Oh, wow, so have you heard this crazy thing about how female bisexuality is kind of hot right now? And how apparently female celebrities are hooking up with other women to boost their cachet, and TV shows are depicting girls kissing other girls, and there's this cutting-edge idea of sexuality being a spectrum instead of an either-or thing? Yes? The media strapped on lesbian-curious themes years ago and has been ramming them down your throat despite muffled cries for mercy? Well, unfortunately, Harvard-trained medical anthropologist Brittany Blockman, 27, didn't hear about any of these exciting developments in the evolution of American sexuality until Mischa Barton kissed some other actress on The OC, and she's been busy appropriating girl-on-girl sexuality for a documentary called Bi The Way that just came out. Her co-director was another (self-described) naive 27-year-old, Josephine Decker, who told the Times Style section she is totally dying to have one of those lesbian flings that are so hot right now:

Ms. Decker, 27, one of the movie's directors, seemed a little embarrassed by her own limited experience.



"The sad thing is, I desperately need to get with a girl," she said, adding that a few stolen kisses was all she could count on the female side of her sexual ledger. "I just didn't want it to be some random woman."

At least Decker is honest about her "desperate" attempt to jump on a trend. Given the tenor of the launch party for her documentary, it would have been hard for her to bill the film as a serious examination of female sexuality:

At the after-party for the screening, at Vlada on West 51st Street, the culture seemed to be shifting in several directions simultaneously. A woman in Ziggy Stardust makeup, wearing a prosthesis cast from a man's penis, participated in a simulated sex act. A while later, the woman, Amy Ouzoonian, a dancer and performance artist, made out on a couch with a mannish woman in a black suit.

The documentary apparently does throw out some mildly interesting facts as it retreads the old idea that women, like men, tend to find women more stimulating to look at.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.



"Women physically don't seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don't," she said. "For heterosexual women, gender didn't matter. They responded to the level of activity."

So, generally-straight women like watch women masturbating and having lesbian sex. Interesting. Someone should do a study on the sexual appeal of a video of two disingenuous women going through the motions of a lesbian fling and then rushing to exploit the affair for cash and/or bragging rights. Who knows, maybe that'll still be hot! And bankable.

[Times]