Oprah: Why Women Are Leaving Men for Other Women

[bluedawg12]

Why Women Are Leaving Men for Other Women
By Mary A. Fischer



Illustration: Lou BeachCynthia Nixon did it. Lindsay Lohan's doing it. TV shows are based on it. Is it our imaginations, or are wives and girlfriends ditching their men and falling in love with other women? New science says that sexuality is more fluid than we thought.

At a Halloween party last October, Macarena Gomez-Barris, dressed as a flamenco dancer, put out a bowl of her homemade guacamole and checked on the boiling pot of fresh corn in the kitchen. She'd recently separated from her husband of 12 years, and the friends streaming in now were eager to meet her new love, who, on this night, was the pirate in the three-cornered hat carving pumpkins outside. After her marriage broke up in 2007, few of those who knew Gomez-Barris had thought she'd be single for long—"a catch," they called her—and they were right.

An animated 38-year-old, Gomez-Barris seemed to have it all—a brilliant career, two children, striking looks. Her family had come to the United States from Chile when she was 2 to escape Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship and to pursue the traditional American dream. While studying for her master's degree at UC Berkeley, she met a charismatic Chilean exile and fiction writer named Roberto Leni at a salsa club in San Francisco. "We had instant chemistry, and he was my soul mate," Gomez-Barris says. They married and eight years later had their first child, a son.





The trouble began after they moved to Los Angeles, where their daughter was born and Gomez-Barris's academic career took off at the University of Southern California. Leni spent his days caring for the house and children. "I was in the more powerful role," says Gomez-Barris, a PhD and an assistant professor in the sociology and American studies and ethnicity departments. "I made more money and was struggling to balance my work and home life."

"Immersed," is how Leni puts it. "She lived and breathed USC. All her friends were professors, and eventually I was obsolete. I'm nothing the system considers I should be as a traditional man. I'm not ambitious. I don't care that much about money. I was brought up among torture survivors, and the most important values were in the emotional realm of human experience, to soothe and support."

His noble ideals unfortunately clashed with day-to-day realities. "Someone had to care about making money to support our family," says Gomez-Barris. Despite efforts to save their relationship in counseling, they ended up separating.

Single again at 36, Gomez-Barris dated a few men, none seriously. "They were not so sure of themselves in their careers or financially," she says. "It was a time of real exploration and personal independence, and I became very rational about the kind of partner I wanted and needed"—someone, she hoped, who would match her intellectual ambitions but also take care of her and her children.

At a party one night last March, Gomez-Barris ran into Judith Halberstam, PhD, a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and gender studies at USC. They had met in 2004 and admired each other's scholarly accomplishments, occasionally finding themselves at the same campus parties. But while they shared an affinity for politics and social justice, they were seemingly miles apart in their private lives. Halberstam, nearly 10 years her senior, was openly gay.

That night, Halberstam, who had also broken up with a partner of 12 years, spotted Gomez-Barris standing across the room and thought, "Now, there's a really beautiful woman." "I saw her differently then and developed a big crush on her," says Halberstam. "Yet it made me nervous, given that I have a history of unrequited love with straight women. Then again, you don't choose who you love."

Gomez-Barris noticed that Halberstam was more attentive to her than usual, even flirtatious. "She got up and gave me the better seat, as if she wanted to take care of me. I was struck by that," she says. A few weeks later, Halberstam suggested they go out for dinner, and again, Gomez-Barris was impressed by qualities she liked. "She chose a Japanese restaurant, made reservations, picked me up at my place—on time. I felt attracted to her energy, her charisma. I was enticed. And she paid the bill. Just the gesture was sexy. She took initiative and was the most take-charge person I'd ever met."

Intrigued as Gomez-Barris was, it still never occurred to her that they would be anything more than friends. While she'd been attracted to women at times, she assumed she would eventually fall in love with another man. "I was still inscribed in a heterosexual framework that said only a man could provide for my kids and be part of a family," she says.

On a warm spring night in Malibu, after attending a film screening together, Gomez-Barris and Halberstam walked on the beach, a beautiful pink sunset rounding out a perfect evening. They kicked off their shoes and ran, laughing, through the rising tide. "At that point, things were charged with sex," Gomez-Barris remembers. Her feelings deepened, and not long afterward, they became lovers. "It was great, and it felt comfortable," she says of the night they first became intimate. "What blew me away was that afterward, Judith held me to her chest. So I got passion, intimacy, and sweetness. And I thought, 'Maybe I can get all the things I want now.'"




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[davidinalameda]

1. have a link?

[RC]

2. Here ya go...

http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200904-omag-women-leaving-men/1

[bluedawg12]

3. Thanks. Details.

:P

[bluedawg12]

4. Is butch in?

(Halberstam above right, with Gomez-Barris, left)

>>onically—or not, as some might argue—it is certain "masculine" qualities that draw many straight-labeled women to female partners; that, in combination with emotional connection, intimacy, and intensity. This was definitely true for Gomez-Barris, whose partner, Judith Halberstam, 47, (above right, with Gomez-Barris, left) says she has never felt "female." Growing up in England as a tomboy who had short hair and refused to wear dresses, Halberstam says people were often unable to figure out whether she was a boy or a girl: "I was a source of embarrassment for my family." As a teenager, she was an avid soccer player—not that she was allowed on any team. And her 13th birthday request for a punching bag and boxing gloves was met with the demand to pick something more feminine. "Throughout my youth," she says, "I felt rage at the shrinking of my world." Halberstam channeled her anger into a distinguished academic career and authored several provocative books, including, in 1998, Female Masculinity. It was during the past few years that she started calling herself Jack and answering to both "he" and "she."<<

[bluedawg12]

5. "that most threatening of cultural identities: the masculine female"

Here's a blurb about Halberstam's book.

This is great:
"...that most threatening of cultural identities: the masculine female. Oh, yum!”—Kate Bornstein, author of My Gender Workbook" :evilgrin:
........

http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-2226-9

Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.

Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. She rereads Anne Lister’s diaries and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. She considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among “transgender dykes”—lesbians who pass as men—and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of “lesbian” a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.
Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.


“Thank goodness for the dashing Judith Halberstam! Her new book is a smart, entertaining and informed tour of that most threatening of cultural identities: the masculine female. Oh, yum!”—Kate Bornstein, author of My Gender Workbook


“Female Masculinity is a very important work that scholars in cultural studies will be talking about for years. Nothing like it exists, period.”—Esther Newton, author of Cherry Grove, Fire Island


Judith Halberstam is Professor of Literature at the University of California in San Diego. She is the author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, also published by Duke University Press, and writes a regular film review column for Girlfriends magazine.

[Withywindle]

6. Biphobia 101!

The GD version of this is full of it!

[bluedawg12]

7. I don't understand.

What is biphobia 101? This article was?

Can you explain a little?

[Withywindle]

8. OH, I was wrestling with a poster who was very invested in the notion

that "straight" men who seek out sex with other men (on the down-low, mind you) are still magically STRAIGHT because they say so.

[bluedawg12]

9. LOL! Yeah, I just found the fantasy fest over there. LMAO!

it also appears that some "experts" meaning, they're str8 and got the info. from their wives, who got it from the cat, that there may not even be any lesbians!

It's just a shortage of men!

Well, as Oscar Wilde once (almost) said, "Once is interest, twice and your queer."

:hi:

[LostinVA]

14. Haruka and I were in there with it -- it caused us both to go

:wtf:

[bluedawg12]

15. It proved the law of entropy

it just spun out of control and was too chaotic to even enter the fray at a late time, there was just so much misinformation from people who aren't about people who are.

[Jamastiene]

10. Wow, the toaster industry will be booming soon.

:P

[bluedawg12]

12. You mean baster, don't you?

:P

[Chovexani]

11. sigh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexuality

Why is this so goddamn hard to understand?

(I would also be remiss to mention the older folks who were pressured into het marriages young and find out they are gay later in life.)

[bluedawg12]

13. I am getting a little tired of these f*cking labels.

I'm gay, I'm bi, I'm tri, .....f*ck it! It shuts down dialogue and the reality is more complex.

We are talking about women here. People. Just people. No one I know goes around saying sh8t like, I am “exclusively het,” or “I am exclusively gay” or “I am bi.” And I don’t care. I care about people’s lives, I am interested in people’s lives and not the box they can check for some study or political demographic nose count.

But mostly I don’t care because these labels shut down discussion.

I posted this because I was hoping to get a conversation going with other women, str8, gay, bi, whatever, about our thoughts on how we form bonds and how we form intimate relationships.

I certainly do not have the answers, I only know what I see, and have seen, in life. That’s why I was hoping other women would open up and share their thoughts and observations on this stuff.

Of course men are welcome too, but not for the purpose of slamming women’s relationships, they’re free to post, it’s not my board, but I am not interested in being drawn into that negative debate.

Oh, yeah and I don’t “hate” men, nor am I a separatist, nor do I ignore them. But I want to be clear. If the apocalypse came tomorrow and I was stuck on planet earth with 100 great looking males, between the ages of 25 and 35 (their peak, IMHO) to include Ashton Kuecher and Brad Pitt I would be militantly and decidedly celibate. But, I would enjoy rebuilding the infrastructure of the planet with them, open a health clinic and hopefully one of them would be a good cook and hopefully we would all just roam from one abandoned luxury apartment to another, because I would not be tidying up either! But I digress, although it does give me a plot idea for a great video game: ** Bluedawg: The Fall of Man - Resurrection** ( It would be a first person shooter with some RPG and it would be a trilogy). I think in the second part, we would find a group of women, 101 to be exact, of whom 100 wanted to reproduce, so we could continue the species, and of course # 101 would be gay and then I wouldn’t be alone and we would open a B&B, bookstore, health care clinic, and I would be President, for three terms, so there would be no more sexist, heterosexist laws again. But, I still digress.

I'm going to take a wild guess at this, but women are different than men. We lead with our hearts, not our schwing. I wonder if that seems fair and accurate?

I'm not exactly sure how or why and I can't speak for men, but having witnessed their actions and having spoken with them and live in a world with them, some of my best friends are men and “I love them dearly,”:P but, I sense it's a safe assumption that we have a different mode of operation. No, I am not steering this to men’s sexuality, I am making a point that a male might see this situation from a completely different point and misinterpret how women react, act, think and feel. I am interested in a discussion about how women react, act, think and feel.

What does that mean and what does this article mean to me?

There may be a subtle change in climate and not a change in women, that allows for more freedom of expresion in matters of love and bonding and commitment. Not sexual experimentation, the article was not about that. That’s something different.

The article is telling me that maybe there is a change in climate, maybe not, where women feel more comfortable in acting on their feelings and being open to emotional and sexual intimacy with other women.

I'm not going to make assumptions that women were pressured into marriage and then discovered this other side to their sexuality. I don't know if they were all pressured, or some were pressured, or none were ever pressured and who cares?

The point of the article was that some women who had been in straight relationships all their lives, found, that when those relationships ended they were open to being attracted to another woman.

I can't even say the article shows that these women are attracted to all other available and suitable women, it just says that the women in this story, when their last relationship ended, were emotionally available to another woman.

Does that make them gay? Bi? Amphibian? I DO NOT care. They are what they are at that moment.

I know a beautiful woman who was divorced, then dated only men, was living with a man and then met a wonderful woman and fell in love with this good looking wonderful, funny, intelligent, did I say good looking(?), woman and has been in a committed relationship with this brilliant woman for 23 years.

Do, I ask her if she is gay or bi or str8 except for me? No. I ask her, what do you want to do today honey? It’s sunny and warm and should I get off this f*cking forum soon and be together and do something fun, like go for a long walk, or do I need to clean the litter box first? Then I read her some of th sh8t I wrote here and make her laugh. :evilgrin:

I see the article as not making the point that women have changed, but rather, that women feel more comfortable in the current climate in allowing themselves to enter into emotional intimacy with another woman to form a bond. A bond that includes sexual, as well as, emotional intimacy. In another words, in some quiet way, apart from the media hoopla, apart from the politics of marriage, DOMA and DADT, something has perhaps shifted in our culture that allows women the sense of comfort to act on their feelings in ways that perhaps they would have blocked in previous times.

Maybe society has shifted imperceptibly and women are picking up on it early?

Or maybe, society hasn’t shifted at all, but some women are more enlightened, have picked up on successful lesbian relationships either from their friends or stories in the media and they connected the dots. “Hey, there is nothing wrong with this. I’ve tried the one way, now I have found someone I care for, I am open to trying the other way, openly.”

Why is this happening?

1.) Perhaps women weren't pressured into marriage. Perhaps they did and wanted to follow the heteronormative path exclusively at one time in their lives and wanted what they thought a different-sex marriage offered, perhaps they wanted a nuclear, m/f, family with kids. Then, for reasons having nothing to do with their attractions to women the marriage ended and now, being single again, having tried the "societal norm" they found a woman who was attracted to them, sparks flew, a chemistry developed and the woman was open to a relationship with that one woman. So far, that’s all we know from these stories, that one woman.

Perhaps not even others? Perhaps in the future it may be with men again, or another woman and, yes, celibacy is always an option.

But for the period of their lives when they are in a full relationship with a woman, they are in a lesbian relationship. If they opt to commit to that relationship, then, they/ we, are entitled to full legal marital rights and damn the boxes, labels and categories.

That’s why I am weary of these categories. It is fluid for some people- obviously.

Freedom means having the same opportunity as other people have, to say, get married and enojoy those exact same legal rights.

Who we are attracted to is not a choice.

Who we fall in love with is not a choice.

Who we have sex with is a choice. Yes I will , no I won’t.

Who we are sexually attracted to is not a choice. It just IS.

Who we consent to marry is a choice. I do, or I don’t.

But who we desire to marry is NOT a choice.

F*ck labels, they shut down dialogue and they mis-state and over simplify the issues.

And no, please none of this crap, “but I thought being gay was immutable, not a choice.” Gay baiting BULLsh8t.

There are strictly heterosexual women and there are women who are and have always been lesbian, lest we forget.

Further, even if it were a choice, so what? Who has the moral right to defame even a choice and deny the right to chose?

Of course once the situation is real and exists, then, those who are part of that group do form a sexual minority and history has shown us repeatedly that, that group is the target of hate, bigotry, violence and prejudice. If you can't f*cking see that for all of the gay baiting rhetoric bullsh*t, then, you are NOT a progressive, IMHO, you are a conservative and debating with conservatives is a suckers game. It's been done before, it's not only a prayer and it has failed because they want it to fail.

For women who have been in love relationships with men and women, ultimately if they fall for one human being, then, that's their primary association at that point in time. No I am not ignoring polyamory, it's beyond the scope of this, it's not a legal issue that I am fighting for as far as marriage, and it would be a suitbale topic for a thread all it's own by someone who knows what the hell they are talking about and as I admit, I do not.

It’s not a choice who you fall in love with, that is a personal reality. You have a choice to go on a date, another date, to some extent you have a choice to be open to situations. Where the heart leads is another matter and even that is an over simplification of things.

Yes, some people can walk away and shut themselves off from that because they fear societal scorn or have internalized guilt and homophobia. Some members of society make a handsome living exhorting people to deny their heart and coerce them, or try to coerce them, into fooling themselves about who they can feel open to and love. That’s not expanding freedom, that's not liberating, that is restrictive thinking, it’s looking for a way to restrict human emotion and physical attraction. That’s the prevailing and historical tend in society that’s the one I buck when I support gay rights. People should be free to explore where their heart leads them and if they opt to make a commitment in a relationship then legal rights should be accorded to all in the same way. Surely not every male/female marriage is one of pure love. Didn’t Anna Nicole marry some 90 year old billionaire geezer, I said marry, with all the legal rights. Het’s do it and do it often. Things are more complicated then many like to admit, so for that reason, laws should apply equally to all.

Message to the prevailing authority figures: Do NOT tell us who to love, and to whom we should commit ourselves.

2.) The shortage of men theory.
Bull sh*t.

This may seem intuitive to some. Oh, there are some who would find comfort in thinking that they are the first and only choice and it’s only because there is a shortage of THEM, that some women accept second best. Bullsh*t!

People marry, or commit for many reasons, some downright clownish, judging by the plethora of str8 themed TV shows where the contestants win: **Marriage!** F*cking buffoons.

I am talking about trends. I sense that it is bullsh8t, that there is a trend in straight women feigning full, intimate sexually active committed lesbian relationships simply because golly gee, “there is a shortage of good men out there.” LMAO. Of course what people tell other people in these revealing little anecdotal stories is also sooooo unscientific and useless unless, you have an ax to grind and an agenda about defaming lesbians for some motive (ego) or other(stupidity).

Women will live in a family setting, will live communally with extended families, will live communally with a friend and co-share expenses and work around the house, but don’t f*cking tell me that there is a trend for women to claim to be “in love and in a romantic, committed, lesbian relationship,” because there is a shortage of men, so they pick women. That sounds like bullsh*it coming from certain members of Group A (men) who can’t deal with things. And I am talking about trends, not the anecdotal story someone’s wife told them, after the cat talked to the cleaning lady. Anything is possible and not every bit of gossip makes a trend.

My theory is that women form emotional bonds often long before we act on sexual urges. I am talking about women who are looking for intimacy and a relationship.

(Yes, there are certainly women who have sex with other human beings, male or female, without any emotional bond and I am not talking about that at the moment.)

Especially in a situation where it entails crossing over from a previously heterosexual pattern of intimacy to a lesbian form of intimacy and relationship.

Let’s leave sexual experimentation out of this for now, I’m trying to understand the rule and not the exception.

My theory is that for a formerly straight woman to enter into a romantic/sexual relationship with another woman, she has to feel something emotionally. This may be the difference between men and women. However, I am not talking about men at this time, just saying how there may be a difference and when people looking in from the outside, especially men view this, they may see it as a sexual response first. I think it‘s an emotional response first. That's what I was hoping to discuss, what other women think about that. I wonder if that is true for str8 women, bi women, gay women, and amphibians? :evilgrin: