True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships

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Aphra Behn and the Poetics of Lesbian Salience in the Seventeenth Century Jane White MA Dissertation University of Brighton 2015 However, Traub also admits that there is a profound gulf between Katherine Philips and a ‘Boston marriage’ in regard to ‘the freedom to advocate for female intimacy as a political alternative to patriarchal marriage.’[99]

In a poem to Lucasia she describes the frustration of being near to a woman who cannot return her love, where Philips’s love is ‘hot’ and Lucasia’s is ‘cold’: Inside the 2010 EMIS survey, almost 13,000 UK MSM described what constitute the best sexual life for them [ 55]. Most of men reported a desire for sex within committed relationships, followed by the need of emotionally and intimately connected sexual experiences. Many MSM expressed a desire for variety and a high frequency of sexual activities in their lives, and some men reported gaining the most sexual and emotional satisfaction out of casual sex contexts (e.g., hook-up, one-night stand) [ 56]. Other gay men reported a high desire for adventurous and exploratory sexual experience, free from social, psychological, and physical harm [ 55]. Interestingly, older men were less likely to idealize relationships or emotional connections than younger ones. Moreover, older men were more likely to ask for the sexual practices they wanted [ 55], as a result of a greater experience and consciousness about their own sexual desire and pleasure. Lippa RA. The relation between sex drive and sexual attraction to men and women: a cross-national study of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual men and women. Arch Sex Behav. 2007;36(2):209–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-006-9146-z.Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox. Parsons JT, Kelly BC, Bimbi DS, DiMaria L, Wainberg ML, Morgenstern J. Explanations for the origins of sexual compulsivity among gay and bisexual men. Arch Sex Behav. 2008;37(5):817–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-007-9218-8.

Researchers have tried to highlight gender differences starting from the evidence that men show higher sexual desire than women. The nature/nurture debate on this topic is still ongoing without resolution [ 8, 9]. However, researchers are moving towards a more holistic understanding of sexual functioning, recognizing the importance of similarities between genders and contemplating an in-depth analysis of interindividual variance within genders and inside the couple [ 2••]. Research on desire in sexual orientations has followed the debate-line of gender differences: early studies have tried to find scientific evidences to state that lesbian women and gay men were different and more pathological than were heterosexual people in their sexual behavior [ 10, 11]. Ronson A, Wood JR, Milhausen RR. Current research on sexual response and sexual functioning among lesbian women. Curr Sex Health Rep. 2015;7(3):191–7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-015-0056-8. Be present with your partner and take your time.’ She adds, ‘Make sure you are clear on consent. And then explore and have fun!’ Communicating with your partner The Civil War (1642 – 1651) did in fact give women a degree of freedom; the State had lost control of the press and this allowed women as well as men access to print.[81] Women preached, prophesied, wrote and published. They travelled the country testifying to their faith and published autobiographical and religious texts. Conversion narratives became particularly popular giving accounts to the public about how they found their religious faith. One such narrative Heaven Realised by Sarah Davy, printed in 1670, is described in Her Own Life, Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen as not simply describing Davy’s religious peace and salvation but also expressing rage at her mother, guilt over her brother’s death and falling in love with a woman:

Born in Flames (1983)

To know that I could finally come clean to my worrisome friends felt liberating beyond belief. I didn’t care about sacrificing my youth to move to outer London with a swarm of forty-somethings. All I wanted was to be with her full-time, and for it to be out in the open that we were together. Nimbi FM, Tripodi F, Rossi R, Michetti PM, Simonelli C. Which psychosocial variables affect drive the most? Analysis of sexual desire in a group of Italian men. Int J Impot Res. 2019;31:410–23. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41443-018-0105-8. Male poets of the period were also keen to avoid of the responsibilities of marriage as demonstrated in an extract from a poem by Charles Cotton (1630 – 1687) where the man is far more interested in sex than marriage: It is exciting to find an erotic poem where the speaker is a woman writing about her desire for another woman. However, more daring and directly erotic are the poems where Behn takes the role of the male libertine poet. In these poems Behn has no need for the trope of the hermaphrodite to negotiate same-sex desires, and although the poems appear heterosexual she writes persistently with a ‘male gaze on women.’[184] Moreover, it is in these poems that where we see Behn reflecting Judith Butler’s ‘performative’ position. When Behn takes on the persona of a man she articulates the instability of gender and as such argues against a heterosexist culture that assumes she should conform and identify herself as woman. Poems Upon Several Occasions with a Voyage to the Island of Love (1684) is a large collection of some forty-five pastoral poems, prefaced by nine poems by men, that Stapleton suggests: ‘provide Behn with a masculine escort if not an apology.’[185] In addition to Poems Upon Several Occasions Behn used the pastoral form in Miscellany Poems (1685), Lycidus or, The Lover in Fashion (1688) as well as in other collections and in her plays. Representative of an idyllic country lifestyle, some critics have suggested that Behn feminizes the pastoral form; for example, Heidi Laudien suggests that Behn used ‘a subversive form of the pastoral ….. “pastorelle” for its femocentrism.’[186] However, Jessica Munns argues that the pastoral: ‘was already a strongly feminized form’ and ‘for Behn as for other practitioners of the mode, its charm and utility lay in its traditions of gender ambiguity.’[187] The Golden Age that Behn, like others, calls upon in her pastoral poetry is a belief, shared by both classical and Christian cultures, of a time of human perfection when man lived a physically and morally perfect existence, in harmony with nature.[188] It was a TIME WHEN place where the land was fertile, crops were lavish, there was eternal peace and stability, people were perpetually young and life was simple. Additionally, as Judith Kegan Gardiner states: ‘[o]ne advantage of the pastoral is that it reformulates social class. Supposedly set in the lowest class of rural society [………] the pastoral masks the real class imbalances of the contemporary urban scene.’[189] For Behn working in the London theatre the opportunity to reformulate social class would have been important. The trade off for a woman like Behn entering the privileged London theatre scene was sexual respectability.

Carvalho J, Štulhofer A, Vieira AL, Jurin T. Hypersexuality and high sexual desire: exploring the structure of problematic sexuality. J Sex Med. 2015;12(6):1356–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsm.12865. Philpot SP, Duncan D, Ellard J, Bavinton BR, Grierson J, Prestage G. Negotiating gay men’s relationships: how are monogamy and non-monogamy experienced and practised over time? Cult Health Sex. 2018;20(8):915–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2017.1392614 This article represents an important dissertation about monogamy and non-monogamy in gay relationships. Weinstein A, Katz L, Eberhardt H, Cohen K, Lejoyeux M. Sexual compulsion—relationship with sex, attachment and sexual orientation. J Behav Addict. 2015;4(1):22–6. https://doi.org/10.1556/JBA.4.2015.1.6. Anne Finch, Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180926(accessed 18 August 2015).

The rise of ‘lesbian chic’

The final element recurring through these women’s writing is evidence of linguistic epistemological indeterminacy. The seventeenth century was an age when women were primarily seen as existing only in relation to men. Therefore, for women to write about their desires, let alone their desires for other women, meant negotiating a space within the parameters of acceptability. For the women writers examined here this negotiation involved coding their language, for example within images of nature, or simply using ellipses to imply what could not be said. Cohen JN, Byers ES. Beyond lesbian bed death: enhancing our understanding of the sexuality of sexual-minority women in relationships. J Sex Res. 2014;51(8):893–903. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2013.795924. Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts with in the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.[152]