In some ways you can even imagine, when you’re making out with a girlfriend, what these things that are so amped up in the culture-like breasts and soft skin-are like. Or they don’t know that having a sexual and romantic relationship with their sexual equals is healthy and liberating. Maybe there’s a dynamic of sexual inequality at their school-where girls feel like they never have the upper hand, or that they’re going to be a slut if they have sex. “There has been progress if they feel that they have more options and choices. Baumgardner said she believes the more freedom there is to figure out sexuality, the better. It’s not about rebellion-it’s about exploration, and it’s natural.” I think girls are so much more relational, and when a girl gets involved with a girl, the girl isn’t just a big ‘Duh.’ The girl talks and cares and listens. Girls often give up their power when they start dating. And a lot of girls are wary of commitments to guys. We’re living in a sexually permissive time, and girls feel empowered enough and want to experiment. Now that’s old hat, and they want to go to Katmandu. “When I was a teenager, the place to go to was Europe. “I think teenagers always want to go to the edge,” said Judith Ruskay Rabinor, Ph.D. It feels normal at Hunter, but once you go outside of New York City, it’s not normal.” And it’s good that this is a society that’s open about it. It’s cool that people can experiment with it, and in high school they can try to find out what they feel about it and what’s their orientation. “I know girls who are really lesbian-that’s their sexual preference-and I’ve met girls who do both. “It’s not really that big a deal,” said Tanya Lewaller, the president of Perspective, a club that deals with gender and sexuality issues, at Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side. to be a real lesbian, but poser lesbians are usually a kind of insecure girl who feels like she’s not really special for any reason-and I know I kind of sound like Dr. They just figure out that it’s something guys think is hot, and they use that to their advantage. But girls who are in high school do it more for novelty purposes.
“The girls in junior high are more experimenting with a partner that they think is safe,” she said. Tina first experienced kissing her girlfriends in seventh grade, at sleepover parties. “Day-long, week-long, month-long: There are many types of lesbians at my school,” said “Tina,” a junior at a private school on the Upper East Side. Boys interested in publicly experimenting with other boys would find themselves in a far less “glamorous” subgroup.)
While “L.U.G.’s” (lesbians until graduation) became a term of derision in the 1990’s-applied to college women who slept with women on campus but would immediately link up with socially appropriate males once they left college-the trend seems to have worked its way into a younger crowd. While many New York girls may act like lesbians to both mock and attract young men, there is a definite group of young women who are finding something in a sexualized female bond that they don’t get from the attentions of the average high-school boy. They both knew that their romance would probably come to an end if either one of them met a guy she wanted to date. And it was both.”Īfter that, Anna and Sophie continued to spend all their time together-but even now that they were physically involved, they never thought of themselves as lesbians.
But there’s this thing about enjoying it-and doing it for attention. “We were being quite outward about it,” said Anna.