainly the rigid role-playing in lesbian culture of the past was a caricature of mainstream culture to a great extent, and certainly we are all a good deal more complex than the roles allowed us to be.
On the other hand, it has also probably always been true that there are differences among us in the extent to which we identify with traditionally male or female roles. In Radclyffe Hall's day, these differences were seen as dividing "real" lesbians, those with a male identification, from "imitation" lesbians, those who were more stereotypically feminine. Real and imitation also meant those who were exclusively homosexual (Kinsey 6's) versus those with some heterosexual experiences and impulses (Kinsey 4's and 5's). The two dichotomies were seen as related, and perhaps they are. One still hears echoes of such thinking. In my community throughout the 1970s some gay women maintained that the only real lesbians were born lesbians, meaning those who had an early identification as not female and who had never had attractions to or experiences with men.
The point is that at least for the last fifty or sixty years these differences have existed in the lesbian community, and we have always been a bit baffled and disquieted by them. The butch-femme advocates, it seems to me, are beginning co acknowledge the differences and celebrate, rather than repudiate, them. On the whole, I suspect this is very positive. These women are acknowledging that physical appearance is important to sexuality, that at least sometimes, opposites attract, and that these opposites may be, to an extent, modeled after gender roles, affirming that it is all right to have different tastes and preferences, that we do not need all to act or look alike. They are also saying that it is all right to have different sexual tastes, not just in what or whom one is attracted to, but in what one does in bed: It is all right to prefer an active or passive role, to enjoy making love to or being made love to more. Our community has had a peculiarly ambivalent attitude toward sex roles. On the one hand, the greatest criticism one could make of another woman has been that she is male-identified. On the other hand, we despise the traditionally feminine as male-defined. This has left us very little room to maneuver, and has surely been one of the factors constraining our sexual selves. The butch-femme stance rejects these political limitations and enthusiastically supports diversity regardless of whether a particular behavior seems to be male-defined or patriarchal. I am sure that this has been liberating to many women. I have found it freeing to decide for myself that I like to wear dresses and makeup sometimes and that my lover hates them, and to acknowledge that indeed these apparently gender-linked traits were part of what attracted us to each other in the first place. Lesbians have always privately joked about butch-femme. "She's the butch in that relationship," someone might say jokingly and then look a little guilty, and it is undoubtedly healthy that this troublesome area is beginning to come out of the closet at last.
Indeed, at best the butch-femme position can help us transcend sex roles. It has been symptomatic of our gender conditioning that we always see these differences as gender-linked: The fact that our culture has typically defined a desire to paint one's face as female and a swaggering walk as male does not mean that these are biologically sex-linked traits. At best, we can learn to separate traits and behaviors from gender. Just as I believe that anything women do together sexually is lesbian sex, so it can be true that any behavior a woman engages in can be female behavior. Just as we can define intercourse from a male point of view as vaginal penetration or from a female point of view as penile containment, just as we can define a dildo as a penis substitute or a penis as a dildo substitute, we can redefine traits and characteristics as neither male nor female, but rather human idiosyncratic differences.
The danger of butch-femme, however, is that such redefinition will not take place, but that this trend will simply become a reintroduction of the same tired old sex roles from which we have been trying to escape. This will happen if we begin to see these differences as not merely interesting preferences that perhaps originated in childhood as modeling of gender roles, but as differences that should fit together as cohesive and integrated roles. An example: In my relationship, I am usually the femme in terms of appearance, although this role is by no means rigid, because I enjoy wearing men's jeans as much as I enjoy dresses. In bed my role is less clear. In other areas I am clearly the butch: I can use a hammer or a saw, and my lover cannot. Thus to label me the femme on the basis of differences in our appearance or abilities is misleading, because there exist in our relationship no such rigidified roles as exist in many heterosexual relationships. My fear is that the use of the terms butch-femme will inevitably lead to such rigidification and will serve to imprison rather than to liberate us: I already see these trends. I had a client last year who was in a butch support group and who told me that she was feeling confused because she wanted to cry sometimes and "butches aren't supposed to cry." Humans seem sorely tempted to simplify life's complexity, and sex roles are the supreme simplification. I would feel more comfortable with butch-femme if we could find other terms for these contrasts that are less connotative of male-female sex roles. We need to create new terms that represent our striving toward a goal of celebrating difference that is fluid, changeable, and multifaceted, rather than terms evoking the origins of our differences in roles that are static and confining.
Monogamy versus Nonmonogamy. As Blumstein and Schwartz point out, lesbian couples handle outside sexual relationships in a unique way. Like their gay male counterparts, lesbians are open with their partners about extramarital sexuality. Like their heterosexual female counterparts, lesbians' outside relationships are affairs, rather than tricking." The combination is deadly. The lesbian-feminist community began debating the issue of monogamy in the mid-1970s, at about the same time, interestingly, that books like Open Marriage became popular among heterosexuals. The political rhetoric that developed was that monogamy was a patriarchal form originating from male ownership of women and children, and jealousy was the correspondingly retrogressive emotional concomitant of monogamy. In a matriarchal society, we would not want to own our partners, we would not split sex and love, we would see sex as a natural extension of all loving relationships, and therefore we would have sex with our friends with no consequences to our primary relationships. We then proceeded to put this theory into practice. Many relationships and friendships split up as a result.
It is time we viewed this issue realistically. I have earlier discussed other, not so idealistic motives that might induce a lesbian to engage in extramarital affairs. We need also to consider the possibility that the female tendency to fuse sex and love is not always an idealistic goal but rather a consequence of stereotypic role-conditioning. We are going to have to admit that very few of us are actually capable of negotiating prolonged emotional, sexual affairs with a new lover without damage to our primary relationships. Sex changes things, including friendships, and no matter where jealousy originated, it seems to be pervasive. If we are really interested in preserving, rather than jeopardizing, our primary relationships, we need to reconsider both monogamy as traditionally practiced or nonmonogamy as practiced by gay man. Gay male relationships are nonmonogamous more often than not, frequently without damage to the primary commitment, but the extramarital sexuality is almost always casual (even anonymous), brief, and recreational rather than emotionally intense. Moreover, gay male couples have rules for their nonmonogamy, rules that may seem to limit spontaneity but that surely serve also to limit the potential threat that outside sex poses to the relationship. These rules basically serve to prevent the partners from establishing precisely the kind of outside relationships that lesbians have hoped to achieve: relationships that combine both sex and love. The rules may be explicit or they may be nonverbal and merely understood, but they almost always exist. Most lesbians (as well as heterosexual women) reject this concept of nonmonogamy for the same reasons they reject all casual sex: It seems wrong, distasteful, immoral, and cheap. Many women who do not reject the notion of tricking on theoretical grounds are simply incapable of being turned on by sex without a relationship attached. If this is the case, we may have to live with monogamy until we can change our sexual preferences so that we are less romantic.
In recent years, I see one other interesting alternative, especially among some of the lesbian sex radicals who are experimenting with S/M, butch-femme roles, and other expansions of sexuality. Some women are redefining romance as an erotic game, rather than as ideal love. Instead of attempting to separate sex from romantic love, these women view romantic love as entirely different from the kind of love that is exhibited in a committed primary relationship. This concept, like the concept of tricking, has already been developed by some gay men. In its mildest form, it might involve an acknowledgment of the kind of intimacy that can be present in even a one-time sexual encounter. The gay male erotica writer John Preston writes eloquently of this." Another form of this concept is exemplified by a gay male friend ho says that he tries to keep in touch with most of his tricks, even if he only has sex with them once or twice, as part of his friendship network. Yet another acquaintance has explained to me that he and his tricks almost always love one another, but that it is clearly understood from the beginning that there will be no commitment between them that will disturb my acquaintance's primary relationship. And finally, each member of a male couple I know that has been together fifteen years has a boyfriend. These boyfriend relationships themselves have each lasted several years. I am beginning to see women trying to emulate these different forms of relationships.
What new ideas or techniques of handling relationships are involved in these modes of nonmonogamy? First, there is an acknowledgment that the feelings of infatuation that constitute what we call romance are feelings that are totally separate from committed love. In a sense, the gay men and a few lesbians who do this are able to take romance less seriously than others. That is, they see romantic feelings as a variation of sexual feelings and are able to enjoy them without seeing them as a reflection upon their primary relationship. Second, people who negotiate these kinds of nonmonogamous relationships are able to have intimacy that is intense but limited. Third, these individuals (and couples) see the function of a primary relationship as a good deal more circumscribed than do most lesbians (and most heterosexual women). Most people in this culture, and women more than men, are taught to view primary relationships as all or nothing. We expect that our main partners will fulfill all of our intimacy needs as well as sexual needs. We may recognize that we have intimacy needs that must get fulfilled by friends rather than lovers; we may know that we have sexual needs that must get met by people other than our primary lover. It is difficult to comprehend that we might have intimate sexual partners with whom we might want to be intensely involved in a limited way at the same time that we maintain a primary relationship. Our dualistic thinking leads us almost inevitably to compare and choose one or another relationship.
In addition, it takes a great deal of maturity to recognize that the intense passion of the initial stages of such an outside relationship is no indicator of what is to come, and to keep in mind that the apparent perfect fit of such new relationships is an illusion that will pass in time. To negotiate such multiple relationships takes an ability to circumscribe and compartmentalize one's life in a way that most women are unable or unwilling to do.
Bisexuality
The lesbian community, like the gay male community, has always been fairly intolerant of bisexuality for some reasons that are understandable. Indeed, the label bisexual has frequently been a cover for gay individuals unable to tolerate the homophobia of society and who found the label more acceptable than the homosexual one. Women and men who embraced the label gay have been a bit contemptuous and suspicious of those who refused this designation: Bisexuals were seen as people who wanted to have their cake and eat it too, who wanted the freedom to have same-sex sexual activities while retaining heterosexual privilege. Probably many people who called themselves bisexual were attempting to do just that.
But in the last few years our community has witnessed the emergence of a new phenomenon. Ironically, as some of us have evolved as gay individuals we have continued to explore our sexual preferences and, once our gay identities were secure, have found a significant bisexual component. This group of people, who have identified as gay and who later decide that the bisexual designation is more appropriate, are being joined by younger people just coming out, who feel comfortable with gay relationships and a gay identity, but who simply feel that the label bisexual describes their feelings more appropriately. Thus a bisexual community, marginal to but connected with the gay community, is now developing, at least in larger urban areas and in academic communities.
It is possible, of course, that some members of this emerging subgroup are merely playing radical chic, identifying as bisexuals with no real intention of ever permanently giving up heterosexual privilege. But my estimation is that many of the people now identifying openly in this way are trying to acknowledge the fact that no matter what their preference (and I know of few people who maintain that they can simply ignore gender or that their attractions are exactly fifty-fifty), their attractions both to men and to women are real and important in their lives.
Why, then, are so many of us threatened by bisexuality? Partly for the reasons I have outlined, but I think for other reasons as well. I cannot speak for men, but I think that many lesbians are threatened because they are afraid that they, too, may need to reopen the issue of their choice of partners. The issue of choice is a sensitive one for lesbian feminists. Many of us would like to believe, on one hand, that we chose to be with women rather than men for reasons that are part emotional and part political, while at the same time we believe that we were always lesbians. It is uncomfortable for us to realize that what is chosen can be unchosen. Particularly in those moments when the heterosexist and homophobic burdens of society press down upon us most severely, it is not necessarily a comfort to feel that our lesbianism may be a product of our own free will. I have a lesbian friend who says, only half-jokingly when pressure and tension mount, "I'm going to find some nice man who will support me and get married." It may be that we have all chosen to be lesbians, consciously or unconsciously. For all or most lesbians, sexual preference may be indeed connected to gender role in a quite political way. This hit home for me recently as I read an article in Ms. magazine entitled "Two-Career Couples: How They Do It." I had picked up the article because my lover and I are just such a couple, with a small child to boot, and I thought I could get a few pointers. I was disappointed to find that the gist of the article, entirely about heterosexual families, was that these couples survive, by and large, because the woman still does the bulk of the housework and childcare. Study after study was cited showing that more than two-thirds of such couples are nonegalitarian in work distribution, and that in the one-third that are, husbands leave the wives eventually in depressingly large numbers. I reflected on how unknown this phenomenon is among lesbian couples; whatever problems exist among lesbian couples, nonegalitarianism is rarely one of them. And it struck me again that this aspect of our life-style is not coincidental, not merely a felicitous benefit reaped from our sexual attractions. It is an integral part of our lesbian choice. Many of us, for example, liked sex with men but still chose to be with women because of the quality of relationships with women, but primarily because we were able to attain deep and truly egalitarian relationships with women. Some of us have a highly significant, occasionally even primary, erotic attraction to men but still identify as lesbians for the reasons I have cited, reasons that are personal to be sure, but that are also political inasmuch as they derive from the inherent inequality of many heterosexual relationships. Others of us experience our lesbianism as more unconscious, as a given rather than as a choice. But is this really so? How many of us who experience our sexual identity in this way ("I was always a lesbian, I was always different") remember our earliest lesbian identification, not necessarily as an erotic attraction but rather as dislike of and rebellion against heterosexual female roles. Perhaps those of us who were always lesbians simply blocked off our heterosexual options at such an early age that we no longer remember ever having such options; perhaps we were tomboys who looked around us at the adult war between men and women and said, essentially, "Hell, no, I won't go." Many lesbians who feel they were always lesbian also remember always feeling that they didn't/couldn't/wouldn't fit into the traditional feminine role. For these women, lesbianism is one option that is an alternative to the feminine fate, and thus is a type of political choice, albeit one made unconsciously at a very early age. Incidentally, this is an alternative explanation of Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith's data linking adult sexual orientation and nonconforming gender behavior in childhood. These researchers make the very sexist interpretation that the link suggests a genetic explanation for both homosexuality and gender-role behavior. I am clearly suggesting something very different.
The point I am making in relation to bisexuality, however, is that if my theory is even partly accurate it suggests that there is more choice involved in lesbianism than many of us would like to think. If that is the case, it is clear why bisexuality is a threatening phenomenon. To believe that one's sexual identity is a choice does seem to re-open options, a not always comfortable prospect; as a friend once said, "I struggled so long and with so much difficulty to develop a positive gay identity, I don't want to have to reconsider now." Choosing to move from a lesbian to a bisexual or heterosexual life-style involves loss for many women. Women I have counseled who moved from a lesbian identity to a relationship with a man did indeed lose some gay friends as well as their sense of community, activities, and involvements. Finally, the issue of choice implies a moral issue to many. That is, many straight people and some gay people feel that homosexuality is acceptable if it is a given, something unchangeable, preferably genetic, like left-handedness. Gay people who feel this way are able to feel positive about their gayness only by saying, in essence, "I can't help it." Seeing homosexuality as a choice destroys this psychological defense against guilt. Despite these discomforts, we must objectively examine the issue of bisexuality, not only out of fairness to those within our community who are increasingly making a bisexual identification, but also because understanding bisexuality may be critical to understanding the nature of sexual orientation itself. New work on bisexuality suggests, for example, that women may be more bisexual than men, perhaps because our sexual desire is less cued to physical visual stimuli, and that there are many different types of bisexuality. Examining male-female differences in bisexuality and analyzing types of bisexuality (e.g., some bisexuals say that gender doesn't matter, and others describe their relationships with men and women as qualitatively different) can teach us a great deal about sexual and romantic attraction in general.
The Origins of Lesbian "Erotophobia"
Amber Hollibaugh has coined the term erotophobia to describe our reaction to sexuality, and indeed it does sometimes seem that we are afraid of intense sexual desire and passion." One evening while watching our great gay playwright's work about women, men, and sexual passion, A Streetcar Named Desire, it struck me that Tennessee Williams had an instinctive sense of the terrible bind in which our society places women regarding their sexuality. Despite the sexual revolution, despite the change in women's sexual behavior, it is still generally true that men encourage women to be sexual and then hold them in complete contempt when they really are and dare to be truly lustful and passionate with whomever they choose. In the worst case, women's sexuality becomes an excuse for sexual assault, just as Blanche Dubois found that her sexual promiscuity both provided an excuse for Stanley Kowalski to rape her and then became the reason why no one believed her story of rape. Think of the stereotypical cry of the rapist who maintains that the victim "really wanted it," or the defense of the child molester or incest perpetrator who claims the child seduced him; and think of the culture that believes these violent men and asks victims to prove their sexual purity as proof of innocence.
Lesbians are women first, and we have been socialized as heterosexual women for at least a portion of our lives. What has been our response to viewing our culture's attitude toward female sexuality? Like other women, our sexuality is contaminated by these conflicting messages: Be sexual/don't be sexual/be a whore/be frigid/be a virgin/be innocent/be experienced/be passionate/be a slut. Our culture allows us only a narrow band of appropriate sexual behaviors, certain techniques practiced within the setting of a committed, loving relationship, and as much as we can and still be lesbians, we obediently comply. More specifically, because our sexual passion has been used as one of the excuses to perpetrate violence — rape, incest — against us, we protect ourselves against this violence in a way that must seem logical to our primitive instincts: by shutting off our sexual desire. We join in blaming the victim—ourselves. As Maryjane Sherfey maintains, we limit what may be a very wild and enormous capacity for sexual pleasure out of a misguided sense of self-protection." Because few of us as lesbians have escaped heterosexual conditioning, we carry this universal female ambivalence toward sex over into our gay lives. And because sexual power has so often been used against us, we try to take power out of our sex, and by doing so make it frequently so ethereal as to be so nonsexual, soft, warm, and cuddly as to eliminate passion.
Tennessee Williams, in the same play in which he portrays the awful price women pay for being sexual, also shows us why women might seek sexual contact despite such strict sanctions. Williams writes that sexual desire is a life force, an affirmation of life, and that sexual women are magnificent as well as tragic. Lesbians, more than heterosexual women, have the opportunity to divorce female sexuality from its heterosexist contest and to transcend male-dominated attempts to control, reduce, and constrain our passion. It is important that lesbians seize our opportunity to open up and expand our sexuality. This is the time for lesbians to explore our passion and the paths down which our sexual desire leads us, and to do this exploration without judgment except when absolutely necessary, when our sexuality is either clearly coercive or clearly self-destructive. Now is the time to affirm that anything that lesbians do sexually really is lesbian sexuality, to affirm all our sexuality as politically correct sex.
NOTES
1. Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwarz, American Couples (New York: William Morrow, 1983).
2. Karia Jay and Alien Young, The Gay Report (New York: Summit Books, 1977).
3. Margaret Nichols, "The Treatment of Inhibited Sexual Desire (ISD) in Lesbian Couples," Women and Therapy I (Winter 1982): 49-66.
4. C. A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975).
5. Dan Bloom and Michael Shernoff, "The Impact of AIDS upon the Urban Gay Male Community," paper presented at the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, San Diego, Sept. 1985.
6. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
7. Julia R. Heiman, "The Physiology of Erotica: Women's Sexual Arousal," Psychology Today 8 (Nov. 1975): 90-94.
8. Betty Berzon, "Positively Gay," presentation at American Psychological Association Conference, New York, Sept. 1979; Betty Berzon and Robert Leighton. Positively Gay (Millbrae, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1979).
9. Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue K. Hammersmith, Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981); Jay and Young, The Gay Report.
10. Judith L. Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
II. Virginia Apuzzo, personal communication, Feb. 1984; Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith, Sexual Preference.
12. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix.
13. Ibid.
14. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sandra Thompson, Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984).
15. R. R. Linden, D. R. Pagano, D. Russell, arid S. L. Star, Against Sado-masochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis (East Palo Alto, Calif.: Frog in the Well, 1982).
16. Samois, Coming to Power (Boston: Alyson Press, 1982).
17. Bemie Zilbergeld and C. R. Ellison, "Desire Discrepancy and Arousal Problems in Sex Therapy," in Principles and Practices of Sex Therapy, ed. Sandra L. Leiblum and L. Pen-in (New York: Guilford Press, 1980).
18. Rita Mae Brown, In Her Day (New York: Daughters, 1977).
19. Marge Piercy, Women on the Edge of Time (New York: Faweett, 1981).
20. Tripp, Homosexual Matrix.
21. Blumstein and Schwartz, American Couples. 22. John Preston, I Once Had a Master (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1984).
23. Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith, Sexual Preference.
24. Fritz Klein and Timothy Wolf, Bisexualities: Theory and Research (New York: Haworth Press, 1985); Margaret Nichols and J. Paul, "Some Theoretical Issues Regarding Types of Bisexuality and the Original 'Bipholsia; " paper presented at the Eastern Regional Council of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Philadelphia, April 1986.
25. Amber Hollibaugh, "The Erotic Voices of Lesbians," New York Native, vol. 3,1983.
26. M. J. Sherfey, "The Evolution and Nature of Female Sexuality in Relation to Psychoanalytic Theory," Journal of the American Analyatic Association 14 (1966): 28 128.
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