Hot Girl on Girl Action

Via Dearest Jonathan we have this post from The American Scene the CDC's sexual behavior data. The relevant bit:

{...}But it's a significant phenomenon nonetheless - and if you broke it out by age and class, I'm sure that bisexuality would be even more common (and increasingly so) among upper-middle-class young people. If the experience of human history shows anything, it's that a large percentage of any given population will experiment with opportunistic homosexuality if the taboos against it are lifted - and at least in our country's more exclusive circles, the lesbian-experimentation taboo is dead and the gay-experimentation taboo is weakening. Ancient Greece, here we come . . .{...}

To which Jonathan adds:

I don't have anything to add to serious discussions about human sexuality, although comments like this one make me wonder if the trend is liberation, or just another instance of women going out of their way to attract male attention by any means:

Ashley, 20, a student at Northern Arizona University, agrees. "It's become this totally hot thing," she says. "And the reason why is that it promises this sexual experimentation to guys. They think, 'She'll kiss another girl; she's gotta be pretty wild.'"

Ashley hasn't made out with that many girls: "I've only done it like a dozen times." It's been fun, she says, but mostly because of the titillation: "There's people watching it, and that makes me feel good. The first time I did it at a party, I thought, 'So this is what it takes to get the guys' attention.'"

You decide if this is benign or a case of women desperate for male affection. (You know you're old when you read Ashley's quote and instead of thinking, Hot!, you worry that she didn't have a capable, present father while she was growing up and hope that she'll spend some time working on her sense of self-confidence and self-worth.)

In any case, what interests me most is the proximate causes of what destroyed the "taboo" against LUGiness in the first place.{...}

{Ed. LUG=Lesbian until graduation. Amazingly enough during college I lived in an all-girls dorm and a sorority and I never saw anyone getting it on with their best friend or their roommate. It never happened. Really and truly. And if something like that WAS going on, believe you me, everyone would have known about it because a. girls are catty creatures and b. close quarters means gossip spreads like wildfire. So, I will admit I believe this whole LUG thing is an urban myth perpetrated by pr0n writers and men who really would like to think that living in a sorority house is all pillow fights and sapphic experimentation.}

Jonathan ultimately places the blame on Friends with Monica and Rachel making out in front of Chandler and Joey to get their apartment back. I think Jonathan's partially correct: Friends showed two women making out. What he misses, however, is that these two female characters were making out not because they were hot for one another but because they were trying to get what they wanted (their apartment) from men. That's when the taboo died: when it became cool to use said bisexuality to lure men into handing over what women wanted. Female bisexuality became a tool to manipulate men. Everyone knows that hetero men adore it when women get busy with one another. There's nothing new in that bit of information. What is interesting in all of this, however, is the lengths women feel they need to go to to get what they want. If making out with a woman will get them something, well, they'll do that.

The thing I find curious about the CDC's results is that, apparently, they did not take into account "The Threesome Factor" when asking women about their relations with other women. They did not ask how that coupling came about or if it took place with another partner present---in this example, a man who'd actually worked up the nerve and asked, "Would you consider being with another woman for me?" I'd be curious to know if this overall trend toward female bisexuality is the result of women actually wanting to love women or if it's just women trying to please their men.

I'd wager it's the latter.

Posted by Kathy at September 16, 2005 01:32 PM | TrackBack