LESBIAN BED DEATH: A SHORT HISTORY

Lesbian bed death arises as a phenomenon out of Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumstein’s 1983 book American Couples: Money, Work, Sex, feeding off their empirical evidence to suggest that women in long-term lesbian relationships have lower rates of sexual activity than other coupled populations, such as married straight couples, cohabitating straight couples, and gay male couples.⁷ Schwartz and Blumstein write that their “research shows that lesbians have a lower sexual frequency at every stage of a relationship, at every point in their lives.”⁸ The causal factors provided for lower frequency of sex are situated in terms of socialization. The authors argue that because men are socialized to be sexually aggressive and women to be sexually passive, a relationship with two women leads to a surplus of sexual passivity, thus forming the ground for a hesitancy toward sexual initiation.⁹ Another motivation provided for lower rates of sex is the idea of “fusion” or “merging,” or that because women are socialized to be relational, within a relationship they easily fuse into one unit, making the expressiveness of sexual intimacy unnecessary.¹⁰ Concern over lesbian bed death gained momentum within lesbian-affirmative sex therapy of the 1990s and became a key site of investigation within the therapeutic lit-erature.¹¹ Ultimately Schwartz and Blumstein’s study, and others that followed on its heels or developed along similar lines, not only put forward what has

been commonly understood as a damaging idea of lesbians as desexualized and of women as sexually passive, but also sedimented the notion that a good sex life, measured by frequency of sexual encounters, is integral to a loving, healthy relationship.

Yet Schwartz and Blumstein’s and similar work has been effectively cri-tiqued by lesbian and feminist scholars for “a privileging of male definitions of sexuality, and a perpetuation of myths and attitudes about female sexual-ity.”¹² Kristina Gupta argues that from its advent, the concept was criticized as well as disproved.¹³ More recently, Jacqueline Cohen and Sandra Byers, in a 2014 study of 586 women in same-sex relationships of one to thirty-six years in length, found that regardless of relationship duration, most women contin-ued to partake in genital and nongenital sexual behaviors about once a week.¹⁴ Clinical sexologist Michele O’Mara, frustrated with the lack of transpar-ency as to the phrase’s origin and the common misattribution of the phrase itself to Schwartz and Blumstein, argued that the phrase “lesbian bed death”

formed spontaneously among lesbians in the mid- to later 1980s because it spoke to a common experience.¹⁵ O’Mara demonstrates not only that it has a collective lesbian history of emergence as a satirical term but also that it embeds within it a lesbian sex-positive critique of sexual absence, since Jade McGleughlin, credited with its first open usage, “wanted the sexiness of talk-ing about sex” and “LBD included more than the diminishtalk-ing sex in a lesbian’s personal relationship . . . [as] it also captured the larger loss of a sexual com-munity.”¹⁶ In other words, lesbians invented the phrase “lesbian bed death” as a loving term to critically think about the social derision of lesbianism.

Critiques of lesbian bed death, such as psychologist and sex therapist Suzanne Iasenza’s, outline that the reliance on Schwartz and Blumstein’s study as evidence for lesbian bed death is unreliable since their data is flawed.

First, while many studies provided evidence contrary to theirs, Schwartz and Blumstein became cited so often that a large body of literature has been built on their findings alone.¹⁷ Also, Iasenza argues that upon a careful reading of Schwartz and Blumstein, it is not altogether clear whether they found that les-bians are, in fact, less sexually active than other coupled formations but only that the type of sex they are having might not qualify under popular schemas of hetero-coital sex, since their study used “male-defined measurements of sex that misrepresent the subjective experiences of women” through placing a premium on frequency and genital sex as opposed to on quality.¹⁸ Cohen and Byers’s more recent study, which collected evidence that disproves the existence of LBD, for instance, challenges restrictive models of both sex and sexual identification by including nongenital sexual activities, sexual satisfac-tion measures, and individuals who are in same-sex relasatisfac-tionships but who

do not identify as “lesbians.”¹⁹ Schwartz and Blumstein, in distilling lesbian relationships to patterns of socialization—that is, in saying that lesbians are socialized to be sexually passive—“may have simply traded a biopsychologi-cal essentialism in for a biosocial essentialism” without regard for how other social vectors, such as ability, age, class, race, butchness/femmemness, and asexuality shape lesbian practices and relations.²⁰

Lesbian bed death is thus a trope with specific attachments to heteronor-mative discourses of gender, sexuality, and sexunormativity. While its phrase-ology is in part sarcastic and embeds a sex-positive critique of sexual decline, clinically, lesbian bed death has been used as a trope to sediment lesbians into a homogenous population overscripted by their gendered socialization in terms of passivity.²¹ As a trope, lesbian bed death comes to honor particular commitments to gender that rest on a gender binary system and biological determinism, within which women and men are understood both as discrete and distinct entities and as homogenously characterized by particular features.

While men are conceived of as sexual aggressors who are interested in sex on straightforward and teleological terms, women are positioned as sexually passive and unwilling to initiate sex as a consequence of their socialization.

In this sense, lesbian bed death comes to the fore to sediment particular gen-dered relations, so that even while it purports to be descriptive of the group

“lesbians,” it smuggles in a two-gendered system of proper sexual conduct—

entrenching passivity among women and sexual activeness among men and reinscribing the possibility of only two genders and paths of socialization.

Further, as Iasenza, Gupta, and others have demonstrated, lesbian bed death, as it is elaborated by clinical literature, functions to desexualize les-bians and lesbian relating in a context where the enactment of sex speaks to the worth, value, and vitality of a person and relationship.²² Desexualization is here a phenomenon distinct from asexuality in that it imposes an absence of sex and sexuality not as an erotic possibility but as a biopolitical strategy, dispensing the promise of sex only to those who are understood as having a right to it. Sex is a promise unevenly distributed, and its salutary qualities are most frequently granted to white, middle-class, able-bodied, and heterosexual populations, which are understood as socially valuable.

In this sense, the trope of lesbian bed death speaks exactingly to sexunor-mativity, or the complex system of habits and discourses that encourages us to perform on sexual terms.²³ As a pejorative phrase, “lesbian bed death” attaches itself to fears around the loss of sex and sexuality and what this comes to sig-nify for belonging, relational formations, self-actualization, and futurity. As a term, it functions in a disciplinary sense to discourage both lesbianism (pur-ported as the site of sex’s death) and to enforce sexual repatriation at any cost.

Thus, many of the critiques of lesbian bed death, including the “Lesbian Fuck Eye” provocation in Archer Magazine, are aimed toward demonstrating that lesbians do in fact have great sex, that this sex is as good as if not better than straight sex, and that lesbian bed death is a “myth,” a “fallacy.”²⁴ In other words, these critiques continue to flesh out an attachment to sex as the life force of a romantic relationship, and they are infused with anxieties around a loss of sex. This leads to a neglect of the asexual erotics within lesbian iden-tification, representation, and theory. Even within Schwartz and Blumstein’s rendition of lesbian sexual failure, there are nodes of asexuality that have been set aside in the push to disprove lesbian bed death. For instance, they cite one participant who clearly articulates her need for nonsexual intimacies in a way that is resonant with asexuality. The participant indicates: “I started feeling like all she wanted to do was be in bed, and I started feeling like that was tak-ing away from everythtak-ing else in our relationship. It snowballed into me feel-ing, like, well, I don’t even want that anymore if we can’t talk and we can’t do anything else together.”²⁵ As I will elaborate later in this chapter, such instances of asexuality become occluded in the hunt to prove that lesbianism is sexual.

Crucially, lesbian bed death provides an asexual current of lesbian sexu-ality, directing us to instances when asexuality might be present but is mis-named and pathologized. On the one hand, LBD is commonly critiqued and demolished as a myth rooted in sexist and homophobic assumptions about lesbian relationships. On the other hand, lesbian bed death lives on in the cultural imaginary and is regularly resuscitated in representations of lesbi-ans. That lesbian bed death refuses to die suggests not that it is a true occur-rence but rather that it is a true anxiety. Lesbian bed death, as a phenomenon to be contested, is also imbued with its own ideals as to which lesbians are being desexualized and which lesbians should be repatriated into sexual life.

Namely, lesbian bed death is a cultural trope that is fought against most vocif-erously in middle-class, white, able-bodied, and neoliberal contexts, as the examples I will next consider flesh out.