Sexual Orientation

There is a striking lack of empirical investigations of lesbian adoles cents’ sexuality. This is not very surprising since sexual development has not been the focus of research on girls’ sexuality. In other words, since lesbian adolescents do not become pregnant as a result of their sexual behavior nor does their sexual behavior put them at high risk for diseases such as AIDS, they have not been targeted by researchers as participants in research on sexuality. Additionally, since lesbian adolescents are not engaging in sexual intercourse, they are not considered sexual by typical research standards, given the assumption that sexuality necessarily means sexual intercourse. Lesbian adolescents experience additional obstacles to overcome in the development of a healthy sense of sexuality, including a lack of socialized role models, lack of social and cultural support, and re strictions in partner selection (Kurdek, 1991). There is some evidence that the average age of coming out has decreased over the last few decades from late adolescence to mid-adolescence. Herdt (1989) maintains that this transition constitutes a life crisis as the lesbian moves from the lifestyle and value systems of her heterosexual role-model parents to the lifestyle of the adult lesbian community. This transition occurs in the larger context of a homophobic society that provides little support and plenty of negative messages and even violence toward the adolescent for her desire for sexual relationships with women. Lesbian adolescents, even in geographic regions with large lesbian communities, experience cognitive, social, and emotional isolation (Martin & Hetrick, 1988). This sense of isolation may have pro found ramifications for their developing sense of themselves as sexual be ings. Studies of adult lesbians have found lesbians engage in sex less fre quently than heterosexual or gay male couples (Bell &. Weinberg, 1978; Blumstein &. Schwartz, 1983; Kurdek, 1991). These researchers have spec ulated that this finding may relate to the restrictive societal context in which girls learn to internalize negative messages about their sexuality. Although research is greatly needed to understand more about the devel opment of lesbian girls’ sexuality, caution should be exercised in the essen tialist dichotomization of lesbian vs. heterosexual status. Most self-defined lesbians have had heterosexual relationships and many self-defined hetero sexual females have had same-gender sexual relationships (Ponse, 1978). Within a normative framework, developmental trajectories for lesbian girls’ sexuality has yet to be charted. They, perhaps more forcefully than any other group, make apparent the inadequacies of a universal application of developmental standards based on European American men.