Excerpted from “You Can Tell Just By Looking” And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People"
Is Lesbian Sex Real Sex?
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Nevertheless, the myth that sex with the right man could make a lesbian go straight persists and can take deadly form, such as corrective or punitive rape. Corrective rape is a violent sexual assault in which a person is targeted because of her sexual or gender nonconformity. The term came into use after the brutal gang rape and murder of openly lesbian South African soccer star Eudy Simelane, in 2008. South African LGBT activists began to track incidence of these crimes against lesbians and to organize against this violence both domestically and internationally. The problem is hardly confined to South Africa. Cases have been documented in Thailand, Zimbabwe, Canada, and the United States.
Corrective here suggests that the reason for a particular assault is the perpetrators desire to fix the victims incorrect identity. This is misleading. There is nothing to correct. Additionally, the violent assault is motivated as much, if not more, by the perpetrators rage at the targets perceived sexual or gender deviance. It is a punishment for the victims transgressing accepted gender or sexual norms. The term punitive rape thus more accurately describes the larger social context of such assaults. In 2011, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights declared that they are [p]art of a wider pattern of sexual violence that combine[s] a fundamental lack of respect for women, often amounting to misogyny, with deeply-entrenched homophobia.
Although their actions are extreme, the perpetrators of punitive rape are expressing viewsabout the naturalness of heterosexuality, for example, and mens authority over womenheld by many people. Most people who hold these beliefs do not rape lesbians. Nevertheless, this violence exists on a continuum with the everyday and, to many people, innocuous prejudices evident in such myths as lesbians do not have real sex.
This innocuous violence is embedded in the idea of virginity. Historically, the very idea of virginity emerged from the religious and social regulations of a marriage contract. Through marriage, a woman was exchanged as property from her father to her husband. Her chastity guaranteed that her property value was intact. The deeply entrenched belief that it takes a man for a woman to lose her virginity begins here. Women have long tried to assert their own sexual desires, but their voices are still not completely acknowledged in many places globally, including the United States.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/03/is_lesbian_sex_real_sex.html