Hola!

A friend of mine very recently concluded that she isn’t only bi-curious, or experimental — she’s probably very, very lesbian. She’s in her mid-twenties, with a (generous) string of men in her past. She’s finally found time to fully address the fact that she finds women physically attractive.

While I happily welcome any of my friends into the non-heterosexuality realms, I think she may be jumping the gun here. So what now?  As a child from the Google-generation, I’m far more inclined to compile other people’s work to make my case.

Behold, excerpt of article entitled What Women Want (Maybe), by Andy Newman, printed in The New York Times:

Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.

“Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” she said. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”

Dr. Chivers’s work adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon.

“She’s pinpointing what’s kind of obvious, and yet unexplored: that women are so fluid in their sexuality,” one of the directors of “Bi the Way,” Josephine Decker, said at an after-party for the screening at a Russian-themed gay bar in Midtown.

As with all generalisations, this may not apply to everyone. But my friend does appreciate the link I sent her. She also find it entertaining that I recommended her this book:

book cover from Amazon.com

The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, by Jen Sincero.

“You can’t swing a dead cat at a bridal shower without hitting a straight chick who’s slept with another woman, who’s thought about it, or who’s ready to make the move as soon as someone breaks out the booze.”

Such are the incisive pearls of wisdom to be heard from straight chick and girl-on-girl dabbler Jen Sincero, author of The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping with Chicks. A deliciously sexy how-to guide, it gives curious straight women the complete inside scoop on girl-on-girl action — from pickup lines and virgin jitters to threesomes, techniques, and toys. Drawing on personal experience and hundreds of interviews with straight girls who’ve slept with lesbians, straight girls who’ve slept with straight girls, lesbians who’ve slept with straight girls, and straight girls who’ve done both or neither, Sincero covers the A to Z of the experience…

Yes, there’s a book about it.

I know some of you are already thinking of ways to discreetly gift this to a certain straight girl out there, possibly through a mutual friend.

Of course, you will be hovering possessively around this straight girl in the period she reads this book, snarling at everyone who comes in her general direction. What this does to your social life, is your problem.

You can head to Amazon.com and read the rave reviews. Or even the introduction to her book, where I found myself nodding in agreement to the things she had to say about sleeping with girls. Props to the straight girl, Jen Sincero, it sounds like she made a good choice to write about sleeping with other women.

Jen and Emily, pic from SexWithEmily.com

To top it off, Jen Sincero was on the Sex With Emily podcast show recently. You can listen to it at straight girls guide to sleeping with chicks. They talk about orgasms a lot — the different kinds they feel, the evergreen topic of multiple orgasm myth-or-not, how to give one, etc.

Sex With Emily’s a pretty fun and sexy website.

I’m all for people continuously exploring their sexuality where they can or want to, be it identity, orientation, or behaviour. If anything, being the default (read: only) lesbian in some of my circles, I’m the one the straight girls talk to when they’re premeditating action with other women.

I usually take it as a sign that if they’re coming to a dubiously-impartial source, they just want some support. Why else would they come up to a lesbian and ask if it’s okay for women to sleep with each other?

[ I'm not one of those who disapprove of bisexuals, or bi-curiousness, experimentation, or anything that isn't a "pure" form of lesbianism -- I think that's ridiculous, and frankly, kinda irritating ]

Now they don’t even need to come to me anymore. There’s plenty of affirmative material out there telling them it’s okay to be attracted to other women, and to act upon these attractions, without identifying as lesbian.

Well, maybe more links next time. Right now, I have a moussaka to cook, and a hungry sister (of the biological variety) to feed. Laters, people.