Sex Column: Lesbianism is on the march

Sounds good to me. Add wine and it's a party!
New research recently presented at the North American Menopause Society suggests that when women experience the 'change of life' they may have a change of sexual identity too.
If you've never experienced same-sex attraction, this could come as a bit of a shock. However, even if all your relationships have been with dudes, there's an excellent chance you already have an inkling. After all, women - research tells us - are a lot more sexually fluid than men.
Just how many women are sexually fluid is unclear, but there is evidence to suggest it's probably quite a few. We'll get to that in a moment.
No one is quite sure why menopause can cause a woman to change her sexual identity, but it seems it's definitely a thing.
One of the researchers, University of Utah psychologist Dr Lisa Diamond, says that further studies are needed to explore both the psychological and sociological factors that underpin this. Diamond, who is an expert in sexual fluidity, reckons that it may be the result of "a complicated dynamic between hormonal changes, physical experiences, and, certainly sexual desires."
SEXUAL FLUIDITY
Evolutionary psychologists theorise that once a woman is past childbearing age, she no longer has a biological imperative to mate with men, which then frees here to explore her sexuality more fully.
It sounds convincing but there's no evidence for this. Evolutionary psychology tends to see all human behaviour as driven by the need to reproduce, but if it were, there wouldn't be any same-sex attraction at all, at least not in younger people. Besides which, plenty of women have sex with men that they have no desire to breed with, and visa versa. People like having sex much more than they like making babies.
It is, of course, entirely possible that having done the expected thing - gotten married and had children - a woman reaches a point in her life when she just goes, "Fuck it! I'll do what I want for a change!"
Societal pressure to conform and reach life milestones is pretty persuasive for most of us, but once you get to a certain point, you stop caring what people think. If you have been repressing same-sex attraction for years, you may simply get to a kind of "it's now or never" moment and decide to act.

A lot of Diamond's work has been on how people label their sexual orientations, and how this can change over the course of a life. In 2008, she released a study after periodically checking in with 79 women for a decade. Two-thirds of the women, who identified as either lesbian, bisexual or 'unlabelled' changed their sexual identity at least once over the course of the ten years.
Sexual fluidity is a pretty contentious subject. While Lady Gaga might remind us that LGBTQ+ folks are "born this way", academics like Diamond argue that for some of us at least - women for the most part - sexual identity is a choice. The problem with the choice narrative is that it suggests that women can simply choose to be lesbians or to be straight. That's definitely not true for most of us.
It also gives credence to the idea that lesbians "haven't met the right man" or just need a "proper dicking" to return to the holy path of heterosexuality. Er, no!
Funnily enough, it's not true for Diamond, despite her being one of the best-known researchers on sexual fluidity and a very vocal advocate for its acceptance. Diamond calls herself "a garden-variety lesbian" and is not sexually fluid herself. It was her curiosity about people's varied sexual experiences that sparked her interest in the subject. However, she does think that bisexuals may have a greater capacity for sexual fluidity.
HIDDEN LESBIANS Just to be clear - bisexuality and being sexually fluid are not necessarily the same thing. You could quite happily spend most of your life exclusively dating one sex, then have a change of heart and exclusively date the other. That means you could identify as straight, gay or lesbian at various points without ever calling yourself "bisexual".
Bisexuality is, in the words of the writer Evan Urquhart "the red-headed stepchild of the LGBT movement." Bisexuals are seen - incorrectly - as promiscuous, deceitful, unable to commit, and uninterested in monogamy.
Lots of people, even ones who have had relationships across the gender spectrum, donÕt like using the label because of its negative connotations. All of which in turn, erases bisexuality as an identity, and sadly, makes plenty of bisexuals feel unwelcome in LGBTQ+ spaces. I've been guilty of this myself. When you are on Team Straight, nobody asks you to explain yourself or wonders if you are more likely to cheat.
Despite the unfair dumping on bisexuals, there are plenty of people, particularly women, who are bisexual, or experience same-sex attraction on occasion, or who would regard themselves as sexually fluid.
Data collected between 2011 and 2015 by America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 17 percent of women are sexually attracted to both sexes. The same was true for only 5.6 percent of men.
Figures from the UK's last National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), found that the number of women reporting same-sex partners has significantly increased over the past 20 years. Natsal-1, conducted from 1990 to 1991 found that only 1.8 percent of women had had same-sex relationships. By Natsal-3, which ran from 2010 to 2012, the figure had jumped to 7.9 percent.
It's unlikely that the number of bisexual or lesbian women has increased in two decades. Instead it seems probable that twenty years ago women felt more compelled to repress acting on same-sex attraction - or perhaps they were less willing to admit to it in a government survey.
As culture and society have made it more "acceptable" to be less than 100 percent straight, women may simply be exploring their options in greater numbers. Perhaps in years to come, that 5.6 percent figure for men will increase too.
It's a curious that menopause could radically shift your sexual identity. The very idea suggests that our sexuality may be at least somewhat hidden from ourselves. That's a scary thought - that we don't know all of our desires. But that's the thing with sexuality: there's always something new to learn - about others, and about ourselves.