The Whole Lesbian Sex Book (5 page)

What happens when you take away the obstacle? Sometimes excitement withers, as in the case of longtime lovers whose desire has waned. No longer risking new levels of intimacy, no longer challenged by the process of discovering themselves sexually, they utter the sad lament “The thrill is gone!” Sometimes familiarity breeds not contempt, but boredom.

It’s rare that a couple’s desire for one another will remain constant through the years. We’ve all experienced the intense sexual high of falling in love and then the inevitable cooling off. Of course, “cooling off” doesn’t mean giving up sex. But maintaining a charged sex life with a long-term partner requires attention.

The most common sexual complaint among long-term partners is “desire discrepancy.” One partner wants
more
sex than the other, or one partner wants
different
sex than the other. This can be very threatening. It’s tempting to simply ignore the problem—but that won’t help. Faced with desire discrepancy, many people opt for a new partner—or give up on sex. As Morin writes in
The Erotic Mind,
reconciling desire discrepancy can be more subtle than that. For instance, you could keep the lover but change the sex. Morin encourages a process of self-exploration and discovery to help you find out what really makes your libido cook.

See chapter 8, Sex and Partnership, for more on sex and intimacy.

Fantasy

Fantasies are great ways to find out what you want sexually. You can try on new sexual activities, styles, and genders in your fantasies. You don’t have to be too literal in interpreting your fantasy. That six-woman gang bang you revisit each night before sleep isn’t proof of a death wish or a deep need to be defiled. It may just be that you want to give up control, have group sex, or be overwhelmed by your partner’s desire for you.

Here are some fantasy classics:

•
Anonymous sex.
“I’m in a crowded bar. We make eye contact and go off to a dark corner. I lift her skirt….” Hotel cocktail lounges are often the settings for fantasies involving sex with strangers (all those bedrooms just an elevator ride away). The rough-trade version of this fantasy can be set in the subway, an alley, or the backroom of a gay bar. Money exchange provides an extra twist.

•
Romance.
We fantasize about falling in love, with soulful gazes and heart-shattering desire. “It’s summer and the mangos are ripe. We’re lying in bed with the fan on, feeding each other and licking off the stickiness….”

•
Cross-orientation.
Many people change sexual orientation in their fantasies. Lesbians can and do get off to fantasies of sex with men. In our fantasies, we can be straight girls or dykes, dominant or submissive; we can be femmes having sex with men or butch dykes having group sex with bodybuilders at a gay sex club.

•
Gender shifts.
“I pull out my dick (in the fantasy it’s real) and start beating off. She reaches down and takes the head of my dick in her mouth and starts sucking really slowly, finally taking it all the way down her throat.” In your dreams you can change gender a dozen times in one night.

•
Dominance.
Many of us fantasize having a partner on her (or his) knees, begging for mercy, for attention, for release, for a spanking, or for an orgasm.

•
Submission.
“I need someone to take control,” wrote one woman, echoing a common theme. “In my 37 years I have not had that kind of sex, but have always dreamed of it.”

•
Discipline.
“I am bent over the teacher’s desk with no panties on, getting spanked for some infraction in front of the entire class—boys and girls. Sometimes the teacher designates a boy to fuck me after the spanking.”

•
Age play.
Hot scenes can come from role-playing in which adult partners adopt age-based (and gender-based) power roles. Daddy/girl, Daddy/boy, Mommy/girl, Mommy/boy roles are popular forms of age play.

•
Exhibitionism.
Up on the roof, under the boardwalk, or in the backseat of a taxi, public sex can be a big turn-on. Wearing revealing clothing and arranging to be “caught” masturbating are also common themes.

•
Famous partners.
Angelina Jolie, Pink, Hilary Swank, Gina Gershon, Kate Moennig (Shane in
The L Word),
and, as one lesbian wrote, “A Tilly sandwich—Jennifer Tilly and her sister Meg Tilly.”

•
Threesomes.
“I’m going down on a woman and a man is fucking me from behind.”

•
Initiation rites.
“Taking” a virgin, teaching a novice new tricks, bringing out a straight woman. “Sometimes I fantasize that I’m a virgin….”

•
Molestation.
“I want to be a little girl selling Girl Scout cookies. I ring a bell and a very handsome man answers the door with only a towel wrapped around his waist….”

•
Role play.
“In my favorite fantasy, I’m the ship’s wench on a coed pirate vessel. I’m tied, spread-eagled, to a giant roulette wheel in a dark room deep in the hull of the ship.”

•
Rape.
“I’m forcing another femme to have sex—tying her up and ass-fucking her.” The debate about rape fantasies usually focuses on the woman as victim. But what about women who fantasize being the rapist?

•
Edge play.
Water sports, blood play, scarification, severe sadomasochism (S/M).

•
Taboo sex.
Vampire play, bestiality (sex with animals), necrophilia (sex with a dead body).

Lesbian Porn

In the world of mainstream porn, the word
lesbian
usually refers to girl-girl action scenes where two (seemingly heterosexual) women get it on. Girl-girl porn places the male viewer inside the popular fantasy of two women putting on a show just for him. (Ironically, many women who have acted in these films have been bisexual in real life—giving us bisexual women pretending to be straight women having “lesbian” sex.)

Lesbian porn came along in the 1980s—videos shot by real lesbian and bisexual and queer women for
us
. Fatale Video appeared on the scene with a list that included
Clips, Hungry Hearts,
and
Suburban Dykes
, which featured porn star Nina Hartley.

Now you can have your pick of explicit videos/DVDs featuring lesbian, bisexual, queer, transsexual sex. You can view lesbian romance; how-to tips on anal sex, play piercing, erotic massage, and female ejaculation; hard-core all-sex no-plot tie-me-up, strap-me-down action; BDSM scenes; and videos featuring Daddy/girl, butch/femme, butch-on-butch, femme-on-femme, and transmen packing some serious heat. You get a wide range of body types, sexual cultures, and styles. You also get a wide range of production values from amateur videos with a homemade feel to the slickest productions. As Violet Blue writes in
The Ultimate Guide to Adult Videos,
“You’re guaranteed an authentic female orgasm in every video, and furthermore these women have styles and methods of getting off that can’t be matched by the adult industry with its formulas and scripts. Not to mention that most of the real lesbian films feature real-life lovers.”
¹⁰

Do you like to watch men getting off? Is viewing an intense blow job your guilty pleasure? You’re not alone. One woman wrote: “I have no doubt that I am a lesbian and have no desire to have sex with a man, but the thought of two guys doing it really makes my clit throb.”
¹¹
Why? Well, to some of us, cocks are hot. Just because we like to look at them doesn’t mean we need to marry one. (Although we might fantasize
having
one.) And, actually, some of us
like
having sex with men—straight men, bi men, gay men,
and
transmen. Gay male porn isn’t hard to find (pardon the pun). It’s a huge industry, thoroughly organized into subgenres: big meat, college boys, rough trade.

Mainstream porn offers a wide selection of feature films, with story, characters, experienced actors and directors, high production values, and bigger budgets than most lesbian films. (No surprise there.) Look for women directors like Veronica Hart and Candida Royalle; beginners’ picks, like the “soft” porn of director Andrew Blake; educational guides by Tristan Taormino, Nina Hartley, Annie Sprinkle, Staci Haines, and Carol Queen; and the fully realized, plot-driven films of Paul Thomas, whom Violet Blue calls the Scorsese of adult films. As Blue says, Paul Thomas makes
movies.
For more on watching porn with your partner, how to find authentic performances, and the story lines of hundreds of videos and DVDs, check out Violet’s Blue’s
The Ultimate Guide to Adult Videos
.

See the videography in chapter 19 for popular lesbian and queer porn videos and DVDs to get you (ahem) going.

Suggested Web Links

CYBERDYKE: THE EROTIC NETWORK FOR LESBIANS ONLY

www.cyber-dyke.net

DARKPLAY

www.darkplay.net

HEATHER CORINNA

www.femmerotic.com

SOURCE OF QUOTE

Patrick Califia,
Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex
, second edition (Cleis Press, 2000),105.

chapter three

Anatomy and Sexual Response

My pussy is a very lovely, shorn, shapely, and soft thing.

LET’S BEGIN WITH A TOUR OF YOUR SEXUAL ANATOMY. Regardless of how you relate to your body—whether you’re comfortable being female, love your genitals, hate your genitals, or feel your body is the perfect expression of who you are—your sex life will be enhanced by understanding what’s going on down there.

Anatomy

The official term for the female genitalia is
vulva
. Some of us prefer
pussy, cunt,
and other names. Our genitals include the clitoris, labia, and vagina. The fleshy area over the pubic bone is called the mons. Our perineum, anus, and breasts can also be quite sensitive to sexual stimulation.

Truth is, there are women who don’t know where or what their clit is—and there are even lesbians who have never held open their labia and looked at themselves. Why? Well, for starters, we’re not exactly encouraged to look at our genitals. If only we were presented mirrors, speculums, and Annie Sprinkle DVDs with those first packages of sanitary pads or tampons…. (As far as I’m concerned, sex ed would best be team-taught by Betty Dodson and Annie Sprinkle, and not your boring, uptight 5th grade science teacher.
A New View of a Woman’s Body
and
The Clitoral Truth
should be required reading. For both girls
and
boys.
“Can you spell c-l-i-t-o-r-i-s? No diploma for you, Johnny!”
)

Add to the lack of basic information about our bodies the complicated relationship many lesbian, bisexual, and queer women have to gender. Some of us experienced considerable pressure to look and act “feminine”—when we didn’t feel feminine inside. We may be questioning whether we consider ourselves to be women at all—female anatomy notwithstanding. Others of us found that our natural femininity made our sexual choice suspect—and, because we looked, dressed, walked, and talked like “normal” women, we felt invisible as lesbians. As a preteen, you may have felt you failed at being the little girl your parents had so wanted. That made it hard to relate to the anatomy diagrams in the package insert that came with your first box of tampons.

Finally, one out of three girls is sexually abused before reaching adulthood. Sex was the site of our pain. No wonder so many of us are shut down, having only a vague notion of what’s going on between our legs.

So, let’s take a guided tour of our genitals.

Clitoris

The glans of the clitoris is the most sensitive spot in your genital area. If you draw your finger up from your vaginal opening in one long stroke, you’ll find your clit at the top of the vulva. (If you like, visualize a clock, with your vaginal opening at six o’clock and your clit at midnight.)

When you refer to your “clit” you probably mean the part of the clitoris on the outside of your body. How big is a clitoris? Clits come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, colors, and sensitivities. Clits can be so tiny you can hardly find them or as big as the first joint of your thumb. Female-to-male transsexuals taking testosterone can develop clits as large as 3 inches long.

The exterior body of the clitoris is made up of the glans (or head), the hood, and the shaft. The glans is the most sensitive part of the clit, analogous to the head of a penis—only far richer in nerve endings (6,000 to 8,000)
¹
and thus more sensitive. Your clitoral hood drapes your glans and keeps it moist and sensitive—still, touching your nonaroused or unlubricated clitoral glans can be irritating or even painful. If you gently hold your clit between your thumb and forefinger, you can feel the shaft.

Hardly the little “nub” described in outdated sex guides and anatomy texts, the clitoris is a complex structure of erectile tissue, much of which surrounds the urethra—no surprise to women who experience ejaculation with orgasm.

The Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers identifies 18 distinct parts of the “complete” clitoris, most of which you can’t see, all of which function as a whole to produce sexual pleasure and orgasm.
²
Such an extensive description of the clitoris helps explain why a person’s sexuality can be decimated by female circumcision or by surgeries imposed on intersexed infants.