Further Down: Sexual Deviancy
Ambidextrous people are able to use
the right and left hands equally well.
Bisexuality is significantly more
common in ambidextrous people.
Those who could use both hands for writing
had significantly poorer spatial performance
in a mental rotation task.
They had significantly higher prevalence of
homosexuality, bisexuality, hyperactivity,
dyslexia and asthma.
Go with the Sexual Flow
It’s increasingly rare to meet a cool straight
girl who’ll admit to being completely straight.
Sexual fluidity is a fact of life.
During a recent debate on lesbianism and the media I asked an audience of around 100 women to put their hands up to indicate how they defined themselves sexually. About a third didn’t raise their hands at all.
Of the rest, the majority were lesbian, a large smattering were bisexual and about five hands wavered nervously in the air, owning up to the very square fact of being straight.
In this sense, this media crowd had a lot in common with chicks in the contemporary swinging scene. I’ve been checking out this world recently and have found that while the male half of the swinging couple’s profile will identify as straight, it’s pretty much par for the course that a woman will indicate “bi-curious” or “bisexual”.
Sure, a lot of this is about women trying to please their men – it plays to a common male fantasy of a threesome involving two women and a man – but actually, in my experience, the bisexual ones really are up for it.
I think there are a ton of “straight” women out there who, once they’ve ticked all the safety boxes (get married, get financially secure, have babies), are ready to “play”, using swinger terminology. And that is the thing about this new sexually fluid world (for women).
Its politics are much less right-on compared with the old-school lesbian separatist thing. The women who claim to be bisexuals are not the type to go marching on the streets about it.
While some big actors and singers have admitted to bisexuality, there is a lot of fudging from other young heroines of popular culture.
Straight girls who, a couple of years ago, might have preferred the company of gay men and would have suffered the “fag hag” tag are now choosing to hang out with lesbians. “They’ve worked out that lesbians know how to have a good time too.”
She says that this realisation will often lead to other things which, for Lisa Luxx, lesbian “preditor in chief” of new counter-culture magazine Prowlhouse.com, often leads to tears after bedtime.
“If you are a lesbian, you will likely get emotionally attached on some level to the “straight” girl, whereas she won’t be at the same place.”
More importantly, she adds, and I have to agree with her on this one, straight girls are often really boring in bed. Passively, frankly. “A lot of them are scared when it comes down to it.”
Still, she says, she has noticed a rise in the number of straight girls coming on to her in the past year. “It seems like the wild thing to do because it’s more talked about.”
She thinks it’s partly about “women allowing one another to be sexual beings rather than seeing other women as a threat”. In some ways, this is one of the unexpected boons to have come out of feminism.
Karley “Slutever” Sciortino, the new showpony of ‘flexi-sexuality’, is an American 26-year-old who started out as a blogger living in Peckham with little to amuse her apart from going out and looking for sex.
Inevitably, she went from straight to bisexual and now she is (only kind of) joking that she’s a lesbian. She recently created the phrase “strategic lesbianism”, meaning that when she really craves a satisfying sexual encounter, she’ll go home with another woman because women are “naturally skilled” at pleasing one another. Sounds like bisexuality in a shiny new wrapper to me.
Certainly, the rise in the number of women-only clubs, gyms and networking organisations points to a feel for more all-girls-together stuff that lezzies have been doing for years.
I personally prefer the old word for “networking”: cruising – but maybe this will come about in this new oestrogen-only renaissance. Otherwise, it’s rather like going to a Japanese tea ceremony and leaving before you’ve tried the tea.
Sexual Deviancy
Sexuality dismantles the difference between normal and transgressive. Bohemians are attracted to sexual deviancy like the male gaze to cleavage.
There was so much sex, porn and erotica in the late capitalist world. Not just because it was one of the most marketable commodities.
Those living in the suburban West were spared civil war, mass famine, earthquakes and tsunamis, wars against drugs and ideological upheaval. Instead, they could focus on sexual orientation, sodomy and BDSM.
Sexuality is often ambiguous, having a natural appeal to literary critics. Empson’s sense of the word gave way to androgyny, cross-dressing and troilism.
Empson believed that a ménage-a-trois involving his wife and another man was the ideal family set-up.
His own sexual needs were focused largely on the male lover in the triangle. Perhaps he was wholly homosexual but saw himself as bisexual.
One notes the serendipity of Empson’s sexual orientation and his seven types of literary ambiguity.