A Girl With a Sword

the love of women

Yeah, so as Emily mentioned, I found this article about high schoolers who claim to be lesbians in the Washington Post yesterday. It's called Partway Gay. It was the title that caught my attention because I've had some quite interesting discussions on the whole subject of the degrees of homosexuality.

This article describes lesbianism as a sort of trend among 16 to 23-year-old women, but it isn't the old seventies kind of lesbianism, it's a "oh, hmm, I'll try this for a while" kind of thing. These are mainly girls who like to keep their options open. There are a lot of quotes saying things like, "I like women only right now, but who knows where I'll be in 25 years." and "If something happened to my relationship with Julie, I could see myself with a boy again. There are some days I notice I'm thinking girls are pretty, and other days I'm thinking there are a lot of good-looking guys at this school."

This isn't such a new thing. I remember a high school near where I grew up where I heared a good number of the girls classified themselves as "bisexual." Hope's first reaction to this idea was that the girls are exhibitionists, trying really hard to get guys' attention. Now I think that is the case for many of the girls, but I think some are doing it because they are attracted to girls and they want to see what this means. One girl explains, "Girls understand how girls think. You can tell a girl, 'I think I'm falling in love with you' and she'll listen. A boy will slough that off, or run away." I think a lot of the reason these girls want to date girls is that they need to be understood and they are beginning to realize that boys are very different from girls.

What fascinates me most, though, about this whole thing is not how new it is, but how old it is. Towards the end of the article, the author brings up the idea of "passionate friendships." Girls at this age do become very close. They are often very physically (but not sexually) affectionate. They are also verbally affectionate. I think it is a need for young women to have these close, and yes, passionate friendships with other young women. The funny thing is, this hasn't been a popular idea for a while, as far as I know. This hearkens back to the Victorian era when women had "bosom friends" and called each other "dearheart." Now that lesbianism is becoming popular the girl have found an outlet for this natural passion. It's really quite sad. It's almost as if young women have been forbidden to have non-sexual friendships.

Now I feel I must state that I am neither advocating nor endorsing any kind of lesbianism. I'm just noting that this is an interesting trend, especially that something so new and "liberated" hearkens quite clearly back to an era so old-fashioned and "prudish."