the feminist librarian reads

Finally! A Nuanced Look at Hookup Culture | Tracy Clark-Flory interviews Leslie C. Bell @ Alternet

I have one finding that I really like to talk about: There certainly were women that I spoke with who did manage to kind of express and feel the full range of their desires, for relationships, for sex, and for all kinds of things, and it was much more like my queer, lesbian and bisexual respondents had comfort with the range of desires than it was with my straight respondents. I asked everybody I spoke with, “What would it be like to have sex or have relationships with a partner who’s differently gendered than your usual partner?” I was really surprised about the degree to which straight women had very elaborated responses about what it would be like to be with women, and they all thought it would be much easier to kind of be the full range of themselves. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but it’s fascinating. In some ways it’s an idealization, I think: Lesbian relationships are not easy and they’re complicated in their own way. So one suggestion I have for straight women is that I think part of what we fall into in this pattern of splitting is also splitting men and women, and it’s assuming this kind of a radical difference. What I hear my queer respondents saying is, their partners are human in a way that some of my straight female respondents did not express. One thing that I would just challenge straight women to do is to think of their male partners, or the men in their lives who may become partners, as more like them than different.