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| Saralyn Chesnut, director of the Office of LGBT Life at Emory University, said young women experience sexuality as ‘more fluid’ than their older counterparts. (Photo by Kay Hinton/Emory University)
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HOME > NEWS > LOCAL
By: RYAN LEE
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The percentage of women who report having a sexual encounter with another woman at some point in their lifetimes “increased substantially” over generations, according to two separate studies published this month.
In a study of 7,643 women ages 15 to 44, 11.5 percent said they had a sexual encounter with another woman during their lifetime, more than doubling the 4 percent of women who reported such encounters in a 1992 study. The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention published the new study Sept. 15.
“The levels [of reporting same-sex encounters] are higher for women in their 20s than they are for women older than that, so this appears to be a recent trend among younger women,” said William Mosher, lead author of the National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
In addition to seeing new trends among younger women, researchers conducting a separate study at the City University of New York-Queens College and RTI International noticed that reports of female-female sexual encounters increased gradually throughout the 20th century.
Reviewing data from 12,336 adult females who participated in the National Data Program for the Social Sciences’ General Social Survey between 1988 and 2002, researchers discovered only 1.6 percent of women born before 1920 reported ever having sexual contact with another woman. Some 6.9 percent of women born after 1970 acknowledged engaging in same-sex sexual behavior.
The findings in the CUNY-Queens College study, published in the fall issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, closely parallel the data collected by NCHS researchers. The studies indicate “a massive social change” in either the sexual behavior women are engaging in, what behaviors women are willing to discuss, or both, said Charles Turner, lead author of the CUNY-Queens College study.
“What we have is two samples, two independent studies, done by different investigators, with different instruments and both of us find substantial increases in the reporting of female-female sexual contacts,” Turner said.
Both studies also showed that the percentage of men who reported having sexual contact with another man remained statistically stagnant over the years, Turner said.
Only 6 percent of men in the NCHS study reported engaging in oral or anal sex with another man during their lifetimes, while the percentage of men reporting same-sex sexual behavior in the CUNY-Queens College study fluctuated over the years between 3.5 and 5.5 percent.
Women’s sexual roles and mores have changed more than men’s over the past several decades, which may help explain the rise of reported female-female sexual contacts, said Saralyn Chesnut, director of the Office of LGBT Life at Emory University in Atlanta.
“It makes a lot of sense because women’s roles have changed so much over the 20th century, and one of the roles that changed was that of woman as a Victorian model for sex, where women didn’t enjoy sex, or their only purpose was to provide men with children,” Chesnut said.
“Young women are sensitive to being labeled lesbian —‑they just see it all as much more fluid, and that’s the biggest difference [between generations],” Chesnut added.
The NCHS data showed that while 11.5 percent of women reported a sexual encounter with another female sometime during their lives, only 4 percent reported having a sexual relationship with another female during the last year and only 1.3 percent reported having female sex partners exclusively.
The proportion of men in the NCHS study who reported anal or oral sex with another man was also staggered, with 6 percent engaging in such behavior at some point in their lifetimes, 2.9 percent reporting a male sex partner within the last year and 1.6 percent who said they only have sex with other men.
An identical percentage of men and women in the NCHS study —‑4.1 percent — identified as either homosexual or bisexual.
The CUNY-Queens College study also noted that tolerance of gay and lesbian individuals among both men and women has evolved starkly over generations, Turner said.
Some 5.6 percent of women and 7.5 percent of men born before 1920 said same-gender sex is “not wrong at all,” compared to 45.2 percent of women and 32 percent of men born after 1970 who answered similarly.
Ryan Lee can be reached at rlee@sovo.com.
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