'Late-Life Lesbians' Reveal Fluidity Of Sexuality

Dan82 · Aug 15, 2010

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129050832

A woman ends her marriage of 12 years, begins dating and finds love again — but this time, with another woman.

For many years, researchers assumed so-called "late-life lesbians" were simply repressed by society until they felt comfortable coming out. But that's not entirely the case, says Lisa Diamond, a researcher at the University of Utah who is studying whether sexuality is fluid or fixed. Diamond has been studying a group of 79 women for 15 years to track changes in their sexuality.

"It does appear to be that women's erotic desires are pretty tightly linked to their emotional feelings," she tells NPR's Guy Raz. "So for some of these women, they authentically did not feel attracted to women before they met one particular woman that they completely fell in love with."

Take Macarena Gomez-Barris, an associate professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She married her husband in her early 20s, but then, like more than half of married couples in America, they hit a wall. Her husband said she was working too much. She said that she knew she was but that she had to support their family. In 2007, they separated. She was 36.

"Then started dating and soon found this person I was attracted to and began dating her," Gomez-Barris tells Raz.

"The feeling of attraction was strong," she says. "What made sense to me was this feeling of the magnetic pull of this person and realizing [that I had become] open to the possibility of being with another female-bodied person."

The researcher, Diamond, says it's hard to know whether the capacity for women to feel attracted to other women increases as they age...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129050832
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Revan · Aug 15, 2010

Interesting except this might give bigots a chance to say "oh it can be a choice" -_-

Swamp56 · Aug 15, 2010

Poorly worded in my opinion.

'Late-Life Lesbians' Reveal Fluidity Of Sexuality

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