Lesbians
By Rod Van Mechelen
In love, a woman's relationship is more likely to be violent if her lover is another woman.
The lesbian landscape after forty
1992 Bellevue, Wash. - In Men and Marriage
, George Gilder asserts that the older a single woman is, the more likely she is to remain single. Countering this, pop-feminists assert that women over 40 are not all that lonely and often find love. What they don't mention is that, increasingly, it's lesbian love:
Sixteen percent of women over forty have love relationships only with other women, and 61 percent of women over forty now living with another woman, as lovers, were previously married. -- Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress
, St. Martin's Press mass market edition, 1989, Shere Hite, p 484
The ultimate rejection is disinterest. Soon after age forty, the vast majority of women lose their sexual appeal to men. Their reign of sexual aristocracy over, they begin to find out what it's like to be sexually invisible, and there is little left for them in this respect than to seek solace in the arms of their own gender.
This tends to support Gilder's contention that women over forty find it more difficult to find heterosexual love. This difficulty is compounded by how women ruin their relationships.
Trouble in Paradise
Ignoring that most women refuse to initiate relationships, pop-feminists complain that women don't marry the men they love most because men won't let them. But even lesbians don't "marry" the women they love most passionately. (Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, St. Martin's Press mass market edition, 1989, Shere Hite, p 485) Lesbians employ all the same "distancing" and emotional-withholding techniques that pop-feminists complain men use.
Their sexual passion withers just the same as it does between heterosexual couples, and communication diminishes. (Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, St. Martin's Press mass market edition, 1989, Shere Hite, p 486)
Men are to blame!
In fact, the pattern of alienation is identical whether the relationship is heterosexual or lesbian. Shere Hite recognizes this, but attempts to side-step the issue by suggesting the underlying culture is too different to draw a parallel. (Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, St. Martin's Press mass market edition, 1989, Shere Hite, p 483 - 484)
If that is the case, however, then why are gay relationships generally free of the problems that plague heterosexual and lesbian relationships? Why are these problems characteristic only of relationships with women? Pop-feminists don't want to know. If women encounter the same problems regardless of the sex of their lover, then they can't blame all their relationship problems on men.
They do try to blame men. Hite attempts to excuse all the similarities by suggesting lesbians are merely reflecting male behavior patterns. (Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, St. Martin's Press mass market edition, 1989, Shere Hite, p 515) Even when they have nothing to do with men, pop-feminists blame men!
Violence in Lesbian Relationships
For a vivid portrait of the dynamics of lesbian and homosexual relationships, see Violent Betrayal: Partner Abuse in Lesbian Relationships
, by Claire M. Renzetti.
I wanted to quote Renzetti to make my point, here, about female relationships, but feminists have generally rejected her book, which is why in this chapter I relied exclusively on one of the most highly regarded feminists: Shere Hite.
Regards
Rod Van Mechelen
Rod Van Mechelen is the author of What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues: The Male-Positive Perspective (the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com. He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served for 9-1/2 years on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council.
