No Strings Attached: Women discover lesbian pleasures but say no to relationships 

Once married to a minister, *Jane Smith, 38, is now single and living in San Francisco. She has dated numerous men since her divorce almost a decade ago, but like many women living in large urban areas, she repeatedly comes up short. Thankfully, she sleeps with women too.

Jane Smith is your modern day heteroflexible.

If you’ve never heard the term before, revert back to all of those frat parties from yesteryear, where straight women could be found slobbering all over each other. Or rent American Pie. Specifically, the second of the trilogy, where you’ll see thong-clad women getting it on for a bunch of gangly male teens.

First described by Salon.com writer Laurie Essig in 2000, heteroflexibility is the willingness to explore same-sex encounters while clearly and publicly maintaining a preference for heterosexuality. “Heteroflexible,” she writes, “is a lighthearted attempt to stick with heterosexual identification while still ‘getting in on the fun of homosexual pleasures.’”

The heteroflexible woman is not to be confused with her bisexual sister. Unlike her even-handed friend, she is fixed in her heterosexuality and makes no claim to a bisexual lifestyle.

This distinction between bisexuality and heteroflexibility is an important one. Though people define bisexuality in numerous ways, a common understanding of bisexual relationships is that they can move beyond mere sex into something deeper and more permanent.

That’s not what Smith wants. She identifies as heterosexual and prefers her romantic relationships be exclusively with men.

“I like the male energy,” explains Smith. “I like that they push back at me. I’m sure that there are women that do that too, but it doesn’t get me as charged. I like to feel sort of like a princess and a woman doesn’t make me feel that way.

“Regardless of my relationship preference, I still get extremely sexually turned on by women and I have these uncontrollable urges and fantasies.”

Today, Smith can explain her sexuality to others—and to herself—but admits that it was not always so clear. Throughout her lifetime she has tried on many different sexual labels.

Lisa Diamond, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah, is one of a handful of researchers altering the way some people think about women like Smith.

In 1994, Diamond conducted a longitudinal study of women age 16 to 23 years who were attracted to other women. She found that over eight years, two-thirds of them changed labels “from unlabeled to bisexual, lesbian to bisexual, lesbian to ‘heterosexual and getting married but may be attracted to women in the future.’”

Diamond’s report suggests that female homosexuality may be grounded in social interaction, may present itself as an emotional attraction in addition to or in place of a physical one, and may change over time.

What Diamond failed to realize, however, was that a woman’s sexual identity or “label” is not necessarily a reliable indicator of sexual behavior.

Similar to Smith, *Maya Silver, a 28-year-old San Franciscan, identifies as heterosexual but openly partakes in same-sex behavior. Unlike Smith, she feels that a bisexual label better suits her since she is open to romantic relationships with both women and men. But she’s concerned that other bisexuals may think of her as a poser, given that she mostly dates men, so she has kept her heterosexual label.

“I find labeling to be something that I do for other people. When I was living in the Midwest and the queer community was pretty small, I felt like it was accurate for me to be like, yeah I’m bisexual, and moving here I feel like it’s inauthentic for me to identify as bi,” Silver explains. “If I were to say that, then they’d say, ‘well you’ve never actually had a relationship with a woman.’

“I just don’t think I’m gay enough to call myself anything else.”

She’s not the only one. When Smith first “came out” as pseudo-straight, she found herself in a relationship with a bona fide lesbian. She was also seeing a man at the time, something she had been open about with her female partner. Unfortunately, Smith’s partner thought she could handle Smith’s associations with men, but she couldn’t, and things quickly went downhill.

“The whole group of lesbians came over and had an intervention with me. Like, asking me ‘so are you committed (to being gay) or what? Like, what the hell Jane?’ It was just like wow, there is just no freedom in this whatsoever.”

Perhaps lesbians do have reason to fear the heteroflexible. In a way, heteroflexibility is the new bisexuality in terms of lesbian dating taboos, where lesbians don’t date non-lesbians in fear of being dumped for a man one day.

Then there are the women who use heteroflexible behavior as a means for getting a man in the first place. For these gals, lesbianism is just another weapon in the war between the sexes, a tool heterosexual (heteroflexible) women use to manipulate the affections of men.

*Nathalie Davis, a 24-year-old graphic designer form Montreal, knows all too well how easy it is to get her boyfriend’s attention. Out on a double date with her girlfriend, the two women decided to kiss in front of their respective partners.

“We had told them how we’d kissed this one time and how crazy we were,” recalls Davis. “And then it became this weird dare-type situation and we kissed again, in front of them, trying to demonstrate how cool we were and how it was no big deal.

“Of course, they fucking loved it.”

*Oliver Corbeil, a 20-something heterosexual musician, and fan of the heteroflexible woman, concurs: “A girl and a guy are hot but there’s always that penis there.”

One need only peruse their local adult video store for proof of Corbeil’s—and most straight men’s—penchant for girl-on-girl erotica. In fact, the scientific academic community has long studied the appeal of lesbian sex; a  1997 study found that heterosexual men placed a high erotic value on lesbianism.

This is consistent with the findings of other studies conducted during the past 30 years, prompting some researchers to cite their results as “verification of a well-worn clinical belief.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that there is little attempt in either film or television to disguise the fact that heterosexual men find girl-on-girl sex titillating. To the contrary, these “reactions” are often included as prominent plot points and can be interpreted as one type of storyline scaffolding female heteroflexibles.

Although such depictions may desensitize the American public to the subject (and images) of lesbian sexuality, they nonetheless make lesbians less visible. Think about it, if all the women making out with each other are securely rooted in heterosexuality, who is ever perceived as gay?

Definitely not men, that’s for sure. There are numerous portrayals of female heteroflexible behavior in mainstream media, but just try to find two men making out to up their chances with the ladies—you won't have much luck.

In a January 2004 article that appeared in the Washington Post, journalist Laura Sessions Stepp cited a national study that found that more than twice as many girls as boys reported being attracted to the same sex at least once. Whether or not this allowance for same sex attraction has anything to do with the greater taboos surrounding boy-on-boy behavior is hard to tell.

An old boyfriend of Smith’s once admitted to her that he was interested in experimenting with same sex behavior, but he never did for fear that women might not find him “straight” enough.

“He said he never actually wanted to go through with the act because he wants complete honesty with partners,” recalls Smith. “He just felt as though some partners would never be able to handle that.

“He didn’t want that on his record, so to speak.”

Though a cause and effect relationship cannot be established between media images and sexual behavior, the current barrage of female heteroflexible characters—and lack of male heteroflexibles—may be setting a sexual agenda for viewers.

A 2002 study conducted by Monique Ward, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a leading expert on media and adolescent development, found that the degree to which people identified with television characters was a primary factor influencing their sexual attitudes, expectations, and behaviors.

If this is the case, female same sex behavior has the potential to be regarded as just another facet of female sexuality. Unfortunately, it also relegates same sex behavior to the tall, thin, and blonde. But hey, it’s a start.

* Names have been changed

Bonnie Zylbergold lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a Master's degree in Human Sexuality from San Francisco State University and specializes in female heteroflexibility. She worked at the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality where she studies the effects of media on adolescent sexuality.