"If I was in a monogamous relationship, how much I love Jennifer would break some rule, I just know it. Even though we're not lovers, our friendship feeds the bisexual part of me, the part that is sexually inspired by women."
Seems to me these women want their sexual partners to be all things to them. It naturally follows that they would find themselves rejecting monogamy. I find it especially fascinating that in the quote above, Higginbotham calls herself bisexual because she is "sexually inspired" by women, and that the bisexual part of her is being fed by a friendship with a woman who isn’t her lover. It deeply disappoints me that she feels that loving a woman in a non-sexual way would be breaking some rule of a monogamous relationship, even though she can’t identify exactly what that rule is.
When my girlfriends and I get together to scrapbook on a Saturday afternoon, we talk about a lot of things, but the number one topic is our husbands. After all the complaining and bragging, we go home really feeling like women. And the sex with our husbands on those Saturday nights is mind-blowing. So it seems we've been "sexually inspiring" each other for years without getting naked in the process. I’m pretty sure we’re not breaking any rules, and our husbands certainly aren’t complaining. I suspect that women have been inspiring each other, sexually and otherwise, for generations.
I haven’t read Baumgardner’s book, but it appears that she has touched on a profound truth about the importance of female relationships to a woman's emotional health and even her sexual identity. However, I get the sense that Baumgardner and her ilk have sexualized female friendships in an unconscious effort to compensate for the deficiencies that plague the modern state of Sisterhood. I've long been saying that the worst consequence of the feminist movement isn't that it has exacerbated the Battle of the Sexes (although it has) but rather that it has disordered and sometimes destroyed the female support networks that used to be our source of sanity and, indeed, power. We’ve lost touch with the unwritten wisdom of our grandmothers.
In modern marriages, instead of relying on the accumulated wisdom of women through the ages, we’ve decided the best way to get what we want from men is to act like men. Our marriages become competitions. We nag and argue rather than charm and persuade. We sacrifice our greatest womanly strengths and gifts on the alter of equality.
A wife can make up her husband’s mind for him without him ever knowing she did it, but my generation has never been shown the way. Instead, we’ve been taught to bargain as equals, to hammer out a deal for the management our day-to-day life in a 50-50 partnership with our husband. Marriage used to be something unique, something greater than the sum of its parts, but now it’s viewed as a contractual partnership for householding and childcare. No wonder people tire of it so quickly and so often. No wonder so many of our parents are divorced.
As a wife, I’m striking out in a new direction. Not exactly traditional, not exactly modern. I’m learning as I go. All I really know for sure is that, as the saying goes, women who aspire to be equal to men lack ambition. It’s not that we’re better than men, but we are different, and we have a crucial role to play. I’ll let you know if I ever figure out what exactly that role is.
