by Robin Baker
Not only are there fewer female bisexuals than male, but on average they begin their homosexual (lesbian) activities a little later in life. Only 50 per cent of bisexual women have had their first homosexual experience by the age of twenty-five, and only 77 per cent by the age of thirty. Some do not have their first lesbian experience until they are in their forties.
Another difference between male and female bisexuals is that bisexual women do not have as many homosexual partners as bisexual men. Only 4 per cent of bisexual women have more than ten homosexual partners in their lifetime compared with 22 per cent of bisexual men. Similarly, women are more likely to have longer-lasting ‘monogamous’ relationships with each other than are men. A common pattern, shown by the girl in the scene, is for a woman to stay in a homosexual relationship for one to three years before moving on to a heterosexual relationship. Also as in the scene, older women often ‘fit in’ a stable homosexual relationship between successive heterosexual ones.
Compared with these minor differences between male and female homosexual behaviour, there are many important similarities. For example, most women who show homosexual behaviour are bisexual. Fewer than 1 per cent of women in any society are exclusively homosexual throughout their lifetime. Over 80 per cent who show lesbian behaviour also show heterosexual behaviour, as did both women in Scene 31. All human societies contain bisexual women; moreover, female bisexuality is genetic and inheritable. And, like all of the characteristics we have discussed, female bisexuality is widespread among different species of mammals, birds and reptiles. In fact, there is one species of lizard which consists only of females. These will not develop eggs unless they are first mounted in a pseudo-copulatory act by another female. They take it in turns to mount each other and to stimulate each other’s egg production.
The many similarities and few differences between male and female bisexuality are significant enough to justify a similar interpretation of the two types of behaviour. When we compare the reproductive success of female bisexuals and heterosexuals, we reach precisely the same conclusion as we did for men (Scene 30) - as a strategy for the pursuit of reproductive success, female bisexuality is a real and successful alternative to heterosexuality.
Briefly, bisexual women reproduce earlier than heterosexuals but are also more at risk to disease and an early curtailment of their reproductive life. Just as for men, the net advantage of bisexuality tends to be greatest when the behaviour is rare. The proportion of women in any given population who are bisexual, therefore, should reflect the level at which the costs and benefits just balance each other.
In many ways, we know more about the costs and benefits of female bisexuality. This is because it is much easier to know how many children a woman has had at different stages in her life than it is a man – especially a man who has had many different partners. For example, we know that by the age of twenty a bisexual woman is four times more likely than a heterosexual to have a child, and that even by the age of twenty-five she is still twice as likely. The woman in Scene 31 had had one child by the time she was twenty and two by the age of thirty-one. By the end of their reproductive lives, however, bisexual women tend to have fewer children than heterosexual. In Britain in the 1980s, for example, one survey gave the average figures to be 1.6 children for bisexuals and 2.2 for heterosexuals. The trends for earlier but fewer children for bisexuals just cancel out, giving them the same overall rate of reproduction as heterosexuals.
As briefly mentioned above, part of the reason that bisexuals often end up with fewer children despite an earlier start than heterosexuals is that, like the woman in the scene, their reproductive life can be curtailed through disease. Just like male bisexuals, females are at greater risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases. By the age of twenty, they are more likely to have experienced genital infections. By the age of twenty-five they are more likely to exhibit abnormal cells in cervical smear tests, and by thirty they are more likely to have cervical cancer.
To what extent this increased risk of disease is a direct result of bisexual activity is not known. Sexually transmitted diseases, such as herpes and genital warts, can be passed directly from woman to woman during love-making. But there are other aspects of female bisexuality which could also increase the risk of infection, as we shall soon see.
The fact that female bisexuality is less common than male suggests to an evolutionary biologist either that women have less to gain from bisexuality than men or that they have more to lose - or both. However, it is unlikely that bisexual women have more to lose – quite the opposite, in fact. For example, not only do male bisexuals seem much more likely to be at risk to disease, they are much more at risk to violence from homophobes than are female bisexuals. This is probably because lesbians are much less of a reproductive threat to heterosexual women than are gays to heterosexual men.
The conclusion, therefore, is that if women do not have more to lose from bisexuality than men, they must have less to gain – and this should not be so surprising. We have already seen that males have a lot more to learn about sexual technique during early adolescence than females (Scenes 27 to 30). Homosexual experience at the appropriate time can confer precocious sexual competence on both sexes, but does so much more clearly on males. In fact, given that females have fewer basic sexual techniques to learn than males during adolescence (Scene 27), we have to ask what it is about sexual experience with other women that gives bisexuals such an early advantage over heterosexuals.
The main things that a woman has to learn about sex are those techniques that allow her to get the most out of long-term relationships (Scene 18). In particular she needs to learn the techniques of infidelity and deception. She also needs to learn how to make the most of her orgasms in a way that will give her the greatest control over sperm retention and warfare (Scene 26).
The elements of deception needed to exploit infidelity are probably better practised with another woman than with a man. Moreover, they are best practised within the context of a relatively long-term monogamous relationship with a woman – which is one of the key features of female homosexual behaviour. If a woman can fool a long-term female partner over infidelity, faked orgasms and the like, then she should find it relatively easy to fool a similar male partner. This allows her to exploit the advantages of infidelity and sperm warfare (Scenes 21 and 26) while reducing the risk of having to pay the costs (Scenes 9 and 11).
If bisexual women learn earlier and better how to exploit relationships and how to promote and influence sperm warfare, it should not be surprising to find that they make earlier and greater use of these abilities. Bisexual women are inseminated just as many times over their lifetime by a man as are heterosexual women. Moreover, bisexual women are more likely to have more than one concurrent male partner, and to have sex with two different men in a short enough period of time to promote sperm warfare.
Not only do bisexual women promote sperm warfare more often, they seem better able (though the finer details have not been measured) to control sperm retention and thus the outcome of that warfare. They are more likely to masturbate, and to masturbate more often, than heterosexual women. They thus create stronger cervical filters (Scene 22). When they do have sex with a man, bisexuals are no more nor less likely to have an orgasm. But they are more likely to have a bypass orgasm (Scene 25), negating the effect of their cervical filter.
Because many of the orgasm responses that are a woman’s greatest weapon in sperm warfare actually occur in the absence of men anyway (masturbatory; nocturnal – Scenes 22 to 26), they can easily be practised in the context of a lesbian relationship - including even those orgasms that in a heterosexual relationship normally occur before, during or after penetration. This is because the stimuli women give each other during lesbian sex are very similar to those given by a man during foreplay. The most common technique used by lesbians is the stroking and massaging of the genitals, particularly the clitoris. After that, in decreasing order of frequency, come the stroki
ng and massaging of the breasts, the licking and sucking of nipples, oral sex, and the pressing and rubbing together of the genitals. In societies such as some in Melanesia, lesbians only ever use their mouths and hands during sex. Elsewhere, objects are sometimes used, either to stimulate the clitoris or to insert in the vagina. These range from reindeer calf muscle in parts of Siberia to bananas, sweet potatoes, and elegant carved wooden phalluses in other parts of the world. In the more industrialised societies, of course, commercially available vibrators and dildoes are sometimes used. However, penetration either by fingers or objects is still a relatively infrequent part of lesbian stimulation. In one American survey, only 3 per cent of lesbians said that they regularly used penetration to stimulate their partner during sex.
The orgasm ‘success rate’ is about twice as great if a woman is stimulated by another woman rather than by a man. Moreover, the orgasms women give each other are much more likely to occur during the fertile phase of their cycle. The peak of sexual activity that we witnessed right at the beginning of Scene 31 took place a week after the women had finished their periods. If they were going to ovulate that month (and they might not – Scene 15) it would be within the next few days. They were both in their fertile phase.
Interestingly, this peak of orgasm frequency during the fertile phase of a lesbian’s menstrual cycle is mirrored by peaks of homosexual activity by other female animals at a similar phase of their cycle. Whether we study cows, rats or guinea-pigs, we find that females are much more likely to mount each other during their fertile phase. It has been shown experimentally that such mounting behaviour is hormone-linked, so that changing the hormone balance during the menstrual cycle alters the timing of mounting, and can even stop it altogether. Lesbians who take oral contraceptives lose their peak of mid-cycle orgasm activity. This suggests that, like the other animals described above, a lesbian’s motivation to have orgasms with her partner is also under hormonal rather than cerebral control.
Our final picture of the homosexual behaviour of women, then, shows a process of practising with women for success at getting the most out of longer-term relationships with individual men. This is not really any different from our conclusion for the advantage of bisexuality to men. Bisexual men, however, are practising primarily for success with many women. Unlike a man, a woman cannot increase her reproductive success simply by having more sex with more men. She does so, instead, by being much more selective and strategic and by thus making the most of exploiting the men around her. In this, a bisexual woman is aided by a precocious ability to promote and manipulate sperm warfare and by a longer-term ability to make better use of infidelity. Just as for male bisexuals, however, the reproductive strategy of female bisexuals brings with it increased risks that can result in an early curtailment of their reproductive activity through disease or early death. The net result, therefore, is that female bisexuals and heterosexuals have similar reproductive success – but achieve it by different means.
There is one last feature of interest in Scene 31 that we have not yet discussed. When women live together, they often synchronise their periods. Not only lesbians, but mothers and daughters, nuns, prisoners, nurses and students also often synchronise when they live together. In a fascinating series of experiments carried out in the USA in the early 1980s, each woman in a group of volunteers agreed to have the underarm secretions from another woman rubbed under her nose every other day for a few months. Each woman who received the secretion adjusted her menstrual cycle to synchronise with that of the woman who had provided it – which implies that chemicals are present in a woman’s underarm secretions which enable groups who spend a lot of time together to synchronise their menstrual cycles.
In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion over whether menstrual synchrony is a real phenomenon. The most recent research suggests that it is – but that so too is desynchrony. In some groups of women, the menstrual cycles become more similar; in others, more different. Which direction is taken by any particular group is not due to chance, but depends more than anything on how many of the women in the group are ovulating regularly (Scene 15). Groups in which few are ovulating, particularly if some are on the pill, tend to synchronise. Groups in which most are ovulating tend to desynchronise. It is as if the women’s bodies are trying to ovulate as many days apart from each other as possible.
Just why these responses should exist is still a mystery, but it probably has something to do with hiding the fertile phase from men (Scene 2). If a group of women all ovulated at the same time, even the most unaware of males might notice the behavioural changes associated with the fertile phase (Scenes 3, 6, 10 and 22). In isolation, an individual can more easily hide these changes from her partner amidst random swings in mood and behaviour.
The fact that the two women in Scene 31 were synchronised suggests that they had not ovulated in recent months. This is a common response to the absence of men (Scene 15). With the beginning of the younger girl’s heterosexual activity, we should expect her first to ovulate, then to desynchronise her cycle from her female lover.
SCENE 32
The Tenth Tonight
The door-bell rang. It was uncanny the way she could tell something about the person at the door just from the way he rang the bell. The previous ring had been aggressive and persistent, but this one had a tentativeness about it. She got up off the bed and pulled on her bath robe over her underwear. Young, she thought to herself – or a vicar.
On her way down the stairs, she did some quick mental arithmetic. It had been a busy night. This would be the tenth – maybe she should also make it the last.
When she saw him standing there, she smiled to herself – he was young, not a vicar. And he looked distinctly uncomfortable. Diffidently, he asked her how much. She told him, then pointed out that it was more if he didn’t want to use a condom. Taken aback partly by the price and partly by her appearance, he hesitated, then agreed. She stood back to let him in, told him to go on up, and closed the door. Before following him, she took her ‘Model – first floor’ notice out of the window.
Once in the room, she asked him which it was to be, condom or no condom. He said it would have to be with a condom because he didn’t have enough money to pay for it without. ‘Money first,’ she told him.
The youth looked very nervous. To settle him she told him her name, or rather a name, and asked for his. He told her his family name. Despite herself, she laughed. She asked him if he was in the army. Embarrassed, he explained he was a student, that he had only just left school and couldn’t get out of the habit of giving his family name when asked. She told him to relax, then asked if it was his first time. When he said it was, she asked if it was his first time ever or just the first time he’d paid for it. It was the first time he had paid and might be the first time ever, he said. He wasn’t sure. He had got close a couple of times but didn’t know if he really had or not.
She didn’t ask him to elaborate – just told him to relax and leave it to her. Then she took off her bath robe and knickers, lay down on the bed, and told him to take off his trousers and pants and join her. She didn’t react at all when she saw that his penis was limp and small, as if it had been hiding under his clothes. With difficulty, she put a condom on him, then did her best to encourage an erection. It was many minutes before she felt any reaction on his part, despite her soothing talk and practised hand. Then just as he began to stiffen and she thought she might be able to help him after all, he ejaculated, long before she could try to put him inside her. His look of dejection and embarrassment touched her. She told him not to worry and, as he hurriedly dressed to leave the scene of such humiliation, tried to reassure him that he would be fine next time. It was just nerves. She saw it happen all the time, she said.
After he had gone, she dressed. As she reckoned up her night’s earnings, five with a condom and five without, the thought crossed her mind that maybe she should become a sex therapist when she retired. A few minutes later she was walkin
g out of her front door and on to the street. Hailing a taxi, she set off for home.
As she watched the familiar route unfurl, her thoughts drifted back to the student and she marvelled at the way education seemed to slow down a person’s sexual development. Not that being a student had hindered her. In fact, it was when she was at college, about fifteen years ago, that she had started on her career. Nobody could deny it had been profitable, even if it hadn’t been the career she had envisaged when she left home.
Short of money, as were many of her fellow students, she had exploited her looks and joined an escort agency. Tempted by the financial offers she received, she had begun to spend the occasional night with those clients she found most attractive. By the time she graduated, she was earning so much money from sex, had accumulated such a large clientele of her own and, frankly, was enjoying herself so much that she saw no point in embarking on any other career.
At one time or another during her fifteen years she had exploited just about every avenue by which an attractive girl could make money from sex. A chance encounter gave her a brief spell making hard-core pornographic films. In the main, it had been fun. She laughed to herself as she remembered the contortions necessary, amidst a dozen naked men, to get a penis in both hands and all three orifices and still leave room for a camera. Even so, when a rich politician from among her clients decided he wanted exclusive access and set her up in an expensive flat in the heart of the city, she had retired from her film career to become a professional mistress. She didn’t entirely give up having sex with other men, but pretended she had – and got away with it. Eventually, the politician’s sex life had been exposed by a tabloid newspaper and she moved on – this time to a judge.
