[Bacchus]

An essay in the London Review of Books discussed a book written by an aged feminist. While containing the normal boomer platitudes about getting old, the essay did discuss a novel response to the problem of the post-wall single woman.

However I Smell

Quote:

‘Orgasms are good for you,’ Segal says, ‘and good to have often,’ though I don’t think she’s including the possibility that the older woman might like to have her orgasms as well as her bed to herself. After two decades of living with a younger man, she tells us, she became single when he left her for a younger woman. Like De Beauvoir with her late love, Sylvie Le Bon, Segal has moved on. ‘Looking around my own ageing feminist milieu, I can see that I am far from the only older woman who has enjoyed and, in my case, celebrated the delights of a heterosexual partnership that ended in her late fifties, who has subsequently found unexpected erotic pleasure in a relationship with a woman.’

Having women lovers makes sense. It always seemed to me to be what there was to look forward to once the tedious hang-up with youthful heterosexuality had played itself out. If you didn’t want to keep the bed to yourself, you might well choose, I imagined, to share it with another woman, on the grounds that women have a wider understanding of love and sexuality than men, and they don’t make so much noise in the bathroom. Annoying as I imagine new-found, latter-day lesbianism in the older woman might be for lifelong lesbians, Segal points to Adam Phillips’s review of Lisa Diamond’s book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, in which ‘he is convinced that she and others are right in suggesting that what is most “mysterious” about women’s desire and relationships is that they are less narrowly focused and more flexible.’ This is Segal’s answer to Kurtz and Figes. She rejects their rejection of sexuality because she has found a way not to reject her own. You can stop assessing your desirability through the eyes of men, and discover that you and other women can desire together more and differently. But it won’t be everyone’s way, and in reality there is more to fearing age than a loss of desire, for all Segal’s examples of sexually active elderly women, and her insistence that sexuality dances kaleidoscopically within us, however old we are.

Cats are the clichéd response. is a smiley for a reason. This is the first time I've seen lesbianism seriously endorsed as a way for spinsters to cope with loneliness.

With a rise in the spinster population expected (combined the increased acceptance of homosexuality), could society see a rise in the population of old dykes too? Or is this only possible for the serious feminists who already hated men in the first place?

[MrLemon]

Somebody needs to buy this lady a vibrator and a few cats.

[soup]

It's true. Dykes can get a way with a lot of things that guys can't.

Fat nerdy Dykes are often a prized possession in that community.

[Private Man]

This shit ain't new:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_marriage

[darklightdispatch]

As I think Family Guy jokingly (but accurately) pointed out, homosexuality *is* a choice for women. More accurately, it's a response to lack of other options, due to being too old, ugly, crazy, too afraid of or envious of men etc. Because female sexuality is a response, it's much more fluid than male sexuality. Male desire is projected out, female desire is received. Men want to "get" sex, woman want to be desired.

Women who are able to attract good quality men are highly unlikely to be lesbians. Very low SMV women, on the other hand, are quite likely to dyke out.

Plus, what the woman is describing in the article has very little to do with sex, even though she presents it that way. Are old wrinkly dykes licking each other's saggy clams every night? I seriously doubt it. Even lesbianism in young women generally isn't much about sex (google: "lesbian bed death.") In contrast, male homosexuality is overwhelmingly about sex.

What it is about is simply companionship and not being alone, which is understandable, of course. Notice how making less "noise in the bathroom" seems to be as important to the author as sexual attraction. Plus, these old feminists are such self-centered and generally unpleasant people that, with their looks totally depleted, other miserable feminists are the only people who might be able to tolerate their company.

[Vroom]

Heaps of women become "lesbians" around menopause. Fucked-up hormones, no attention from men, and no sex drive makes it an attractive option for them.

The reason I put quotation marks around lesbians is because I'm not really sure if they can genuinely be called lesbians when they don't have sex, they're more accurately just close friends. It may be the only time in a womans life when she has a genuine friend.

[J DOE]

I can't decide which group is more joyless: Feminists, aging spinsters or dykes. Sounds miserable.