Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire

Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire

By: Lisa M. Diamond  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

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 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.

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Is this subject really that complex? - Dr. Lisa Diamond has a fairly simple thesis: male homosexuality is different from female homosexuality. In short, homosexual males are born not made and the opposite is true for lesbians. There is evidence to support this. The study Diamond refers to is the Blanchard et. al. "fraternal birth order effect" studies which reported that the likelihood of male homosexuality increases when a woman gives birth to successive males. No similar correlation can be found for lesbians.

If lesbians are not formed at birth then it seems likely that they become so later in life. But, as Diamond points out, what often gets a lot of press are the lesbians who become straight later in life: Anne Heche, Holly Near. Diamond has other anecdotal evidence that comes from one rather non-random sample: the students in a women's studies class. Diamond conducted interviews with many women from this class who answered her request to talk with women who are gay or bisexual or any other alternative status.

Diamond does not consider the evolutionary basis of homosexuality until page 223. Even the few scant paragraphs spent on evolution sound off base. Terry Coyne's book "Why Evolution is True" says that evolution is only interested in characteristics that improve the ability to survive and to spread one's genes. So the evolutionary case for homosexuality must improve a group's ability to survive. That case can be made in a better fashion. Obviously, if there are too many males the often tragic competition for females can be reduced if some of the males are matching up themselves. Considering that males are preferentially conceived (Y sperm can swim faster than X sperm) the possibility of too many males is a real possibility. But early death rates for males are higher than for females and a few disastrous hunts or battles might reduce a group's male count drastically and quickly. In such a case, the group's survivability might improve if some of the females start matching up even though they were heterosexual earlier. Diamond doesn't follow this path or I'm not understanding the few pages that discuss evolution.

In order to find more women whose sexuality can be considered "fluid", Diamond goes to great extremes. One person is married and completely faithful to one man but she considers herself a lesbian. We are supposed to think this is ironic or an example of sexual fluidity but it seems to me to just be an abuse of the English language.

I did not know about the acronym LUG (Lesbian Until Graduation) until this book. Diamond also considers transvestite, transsexuals, and straight women with gay fantasies. The only persons not considered are the guys who write "Help, I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body" on bathroom walls.

Diamond starts off making it clear what she does NOT believe. Not all women are bisexual, sexual orientation cannot necessarily be changed, and she does not intend to prove that it is a "nuture versus nature" problem. But she thinks that perhaps all people are fluid and women more so than men. What does she believe? She says that she is one of "the social scientists who view sexual feelings and experiences as simultaneously embedded in both physical-biological and sociocultural contexts that require integrated biosocial research strategies." Oh, is that all!

If a woman that I knew and cared for was concerned about her sexual orientation, I would recommend this book just because it explores that so many distinct manifestations of female sexuality. However, this book won't provide specific guidance. I give this book 4/5 stars because I think it uses almost 260 pages to expound on the points that I think were sufficiently studied in the first 2 chapters (50 pages).

The following is probably irrelevant but the reader may think otherwise: Diamond is currently in a same-sex relationship; this reviewer is a married, heterosexual male.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
LUGs are Women Too! - Starting in the mid-1990s, Diamond, a professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, conducted a longitudinal study that tracked sexual attitudes among a cohort of non-heterosexual identified women from their late teens into their early thirties. From this work Diamond concluded that while a model of sexual orientation in which a person is unswervingly straight or gay may be appropriate for men, it is too rigid for women. Over the course of a few years, a typical woman in Diamond's study might move from being attracted to other women to being attracted to men, or vice versa, with the nature of the attraction dependent on an individual's circumstances and partner in ways that often rendered simple straight/lesiban/bisexual categorizations too coarse to be informative. This fluidity is not a matter of dilettantish sexual experimentation or repressed lesbianism in the face of homophobia. (Nor, contrary to the wishes of religious traditionalists, does it mean that sexuality is a conscious lifestyle choice that can be reset by bullying therapy.) Instead, Diamond contends, it is a natural course of many women's development which has been overlooked by both the general public and researchers into human sexuality.

"Sexual Fluidity" mixes a discussion of Diamond's statistical results and anecdotes about the women she studied, along with theoretical taxonomies of female attraction styles and speculation on why women would be more fluid than men. It is academically rigorous but still pitched at a lay audience. It's a credit to her work that you come away wishing that Diamond could broaden her research to older women, straight-identified women, and men. The only shortcoming is that the book only presents quantitative data in prose, which can be difficult to follow. Presumably people who really care about the statistics can look up Diamond's journal articles, but a few bar charts would have still gone a long way.

All in all, Diamond's findings are not surprising to anyone young enough to have been dating women since the 1990s. (I'm one of those people--I discovered this book because an old girlfriend was one of Diamond's subjects--and the descriptions of sexual fluidity so neatly fit almost every woman I've been involved with I found myself getting surprisingly sentimental over what is basically a dry research precis.) Still, it's nice to see one's informal impressions in print with research to back it up. "Sexual Fluidity" is both a compelling study of women's sexual nature and an interesting snapshot of society's evolving attitude towards the same.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Wonderful book! - Amazing book. Extremely informative. Talks upon the spectum of sexuality and how we all fall somewhere on it. Highly recommended.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Accessible Psychological Science - Sexual Fluidity is the rare scientific book that will satisfy other researchers, but also be accessible to laypeople. As I read any given paragraph a question would occur to me, and then I would find that the question was answered in the next paragraph. It takes skill for a science writer to do that a few times; Lisa Diamond did it dozens of times. She addresses sexuality as both an academic question and a personal, emotionally-charged issue, which is vital to any productive discussion of sexual orientation. Anyone looking for something hot and naughty or sensationalist will be disappointed, but if you want to learn more about sexual orientation as researchers currently understand it, this is the only book that covers it in detail without accepting culturally-based underlying assumptions.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Much needed reference/research on topic - Lisa does an excellent job exploring the topic of how women's sexuality is distinct and it's own entity. A must read for someone who would like more concrete information about the topic for professional or personal reasons.

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