[featured image via maurizio di iorio]

Apparently it’s just “not that simple” for men and women to be “friends with benefits” or to have “no strings attached.” This concept is a hot topic right now, due to the nation’s excitement regarding “No Strings With Benefits,” the remake of the Natalie Portman/Ashton Kutcher original from earlier this year, this time starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake.

But what about lesbians?

Once upon a time I had a habit of getting into these situations with “straight girls” — the absence of strings was implicit in the relationship because obviously a straight girl wasn’t looking for a relationship with a girl. Especially if she already had a boyfriend. All the drama, all of the sex, and none of the commitment! It’s magical/excruciating.

Although I caution against pursuing or falling in love with or confessing your love for a straight girl and have never done so myself, straight girls are great fun as friends-with-benefits as long as you can keep your feelings contained in a safe little box. “In your box office,” so to speak.

But friends with benefits between two real-live lesbian ladies or you know, bisexual or otherwise interested-in-ladies ladies? Many claim that it’s too difficult because ladies have a lot of feelings, but it’s been known to happen. It’s possible. Sometimes two girls just wanna have fun! (Just like Whitney Mixter)

But, in an article which asks the question “why is there no female version of grindr?”, WildCherry argues: “Generally gay men take to casual sex like a duck to water. Straights hold their own in the casual sex stakes but behind the scenes it’s very often men driving these encounters. When it’s left up to 2 women, things become far less feverish.”

At Examiner.com, The Lesbian Relationship Writer has some advice for seeking friends with benefits, such as “when you are over her demand for you to be faithful or call her regularly, just saying “I told you I didn’t want anything serious,” does not get you off the hook.”

Ashley at Diffuse5.com also has some tips from a lesbian perspective but more importantly, Dara Nai at AfterEllen finds a way to talk about sex on AfterEllen with her review of Friends With Benefits entitled We All Need Friends With Benefits:

“Friends with Benefits goes When Harry Met Sally one better. Instead of asking whether men and women can be just friends, it assumes they can these days. The question in 2011 is: Can friends have sex and not fall in love, or worse, screw up the friendship? Well, sh-t howdy, lesbians have been asking ourselves that for decades.”

In September 2009, The New York Times published an article called “What Do Women Want” about what turns women on, focusing initially on a study of female desire conducted by highly regarded scientist Meredith Chivers. She did experiments which involved watching different types of porn, and found that although men responded genitally in “category specific” ways (straight men like straight porn, etc) that:

“No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, [women] showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men.”

Furthermore, when it came to discrepencies between the subject’s reported arousal (which they wrote about) and their actual arousal (which was measured by fancy scientific materials attached to various key body parts):

“…with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded.”

The whole article is fascianting, in fact, but the most important part is that this research could “shift the way women perceive their capacity to get turned on.” Or maybe not:

“…sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn’t visible at all, as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that have left women’s lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding. “So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality,” she said. “If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to control it? Why is it so frightening?” There was the implication, in her words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the intimation that, at its core, women’s sexuality might not be passive at all. There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women’s lust too deeply to unearth, to view.”

Some time while searching for links on this topic I ended up at this syllabus for a class called College Sex & Philosophy: Friends with Benefits and somehow from there ended up on this index of Go Ask Alice advice questions about LGBTQ issues and I think you’d like that too. It’s like we’re taking a journey on the internet together.

In conclusion, someone else thinks friends with benefits is scientifically impossible, however from what I read of it, I think this someone is very incorrect.

CUTE TUMBLR ALERT:

Freckled: Devoted to your love of freckled women.

CUTE PHOTOGRAPHY ALERT FROM CHD-WCK.COM:

CHD-WK!: In Her Own Skin





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