I'm not very one sided in general but I do have to say this mentality you find below is completely unappealing. Like completely. From the woman complaining that the OP said she wants to have sex with women to the implication that celibacy is automatically connected to being a lesbian (she didn't say she was a lesbian either,) the whole thing has sex negative vibes there's the dislike and personal issues they have with trans women as well and they blame people avoiding lesbian spaces on trans women like white rectionary men blame foreigners for stealing their jobs and women, it's so unsexy and I feel like I morph into Camille Paglia just reading this. But you know the version of Camille Paglia that's pro trans. The darkest timeline Camille Paglia if you will.
After 20 years of being a crap, intermittent heterosexual, I have come to the realisation that I really do want to explore the possibility of shagging other women. Internet dating feels too full on, so really I would much prefer to get to know more lesbians and see if anything happens. However, from other recent threads it sounds like the whole scene has become very divided given the whole trans debate. I don't want to join any groups which are bound up in TWAW-type rhetoric.
Any views/experiences would be really welcome. I live in London and do have a couple of lesbian friends, but they are pretty settled and not really part of a wider scene. Thank you!your post said it all and I too am angry and sad about what we had and did which we can no longer do, I remember in the 70s the women’s monthly events when we could all be together, straight and lesbian having a good time, the place in Camden too in the eighties with live acts sometimes. The men have spoiled it all, and I’m y heart aches for w9men and young lesbians especially in these times. But thank you for all you did...The BBC piece about lesbian bars is actually really nice, though it evades any discussion of why they are so rare now, which makes it ring slightly hollow in the light of the posts above on this issue.I started to reply in what I hope was a supportive manner but couldn't get over the phrase "possibility of shagging other women" so gave up.
But I think there is quite a long conversation to be had about how women who are celibate, are in fact on the start of a journey towards becoming lesbian.
It's just kind of funny to me I know she's pretty offensive and I've gotten pissed off by various things she's said but it's funny because she just sounds so frantic all the time:
and it's like "And the lesbians are so boring and unsexy and can't make good porn and gay men are so creative and I love drag queens and dicks and we have to make more lesbians and I travelled around the whole of Europe and no women wanted to have sex with me and-"That is such bullshit. Women are socialized to be sensory, sexual creatures. Everything from the makeup you put on to the stockings you put on. You're being trained to be sensual. There are so many cliches in the air. So much garbage in the air, that's why I'm so valuable, whether you like me or not, I just cut through the crap and say "that’s bullshit!" I’m not saying we should give up lesbianism, I'm saying I want more lesbianism, much more! What I don’t like right now is that straight women are afraid to have sex with another woman because, "Oh, then I'll be gay." You're not gay just because you have sex with another woman! I want to break down the barrier between gay and straight. It’s false! As a historian of sexuality, that’s a false dichotomy, this gay/straight bullshit. That’s not true!
Someone online described her as a gay man trapped inside a lesbians body lol.
I get it though that's what happens when you're too risk averse.
Tbf I don't think the problem is that they don't want to appear gay. Maybe that was an issue in the past I dunno. This is an old interview from like the 90s I think."Well," she says, "I was always cautious. I was also cautious about drugs and I'm glad I was, because my generation destroyed itself on psychedelic drugs. If my work looks odd, or sui generis, it's because people whose work should have been a context for my work lost the capacity to write."
I mean consider from the thread with the other stuff I quoted about the woman who is looking for women to have sex with:
OP, you might like to consider the fact that this:
"I have come to the realisation that I really do want to explore the possibility of shagging other women"
is unlikely to get you very far with any of the lesbians I know.Paglia actually touches on something important here but because she likes to essentialise all the time people just get pissed off and don't listen so I actually don't think her approach is useful but I think it's important so I think it would be good if people:Perhaps I'm harsh but lesbians have always known the perils of straight women wanting to experiment with them and these days we have the extra complication of transbians infiltrating every group. You actually need to like the company of women-focussed women, OP, and be sensitive to what is now a beleaguered and underground community.
1. stop denying this because of sex negativity
2. don't extend it to literally all women
Well actually I think the problem is that she essentialises based on sex too much and not enough based on sexuality. So it's not just that. But no I'm not writing another essay on all her ideas oh my god. Just the parts that are relevant to this post.
I'm assuming they can't and that she might as well ask them to become men. Because they're not naturally bisexual.Women, I think, are naturally bisexual. You know I'm not telling lesbians to stop sleeping only with women, but to leave open a part of the brain toward men and accept male lust and find men extremely attractive and get horny in relation to men and ogle their bodies and do something with them, then sex with women will be hotter.
She's obviously 'mostly homosexual' though and so she thinks like a bisexual. Because she's not a lesbian in the sense below (not the colloquial sense where you pick a label to be pragmatic or something. She alternated between labelling herself bisexual and lesbian over the years anyway):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25808718/
Bisexuals reported higher sexual arousal and desire for women than heterosexuals and lesbians, while lesbians reported lower sexual arousal and desire with men than the other groups. Heterosexuals and mostly heterosexuals scored higher on the male than on the female motivational dimension of the SADI, while the reverse was found for lesbians and mostly lesbians. Findings indicate that non-monosexuals have higher sexual arousal and desire in sexual activities with women than monosexuals. Further, bisexual women did not differentiate their sexual arousal with men versus women, while the other sexual orientation groups differentiated in terms of their motivation to engage in sexual activity. These findings may have implications for how female sexual orientation is conceptualizedIn a series of studies, Lippa (2006, 2007) has found that for most women (lesbians may be an exception), high sex drive is positively correlated with attraction to both men and to women (supporting the hypothesis that attraction may be bi-dimensional). Further, in that study, bisexual women reported higher general sex drive than both lesbian and heterosexual women. If there is indeed a link between non-monosexuality and higher sex drive, then one would expect there to be greater similarity between the sexual arousal and desire of mostly heterosexual, mostly lesbian, and bisexual women than between any of these groups and either lesbians or heterosexuals.It is noteworthy that in the current study, bisexual women reported higher sexual arousal and desire but also more aversion. Future studies should further explore which mechanisms may be related to both high positive and high negative sexual arousal.For sexual contact with women, bisexual women reported the highest sexual arousal and desire of all the sexual orientation groups and at levels significantly higher than both lesbian and heterosexual women. However, the three non-monosexual groups did not differ from each other, which suggests that these women's subjective sexual experiences with women may be more similar to each other than to those of heterosexual and to lesbian women.However, in our study, bisexual women reported higher levels of sexual arousal and desire toward women than the lesbian women did. Illustratively, Vrangalova and Savin-Williams (2012) found that mostly heterosexual and mostly lesbian women were equally high in opposite and same-sex sexuality as heterosexual and lesbian women, implying that being less exclusive does not mean less attraction to men or to women, as would be expected if sexual orientation is one dimensional.Lippa (2007) argued bisexual women's high sex drive may "energize latent same-sex attractions (or other-sex attractions), and it is possible that the same mechanism may be at work for mostly heterosexual and mostly lesbian women. In short, the finding that the lesbian women in this research did not report higher sexual arousal and desire toward women than the heterosexual women did could be a reflection of a generalized lower sex drive among monosexual than non-monosexual women.That's not the best of both worlds. Also anecdotally at points in my life I have done this more often compared to the average reported in some surveys etc. I think maybe for guys too... But it's not just desire it's also just that orgasms feel good so why wouldn't you?Even if the bisexual women in the current study reported higher levels of sexual arousal and desire than the hetero- sexual and lesbian women did, they did not proclaim a greater number of total sexual partners, more frequent masturbation, or elevated levels of weekly sexual desire. In short, the current research does not support the stereotype that bisexual women are sexually promiscuous (Israel & Mohr, 2004; Rust, 1995, 2000). In sum, bisexual women may have the "best of both worlds," in that they report high levels of arousal and desire, without this translating into promiscuity
I can tell I'm going to be quoting this paper for years lol it was so revelatory for me.