Free Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman Page B

between women. The precious intimacies that adult females had been allowed to enjoy with each other earlier—sleeping in the same bed, holding hands, exchanging vows of eternal love, writing letters in the language of romance—became increasingly self-conscious and then rare. While such possibilities have been restored, to a greater or lesser extent, by the feminist movement of the last twenty years, history does not repeat itself. Love between women in the late twentieth century can no longer hide completely behind the veil of sexual innocence that characterized other centuries. Our era, through the legacy of Freud and all his spiritual offspring, is hyper-sophisticated concerning sex; thus whether or not two women who find themselves passionately attached choose to identify themselves as lesbian today, they must at least examine the possibility of sexual attraction between them and decide whether or not to act upon it. Such sexual self-consciousness could easily have been avoided in earlier eras.
    But in earlier eras a lesbian identity, which many women now find viable, appropriate, and even healthy, would have been unattainable also. That identity is peculiar to the twentieth century and owes its start at least partly to those sexologists who attempted to separate off women who continued to love other women from the rest of humankind. The sexologists were certainly the first to construct the conception of the lesbian, to call her into being as a member of a special category. As the century progressed, however, women who agreed to identify themselves as lesbian felt more and more free to alter the sexologists’ definitions to suit themselves, so that for many women “lesbianism” has become something vastly broader than what the sexologists could possibly have conceived of—having to do with lifestyle, ideology, the establishment of subcultures and institutions.
    In fact, for these women, lesbianism generally has scant similarity to the early definitions of the sexologists. For instance, it has little to do with gender-dysphoria: those who see themselves as men trapped in women’s bodies usually consider themselves as “transsexual” rather than lesbian, and modern medical technology has even permitted them to chose to alter their sex to be consonant with their self image. Lesbianism has nothing to do with morbidity: there are enough positive public images of the lesbian now and enough diverse communities so that lesbians are assured that they are at least as healthy as the heterosexual woman. Not even a sexual interest in other women is absolutely central to the evolving definition of lesbianism: a woman who has a sexual relationship with another woman is not necessarily lesbian—she may simply be experimenting; her attraction to a particular woman may be an anomaly in a life that is otherwise exclusively heterosexual; sex with other women may be nothing more than a part of a large sexual repertoire. On the other hand, women with little sexual interest in other females may nevertheless see themelves as lesbian as long as their energies are given to women’s concerns and they are critical of the institution of heterosexuality. The criterion for identifying oneself as a lesbian has come to resemble the liberal criterion for identifying oneself as a Jew: you are one only if you consider yourself one.
    The changing self-definitions of lesbians have evolved in the context of a changing society in which the smug conceptions of what is normal, natural, and socially permissible have been called into question for heterosexuality as well. There has been a relative social and sexual openness in America in the last couple of decades. That factor, coupled with a strong feminist movement that was very critical not only of men’s treatment of women in society but also of their treatment of women in their own homes, has meant that more and more females were willing to consider themselves lesbians. Those women have had a