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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Lesbian-2


Sexuality
Sexual activity between women is as diverse as sex between
heterosexuals or gay men. Some women in same-sex relationships do not identify as lesbian, but as bisexual, queer, or another label. As with any interpersonal activity, sexual expression depends on the context of the relationship.
Recent cultural changes in
Western and a few other societies have enabled lesbians to express their sexuality more freely, which has resulted in new studies on the nature of female sexuality. Research undertaken by the U.S. Government's National Center for Health Research in 2002 was released in a 2005 report called Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002. The results indicated that among women aged 15-44, 4.4 percent reported having had a sexual experience with another woman during the previous 12 months. When women aged 15–44 were asked, "Have you ever had any sexual experience of any kind with another female?", 11 percent answered "yes".
There is a growing body of
research and writing on lesbian sexuality, which has brought some debate about the control women have over their sexual lives, the fluidity of woman-to-woman sexuality, the redefinition of female sexual pleasure and the debunking of negative sexual stereotypes. One example of the latter is lesbian bed death, a term invented by sex researcher Pepper Schwartz to describe the supposedly inevitable diminution of sexual passion in long term lesbian relationships; this notion is rejected by many lesbians, who point out that passion tends to diminish in almost any relationship and many lesbian couples report happy and satisfying sex lives.


Lesbian feminism
Many lesbians have been involved in
women's rights. Late in the 19th century, the term Boston marriage was used to describe romantic unions between women living together, often while contributing to the suffrage movement. Lesbian feminism gained renewed popularity in North America and Western Europe during the "second wave" of the 1970s and early 1980s. By the end of the 1970s lesbian feminism was accepted as a field of study within academic institutions, although mostly as a branch of feminist disciplines. More recently, lesbian feminism has emerged as an expression of dissatisfaction with the 1970s era second wave feminist and gay liberation movements.
Lesbian feminist texts have examined the influence of institutions such as
patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism on gender and sexuality with mixed success, sometimes describing lesbianism as a rational result of alienation and dissatisfaction with these institutions. In her 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Adrienne Rich characterized heterosexuality as a violent political institution making way for the "male right of physical, economical, and emotional access" to women. Other key thinkers and activists have included Rita Mae Brown, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Frye, Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys.
Lesbian Separatism is one specific type of Lesbian feminism.

1 comment:

Basanta said...

Thank you for putting together all these information about Lesbianis.

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