Random Thursday: It's Falling

Here in the Bay Area, there's a certain feel in the air when fall has come--an assortment of possible feels, truth to tell. The one we all dread is when the wind turns hot and strong, the leaves dry up and turn to dust in the air, blinding the eyes, and every breath is evaluated for the taste of smoke. October is Fire Season, when the particulates in the air turn the sunset into a Maxfield Parrish painting.

But this year fall came with a different feeling. Between one day and the next, the air tasted...colder, damper, darker. And then, with almost no warning, an energetic downpour passed through. Not a large-system storm that wets everything across the eleven counties, but the sort where I could bicycle to Walnut Creek and back and not realize it had rained until I came back to wet pavements in Concord. At least twice since then I've woken up to clear skies and puddles on the patio. The air is thick with thoughts of, "Please, let it be a wet winter."

In the space of a week, I went from sleeping with the window open and the ceiling fan running to swapping out the summer duvet (that mostly lay scrunched at the foot of the bed) for the winter one.

The tomatoes are shutting down their flowers and I'm reviewing recipes for green tomato relish in case we don't get enough hot days for the remaining fruit to ripen. On the days when it's still warm enough to sit out in the garden, birdsong has given way to the rasping of squirrels cracking nuts and the explosive crunch of the black walnet shells from the alley behind my yard as cars pass through.

Dusk has drawn back far enough that we put the running lights on the dragonboats before taking them out, but not yet far enough that the bay has calmed and we can paddle out past the breakwater to practice with the fairy-lights of The City in view. The next month's practices will be marked by watching sunset creep slowly south from the Marin headlands until it's framed between the towers of the Golden Gate. If the fog allows, we time the practice route to include a pause to watch the sun sink into the sea. Some people say they've seen the Green Flash, but I never have.

What signs mark the turning of your season?

LHMP #137b Faderman 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men I.A.2 What Do Women Do?

Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6

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A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).

This chapter begins with the statement “If any women wrote lesbian sex literature during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, it has been lost to posterity. Had such literature existed, the descriptions of lesbian lovemaking would certainly have been different from the ones that are extant.”

Thanks to the research of others, we know of a number of such items that have not been lost to posterity. The anthology The Literature of Lesbianism (ed. by Terry Castle) provides a useful sampling, such as Delarivier Manley’s “The Ladies of the New Cabal” from The New Atalantis (1709) which describes the romantic and erotic adventures of members of an all-female society, or Mary Wortley Montagu’s (non-fictional) descriptions of sex between women in Turkish bathhouses (1716-18).

There is, perhaps, not a large enough volume of such work to make solid contrasts between how men and women addressed the topic. But Faderman’s assertion that the focus during this era on “missionary position” tribadism and on penetrative sex using a dildo was a creation entirely of male imagination also falls afoul of the legal testimony around women who were accused of lesbian sex. Both types of activity feature in real-life cases, although it’s true that the written record may focus on these activities in contrast to other possibilities precisely because they played to male anxieties.

My own anxiety around the conclusions of this chapter is in their circularity. If one excludes kissing and caressing from the definition of “sex” on the basis that they didn’t seem to provoke male anxiety, then it’s hard not to conclude that “sex” is defined only as genital activity. But this seems to presuppose that “sex” is defined as “those activities that provoke male anxiety when performed between women”. Starting from that point, you get an argument along the lines of “Men didn’t care what women did together as long as they only did things that men didn’t care about when women did them together.”

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In this chapter, Faderman explores the types of sexual activity between women that were portrayed in literature written by men. Authors such as Brantôme describe tribadism, with one woman atop another rubbing the genitals together, or the use of a dildo to perform penetrative stimulation.

Male authors also emphasize that when penetrative sex (whether involving a man or an instrument) is absent that other types of activities, such as kissing, caressing, and embracing, must be by definition unsatisfying. This theme comes up in Sir Philips Sidney’s Arcadia and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

The genre of medical literature that was beginning to take note of the role of the clitoris in female sexual satisfaction echoed this interpretation in imagining that sex between women necessarily either caused or was caused by a clitoris that was sufficiently enlarged to function as a penis.

Faderman’s conclusions--though based entirely on male-authored works--are that relationships between women that involved admiration, tenderness, and mutual concern never involved genital activity; that only genital activity was considered “lesbian” regardless of what other erotic components might be present; and that women would never have conceived of a definition of lesbianism that was defined solely by genital activity and in particular by penetrative sex.

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