Imagine that you hear that your 18-year-old daughter was kissinganother girl at a party last weekend. What races through your mind? "Omy gosh, she's exploring same-sex attractions. She must be a lesbian."
Holdup, Mom and Dad. You're showing your age. Chances are, your daughter'snot fixed on the pretty young blonde she's locking lips with. There maybe something entirely different and unexpected going on.
"Girlsmaking out with each other to turn on guys is the latest craze at highschool and college parties," according to the online magazineSalon.com.
Still don't believe it? Listen to this summer'smonster hit song, "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry. It's aninternational phenomenon -- topping the charts all summer in America,Canada, Australia and Great Britain. A few weeks ago, Perry was aheadliner at the Warped music festival at Canterbury Park in Shakopee,belting out the song's provocative lyrics:
I kissed a girl and I liked it,
The taste of her cherry chapstick,
I kissed a girl just to try it,
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it.
It felt so wrong, it felt so right.
Perrycagily maintains that her song is about drunken curiosity regardingsame-sex attractions. But her music video, which features gyratingwomen in lingerie, is clearly designed to give the male libido a jolt.
Webaby boomers like to think we invented and defined the sexualrevolution. But our offspring are tossing out the categories we tookfor granted, including the view that "gay or straight" is preprogrammed.
Youngwomen whom Salon.com interviewed about the girl-on-girl trend said theyhad initially kissed other females to get a free beer at parties or ona dare from guys. But they soon saw it as a way to signal to males thatthey are "sexually open and adventurous."
"It was like, look, I'm the center of attention!" recalled one 16-year-old.
The16-year-old, who first saw girls making out at a party and later triedit herself at male urging, added, "And the kissing itself didn't reallybug me. From then on, it became a normal thing to do."
"It makes you feel more attractive," said another girl. "You're turning on a guy, and he thinks it's cool."
Staged bisexuality is now the norm for what is being called the "post-gay generation."
Salonreports that "the term for the 'I'm straight but I'll kiss girls'mentality is 'heteroflexible,'" according to Deborah Tolman of (whereelse?) San Francisco State University's Center for Research on Genderand Sexuality. Salon also has its headquarters in San Francisco.
'The erotic new trend'
Female bisexuality is "the erotic new trend (everyone's trying it)," announced Marie Claire magazine in 2006.
A2005 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appearedto confirm this. It found that while 1.3 percent of women identifiedthemselves as homosexual, 11.5 percent of women ages 18 to 44 -- andabout 14 percent of women in their late teens and early 20s -- reportat least one sexual encounter with another woman.
Only about 4 percent of women, ages 18 to 59, reported such an encounter in a similar survey in 1992.
What is fueling this trend?
Onefactor is the huge popularity of Girls Gone Wild, a DVD franchise thatfilms alcohol-addled females' sexual encounters with other women atcollege drinking revels. Same-sex kissing has been glamorized bycelebrities, including Madonna and Britney Spears.
One of thebiggest influences, however, may be Internet pornography, which hasdramatically altered young people's ideas of mainstream sexualbehavior.
"Girls aren't kissing other girls because they wantto," Pamela Paul, the author of "Pornified," told Salon. "They're doingit because they want to appeal to boys their age. And for boys theirage who've developed sexually alongside Internet porn, their sexualcues are affected by the norms and standards of porn. And that'sgirl-on-girl action."
The result? Rampant cultural confusion.
Straight girls 'playing gay'
ChicagoTribune sex columnist Jenni Spinner, who is a lesbian, maintains thatPerry's "I Kissed a Girl" song "sets gay rights back." In nearly every"gay dance dive," she has complained, "the joint has been infiltratedby a gaggle of giggling straight girls, playing gay for a night becauseit amuses them."
Women who kiss other women to attract guysare making it "difficult to distinguish between the behavior of someonewho is legitimately sexually interested and someone who wants toimpress the boy across the room," according to New York magazine.
Increasingly,young people are transcending sexual categories altogether, themagazine points out. They are coining terms such as "pansexual,""bi-curious," "bi-queer" and "metroflexible" to describe their fluidsexuality.
This is the brave new world that the sexual revolution unleashed. Has it liberated our daughters, as originally promised?
Oneyoung woman interviewed by Salon says that, for her and her friends, itcomes back to an age-old desire to be cherished by a man.
"Alot of girls who do want long-term boyfriends will still settle for thehookup [triggered by girl-on-girl kissing] because it gives them thattemporary feeling of being taken care of and being close to someone,"she said.
"It's sad to see that this is what it's come to --that guys will raise the bar and girls will scramble to meet it. Womenjust want to know what they have to do to get these guys to fall inlove with them."
http://www.startribune.com/local/27300359....Unciaec8O7EyUsX
Holdup, Mom and Dad. You're showing your age. Chances are, your daughter'snot fixed on the pretty young blonde she's locking lips with. There maybe something entirely different and unexpected going on.
"Girlsmaking out with each other to turn on guys is the latest craze at highschool and college parties," according to the online magazineSalon.com.
Still don't believe it? Listen to this summer'smonster hit song, "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry. It's aninternational phenomenon -- topping the charts all summer in America,Canada, Australia and Great Britain. A few weeks ago, Perry was aheadliner at the Warped music festival at Canterbury Park in Shakopee,belting out the song's provocative lyrics:
I kissed a girl and I liked it,
The taste of her cherry chapstick,
I kissed a girl just to try it,
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it.
It felt so wrong, it felt so right.
Perrycagily maintains that her song is about drunken curiosity regardingsame-sex attractions. But her music video, which features gyratingwomen in lingerie, is clearly designed to give the male libido a jolt.
Webaby boomers like to think we invented and defined the sexualrevolution. But our offspring are tossing out the categories we tookfor granted, including the view that "gay or straight" is preprogrammed.
Youngwomen whom Salon.com interviewed about the girl-on-girl trend said theyhad initially kissed other females to get a free beer at parties or ona dare from guys. But they soon saw it as a way to signal to males thatthey are "sexually open and adventurous."
"It was like, look, I'm the center of attention!" recalled one 16-year-old.
The16-year-old, who first saw girls making out at a party and later triedit herself at male urging, added, "And the kissing itself didn't reallybug me. From then on, it became a normal thing to do."
"It makes you feel more attractive," said another girl. "You're turning on a guy, and he thinks it's cool."
Staged bisexuality is now the norm for what is being called the "post-gay generation."
Salonreports that "the term for the 'I'm straight but I'll kiss girls'mentality is 'heteroflexible,'" according to Deborah Tolman of (whereelse?) San Francisco State University's Center for Research on Genderand Sexuality. Salon also has its headquarters in San Francisco.
'The erotic new trend'
Female bisexuality is "the erotic new trend (everyone's trying it)," announced Marie Claire magazine in 2006.
A2005 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appearedto confirm this. It found that while 1.3 percent of women identifiedthemselves as homosexual, 11.5 percent of women ages 18 to 44 -- andabout 14 percent of women in their late teens and early 20s -- reportat least one sexual encounter with another woman.
Only about 4 percent of women, ages 18 to 59, reported such an encounter in a similar survey in 1992.
What is fueling this trend?
Onefactor is the huge popularity of Girls Gone Wild, a DVD franchise thatfilms alcohol-addled females' sexual encounters with other women atcollege drinking revels. Same-sex kissing has been glamorized bycelebrities, including Madonna and Britney Spears.
One of thebiggest influences, however, may be Internet pornography, which hasdramatically altered young people's ideas of mainstream sexualbehavior.
"Girls aren't kissing other girls because they wantto," Pamela Paul, the author of "Pornified," told Salon. "They're doingit because they want to appeal to boys their age. And for boys theirage who've developed sexually alongside Internet porn, their sexualcues are affected by the norms and standards of porn. And that'sgirl-on-girl action."
The result? Rampant cultural confusion.
Straight girls 'playing gay'
ChicagoTribune sex columnist Jenni Spinner, who is a lesbian, maintains thatPerry's "I Kissed a Girl" song "sets gay rights back." In nearly every"gay dance dive," she has complained, "the joint has been infiltratedby a gaggle of giggling straight girls, playing gay for a night becauseit amuses them."
Women who kiss other women to attract guysare making it "difficult to distinguish between the behavior of someonewho is legitimately sexually interested and someone who wants toimpress the boy across the room," according to New York magazine.
Increasingly,young people are transcending sexual categories altogether, themagazine points out. They are coining terms such as "pansexual,""bi-curious," "bi-queer" and "metroflexible" to describe their fluidsexuality.
This is the brave new world that the sexual revolution unleashed. Has it liberated our daughters, as originally promised?
Oneyoung woman interviewed by Salon says that, for her and her friends, itcomes back to an age-old desire to be cherished by a man.
"Alot of girls who do want long-term boyfriends will still settle for thehookup [triggered by girl-on-girl kissing] because it gives them thattemporary feeling of being taken care of and being close to someone,"she said.
"It's sad to see that this is what it's come to --that guys will raise the bar and girls will scramble to meet it. Womenjust want to know what they have to do to get these guys to fall inlove with them."
http://www.startribune.com/local/27300359....Unciaec8O7EyUsX
