A heterosexual woman might make a full
transition to a singular lesbian identity . . . In other words, they might
actually change their
sexual orientation
Christian
Moran, Southern Connecticut
University
A comprehensive study of female sexuality presented to the
American Psychological Association's annual meeting in 2010 has pointed out on
a surprising growth in the numbers of so-called “late-blooming lesbians” - women
who have switched their sexuality once they've passed the age of 30.
Late-blooming lesbians have attracted increasing attention
over the last years, partly due to the clutch of glamorous, high-profile women
who have come out after heterosexual relationships. Cynthia Nixon,
for instance, who plays Miranda in Sex and the City, was in a heterosexual
relationship for 15 years, and had two children, before falling for her current
partner, Christine Marinoni, in 2004.
The findings raise fascinating questions over the long-held
belief that sexual preferences may be partly genetic and are fixed early in
life. They also suggest that female sexuality may be more “fluid” than men's,
accounting for the fact that some women sustain long and often fulfilling
marriages before developing lesbian or bisexual tendencies in early middle
age - often leaving behind them a devastated husband and utterly
bewildered children.
While the phenomenon of married women falling in love with
other women is nothing new, in the past it was generally only bohemian, upper
class women who dared to be overt about their lesbian tendencies - women
like the married writer Virginia Woolf, who was 40 when she began a long love
affair with Vita Sackville-West, who was also middle-aged and married.
But the new research suggests that this could be changing.
And while some have previously concealed their sexuality to keep their families
together, many women have no prior inclination to change their sexual
preference until their mid-life revelations.
The consequences can be traumatic.
As the new research reveals, mothers understandably agonize
about the reaction of their children if their sexuality begins to waver. Christian
Moran, who conducted the studies at the Southern Connecticut State University,
found that many women initially go through what is effectively psychological
trauma as they try to reconcile their loyalties to their families with their
attraction to other women.
While for many women “coming out” is a liberating and
ultimately fulfilling experience, for others there can be irrevocable damage to
their family relationships.
Dr Lisa Diamond, associate professor of psychology and
gender studies at the University of Utah, has been following a group of 79
women for 15 years, tracking the shifts in their sexual identity. The women she
chose at the start of the study had all experienced some same-sex attraction –
although in some cases only fleetingly – and every two years or so she has
recorded how they describe themselves: straight, lesbian, bisexual, or another
category of their own choosing. In every two-year wave, 20-30% of this sample
have actually changed their identity label, and over the course of the study,
about 70% have changed how they described themselves at their initial
interview. What's interesting, says Diamond, is that transitions in sexual
identity aren't "confined to adolescence. People appear equally likely to
undergo these sorts of transitions in middle adulthood and late
adulthood." And while, in some cases, women arrive at a lesbian identity
they've been repressing, "that doesn't account for all of the variables .
. . In my study, what I often found was that women who may have always thought
that other women were beautiful and attractive would, at some point later in
life, actually fall in love with a woman, and that experience vaulted those
attractions from something minor to something hugely significant.
It wasn't that they'd been repressing their true selves before; it was that
without the context of an actual relationship, the little glimmers of
occasional fantasies or feelings just weren't that significant."
Diamond has a hunch that the possibility of moving across
sexual boundaries increases as people age. "What we know about adult
development," she says, "suggests that people become more expansive
in a number of ways as they get older . . . I think a lot of women, late in
life, when they're no longer worried about raising the kids, and when they're
looking back on their marriage and how satisfying it is, find an opportunity to
take a second look at what they want and feel like." This doesn't mean
that women are choosing whether to be gay or straight, she clarifies. "Every
one of the women I studied who underwent a transition experienced it as being
out of her control. It was not a conscious choice . . . I think the culture
tends to lump together change and choice, as if they're the same phenomenon,
but they're not. Puberty involves a heck of a lot of change, but you don't
choose it. There are life-course transitions that are beyond our control."
Why?
So why are women like these changing their sexual
orientation after relatively long and conventional marriages, and sometimes
with painful consequences?
There are, according to Dr. Ceri Parsons of Staffordshire
University, a multitude of causes, both psychological and social. “Women today
are finding it easier to be in same-sex relationships for many reasons: society
is taking a more liberal position. Generally people are more aware of
lesbianism - so while it appears that there is an upsurge in lesbian
relationships when actually it might simply be the case that they are just more
visible,” she suggests.
More provocatively, Parsons also agrees with the conclusions
of the recent study, that women's sexual identity is capable of change and
flux. “Historically psychologists have tried to pigeonhole people as homosexual
or heterosexual but these categories are highly inadequate,” she says.
She believes female sexuality can be far more fluid than
that. “I've heard women say: "At this point I was heterosexual and now I
identify myself as a lesbian." Sexual preferences aren't always set in
stone.”
Some psychologists suggest that women are drawn to one
another because of an emotional empathy; a shared capacity to talk about their
feelings. “Women tend to have more close friendships with other women than men
do with other men,” says Professor Marilyn Davidson, a psychologist at
Manchester Business School. “They may feel they get more emotional and physical
support from a relationship with another woman than they have had from their
husbands; or it may be simply that they have chosen to have a relationship with
another woman because they've fallen in love.”
Other researchers propose that women are far more likely to
have experienced sexual assault than men are, and often at a young age. And the
perpetrators of sexual assault are generally men. That can trigger an subconscious
mistrust and discomfort with the very gender that girls are raised to think
they should be attracted to, as well as conflicted feelings about the act of
sex itself. When sexual difficulties occur, they have an all-too-ready
explanation: They think it’s their history, when in fact it may be geography.
If the body touching theirs had a different topography, perhaps they would
respond differently.
Trying to answer the question of why it comes to women later
in life, after long heterosexual experience, both overly positive and not, researchers
found that for women, desire does not generally precede but instead follows
sexual behavior. Women often don’t feel much desire until sexual activity
begins, and many may never feel it in the abstract. Like the old saying that
“when you don't know what to write, you should just start writing,” for women
it seems to be true that if you aren’t in the mood for sex, the best remedy is
to just start having it. Desire tends to proceed from action for women, rather
than from mere thought or visual stimuli as it does for men. For both genders,
desire and arousal may be so closely linked as to be nearly inseparable, but,
unlike men, most women need actual physical stimulation to register either. As
other research has shown, even when their genitals say they’re aroused, women
often will report feeling no desire at all. That may explain why women can't
even imagine wanting sex with a woman until they actually try it, or at least
are in the presence of a woman who really turns the key in their lock.
The social stigma attached to lesbianism is also
evaporating, claims Davidson. “It is more socially acceptable among
middle-class women. Women such as TV presenter Mary Portas, who left her
husband to live with a woman, are acting as important role models, so other
women are saying: "It’s okay for me to follow my feelings," whereas
in the past they may have suppressed or hidden them.”
All of which may remain hard to accept for many heterosexual
women - especially among the older generation.
Ultimately, no research in the world can prove conclusively
why some women have lesbian encounters in later life while millions of others
go through a lifetime without the slightest attraction to another woman.
But for those who do discover latent tendencies in middle
age, the turmoil, it can cause to their families, is often every bit as hard
for them to confront as their own hidden desires.
Role of Hormones?
It is well-known fact that menopause is the time when the
production of hormones, chiefly estrogen and progesterone, dramatically
decreases, bringing an end to the menstrual cycle and fertility. So, can the
hormonal misbalance contribute to the transition from heterosexual to
homosexual in female? While some researchers corroborate that is theoretically
possible, we could not locate any references to the scientific studies, which
would be address this theoretical suggestion. However, most serious researchers
reject this hypothesis, claiming that sexual orientation cannot be
substantially affected by activational effects of hormonal changes in
adulthood.
Testing your Sexual
Orientation
Researchers wanting to measure sexual orientation today have
four basic choices of measurement tools. These are dichotomous measures, the
Kinsey Scale, the Klein Scale, or the Shively and DeCecco Scale. Unfortunately,
none of these is completely satisfactory.
Kinsey Scale
The Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale, sometimes referred
to as the “Kinsey Scale,” was developed by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues
Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin in 1948, in order to account for research
findings that showed people did not fit into neat and exclusive heterosexual or
homosexual categories.
Interviewing people about their sexual histories, the Kinsey
team found that, for many people, sexual behavior, thoughts and feelings
towards the same or opposite sex was not always consistent across time. Though
the majority of men and women reported being exclusively heterosexual, and a
percentage reported exclusively homosexual behavior and attractions, many
individuals disclosed behaviors or thoughts somewhere in between.
There is no “test” per se for self-identification. The scale
is purely a method of self-evaluation based on your individual experience, and
the rating you choose may change over time.
The scale ranges from 0, for those who would identify
themselves as exclusively heterosexual with no experience with or desire for
sexual activity with their same sex, to 6, for those who would identify
themselves as exclusively homosexual with no experience with or desire for
sexual activity with those of the opposite sex, and 1-5 for those who would
identify themselves with varying levels of desire or sexual activity with
either sex.
0- Exclusively heterosexual with no homosexual
1- Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2- Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally
homosexual
3- Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4- Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally
heterosexual
5- Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally
heterosexual
6- Exclusively homosexual
The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid
The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (or KSOG)
is a system for describing a person's sexual proclivities in a way more
detailed and informative than previous methods. It was introduced by Dr. Fritz
Klein (1932-2006) in his book The
Bisexual Option.
The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid is shown in the table
below. For each person, it sets out the seven component variables of sexual
orientation, listed as A through G down the left side. The three columns
indicate three different points at which sexual orientation is assessed: the
person's past, their present, and their ideal. The person then receives a
rating from 1 to 7 for each of the 21 resulting combinations, one rating for
each empty box in the chart below. The meanings of the ratings are indicated
just below the grid itself.
Definitions helpful in using the Klein scale:
Past: Your life up to 12 months ago.
Present: The most recent 12 months
Ideal: What do you think you would eventually like?
Present: The most recent 12 months
Ideal: What do you think you would eventually like?
The Variables:
- Sexual Attraction: To whom are you sexually attracted?
- Sexual Behavior: With whom have you actually had sex?
- Sexual Fantasies: Whom are your sexual fantasies about? (They may occur during masturbation, daydreaming, as part of real life, or purely in your imagination.)
- Emotional Preference: Emotions influence, if not define, the actual physical act of love. Do you love and like only members of the same sex, only members of the other sex, or members of both sexes?
- Social Preference: Social preference is closely allied with but often different from emotional preference. With members of which sex do you socialize?
- Lifestyle Preference: What is the sexual identity of the people with whom you socialize?
- Sexual Identity: How do you think of yourself?
- Political Identity: Some people describe their relationship to the rest of society differently than their personal sexual identity. For instance, a woman may have a heterosexual sexual identity, but a lesbian political identity. How do you think of yourself politically?
Note that the Klein Grid takes into consideration the fact
that many people change their orientation over time. Where a person is today is
not necessarily where she or he was in the past -- or, for that matter, where
he or she will be or would like to be in the future. The concept of sexual
orientation as an ongoing dynamic process is necessary if we are to
understand a person's orientation properly in its entirety.
Please note that although it is entirely possible for an
individual to utilize the Klein Grid for the purposes of better determining
self identification through a process of self assessment, if you are in the
process of coming out as bisexual, the best option is to seek the guidance of a professional
therapist.
Opinion
For many, the challenging period in woman’s life,
characterized by midlife crisis and menopausal transition, became really unbearable.
Here you see sad results – nervous breakdowns, depressions, broken families.
Sometimes, it is quite tempting to let it go and change your life upside-down.
For some, it is indeed a helpful solution, for other, it is another nightmare.
If there is no peace in your mind and body, replacing home, lifestyle, even
your sexual identity, might not help.
I also challenge the popular statement - "experiencing
a change of sexual orientation." I would rather say that sexual
orientation remains more or less fixed in majority of cases. Rather, many women
experience sexual fluidity--a deviation away from their own in-born
orientation. There is a big difference between "changing sexual
orientation" and "experiencing sexual fluidity".
So, in practice, this natural sexual fluidity, which is
especially active during the crisis times, should not substantially impact the
women, who never had any homosexual predisposition in their life. There is no
switch in your brain, which can change you from hetero- to homo- overnight.
However, for those, who were always bisexual, that might move the balance to
the other side of the fence. Bisexual women
have had a lifetime of sexual attraction to both men and women. Maybe they
tried to repress it for years and focus on the male attraction...in which case,
that's just repression of the inborn bisexual orientation.
Think twice, before overwhelmed by the sexual fluidity and being
frustrated with your lifelong partner, you decide to dispose in a trash can
your previous life, your lifetime desires for men, and announce to your friends
and family "Hello, I'm a lesbian now." May be, that is not what you
want? May be, that is not what you need? Do you really think that finding a
female partner, which will fit you, is easier than finding a male partner? Well,
may be, THIS change will do you good. But, before making final decision,
consult your therapist, and try to find, what you really want.
Sources and Additional Information:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1296628/Scientists-say-more-women-changing-sexuality-mid-life-Can-really-true-And-whats-emotional-cost.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1296628/Scientists-say-more-women-changing-sexuality-mid-life-Can-really-true-And-whats-emotional-cost.html