Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire

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Harvard University Press, Feb 28, 2008 - Psychology - 333 pages
Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.
 

Contents

Will the Real Lesbians Please Stand Up?
1
Gender Differences in SameSex Sexuality
17
Sexual Fluidity in Action
54
Nonexclusive Attractions and Behaviors
91
Change in Sexual Attractions
137
Attractions to the Person Not the Gender
171
How Does Fluidity Work?
202
Implications of Female Sexual Fluidity
235
References
263
Notes
309
Acknowledgments
325
Index
327
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