You probably didn’t mean anything by it, but I find this a rather odd way of phrasing the question. It sounds more…prurient…than just asking if female prisoners have sex with each other.
Given the harsh realities of prison life, I’m sure there are women who are pressured into sex with other inmates but don’t find it a real “pleasure”. And it’s not just other prisoners who may be involved in this kind of sexual coercion. There have been cases of male guards forcing female prisoners to perform sexual acts with each other for the guard’s amusement.
It seems that openly lesbian prisoners are especially likely to be targeted for sexual abuse by male guards. See this 1996 Human Rights Watch report, Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons. It’s very long, but if you search on “lesbian” you’ll find some info on this.
I was trying to omit the coerced or forced acts and concentrate on mutually pleasureable relationships. I feel that women might be more likely to have consentual sex with each other than men would with other men. Since women are generally more comfortable touching, they wouldn’t (maybe) have that initial barrier to get past.
A friend at work has a photo of two women soldiers resting, one leaning against a vehicle and the one lying on her back with her head in the other’s lap.
It’s a nice picture.
So true. It doesn’t help that coming out frequently happens during the teenage years (it did for me), during which just about everything turns into the most important event to ever have occurred in human history.
I actually have a male friend who, at 25, just came out a few weeks ago. This is a guy who has lots of gay friends and doesn’t really have any reason to have kept it a secret so long among our group of friends. And frankly, it’s not like everybody didn’t suspect anyway. But even when he started breaking the news he would get super nervous about certain people knowing. He flipped out when he found out I knew, and I’m a gay guy.
I suppose you never do know how people are going to react. My coming out was unexpected; my parents found my stash of magazines while I was in high school. I was totally confident in my gayness by that point, if not ready to share yet, and was shocked when my liberal parents totally lost their shit.
Oh yes. I should have mentioned that. It took a few years, and it’s still largely in the realm of “things of which we do not speak,” and extended family is forbidden from knowing, but that’s a big step up.
I remember reading in a NYT article that sexuality is much more nebulous for women than for men. The way they put it was, ‘Men have a sexual orientation. Women just have strong preferences in partners’. Something like that, anyway.
I was in the military and didn’t come out until around 27. Even then it was only to a very select couple few, and I was trembling when I finally got the words out. The reaction I got was usually “great! I thought once maybe you might be because you don’t date much, but then I thought ‘nah’ can’t be. You just don’t seem gay.”
Prior to that, I had multiple gay guys come out to me in the military. Not to hit on me, but because I was known as the accepting, non-judgmental type they could trust. I felt terrible playing the non-judgmental cool straight guy who was too afraid to come out to anyone himself, but at least I helped some guys by being someone they felt safe talking to. The military can be terribly lonely for gays. You can’t go to priests, ministers, doctors or their own leaders for counseling, yet counseling is so important in the military.
Anyhoo, in the units I served in, if a woman was someone everyone just knew was a lesbian, then that’s basically how it was. If a guy was the type everyone knew was gay, people would take the attitude that he’s just kinda femmy, but not really gay. Just sorta gay acting. Basically, people could accept a woman is a dyke, but had a harder time accepting a guy could really be a fag.
There are exceptions though. I’ve been in units where gay is as okay as the regs will possibly allow.
If this were true my love life probably would have been a lot more exciting than it has been.
Now, I’ve never been in prison so I don’t know how women act when they really have NO access to men. But on the outside at least, comfort with say hugging a friend doesn’t mean a woman is remotely interested in lesbian sex, or even comfortable being around lesbians. Based on what I’ve heard from men (including here on the SDMB), I’d say that situational homosexual activity is more common among more-or-less straight men than women. Many men seem to feel that being really REALLY horny can justify a lot of things, but women are less likely to see this as a good explanation.
I was assuming jail time.
I see two cell mates sitting on a bunk, one feeling down, the other with her arm around the firsts shoulders comforting her. So far, easy to imagine, right? But then both are lonely and horny and one thing leads to another…
I can’t help being a incurable romantic. So maybe I’ve seen too many movies.
In the case of men in jail, the initial contact, arm around shoulders etc, seems less likely to happen. I guess.
I’ve never been in jail, except for the drunk tank in Milwaukee back in the '60s. No chance for encounters there. They kicked us out in the morning. I didn’t even get a friendly squeeze. :eek:
I think you have been watching too many movies. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of sex going on in women’s prisons, but this particular scenario doesn’t sound especially likely to me. Women comfort friends all the time with zero expectation of it leading to sex. If I hug a sad friend I’m not thinking “Maybe I’ll get lucky!”, so I’d be pretty sure it’s not on the radar for many straight women.
Googling around and reading what I can get online through the library, it looks like there hasn’t been a lot of research on consensual prison sex. Non-consensual sex is obviously an area of much greater concern. But what little I’ve been able to turn up suggests that it’s somewhat more common in men’s prisons than in women’s prisons. The low estimates for both have around 25% of inmates engaging in homosexual activity, but the high estimates I found for women are around 50% and for men 65-70%. But figures vary quite a bit from study to study, some define homosexual activity more broadly than others, and some asked inmates to identify themselves as hetero/bi/homosexual rather than asking about their actual sexual behavior, so it’s hard to know what’s really going on.
Something interesting I noticed was that kissing seems to be a lot more common in women’s prisons than in men’s. One study of women had nearly 45% reporting that they’d kissed other inmates “in a sexual manner”, while another study of men had only 8% saying they’d kissed other inmates. In women’s prisons many inmates also apparently draw the line at kissing. A greater percentage of women said they’d kissed other inmates than said they’d had sex with other inmates. In men’s prisons the opposite appears to be true: far more men said they’d had consensual sex with other inmates than said they’d kissed other inmates.
I identify as bisexual when an understandable category is needed, but queer to myself. I am in a relationship with a man, but that doesn’t change the nature of my sexuality, and I kind of loathe the heterosexual privilege afforded me by assumptions about my straightness.
I was a teenager when I realized I was attracted to girls as well as boys, it took a good bit longer to figure out that rather than a gender issue, for me attraction is … eh… hard to explain, but I’m more likely to be greatly attracted to more androgynous looking people of either gender than more feminine or masculine looking people. I have a ‘type’, essentially. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve never been attracted to extremely masculine men or feminine women. Sigh, brain complicated.
It wasn’t difficult for me to figure out for myself that I was attracted to girls/women. Frankly, my sexual response to any kind of stimulation has been about as obvious to me as an erection must be to a guy. Parts started to light up like a pinball machine when I was around particular girl friends, I went “oh, hmm.” and I came out to my parents who promptly discussed where they were on the kinsey scale, and that was that.
All of this is why I sort of hate the word ‘bi’. Are you bi if you’re attracted to both genders but have never acted on your attraction to one of them? How about if you like one gender way more than another? Or if you like both genders but in different ways?
Someone smarter than me really ought to come up with a whole new vocabulary, IMHO.
To respond directly to the OP, I think it can be. Gay women who aren’t particularly butch don’t seem to be too threatening to the more conservative ewww-causing paradigm a lot of homophobic people participate in.
From a lesbian friend (so information is from her perspective):
Most lesbians she knows /is friends with have tried being straight for years, before realizing and accepting themselves.
As a lesbian, she tries to stay away from women proclaming to be bisexual. It seems to be a fad (or fashionable) for girls to come out as bi while they’re straight, would go to the point of having a relationship leading to sex with other girls, then saying buh-bye.
My friend and a lot of her friends have actually been (some profoundly) hurt.
edit to add: sorry! this is not answering the OP’s question.
I can relate to this, my first wife self-identified as lesbian. She was technically Bi, because we did have sex, but that’s how she thought of herself. It was a friendship run riot, basically. We connected on so many levels, talked for hours, etc. I think that it was a combination of family pressure, and a ‘If I’m going to be with any man, it would be one like him’ that led to her accepting my LSD inspired marriage proposal. It lasted a little over six months.
I’ve seen people on here before suggest that everyone just go with their Kinsey number, which would make it easier to express different “shades” of bisexuality. But even then there’s the issue of actual sexual experience vs. sexual desire.
We’ve had sexual orientation polls on here before and IIRC for a fair number of people how they self-identify isn’t totally consistent with their sexual experience. That is, there are people who consider themselves Kinsey 0s, totally hetero, but have engaged in sexual activity with members of the same sex. There are people who consider themselves gay but have tried very hard to be straight, including having sex with people of the opposite sex. There are people who consider themselves bisexual but have never engaged in sexual activity with members of the same sex. Some people do have a “just experimenting” phase, and for others their orientation is not set in stone and may shift during their lifetime (this appears to be more common with women than men). And of course everyone spends at least part of their life with only desire but no experience at all!
So I’d agree that our terminology could be a lot better than it is, but sexual desire and behavior is so complicated (and we haven’t even addressed preferred positions/acts and fetishes) that I don’t think we’ll ever have a perfect label for everyone.
My best friend grew up in a very accepting environment – bisexual mother, lesbian aunt, polyamorous father – yet even she struggled with the leap from ‘‘bisexual’’ to ‘‘lesbian.’’ She definitely came to the conclusion that she’d identified as ‘‘bisexual’’ most likely because it allowed her to hang on to some semblance of normalcy… there was also the possibility of marrying a man, having children, etc. She was in her early twenties before she was willing to say, ‘‘I’m a lesbian’’ despite the fact she had nothing but relationships with women for years.
Just based on my observation it seems like males struggle more with accepting their homosexuality than women do. They tend to be more punitive and repressed with themselves. Anecdotally, I’m familiar with stories of guys who pretend to be straight, often believe they are straight besides all evidence to the contrary, and even have marriages and kids in an attempt to maintain this facade of straightness. I know this happens with women, but I think it’s more rare, perhaps because women are more likely to find sexual satisfaction in the relationship vs. in the particular gender of the person they are with. I have a strong preference for males but the idea of living happily with a woman really doesn’t seem that farfetched to me. I think, in general, for women, sexuality is more emotional, while for men its more visceral. I’m not familiar with any citations, but there is research to support that theory, and it makes sense because there are clear differences in brain structure.
She must have been attracted to you and cared about you, surely? I really don’t understand how she can not be bi. Calling herself a lesbian while being married to you would be pretty much saying ‘I don’t love you and don’t like sex wth you.’
@Olives: anecdotally, my experience is the opposite of yours. I know one gay man who was married when younger, but about thirty gay women who were married or living with a man for a long time, many of whom had kids too. This, even though most of the gay men I know are older than the gay women I know.
A very public example of a woman coming out well into adulthood would be Ellen. It was like “everybody knew”, but it took awhile for her to be comfortable enough to actually do it. She played it pretty cool on her show, with little hints about toasters and the like. The scene where she was literally in her closet when someone came to visit was a hoot. I think she did pretty well, but I really like her. And her newer show.
Her very public relationship with Anne Heche was a good example of the problems in a relationship with a bi-sexual as mentioned above.
Sheesh, I said both “very public” and relationship" twice! Mangeorge need Thesaurus.
I think that in order to accurately describe human sexuality, you need at least four variables: physical preference (the relative time a person spends physically attracted to members of either sex), emotional preference (the relative time a person spends with feelings for members of either sex), and some measure of how well their sexual behavior jibes with those other numbers.
I was assuming jail time.