Gallery Carre
The Vagina Dialogues
Sep 20th, 2024 by Viviane
Bi-curious women are here — but not quite queer. Welcome to the new lesbian chic
By Sarah Fenske
Jen Sincero was having the best sex of her life.
And while that should have been cause for celebration, it wasn’t quite that simple. After all, in the age of Oprah, you can’t simply live. You need explanation. Analysis. Most important, you need written assurance that your life choices fit neatly into an Important Generational Trend.
You need a book.
A book can put everything in perspective. You’re not a doormat; you’re a Woman Who Loves Too Much. It’s not that you’ve botched a life commitment at an early age — you had a Starter Marriage. You’re not lazy if you quit your job to watch Real World reruns: You’re having a Quarter-Life Crisis.
But what context is there for a girl who’s straight, but who’s having great sex — with another girl?
Sincero didn’t think she was a lesbian. A former punk rocker with a little-noticed novel under her belt, she was in her late 30s. She’d always liked men. She still did. And yet there she was: “All of a sudden, I found myself with an incredible woman who got it and me, and the sex was hot as hell,” she’d later write. “And before I knew it I was in a relationship.”
There weren’t any books on that.
So she wrote one herself.
Sincero used to be an advertising copywriter, so the title was the easy part: The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks. Solely on the strength of its catchiness, she sold the book to Simon & Schuster. She had yet to write even the opening sentence.
But write it she did, and fortunately for Sincero, the finished book tapped an Important Generational Trend. After all, if blow jobs defined sexual relations in the Clinton era, in the Bush years we’ve got nothing but, well, bush.
For all the buzz surrounding Showtime’s glossy lesbian soap opera The L Word, this trend isn’t really about lesbians. Mostly, it’s about women who aren’t gay, women who’ve barely paused to ask if they might be gay — and yet are kissing their girlfriends, making out with their girlfriends, even occasionally turning their girlfriends into their Girlfriends.
Call them “bi-curious.”
These women don’t come out so much as try it out — think Anne Heche, not Ellen DeGeneres. Men are in their past; men may be in their future. But for the moment, they’re hooking up with a woman, and it’s cool.
Dabbling isn’t particularly new. Straight women slept with other women long before June Miller taught Anaïs Nin a thing or two. And female college students have long expressed their heightened consciousness by shagging their roommates. (There’s even a term for that: Lesbian Until Graduation, a.k.a. LUG.)
But this is different. (more…)
Oh i do love my visits here.
Sarah xxx
as a woman who’s been there as well, I prefer the term hetero-flexible. So much more informative than bi, or bi-curious.
Thanks for always bringing us the goodies!
I like ‘hetero-flexible’! To me, it seems a more inclusive term.
Hummm… cant yall just make up your minds ?
JT, why is it necesary to make up our minds? Makes it easier to get a date on Saturday night! ;-D
Hi V,
Yeah, and more informative as a term too. Im trying to promote the use of hetero-flexible and homo-flexible. Im sure there are people for whom ‘bisexual’ is accurate. But there are also people for whom the term isn;t precisely apt; their partners arent split 50/50, they are not *equally* likely to be attracted to a member of the opposite sex as a member of their own, say. For example.
So i like hetero-flexible,to denote “primarily hetero,but hey, Im flexible.” Or homo-flexible, to mean well, the opposite. I kind of like the fluidity, and I like the lack of labels,and I dont see these labels as being fixed.
But sometimes we need a brief description, and for me, and many people I know, ‘bi-sexual’ is potentially misleading.
And of course, Im all for anything that makes it easier to get a date on Saturday night…