Pega Eles, Tupi!

fuckyeahlongbox:

alliterate:

wicked-grin:

nomorewords:

alliterate:

equalitopia:

Late-blooming lesbians: women can switch sexualities as they mature

Women are embracing lesbianism in their thirties, according to research indicating that shifts in sexual orientation may be more widespread than previously thought.

One study even indicates that as many as two-thirds of women who feel lesbian attractions may have changed their sexual orientation over time.

Christan Moran, a researcher at Southern Connecticut State University in the US, said that many women who develop lesbian feelings in later life refuse to “come out” for fear of society’s reaction. Women in long-term heterosexual relationships, especially those with children, face even greater problems reconciling themselves to their new identities, she said.

High-profile examples of women leaving their husbands to pursue same-sex relationships include Portia de Rossi, the Ally McBealactress who married the US comedian Ellen DeGeneres in 2008, nine years after divorcing a man.

Read more on this study at Telegraph.co.uk.

This is bugging the hell out of me, because it ignores two huge things: 1) the fact that sexuality is not a fucking binary, and 2) the fact that plenty of these women have probably been attracted to women for most of their life and only admitted it to themselves/came out/found a woman they could fall in love with/wtfever later in life. For example, Portia de Rossi, who they use as their example of a famous woman “switching sexualities”? She’s said in many, many interviews that she has always been attracted to women. The fact that she was briefly married to man does not mean that she has ever been straight.

I totally agree with your first point (that sexuality is not a binary), but I have some issues with your second one.

I am very much in the minority on this one, but I am very much opposed to the prevalent view of sexuality among the “GLBT community,” which is that sexual orientation is a fixed identity that cannot change or evolve or develop over time.

I find it much more offensive to suggest that anyone who experiences a change in their orientation was “in denial” or “repressing” their true feelings, than to allow for the possibility that some people just change.

I understand why activists adopt and promote this view of sexuality. Because they fear that if you admit that people can and do change orientation over time, then you open the door to the idea that homosexuality can be “cured,” or that it’s a “choice,” and that is of course what the religious right wants everyone to believe.

But I think there is a difference between saying that orientation can change and saying that anybody has control over that change. Furthermore, this deterministic view of sexuality as something that we are all locked into and that is immutable and static and inflexible is not only extremely unappealing to me, but my own experience and everything that I believe in suggests that it is simply not true. And I firmly believe that by pushing this limited and limiting view of sexuality, we are ultimately doing ourselves a great disservice.

Queerness is all about recognizing the fluidity and complexity of sexuality. I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I don’t particularly care for the tone of that article. But it really irks me that people within the GLBT community immediately respond with outrage the moment someone suggests that maybe sexual identity is not as written in stone as some people believe.

I think you’re both saying the same thing with different words. No binary would indicate fluidity, what I think @alliterate is reacting to is the assumption of straight as “neutral” as well as queer denial and invisibility. I don’t think she’s saying your sexuality can’t be fluid over time - more that it’s frustrating to see mainstream media assuming that if a woman was once married to a man, but is now with another woman, she has somehow “switched sides.”

Okay, wow, I missed @nomorewords’s response before. Yeah, @wicked-grin has it right: that’s pretty much exactly what I was trying (and sort of failed) to say.

I see my own sexuality as fluid. I did not mean to imply that nobody’s sexuality can change or that people who feel it has changed were just “in denial”, or whatever. I think you’re reading way, way too much into a few poorly worded sentences, @nomorewords; like @wicked-grin said, what I take exception to is the idea that a woman like Portia de Rossi, or Lindsay Lohan, or whoever else, must automatically be “switching sides” any time they take a new partner of a different gender. Of course sexuality can change. That doesn’t mean that a woman who was once married to a man ever saw herself as straight, which is what that article is assuming, and I’m objecting to that “straight until proven otherwise” sort of mentality.

REBLOGGING FOR TRUTH! AND ALSO REBLOGGING TO SAY THAT, FWIW, ALLITERATE, I DIDN’T READ YOUR OP AS SAYING THAT SEXUALITY CAN’T CHANGE OVER TIME. I JUST READ IT AS SAYING THAT MOVING FROM AN OPPOSITE-SEX RELATIONSHIP TO A SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIP DOESN’T NECESSARILY MEAN IT HAS CHANGED.

Anne Heche agrees