Can you be a lesbian but still like sex with men?

[velourvoyageur]

Just wondering. Promise I'm not a troll.
I sometimes wonder if I'm just plain gay and not bi but I do like sex with men because (sorry) there's nothing else exactly like a dick. But I don't feel the same attraction to men as I do to women.

It's not that important, I mean the classification of attraction or whatever, don't mind if I or anyone else is gay, bi, straight, just curious as to whether anyone had any thoughts?

caryam yeah, you're right. I'm choosing my lovely, kind, handsome dh. But yes, if it ended I wouldn't dismiss my attraction to any women this time.

Exactly summerlovinf It's all too easy to romanticise something you have had no experience of. Relationship with Dh is having a wobble right now and so once again it's easy to think, "what if?" without working on things at home first. I love him too much and were too invested to give up without a fight!

And yes, summer it's purely a sex thing! I'm not sure how much respect I would have for a man who left his wife and children so he could sleep around. Which are the bare bones, basically!

What is this technically correct bollocks?

I think many people perhaps even most people are varying degrees of bi.

The idea that 'technically' you have to be attracted to only one gender or the other to be truly homosexual is just nonsense.

It subscribes to a simplistic, rigid and inaccurate picture of human sexuality.

How someone self-identifies is entirely up to them.

Although it depends how important sex is to you. One MNer who left her husband on that thread said her DH was her best friend, but it was sex and sexual attraction that drove her to leave her DH and go out with a woman.

Sexuality is nothing to do with love btw.

I'm not talking about who should call themselves anything. I'm talking about what the words actually mean. Obviously the meaning of words is somewhat fluid but to change the technical meanings of gay, straight and bi to mean other things makes them totally redundant words without any meaning at all.

That's not where we are as a society. The words do have specific meanings - good and bad ones and are not actually redundant.

But I don't see a problem with people identifying themselves in a way they feel suits them. If it's because they don't want to be associated with bisexual because they feel it has negative connotations then, as a bisexual person, that is obviously something pretty shit. People who are keen to distance themselves from relationships they have had that they don't want to be used to define them is fair enough but when that is happening as a result of prejudice and/or discrimination that's clearly bad for society.

You are assuming this is because of prejudice or discrimination. I am telling you for the people I know it is not.
And lesbians and gay men experience lots of prejudice and discrimination.

George Michael decided in his words it wasn't about "who he could get it up for", but who he fell in love with. Plenty of people will have sex with either men or women, if that is all available. It doesn't mean that is who they would choose.

Can a vegetarian enjoy the odd bacon roll and still be vegetarian?

And I'm suspicious of people who go to great lengths to justify why they aren't bisexual. Not necessarily because I assume that they are and are just uncomfortable with it but because I think it is an expression of feeling the prejudice and discrimination which exists in a hierarchical way against non-heterosexuals where being gay is considered less undesirable than being bi.

I think it's ironic because I agree that probably most people would have at least a minor level of attraction to both genders and therefore the labels should really be redundant but to imagine that they are redundant now, when there is still so much prejudice based on them would just be will fully ignoring the fact there is prejudice.

Offred, you really have a bee in your bonnet about this one. I can tell you my parents would have preferred my sister to be bi rather than lesbian, because at least then there would be some chance she might settle down with a man.

Maybe they go to great lengths to justify it to you as it is obviously an important issue to you? I know people who are bi, lesbian and gay and I have never heard anyone going to great lengths to justify why they are not bi.

It was the Turning Tavern threads here in relationships btw Brush

As a almost completely irrelevant aside, my mum swears blind George Michael tried to pick her up in a bar once and I always laughed her off as I thought he was only into men. Maybe not!!

Thanks capricalia going to have a read tonight

There are no real 'technical' meanings of gay, straight and bi.

For a start, originally gay meant fun, and straight meant an undeviating line.

Even if you take the words 'homosexual', 'heterosexual', 'bisexual', which are all derived from the Ancient Greek: homosexual - means 'same' 'sex', heterosexual means 'other' 'sex'. There's no insistence on exclusivity, they just describe a type of sexual attraction. And these terms, despite their ancient derivation, didn't come into common usage until the mid-20th century.

So we're talking about meanings of sexual orientation signposts rather than meanings of words. And people interpret and define those signposts differently.

For some people - to be truly homosexual you have to have no attraction to the opposite sex at all, for others you can have some attraction, but less.

The former position not only doesn't acknowledge the fluid and ambiguous nature of sexuality, and also its capriciousness, but also leads to the idea that some people are more 'purely' or 'exclusively' homosexual, perhaps even more 'authentically' gay than others...

I agree with Offred though that those who identify openly as bisexual get discrimination from all sides.

Until 2 years ago (I'm almost 30) I had only been attracted to men (previously married) and until recent years hadn't clicked anywhere in my head I was anything other than hetro. Me realising I was attracted to women initially made me think I was bisexual but long story short resulted in me leaving ex dh and meeting now gf. While I don't consider myself attracted to men the thought of sex with them doesn't repulse me but it cant be compared to my attraction to my gf. Although I can still find men attractive I don't want to sleep with them and I definitely wouldn't want a relationship with one, I consider myself gay now, did my sexuality just change or was it repressed all along, I have no idea.

I think that's a big no, the whole "nothing like a dick" isn't what most gay women think... I'm a lesbian, don't fancy men and wouldn't sleep with a bloke ( though I do love blokes in a non-sex way). My friends who identify as lesbian wouldn't sleep with men, and I wouldn't consider someone who slept with men a lesbian, I'd say they're Bi, or Queer but not lesbian. I have plenty of Bi friends, they are genuinely attracted to men and women. Some to women much more than men and vice versa. Wouldn't worry about the labels too much.

You quoted George Michael doing it!

Twinklestein - that's what I meant, I was just typing while making lunch.

I know the categorisations and the labels are a relatively modern construct and are related to discrimination. I just don't think we can ignore that they exist and when someone is adopting them and distancing themselves from others then it demonstrates something about prejudice and how it works that is important to know.

I don't think the categorisations exist in the way that you have implied. The meaning of each label is debatable and people interpret them in different ways.

So it's not a question of ignoring the labels, but acknowledging the ambiguity and limitations of them.

"Besides, I'm not convinced that people coming out as individuals in situations where it is irrelevant really does do much to tackle discrimination, it often just invites it."
The more bisexual people (men and women) come out, and are visible, and normal, the more that other people (gay and straight) will realize that prejudices and assumptions are just that, and not based in any fact. Visibility, therefore, counteracts discrimination. Just the same way it has done and is doing for gay men and lesbians.
I'm certainly not suggesting that anybody - gay, straight, or otherwise - should be forced to come out, but in my mind that's a good reason to choose to do so.

I'm in an interesting position, because I've fallen in love with women a few times but I've never really been particularly sexually attracted to one - at least, and certainly, never enough to act on it. Does that make me curved rather than straight?
My daughter is both bisexual and non-binary gender - most people probably assume when they look at her that she's a stereotypical lesbian... at least until they see her with her boyfriend. She's not shy about telling people except her dad who and what she is.

As an older women, I know lesbian and gay men, and anyone bi who lived with a same sex partner, have had a long history of being discriminated against. I know plenty of people who were sacked from jobs, turned away from hotels, evicted from rented accommodation and verbally and physically attacked because they had a same sex partner.
It is relatively recently the law changed so that employers can no longer sack you for this reason, and you cannot be denied services.
This is real discrimination. Not just people having stereotypes about what your sexuality means, or making assumptions about you.

There are so many stories I could tell. The police van in the 80's in Manchester that used to take lesbians off the street and let policemen rape them in the back of the van.
The police who were concerned were two women were being attacked regularly by neighbours until they found out they were a lesbian couple.
The council worker who had constant verbal harassment from his managers because he was gay.
This used to be commonplace.

Twinklestein - I think people commonly use them in a way which is technically incorrect whilst disputing the validity of a society that has/needs the labels in the first place but I think the reasons they do can tell us a lot about the form and structure of discrimination towards women and non-heterosexual people generally. It's not a point about me thinking people should use bisexual/homosexual/heterosexual. It's that I feel you can make observations by comparing common use of the terms to their technical meaning.

Caryam - so because sufficient headway has been made that people are no longer actively oppressed and violently attacked by the state there is no longer any discrimination and even people who live through it must not be affected by the past or the present?

You might want to tell people they aren't allowed to say racism exists because we no longer have slaves.

And much of what you describe still happens. Sure the people subjected to it will be comforted to know it's not a problem anymore because in the past it was worse.

As I've said there is no 'technical' meaning - the meanings are broad an open to interpretation.