Learn Something New Everyday
Did you know the history behind lesbian bed death? I didn’t.
Felice Newman, author of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, explains it to Jennifer Vanasco of the Washington Blade here.
Lesbian bed death is something that a lot of us believe in. If it hasn’t happened to us, we figure that we’re the lucky exceptions.
But Newman says it’s just not true.
She tells me that lesbian bed death was a concept coined by writer JoAnn Loulan in the 1980s and 1990s. Loulan wanted to get lesbians to talk about sex, something they were uncomfortable with after the parched years of the 1970s.
“She was a bit of a comedian,†Newman says now. “She was trying to be funny so that lesbians would be comfortable, so they wouldn’t feel alone.â€
The phrase was sticky. So sticky, it stuck. Instead of being a term that described a common condition that women should work to overcome, it became a mandate. Enter into a long-term relationship, and lesbian bed death was inevitable.
I think everyone suffers from bed death after a while, lesbian or not.
I’ve always found it questionable that the idea of “bed death” was (obviously) attributed to lesbians, who already have a problem with not being seen as sexual. From doing therapy, I know just as many straight couples who have experienced “lesbian bed death,” but no one singles out that experience by naming the pathology after the heterosexual population.