Mar 25, 2005  |  By: Jennifer Vanasco  | COMMENTS     

FELICE NEWMAN IS on a mission.

“I want to stamp out the idea of ‘lesbian bed death’ in my lifetime,” says Newman, whose revised “The Whole Lesbian Sex Book” just hit stores.

Lesbian bed death. It’s become one of our founding ideas, like the second-date-U-Haul phenomenon, or the notion that all lesbians are related by six degrees of girlfriends.

Lesbians in long-term relationships at some point just stop having sex. Instead, we crawl into bed with our books and our cats. We cuddle, we read, we talk — and then we fall asleep.

Lesbian bed death is something that a lot of us believe in. If it hasn’t happened to us, we figure that we’re the lucky exceptions.

But Newman says it’s just not true.

She tells me that lesbian bed death was a concept coined by writer JoAnn Loulan in the 1980s and 1990s. Loulan wanted to get lesbians to talk about sex, something they were uncomfortable with after the parched years of the 1970s.

“She was a bit of a comedian,” Newman says now. “She was trying to be funny so that lesbians would be comfortable, so they wouldn’t feel alone.”

The phrase was sticky. So sticky, it stuck. Instead of being a term that described a common condition that women should work to overcome, it became a mandate. Enter into a long-term relationship, and lesbian bed death was inevitable.

So a whole generation of lesbians became resigned to the idea of life without sex. Perhaps that’s why so many of us became serial monogamists. We thought, “Well, if we haven’t had sex for a few months, it’s probably all over. We should break up and move on.”

We think that the only way to liven up our sex lives is to try sex with someone new, either by leaving or by cheating.

NEWMAN WANTS TO change our minds. All couples experience some kind of lessening of sexual activity after the initial burst of rabid, bonding, bunny-sex at the beginning of a relationship.

Heterosexual couples talk about it all the time. But they work on it. They know that other things get in the way when you create a life together: jobs, family stress, kids, graduate school. Other parts of life start to become more important than sex.

But Newman believes — and I think she’s right — that we should prioritize our sexual lives. In fact, she says, “our sexual lives should be as important as our work lives, as our creative lives, as our social lives.”

We need to build in time for sex. It’s important. It glues couples together, first of all. And we need to learn that a fulfilling sex life doesn’t mean we must have many partners (although multiple partners are fine by Newman, as long as everyone is honest about what’s going on).

More isn’t necessarily better in this case. You can sleep with a lot of people and still have really bad sex. Or you can stay with your partner for years — 40 years, 50 years — and have a continually renewed sense of sexual desire and fulfillment for both of you.

But sex is also personally important, personally nurturing, a vital part of our solo identities. Giving up sex is like abandoning all your friends.

IF THAT DOESN’T convince you, maybe you should think about sex between lesbians as a very feminist idea. For too long it was assumed that sex was for men only. They crawled on top of us; we sat back and thought of England, or our new cookie recipe.

But as we know now, that’s just not true. Women love sex! Lesbians love sex! And we’re good at it. And it’s fun. We don’t have to give it up halfway through a love relationship just because we think it’s inevitable.

“You can have hot sex in a relationship,” Newman says. “It doesn’t have to be all pastels and flowers.”

Newman has many ideas in her quite excellent book, but my favorite is to compile a list of sexual activities you’ve done, fantasized about, or would like to try.

To keep your sex life active and fun and adventurous you should look at both partners’ yes lists and commit to trying new things out. It is the differences that keep sex alive, not the sameness.