A lesbian is a woman who is romantically and sexually attracted only to other women.
Women who are attracted to both women and men are more often referred to as bisexual. An individual's
self-identification might not correspond with her behaviour, and may be expressed with either, both, or neither of these words.
Sexual
activity between women is as diverse as sex between heterosexuals or gay
men. Some women in same-sex relationships do not identify as lesbian, but
as bisexual, queer, or another label. As with any interpersonal activity,
sexual expression depends on the context of the relationship.Recent cultural
changes in western and a few other societies have enabled lesbians to express
their sexuality more freely, which has resulted in new studies on the nature
of female sexuality. Research undertaken by the U.S. Government's National
Center for Health Research in 2002 was released in a 2005 report called
'Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years
of Age, United States, 2002'. The results indicated that among women aged
15-44, 4.4 percent reported having had a sexual experience with another
woman during the previous 12 months.
When women aged 15–44 years of
age were asked, "Have you ever had any sexual experience of any kind
with another female?" 11 percent answered "yes".There is
a growing body of research and writing on lesbian sexuality, which has brought
some debate about the control women have over their sexual lives, the fluidity
of woman-to-woman sexuality, the redefinition of female sexual pleasure
and the debunking of negative sexual stereotypes. One example of the latter
is lesbian bed death, a term invented by sex researcher Pepper Schwartz
to describe the supposedly inevitable diminution of sexual passion in long
term lesbian relationships; this notion is rejected by many lesbians, who
point out that passion tends to diminish in almost any relationship and
many lesbian couples report happy and satisfying sex lives. |
