Excerpted from “You Can Tell Just By Looking” And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People"
Is Lesbian Sex “Real Sex”?
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Nevertheless, the myth that sex with the right man could make a lesbian go straight persists and can take deadly form, such as “corrective” or “punitive rape.” Corrective rape is a violent sexual assault in which a person is targeted because of her sexual or gender nonconformity. The term came into use after the brutal gang rape and murder of openly lesbian South African soccer star Eudy Simelane, in 2008. South African LGBT activists began to track incidence of these crimes against lesbians and to organize against this violence both domestically and internationally. The problem is hardly confined to South Africa. Cases have been documented in Thailand, Zimbabwe, Canada, and the United States.
“Corrective” here suggests that the reason for a particular assault is the perpetrator’s desire to fix the victim’s “incorrect” identity. This is misleading. There is nothing to correct. Additionally, the violent assault is motivated as much, if not more, by the perpetrator’s rage at the target’s perceived sexual or gender deviance. It is a punishment for the victim’s transgressing accepted gender or sexual norms. The term “punitive rape” thus more accurately describes the larger social context of such assaults. In 2011, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights declared that they are “[p]art of a wider pattern of sexual violence” that “combine[s] a fundamental lack of respect for women, often amounting to misogyny, with deeply-entrenched homophobia.
Although their actions are extreme, the perpetrators of punitive rape are expressing views—about the naturalness of heterosexuality, for example, and men’s authority over women—held by many people. Most people who hold these beliefs do not rape lesbians. Nevertheless, this violence exists on a continuum with the everyday and, to many people, innocuous prejudices evident in such myths as lesbians do not have real sex.
This “innocuous” violence is embedded in the idea of virginity. Historically, the very idea of “virginity” emerged from the religious and social regulations of a marriage contract. Through marriage, a woman was exchanged as property from her father to her husband. Her chastity guaranteed that her property value was intact. The deeply entrenched belief that it takes a man for a woman to lose her virginity begins here. Women have long tried to assert their own sexual desires, but their voices are still not completely acknowledged in many places globally, including the United States.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/03/is_lesbian_sex_real_sex.html