‘Why are people so perplexed about how lesbians have sex?’

Nadia Bokody has a harsh wake-up call for anyone who relies on a very specific - and common - bedroom tactic.

I slept with another woman for the first time when I was 20, but I wasn’t able to call it “sex” until several years later.

“We messed around,” I remember confiding in a friend. “Just oral and stuff.”

Sex, as I knew it back then, was something you did with a guy, and it didn’t count if penetration wasn’t involved.

Even the term itself – “lesbian sex” – seemed oxymoronic to me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe lesbians existed, I’d just never been told sex was a thing that could happen between two women. What would that even look like, anyway?

When researchers asked university students this question in a small US survey back in 2010, participants almost unanimously defaulted to a heteronormative description of sex; defining it as something that included vaginal penetration with a phallic aid.

A few years later, Cosmopolitan broke ground with its first gay sex guide, “28 Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex Positions”; a story featuring cartoonish illustrations of women pretzeled into complex erotic poses.

Nadia Bokody has a harsh wake-up call for anyone who relies on a very specific bedroom tactic. Picture: Instagram

Though it was mostly lauded for taking an – albeit small – step toward LGBTQ inclusivity, the lesbian community expressed dismay over its confused depiction of queer sex.

Daily Beast writer Samantha Allen described the guide as, “bearing little resemblance to the sex that actual lesbians have”, going on to note that, “much like Cosmo itself, the slideshow is pretty to look at but lacking in substance and utility”.

Nearly a decade on, it seems we’re just as perplexed about the mechanics – and, indeed, the legitimacy – of queer women’s sexual pleasure.

Though “lesbian sex” has been a reliably popular search term since the launch of PornHub back in the noughties, its representation remains highly inaccurate and almost exclusively catered to the male gaze.

Pornography’s homogenised version of lesbians as hyper-femme women who partake in sex with other women as a way to pass the time while their husbands are away has perpetuated myriad myths about female sexuality – largely, the idea that it’s performative for men.

It might be fantasy material, but in the absence of meaningful sex education, porn has shaped our mainstream understanding of women’s pleasure, and continues to detrimentally impact the way we think of queerness. This is evident not only in the fetishising and delegitimisation of romantic female relationships, but through widespread falsehoods about how people with vulvas get off in general.

Since I unpacked my own heteronormative conditioning and came out as gay a couple of years ago, the main comments I’ve received from men are assertions I’m faking my queerness for attention (even more so since I grew my hair out and leaned into a femme style – an aesthetic men assume is for them), and general confusion about how I’m able to have satisfying sex without the involvement of a penis (read: “You know you’d prefer the real thing”).

What’s interesting is that, even as men continue to resist the idea women can experience vast sexual joy without them (and, in the same vein, that we can exist without the need for their sexual validation), the most extensive study ever conducted into sexuality and pleasure shows it’s lesbians, not straight men, who give their female partners the most orgasms.

And despite the persistent belief a man’s erection is essential to sex and queer women must therefore rely on substitutes like strap-on devices to get each other off, research shows penetration isn’t an effective route to climax for most women, nor is it an integral part of lesbian sex.

Research shows penetration isn’t an effective route to climax for most women, nor is it an integral part of lesbian sex. Picture: iStock

In fact, a 2015 survey of more than 13,000 lesbians found the top five ways women prefer to give one another pleasure don’t involve any form of phallic stand-in at all, with oral sex and clitoral stimulation topping the list.

Contrary to the narrative straight, patriarchal culture has pushed on us, women’s pleasure isn’t dependent on the gender or even the genitalia of a partner. The way to more orgasms for women of all sexual orientations is via moving away from the heteronormative penetration-centred model of sex. (Which should be heartening news to straight men, who’ve been conditioned to measure their masculinity by their ability to produce and maintain an erection.)

Almost two decades on from my first encounter with another woman, I now know there’s no such thing as “lesbian sex”.

Not because sex between women isn’t “real” (if anything, straight men could benefit from looking to lesbians on how to do it, given our orgasm rate, not the other way around). But because human beings aren’t porn categories, and pleasure isn’t gendered. All sex is just that; sex.

Though, if you’re a guy who still doesn’t understand how women get each other off without “the real thing”, you’re definitely doing it wrong.

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