The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIPS AND LESBIANISM
intellectually inferior which should be enough to discourage
women from ‘imitation’. Bloch informs us that ‘original’
homosexuality is much less common amongst women than
amongst men, ‘Whereas in many women even at a
comparatively advanced age, the so-called “pseudohomosexuality”
is much more frequently met with than it is in
men.’ 15 This pious hope that women are somehow more innately
heterosexual than men, he supports with the explanation that
heterosexual women are inclined towards ‘tenderness and
caresses’ which make it easy for ‘pseudohomosexual tendencies’
to arise. 16
For Bloch, as for the other sexologists, male homosexuality
was defined by genital contact and their lack of other kinds of
physical contact with each other prevented men from straying
from the heterosexual path. Through the defining of any physical
caresses between women as ‘pseudohomosexuality’ by the
sexologists, the isolation and stigmatising of lesbianism was
accomplished, and women’s friendships were impoverished by
the suspicion cast upon any physical expression of emotion.
What lesbians do in bed
In order to fit women’s passionate friendships into the category
of lesbianism, it was necessary to categorise the forms of physical
expression quite usual in these relationships as homosexual
behaviour. So Ellis asserted that the commonest form of sex
practice between women was ‘kissing and embracing’ and that
genital contact was rare:
Homosexual passion in women finds more or less complete
expression in kissing, sleeping together, and close embraces,
as in what is sometimes called ‘lying spoons’…mutual contact
and friction of the sexual parts seems to be comparatively
rare…. While the use of the clitoris is rare in homosexuality,
the use of an artificial penis is by no means uncommon and
very widespread. 17
We notice that whilst describing the rarity of genital contact
Ellis found it necessary to cite the use of the ‘dildo’. The use of
dildos is likely to have been as rare between women in the
nineteenth century as it is in lesbian practice today. The use of
dildos has always been a common motif of men’s sexual fantasies
about lesbians and figures largely in nineteenth-century male
pornography, as it does today. It is probably from this source
that Ellis derives his inspiration. It is possible that some of his
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