Im awfully interested in GBLT history and as such, while on the internet i found this little amusing thing ~ sorry if it offends it just made me chuckle ~ In the United Kingdom, lesbianism has never been illegal. In contrast, sexual activity between males was not made legal in England and Wales until 1967. It is said that lesbianism was left out of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 because Queen Victoria did not believe sex between women was possible. Hehe Share other little things you find! Im interested =]
lol i read that before. it's hilarious. i think it's because society has always seen penetrative sex as the pinnacle of sex. it's quite an essentially male-centric view. so obviously lesbian sex involves no penises and if you have always been brought up to think of sex as penetration, then you can see how lesbian sex would seem like an oxymoron. sad, really...
Oh, I've never heard that before. That's funny. :lol: I'm actually reading this book I got about gay history in Britain. They were talking about how every year or so they'd change what hinted at people being gay in the '20s and '30s. One year it was brown suede shoes, but then more straight men started wearing them. Another year it was pink shirts. A lot of lesbians would wear rings on their pinkies as a signal. They'd exchange rings and put them on their third finger when they got "married" to other women (basically pledging they'd stay together forever). Um... OH! And at one point they'd speak "Polari" which had elements of prison slang, pig latin, and back-slang so people wouldn't be able to figure out they were talking about something so taboo. For example, 'vada' meant 'look', 'riah' was 'hair', 'ecafe' (abbreviated to 'eek') was 'face', 'omes' were men, 'palones' were women, gay men were 'ome-palones', etc... Sorry for the really long post, it's just so interesting! (I'm reading It's Not Unusual by Alkarrim Jivani, by the way. :])
Really? Gays and Lesbians had their own langauge? I never knew that.... Gives a new definition to "Gaylingo" I must look for that book...
Yeah, it was like a lot of slang, so it almost sounded like they were speaking another language. Like "Bona to vada your jolly old eek again." was "Nice to see your face once again." And "palone vadas ome palone very cod" apparently "meant you were getting very funny looks from her serving tea". It's so cool. : D
Hate to say it, but the Queen Victoria fact was discredited on yesterday's QI. Which, oddly, started eighteen minutes after you made that post. Odd.
so why was lesbian sex never made illegal then? Or did the law makers "acidentially" forget to make it illegal but remembered to make gay illegal ?
might well have been due to the fact that lesbians are seen as ok by a lot more men than male homosexuals are. Bare in mind that back in the Victorian era, whilst Victoria was the monarch it was still predominantly a male run world. so lesbians they liked could continue being lesbians.. the remainder were probably drowned for witchcraft... and so was the law of the day.
in the past, women had hardly any sexual freedom whatsoever. the only ones getting it outside of marriage were prostitutes, or quickly became them. so the amount of women with the gumption to actually lesbianise with anyone was probabaly virtually nil. whereas men, or at least high class men, have always had their libidos more tolerated and satisfied, so cases of male homosexuality were relatively common. that's my guess, anyway.
