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Lesbian
A lesbian is a woman who is romantically or sexually attracted to other women. This usage of the term entered the English lexicon as early as 1870, though it went through further development for at least the next fifty years.//TerminologyThe word lesbian in English was originally an adjective referring to the inhabitants of the Greek island of Lesbos and the dialect of Greek from the island. From antiquity Lesbos was associated with female homosexuality because of the homoerotic verse of native poetess Sappho. The ancient Greek rhetorician Lucian used "Lesbian" as an adjective to refer to female homosexuality, but the most common term used by ancient writers was Tribade, which could mean either a masculine woman, or a woman who has sex with another woman. This term continued to be the most common word used in medical literature in up to the 18th century in Europe. The word meant "rubber", on the assumption that female homosexual practices involved sexual stimulation by rubbing together both the genitalia of two women, and referred to sexual practices rather than the modern concept of sexual orientations.The dominant meaning of "lesbian" until the 19th century still referred to Lesbos rather than any sexual identity. However, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, the French 17th century writer on sexuality, uses the term "lesbian" ("dames et lesbiennes") to mean homosexual women, but according to David M Halperin the word is always still directly linked to the women of Lesbos:"Lesbian" in this period, then, remained largely a proper name, a place name, a geographical designation - though as Brantôme's usage indicates, a name strongly associated with sexual relations between women.By the late nineteenth century the term Uranian came into vogue for both male and female homosexuals. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word "lesbianism" to refer to a specific sexual identity or orientation to 1870, the word lesbian, as an adjective, to 1890 and as a noun to 1925. Until the early twentieth century the term lesbian was used interchangeably with the word Sapphist. From the 1920s "lesbian" became the most commonly used term.Broadened meaningCalling a historical figure a lesbian can be misleading. Women who have written about their affection for each other, along with spinsters who lived together for years, have often been viewed without much hint they had intimate relationships. With the coming of second wave feminism in the later 20th Century, a tendency to view all women in more or less heterosexual terms stirred a rebellion in which the definition of lesbian was challenged. Some groups widened the definition to mean any woman who didn't live a traditional heterosexual life. In 1970 the lesbian feminist organization Radicalesbians stated, "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion." In 1980 feminist writer and poet Adrienne Rich proposed a continuum of lesbian relationships ranging from sexual to platonic. Rich wrote that instead of sexual relationships between women, lesbian can mean any woman who avoids a conventional married life and resists male tyranny. Rich suggested lesbian relationships can happen between women who live or work together, even within the same family.An updated view on this wider definition has to do with the girl crush as written about by Stephanie Rosenbloom in The New York Times. Rosenbloom defines a girl crush as "that fervent infatuation that one heterosexual woman develops for another woman who may seem impossibly sophisticated, gifted, beautiful or accomplished." Such girl crushes may trigger the same kind of feelings involved in a romance; and although not sexual in nature, these feelings may sway relationship dynamics if the object of the crush learns about them. This broadening of the meaning for lesbian as any woman who bonds with another woman became known as woman identified woman. However, this usage has been criticized as desexualizing lesbians. Cheshire Calhoun wrote in 1995, "When feminist woman loving replaces lesbian genital sexuality, lesbian sexual identity disappears into feminist identity."Conflicting semanticsIn the summer of 2008, inhabitants of the isle of Lesbos spearheaded a case to deter conflict arising from the dual usage of the term. Publisher Dimitris Lambrou claims that the "international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world." However, the three residents campaigning for the end of the term in its sexualized usage lost an attempt to ban the use of the word "lesbian" to describe homosexual women. They had argued that using the term in reference to the said women insulted their identity. An Athens court ruled there was no justification for their contention that they felt slighted, saying the word did not define the islanders' identity. SexualitySexual activity between women is as diverse as sex between heterosexuals or gay men. Some women in same-sex relationships do not identify as lesbian, but as bisexual, queer, or another label. As with any interpersonal activity, sexual expression depends on the context of the relationship.Twenty-first century cultural changes in Western, as well as a few other, societies have enabled lesbians to express their sexuality more freely, which has resulted in new studies on the nature of female sexuality. Research undertaken by the U.S. Government's National Center for Health Research in 2002 was released in a 2005 report called Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002. The results indicated that among women aged 15-44, 4.4 percent reported having had a sexual experience with another woman during the previous 12 months. When women aged 15–44 were asked, "Have you ever had any sexual experience of any kind with another female?", 11 percent answered "yes".There is a growing body of research and writing on lesbian sexuality, which has brought some debate about the control women have over their sexual lives, the fluidity of woman-to-woman sexuality, the redefinition of female sexual pleasure and the debunking of negative sexual stereotypes. One example of the latter is lesbian bed death, a term invented by sex researcher Pepper Schwartz to describe the supposedly inevitable diminution of sexual passion in long term lesbian relationships; this notion is rejected by many lesbians, who point out that passion tends to diminish in almost any relationship and many lesbian couples report happy and satisfying sex lives.Not all lesbians express their sexual orientation in their behaviors. According to a 1990 study of The Social Organization of Sexuality, out of 131 women who self-reported same-sex attraction, only 42 women (32%) had sex with other women.History of lesbian sexualityThe earliest known written references to same-sex love between women are attributed to Sappho (the eponym of sapphism), who lived on the island of Lesbos in ancient Greece from about 625 to 570 BCE and wrote poems which apparently expressed her sexual attraction to other females. Modern scholarship has suggested a parallel between ancient Greek pederasty and the friendships Sappho formed with her students. Lesbian relationships were also common among the Lacedaemonians of ancient Sparta. Plutarch wrote "love was so esteemed among them that girls also became the erotic objects of noble women."Accounts of lesbian relationships are found in poetry and stories from ancient China. Research by anthropologist Liza Dalby, based mostly on erotic poems exchanged between women, has suggested lesbian relationships were commonplace and socially accepted in Japan during the Heian Period. In medieval Arabia there were reports of relations between harem residents, although these were sometimes suppressed. For example Caliph Musa al-Hadi ordered the beheading of two girls who were surprised during lovemaking. During the 12th Century, Etienne de Fougères derided lesbians in his Livre des manières (about CE 1170), likening them to hens behaving as roosters, and reflecting a general tendency among religious and secular authorities in Europe to reject any notion women could be properly sexual without men.Public policyIn Western societies, explicit prohibitions on women's homosexual behavior have been markedly weaker than those on men's homosexual behavior. During the 1990s, dozens of chapters of Lesbian Avengers were formed to press for lesbian visibility and rights. Same-sex marriage has now been legalized in Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Canada, South Africa – and Norway (on January 1st, 2009) – but it is still not permitted by many countries. In 2004 Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to legalize same-sex marriages.In the United Kingdom, lesbianism has never been illegal. In contrast, sexual activity between males was not made legal in England and Wales until 1967. Lesbianism was left out of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885; a common anecdote stating that Queen Victoria did not believe sex between women was possible is likely apocryphal. A 1921 proposal, put forward by Frederick Macquisten MP to criminalize lesbianism was rejected by the House of Lords; during the debate, Lord Birkenhead, the then Lord Chancellor argued that 999 women out of a thousand had "never even heard a whisper of these practices." In 1928, the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity in a highly publicized trial, not for any explicit sexual content but because it made an argument for acceptance. Meanwhile other, less political novels with lesbian themes continued to circulate freely.Jewish religious teachings condemn male homosexual behavior but say little about lesbian behavior. However, the approach in the modern State of Israel, with its largely secular Jewish majority, does not outlaw or persecute gay sexual orientation; marriage between gay couples is not sanction
Whether the homosexuals should receive all the rigA campaign has been launched by a gay and lesbian advocate group to allow same-sex marriage in all six states in New England by 2012.16 families will join President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden on their Whistle Stop Tour to D. 22:16 podcastLindsay Lohan hit the Beverly Hills Burberry store for a little shopping sans lesbian girlfriend, Samantha Ronson. Lesbian couple Lisa Hazirjian and her partner Michelle have been invited to join the tour and appear onstage with Obama and Biden during events. (Suck on that, Rick Warren.The film in question is called Champion: Love Hurts, and its star is an honest-to-God MMA fighter.Let them be homosexuals and it is their private life. Submit your own adult story or erotic sexual fantasy The most funny breakup in history, see a girl dump her boyfriend by web camera and admit that she is a lesbian to! The "absolute code" was a rule of thumb in the 50's that you do not expose a fellow gay or lesbian person to their boss or to the press.Stonewall, renowned for its campaigning and lobbying on behalf of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, has launched its 2009 list of top 100 employers.C. As
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