Lesbian

From an etymological point of view, lesbianism is a sexual orientation and, according to that, a lesbian is a woman sexually involved with other women. In other words, a lesbian is a female homosexual. Although the definition seems to be clear enough, it is also true that it causes serious difficulties to its theoreticians. For example, it is difficult to determine when a woman can be considered a lesbian. For some experts, it happens once she had a sexual intercourse with other women. For others, after a first experience and maybe, for a few, should be sufficient to feel attraction to other women or even to fall in love with them. And some sexologists are definitely uncertain about cases where there is no conviction or where a lesbian experience is just a challenge or a new way of exploring one's own intimacy. Those are too many nuances, with no concluding answers so far. In the meantime, we can affirm that “to be a lesbian” is much more than just a sexual orientation, practice, or preference. In fact, in the widest sense of the word, a lesbian is a female who is emotionally, romantically, or sexually involved, somehow, only with other women. It can even be applied to women who feel some kind of aesthetic attraction to other women.

Once lesbianism became more visible, it was described as an inversion—that is what Sigmund Freud affirms—a deviation, a worrying medical condition, a biological or psychological disorder. And certainly for some main religions, lesbianism is just a sexual perversion. In the last few years, some genetic studies attempted to look at female homosexuality from a scientific point of view, but the results have been far from being satisfactory.

The term lesbian is not new. It derives from Lesbos, a Greek island in the eastern Aegean Sea, inhabited [Page 1011]by Amazons, the most famous female warrior group. Nevertheless, given the male dominance in Greek culture, it is not surprising that references to female homosexual behavior are rather rare. The original Greek word for female homosexual was tribas (that is why many sexologists use it as a synonym of lesbianism). At the beginning, the term was used to refer to female sexual freedom and licentiousness; however, it gradually became a simple term to designate women sexually or emotionally involved with other women. This semantic evolution of the term was possible thanks to the fame of a lyric poetess, Sappho, born in a local aristocratic family and responsible for a school only for girls called “House of the Muses” (a school of music and poetry), where she supposedly had sexual experiences with some of her pupils to whom she dedicated her passionate verses. Some sources claimed that her relationships were merely platonic. Sappho was a symbol of lesbianism to the extent that another term to refer to lesbianism is the eponym Sapphism. Most of Sappho's pupils were young, and for that reason, there is a specific concept to define this kind of relationship: gynerasty, which is the female equivalent to male pederasty. At that time, gynerasty had to do with a way of understanding pedagogy and its dimensions.

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