[chaya]

I'd love to know when the girls who are bi-sexual knew they were into women as well as men.

I knew the second my female friend was able to bring me to orgasm, something my husband has not been able to do for the last 2 years. I've been sleeping with her every day for 2 weeks while hubby is out of town.

[jen1447]

I wish I could 'love' that post rather than just like it!

[DreamP346]

I knew the second my female friend was able to bring me to orgasm, something my husband has not been able to do for the last 2 years. I've been sleeping with her every day for 2 weeks while hubby is out of town.

So chaya, what do you think this will mean for your relationship with your husband? Are you doing to use this knowledge about pleasure to teach your husband? Are you going to leave him? Are you going to continue living a polyamorous life and will your husband be OK with it? At least you know that it wasn't you with the sexual issue.

[chaya]

So chaya, what do you think this will mean for your relationship with your husband? Are you doing to use this knowledge about pleasure to teach your husband? Are you going to leave him? Are you going to continue living a polyamorous life and will your husband be OK with it? At least you know that it wasn't you with the sexual issue.

Questions I don't know the answer to right now. I'll get my answers when he returns, I intend to tell him everything.

[Patti-here]

Everybody is. Smart people are humble enough to admit it.

Hope I passed the audition

[Stillness]

I like the honesty, but please be careful, Chaya. Do you think he could become violent?

[effy2014]

I knew the second my female friend was able to bring me to orgasm, something my husband has not been able to do for the last 2 years. I've been sleeping with her every day for 2 weeks while hubby is out of town.

Didn't you have the attraction before the two of you became sexual? I'm curious how the two of you ended up in bed.

I know that sexual frustration can lead to affairs .... never thought about whether it could lead to bisexual curiosity.

[chaya]

I like the honesty, but please be careful, Chaya. Do you think he could become violent?

Never, unless he is drinking.

[jen1447]

Sorry to go back to the 'data,' but here we go ....

Here is some informative info, some of it even rather pertinent to Romy's initial question of "when did you know," as it suggests a high degree of fluidity in women's sexuality as opposed to men. This comes from the April 2010 Psychology Today article "Why Are So Many Girls Lesbian Or Bisexual" by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D. You can look the article up itself if you want to see his analysis, but I'm posting mainly the footnotes relaying study references and results (as well as a few relevant points in his analysis). It covers then, now, and how/why, basically, and the main takeaway is that women are roughly three times as likely as men to be bisexual today.

Psychologist John Buss estimates that for most of human history, perhaps 2% of women have been lesbian or bisexual (see note 1, below). Not any more. Recent surveys of teenage girls and young women find that roughly 15% of young females today self-identify as lesbian or bisexual, compared with about 5% of young males who identify as gay or bisexual (see note 2, below).

Note 1: How common has bisexual and lesbian sexual orientation been among women, historically?: In the third edition of his textbook Evolutionary Psychology: the new science of the mind, Professor David Buss (University of Texas / Austin) asserts that "1 to 2 percent of women" are lesbian or bisexual ("What about lesbian sexual orientation?" Box 4.1, p. 137 in the Pearson International Edition, 2009). He implies that this figure has been generally valid over time, a finding which he acknowledges poses an as-yet-unsolved mystery for evolutionary psychology. Popular accounts of homosexual behavior often suggest that these behaviors make evolutionary sense because the people practicing these behaviors make better aunts and uncles than heterosexuals do, a theory first advanced by E.O. Wilson back in the 1970's. However, studies published in the past twenty years have provided little support for this hypothesis, and have often directly refuted it, particularly for male homosexuals: it turns out that gay men are actually more likely to be estranged from nieces and nephews, which contradicts the predictions of Wilson's kin altruism theory: see for example Bobrow & Bailey 2001, also Rahman & Hull 2005. (Nobody seems to have told the New York Times about this, as they repeated E. O. Wilson's 1970's hypothesis about homosexual men being better uncles, with breathless credulity, and no substantive mention of the studies refuting this theory, in a lengthy March 29 2010 feature in the NYT Magazine.)

It's very difficult to estimate accurately the "true" proportion of lesbian or bisexual women 50 years ago or 200 years ago. In many jurisdictions 50 years ago, lesbian behavior would have been a criminal offense. In that era and in those jurisdictions, asking a woman whether she was a lesbian was equivalent to asking her whether she had committed a crime. Even when assured of confidentiality, women might reasonably under-report the true incidence of bisexual or lesbian orientation.

However, it's hard to deny that lesbian and bisexual behavior has become much more visible in our time compared with one or two generations ago -- and also that lesbian behavior is much more visible today in mainstream North American culture than is homosexual behavior among men.

Note 2: How common is bisexual and homosexual orientation, today? Researchers at Cornell University, examining data collected from a representative sampling of young Americans which included more than 20,000 individuals in 80 communities across the United States, found that 85.1% of the young women identified as heterosexual; 0.5% reported no sexual identity; and the remaining 14.4% were sexual but not strictly heterosexual, i.e. either lesbian or bisexual. Among young men, 94.0% identified themselves as heterosexual; 0.4% of the men reported no sexual identity; and the remaining 5.6% identified as gay or bisexual. See Ritch Savin-Williams and Geoffrey L. Ream, "Prevalence and stability of sexual orientation components during adolescence and young adulthood," Archives of Sexual Behavior, volume 36, pp. 385 - 394, 2007. The proportions in Europe might be higher. For example, in Norway, more than 20% of girls and young women identified as lesbian or bisexual: see L. Wichstrøm and K. Hegna, "Sexual orientation and suicide attempt: A longitudinal study of the general Norwegian adolescent population," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, volume 112, pp. 144-151, 2003. In a study from New Zealand, 16.4% of young women identified as lesbian or bisexual, compared with 5.6% of men who identified as gay or bisexual: see N. Dickson and colleagues, "Same-sex attraction in a birth cohort: prevalence and persistence in early adulthood", Social Science and Medicine, volume 56, pp. 1607 - 1615, 2003.

Now this:

Female sexuality is different from male sexuality. If a straight boy kissed another boy, perhaps to amuse some girls who might be watching, he would be unlikely to undergo a change in sexual orientation as a result. But, as Professor Roy Baumeister at Florida State University and others have shown, sexual attraction in many women seems to be more malleable (see note 3 below). If a teenage girl kisses another teenage girl, for whatever reason, and she finds that she likes it - then things can happen, and things can change. If a young woman finds her soulmate, and her soulmate happens to be female, then she may begin to experience feelings she's never felt before.

^ As regards V

Note 3: Maybe a straight woman is just a woman who hasn't yet met - the right woman? Professor Roy Baumeister's most relevant article about erotic plasticity is "Gender differences in erotic plasticity: the female sex drive as socially flexible and responsive," Psychological Bulletin, volume 126, pp. 347 - 374, 2000. Professor Lisa Diamond has made a compelling case that many women don't discover their "true" sexual identity until their 20's, 30's or even 40's. A woman may reach her 40's, believe that she is a straight woman, and then find herself falling in love with her soulmate - who happens to be a woman. Here are three of Professor Diamond's most relevant articles:

"Female bisexuality from adolescence to adulthood: results from a 10-year longitudinal study," Developmental Psychology, volume 44, pp. 5 - 14, 2008.
"The evolution of plasticity in female-female desire," Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, volume 18, pp. 245 - 274, 2006.
"What does sexual orientation orient? A biobehavioral model distinguishing romantic love and sexual desire," Psychological Review, volume 110, pp. 173 - 192, 2003.

[effy2014]

Jenn's article and analysis comports with my limited anecdotal knowledge and postings by the active women in this forum. Women do seem way more prone to same sex experimentation and their sexual orientation perhaps more fluid. Nice to have the data confirm what I suspected.