I don’t mean that in the sense of are people more accepting of gay females.
What I mean is, as far as the female herself and at the point she realizes “Hey, I’m gay!”
I ask because I know I’ve heard hundreds of stories about men trying to deny their own sexuality. (For various reasons I’m sure) But I never really hear of women going through this denial stage.
These two are very likely related.
I went through a really long denial stage and many other lesbians I know did too.
That’s probably because one so rarely hears about homosexual women in a serious context at all. I’d say that women actually have a MUCH harder time than men getting to that “Hey, I’m gay!” moment.
I don’t remember what I was reading where the author made this point, but plain old anatomy may* make it easier for young and inexperienced women to deny their sexual feelings. If a young man regularly gets an erection thinking about another man, that’s a pretty clear sign he’s attracted to that man. A young woman has no such obvious physical sign and may convince herself that she likes the other woman just as a friend, that she admires the other woman’s looks because she wishes to look like her, that this is just a phase, etc. (Similarly, a young straight woman may convince herself that she’s “in love” with a guy when what she’s feeling is really just sexual attraction.)
Gay women on average tend to come out at an older age than men. I know of quite a few lesbians who didn’t come out until their 30s or older, often after marrying and having children. Interestingly, many of these women say they were not consciously in the closet. That is, they say they weren’t struggling to repress their sexuality but either did not feel or did not recognize that they were attracted to other women until adulthood. This is all anecdotal, but I’ve read and heard similar anecdotes from others.
*And I do mean “may”. This is an interesting idea, but it’s not something one could easily prove.
In my limited experience, women seem to be more comfortable with being bi-sexual than men. Two of the three lesbian women I’ve been close to have been monogamous one at a time with whoever they fell in love with, man or woman. Neither of them were interested in threesomes.
All three were closeted at least into their twenties.
Peace,
mangeorge
This is anecdotal purely, but I’ve actually known more women who were well into adulthood (20s up; some as late as grandmotherhood, not that’s necessarily very old) before realizing or accepting their sexuality as lesbian than I have men. I also have known a lot more bisexual women who seemed truly bisexual than I have men (where bisexuals do exist but many are just straight guys wanting to seem more interesting/edgier or gay guys halfway out of the closet).
Pardon unintentional explicitness, but erections are a pretty unfailing gauge as to your sexuality, whereas female sexuality is a more internal (pun intended and unintended) matter. It could be that I’m just an outsider, but I’ve always felt female sexuality was a far more complex critter than male.
I was thinking along those lines too.
OTOH, boys are subject to a lot more casual homophobic abuse than girls are. You do sometimes hear a teenage girl call another girl a lesbian, but you hear it all the time with teenage boys.
I’ve known a lot of women who came out late, too - indeed, I didn’t come out even to myself till I was 22, and by then I was already pregnant. It took me three more years to come out to other people.
It’s easier to just go with the flow if you’re not the gender who’s usually expected to make the running, and your BFs aren’t all that bothered if you don’t enjoy sex.
Of course, some lesbians do enjoy their earlier encounters with men - it’s just that they’re on a different level to sex with a woman; more like masturbating than sex, really, except - often, even for those women - without the orgasm.
Yeah, I agree with Lamia. When reading memoirs of gay men about their closeted years, you hear a lot of semantics, “Seeing attractive men gives me a boner, but that doesn’t make me a faggot, those people talk funny and wear flashy clothes”, etc. On the other hand, a lot of gay women say they knew they were different in some way, but never seriously considered that possibility. Mainly, I’m thinking of that bit in Fun Home with Alison Bechdel drawing skinny androgynous basketball players.
I think it might be easier because the denial can be so much easier for women; they might not have to confront those questions until they’re out of adolescence and have an identity and maybe even moved to someplace more tolerant than where they grew up.
Interesting.
I’ve often wondered if some gay women feel more comfortable with calling themselves bi-sexual as oppossed to all out gay. (And let’s face it. Some misguided twenty something year old women call themselves bi because they know it will get them attention from other (stupid) guys.)
I have a female friend who claims to be bi-sexual, yet the 10 years that I’ve known her, she’s only been with women. I’ve seen her flirt with guys lots of times. But I’ve never seen her be with a guy. (So to speak)
Bi now, gay later!
Women are like noodles: only straight until you get them wet.
I’m not serious, of course. Well, not totally. Some women do come out as bi as a kind of ‘safe’ status before coming out as lesbian, but some women really are bi, of course.
Many gay women I know do have a pretty wide-ranging definition of bi - but so do many straight women. Just thinking ‘he/she’s hot’ seems to be enough to be bi. An astonishing number of women, upon finding out that I’m gay, reveal to me that they’re bi in this way. For a while I started to wonder if I knew any totally straight women at all!
It’s a fair enough definition, but the gay men I know seem not to define it that way (I’m sure some others do - this is just IME) - maybe because, as others have said, men have more obvious signs of physical attraction than women.
That reminds me of something I’ve seen pointed out elsewhere; that straight or lesbian, women in our culture also tend to be much more touchy-feely and physically affectionate with each other than men are. So if a woman gets the urge to touch other women, or hug them and so on, it’s less likely that it’ll occur to her that those are homosexual impulses than it would to a man with an urge to kiss other men.
I don’t have a cite, but when I’ve seen survey results about sexual orientation then it appears that there are more men than women identifying as homosexual, and more women than men identifying as bisexual. It’s not clear why this is. Maybe women really are more likely to be bisexual than men are. Maybe women who are really lesbians say they are bisexual on surveys. Maybe women who are really straight say they are bisexual on surveys. (I too knew a few in college…) It may be that there are really just as many bisexual men, but many are claiming to be straight. Or maybe they’re claiming to be gay? It’s a mystery.
*There are a lot of things people could mean by “bisexual”, which means it isn’t always a very useful term. Consider the Kinsey Scale. If someone says “I’m bisexual” they might mean they’re a perfect 3, equally attracted to both men and women. But they might mean they are primarily interested in people of one sex and only incidentally interested in the other (anywhere from 2-4, or even 1-5). Your friend might feel it’s more honest to call herself bisexual because she enjoys flirting with men even if she’s not seriously interested in dating any. Or maybe she had sex with guys when she was younger and wants to be open about this.
So true!
There’s an extent to which I privately consider myself a high Kinsey bisexual (I’ve had this crush on Eddie Vedder since I was a teenager), but I don’t openly refer to myself that way because I feel it’s misleading. Personally, I don’t think single people should go around saying they’re bisexual unless they’re genuinely open to dating and having sex with people of either sex. Otherwise why bring it up?
During my time on OKCupid I was rather annoyed to find that many women had entered themselves in as bisexual but indicated in their profiles that they were only interested in men. Some were probably “Well, I think Angelina Jolie is hot, so I must be bisexual!” types and some probably put that they were bisexual to make themselves seem sexier to men, but either way they were just cluttering up my search results. It was possible to limit the results to gay women only, but this left me with four women within a 50 mile radius…including one who said in her profile that she lived with her boyfriend! So I guess there are a few women who also have a rather loose idea of what it means to be gay.
It’s been my experience that in general, women are simply attractive to more people than men are. A lot more people can appreciate a pretty/shapely woman than a handsome man. Even fully hetero women tend to prefer men with more feminine features, less body hair, etc.; there’s fewer people who really appreciate masculine, hairy men. I think this, plus the erection/lack thereof issue means you’ll find a lot more women willing to call themselves bi than men. On the flip side, I think I’ve probably encountered more fully gay men than women.
My denial contributed to:
[ul]
[li]not having any sort of dating/social life until I was almost out of college[/li][li]a torturous few years of very conflicted, confusing, and unrequited love for my roommate/best friend (she thought of me like a sister and I…didn’t want to admit what was going on on my side of things. There was lots of crying alone listening to Tori Amos whenever we weren’t together and particularly when she was out on dates with guys)[/li][li]2 awkward and unsatisfying but otherwise not horrible (per say) one-night-stands with guys that may have had actual feelings for me.[/li][li]Some :eek::smack::o adventures once I did come out and got in touch with my inner slut and decided I should make up for lost time.[/li][/ul]
@Der Trihs: That’s another way in which it’s both easier and more difficult for women to come than men. Women can get away with such physical contact for longer, but are more likely to interpret it as friendship; men won’t be able to interpet it as friendship as often, but will be called gay the second they put their arm round their sixteen-year-old fellow student’s shoulders, making them more likely to revolt against their sexuality.
It’s weird how difficult coming out is for so many people. For me there was a notable hurdle, and once I was over it, I was amazed that the jump took so much work, because, looking back, all I saw was clear fields. Why did I ever imagine that hurdle was there? It seemed so real at the time.
@lamia: I’m coming to think more and more that the male-female difference in identification as bisexual is pretty much down to men having a more obvious sign of sexual attraction than women do. When it comes to sexual relationships, a lot of it is an emotional connection, but there has to be a physical attraction too. For men (most men, at least), it’s easier to know when the physical attraction isn’t present even thought the emotional one might be.
The only time the wide-ranging definition of bisexual annoyed me was when I was the subject of really, really severe homophobia, and my colleague commented that she’d never had any problems with homophobia, and she was bisexual. She’d never even kissed a woman and had been married to a man since she was 21.
Years ago there was a man on here who had a lesbian GF. No, I didn’t mistype that. He was man born male, and was not transitioning. He was a bloke, a dude, a guy.
There were a couple of threads about the fact that she should be allowed to identify as lesbian because that was the identity she chose.
Generally I come down on the side of ‘identify as whatever you like,’ and I know that the boundaries of sexuality are blurred - they’re just labels to describe attractions and intentions. However, I wouldn’t think that those boundaries are so blurred that ‘lesbian’ includes ‘in a current committed, fulfilling sexual relationship with a man.’
As the flipside to women who identify as bi without so much as a kiss, there are a few lesbians who won’t identify as bi despite all evidence to the contrary. The two may not be unrelated.
I lived for a few years with a woman who spent a lot of effort trying not to be a lesbian. Coming out of the closet was not easy for her.
This thread reminds me of discussions about the sexuality of people who are incarcerated. Many, it seems, have homosexual relationships while inside, then go totally straight upon release. Are they straight, homosexual, or bisexual.
I’ve read that any two people stranded on a “desert island” will probably (eventually) have sex. I believe that.
Are women in prison more like to pleasure each other than men?
A significant challenge in the study/quantification/qualification of homosexual behavior are the pressures and stigmas against it, and the consequences those pressures and stigmas have on how either researchers classify members of a study, or how the subjects of the study classify themselves.
We don’t have (I don’t think, yet) really reliable data on the occurrence of homosexual behavior/preferences outside of the constraining circumstances such as prisons or desert islands. Studies of such constrained environments require even more attention to detail due to the accumulative effect that the constraint brings to the equation.
For example, it seems reasonable to me for people who have been in prison to try and downplay any stigmas that they’re able to when trying to re-engage with society. An ex-con can’t really hide the fact that they are an ex-con. Their record follows them. But an ex-con can (and will, imho) hide that they had homosexual relations while they were inside, and may still wish to continue homosexual relations in the future…IF hiding such things makes them more likely to a) be accepted by their family/friends on the outside b) get a job, etc…
NETA: “But an ex-con can (and SOMETIMES will, imho) hide that they had homosexual relations while they were inside…”