Sexual Relationships 
Sexual Health 
Lesbianism is most often associated with sensuality and sexuality, but in this myTake we will explore the origin of the word and it's meaning in greater detail, not to mention the island of origination. And lest we not forget Sappho, the spark for all that contains the essence of the intense emotional feeling of love that has yet to be described in a way that matches the beauty of her poetic imagery for the true love that one woman can have for another.
We all know that a lesbian is a female who is physically, romantically and emotionally (or any combination thereof) attracted to other women. Lesbianism, as most of us are aware, is a form of homosexuality, the physical love of the same sex or gender ...but did you also know that Lesbian is a nationality? Yes, it's true.
Before proceeding, however, I want to take a brief detour to caution you that this post may contain content, comments and explicit descriptions of Lesbian subject matter. If you are not comfortable with that please find another post that is more applicable to your post consuming proclivities. You have been warned! :)
Yes, the residents of Lesbos are also known as Lesbians, even though they may be straight as an arrow. Is this cause for any confusion among the islands inhabitants? You bet it is!
Such confusion, that two Island residents filed a lawsuit in 2008 against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece claiming that the word should not be allowed to describe homosexual women but instead reserved for the exclusive use to describe the Nationality of those born, and or living, on Lesbos Island, even though it has been the most widely known meaning of female homosexuality for thousands of years. Needless to say, they did not win the case as the court determined that the cat (or pussy if you might ...lol) was already too far out of the bag since, as previously stated, it has been used world wide for centuries.
Where is this most famous Island and how exactly did it achieve such fame? ...as if we didn't know that last part ...lol
ISLAND OF ORIGIN
Lesbos is the 3rd largest Greek Island located off the west coast of Turkey, being 629 square miles in size, with the next largest land mass to the west being the main Greek Island of Greece itself.
ORIGIN OF LESBIANISM
The following is Part 2 (see text in italics) from an amazing Lesbian series by Lori L Lake titled "Lesbian Fiction Herstory", with part 2 being "From Whence The Name Came".
The title of the series is a dichotomy she uses to illustrate the fact that Lesbian History has been greatly 'cleansed' from antiquity by the re-writing of history, purging all renditions of Lesbian love between women or describing them as "Stories of Fiction" and the true story of Sappho, 'From Whence The Name (Lesbian) Came' is no exception. In other words, Lesbians have been greatly discriminated against throughout history and attempts made to make all knowledge of them disappear or be disregarded as fabricated.
I have taken some less relevant parts out while adding some of my own commentary making this a mixture of the Lesbian/bisexual team of Lori and Laurie :)
First, much of this will anger or upset you to hear that they tried to disappear Sappho from the pages of history, and actually succeeded for much of it. But for those who can appreciate the intrigue of Lesbian Love, this will be both an adventure in the love between women and an additional journey into the physically erotic aspects of Lesbianism that you may be able to feel emotionally. Get ready, here we go...
Once upon a time, over 2,600 years ago, on an island called Lesbos, in the sunny Aegean Sea near Greece, there lived a woman of the Aristocratic class named Sappho. She was beautiful and blessed by the gods and goddesses with the gifts of poetry, music, and teaching. Her poems were heralded, quite literally, near and far. Great poets, statesmen, and historians of antiquity lauded her name and praised her poetry. Sappho was the greatest and most acclaimed woman of ancient history.
...all of this is true.
But if it also sounds a little like a fairy tale, it is ...why? Notice that all reference to her love of women was left out.
The legend of Sappho has lived on through 26 centuries, and yet, few "facts" of her life are actually known. Too much of the record has been purposely expunged from history. Purposely deleted. Through the ages, men have tried to erase her from the records and from memory. They have not wholly succeeded. Here's what we know:
Sappho was a poetic genius. She came from the isle of Lesbos. In the custom of her society, she apparently married and some say she had a daughter named Cleis. She read and sang her poetry to enthusiastic crowds. She was famous in her time . . . but of most interest to us, from her legend and even from the shreds of poetry left behind, it is clear Sappho loved women. In every way. She was called simply The Poetess, just as The Poet meant Homer, and later in history, The Bard (declaimer of epic or heroic verse) referred to William Shakespeare.
Sappho worshiped and lauded Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Her poetry frequently mentions Aphrodite with admiration and appeals to her for intercession in Sappho's relationships with women. It is this aspect of her poetry that would later get her in trouble. More on that in a moment.
(see the myTake I did on the Goddess Aphrodite, you won't be disappointed, I promise! ... The Goddess of Love )
For at least 700 years after her death, Sappho was honored throughout Greece and many parts of southern Europe. She had traveled a great deal in her life - how else to explain that residents of Syracuse put up a statue in her honor? Or that various regions honored her by minting coins bearing her image? Or that a huge statue of her was erected in the town square of Lesbos? They eradicated her words, but they couldn't erase the statues.
Sappho was a lyrical poet, well-known for the tone, meter, and grace of her poetry. This was music to the ears of listeners-literally. She was often accompanied by a lyre or harp, and her work included clever wordplay, allusions, metaphor, and humor. Single-handedly, she redefined the already-existing lyric meter of the day. Her work was so groundbreaking and marvelous that the Greek meter she often used was named after her and continues to bear that name to this day.
Sappho created nine books of poetry, one of which was described as 330 stanzas of Sapphic meter. She wrote of passionate love of women and all that was feminine. She also wrote of the beauty of some of the men of the time and about the beauty of nature and the simple life, where love and sensuality were topics of real importance. She was so respected that Dracon of Stratonica, Alexander the Sophist, and Chamaeleon, a disciple of Aristotle, all wrote books about her and her work. She influenced the writing and thought of countless men, including Ovid, Catullus, Aristotle, Alcaeus, and Epicurus. The philosopher, Plato, called her the Tenth Muse.
(Muse - in ancient Greek mythology any of 9 daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; protector of an art or science. Greek deity - a deity worshiped by the ancient Greeks. 2. Muse - the source of an artist's inspiration)
But something happened along the way that subverted the proper telling of Sappho's life in the fairy tale that is history. It is not clear when Sappho's star stopped shining, but as early as 140 A.D., men of the Christian church branded her a "whore" and described her work as deviant, especially due to her "unnatural" love of women. Some say her work was destroyed then, in the second century. Others say this occurred as late as the eleventh century. Either way, all that remains of the nine books of genius are fragments-actually forty pieces that make sense and only one poem in its entirety, and all are bits known only because they are contained within the work of later writers who quoted her.
By all accounts, Sappho's reading and singing of her poetry had the same emotional effect on her listeners as the music Beatles had on the Western world in the 1960s. What happened to her reputation and her poetry? Why are only fragments left when most of the works of Homer still exist in their entirety?
The calculated extinguishing of the work of Sappho appears to be nothing short of the attempt to blot out her very existence so that no woman would ever have any of Sappho's works to read.
For the last thousand years, it appears that many male scholars and historians have worked busily to revise the history of many aspects of the world, including Sappho's place of glory. Men tried to wipe away her record, but enough of her poems live on. Over the last 2,500 years, men have tried to claim that Sappho's lyrics were written by a man. Unbelievable amounts of scholarship and argument have been undertaken in attempts to prove that Sappho was not lesbian in her sexual orientation - or if she was, her love of women was never actually consummated. This went so far as a legend being promulgated that she swore off women and fell in love with a ferryman named Phaeon, and when he spurned her, she jumped off a cliff to her death. As if!
History is selective. The old saying is "to the victor go the spoils," and it's clear that those in power write the history books. Sappho quite simply had to be written out. Her poems were subversive, they encouraged something other than a heterosexual and male-dominating model, and they placed a woman in a position of equality with - or perhaps even superiority to - Homer.
And yet . . . The myth of Sappho . . . the legend . . . shreds of her words . . . all live on. For 2600 years, women have clung to the belief that once upon a time, in a more open-minded and glorious age, women who loved women (and men who loved men, as well) were respected and honored and even managed to thrive.
But it wasn't until the nineteenth century that women found ways to search for and re-tell the story of Sappho. They dug beyond the fabricated version of Sappho as a halfway decent heterosexual poet whose work was lost, and they unearthed the truth-Sappho loved women in all ways, and her work and life had been blotted out in order to preserve male and heterosexual priorities. It wasn't until 1898 that some of the final fragments of Sappho's poems were found by the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in Egypt, and this surely must have spurred modern speculation. As the nineteenth century drew to an end, interest in Sappho renewed and women studied and researched her life and poetry. Where there was little evidence or few facts, creative women wrote novels and stories that painted Sappho in positive - and lesbian - light. Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien had even traveled to Lesbos on a quest to learn more. Once again, the records aren't so easy to research, but women searching for and dreaming about the existence of Sappho must have made an impact on the current society of the late 1800s. How else to explain that the term Lesbian first appeared in printed English in the 1890 Billings Medical Dictionary? When the term first circulated in popular spoken lingo is anybody's guess.
English-speaking women will never fully know the wonders of Sappho's work, not only because so little of it was preserved, but also because the Sapphic meter is unique to the style, tone, and rhythm of the Greek language and does not translate to English. But the following translation of a section of a poem, which lauds Aphrodite the Goddess of Love and asks for intercession with Sappho's own love life, still packs power, even in English:
In her article "Sapphistries," feminist scholar Susan Gubar writes that Sappho represents "all the lost women of genius in literary history, especially all the lesbian artists whose work has been destroyed, sanitized or heterosexualized." Despite centuries of denial and exclusion and outright lies, we remember and we honor the memory of this unique and singular woman, The Poetess.
Isn't this the hope many people carry in their hearts - that their accomplishments will not be lost and their lives will not have been lived in vain? Women of power, of beauty, and of grace. Women who contribute to their families, communities, and the world. Women who should never be overlooked, whose voices should never be silenced, never be erased from the records of history. All lesbians, not just poets, should pay Sappho homage as a "first" in recorded history.
The legend lives on. Let it live on in truth.
"I tell you, someone will remember us, even in another time."
~Sappho, Greek poet, teacher, and lesbian (c. 630 BCE)
This Lesbian music video remix makes me cry every time that I watch it, I totally love it...
HOW DOES LESBIAN SEX COMPARE TO STRAIGHT SEX?
Did you know that in several studies it was determined that Lesbians had better sex than straight women?
One study in the 'Journal of Sexual Medicine' showed that 75% of Lesbians had orgasms during Lesbian encounters compared to 61% of heterosexual women. And an even larger study from the 'Kinsey Institute' found that 86% of Lesbians had orgasms during Lesbian sexual encounters compared to 65% of heterosexual women.
THE TOP 15 LESBIAN SEX ACTIVITIES
According to Autostraddle's 'Ultimate Lesbian Sex Survey' here are the top 15 Lesbian sex activities in the order of popularity among Lesbians
1. Clitoral Stimulation - 99% : Did you know that the clit is THE ONLY human organ created by God exclusively for sexual pleasure? The penis cannot even make this claim.
2. Fingering - 97.2% : AKA: Finger Banging, Finger Fucking
3. Oral sex - 95.2% : My favorite Lesbian sexual pleasure ...OMG!
4. Frottage/dry humping - 79.6% : Not my favorite but ranks high with most
5. Nipple play – 73.1% : Always a nice addition to the fine art of Lesbianism
6. Strap-on play – 58.8% : What do you need guys for when you have a quality dildo strap-on penis? Sorry guys, just kidding. At least I am because I'm bi, but most Lesbians, not so much. I use my strap on to train bi-girls to learn how to deep throat guys. We start out with a smaller penis dildo and work our way up to longer and wider ones. The boys they get with love me for this ...lol
7. Vibrators – 55.5% : Vibrators are commonly used while masturbating, being penetrated with a stap-on and even during oral sex and fingering.
8. Dildos – 55% : Although not specifically written for Lesbians, here is the myTake I wrote on penis dildos ... Adult Sex Toys 101- Penis Dildos
9. Spanking – 50% : You know you deserve one! ...lol
10. Scissoring – 34% : This is highly controversial. Some girls enjoy scissoring and others do not like it at all. It's an individual taste. It can be a fun warm up when the chemistry is working right.
11. Anal play (external) – 31% : Gently rubbing with the fingers or rimming with the tongue. As you see not a high percentage, but I love this one.
12. Anal penetration – 25.2% : Another low percentage appeal that I totally love doing with another girl. Can be done with a strap-on or free handed with a penis dildo.
13. BDSM – 22.2% : This number looks right. I think mainly due to negative press and fear. And we must admit, some if it is a little to a lot off the charts. I like the simple bondage part, like furry hand cuffs with blindfold and maybe a light spanking.
14. Other sex toy play – 22% : I think this one is low due to the cost of some toys, they can be pricey.
15. Fisting (vaginal) – 18% : I'll pass on this one. I think I'll get enough of that area's abnormal expansion when having my first baby.
WHAT SEX TOYS DO LESBIANS USE
One of my favorites is the 16 inch double ended penis dildo. This is used by both girls at once in a variety of positions but my favorite is butt to butt doggy ...I am not kidding! ...OMG!
Others are vibrators, butt plugs, anal beads, strap-on's, fucking machines, BDSM whips, cuffs, ropes, etc
LESBIAN FESTIVALS AROUND THE WORLD
Lesbian festivals in the USA
1. Dinah Shore Weekend – Palm Springs, California
2. Krave Spring Break – Palm Springs, California
3. Aqua Girl – Miami, Florida
4. Girls in Wonderland – Orlando, Florida
5. Single Women’s Weekend – Provincetown, Massachusetts
6. Girl Splash – Provincetown, Massachusetts
7. She Fest – San Diego, California
8. Back Lot Bash – Chicago, Illinois
9. Plezzure Island – South Padre Island, Texas
10. ClexaCon – Las Vegas, Nevada
Lesbian festivals in Europe
1. Girlie Circuit – Barcelona, Spain
2. Velvet Ibiza – Ibiza, Spain
3. L-Fest – United Kingdom
4. Eressos International Women’s Festival – Lesbos, Greece
5. Ella Summer Festival – Mallorca, Spain
6. Ella Davos – Switzerland
Lesbian Parties in the rest of the world
1. Ella Festival – Colombia, Mexico and Costa Rica
2. L-Fest del Mar – Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
3. Gay Prides – All over the world
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q: Why is it believed that Lesbians hate men?
A: There is a very small number of Women who do hate men, mostly resulting from an abusive father, brother or other early male relationship. The vast majority of Lesbians do not hate men but just prefer other girls/women for emotional reasons and many times because they don't understand and can not relate to men in the same way that they can girls/women.
Q: Poss other questions in your comments and I will try to answer them :)
I want to close this myTake about this great woman repeating the words of Sappho herself once again...
"I tell you, someone will remember us, even in another time."
~Sappho, Greek poet, teacher, and lesbian (c. 630 BCE)
Each time I read about the sweeping of Sappho under the rug of history I cry. Why would anyone do such a thing to a great woman like this whose fame, even during her living days, was off the charts? I cry for her and I cry for all of us that receive rebuke for being who we really are. I wish to meet this great woman, who once so gloriously graced our planet, in heaven!
I pray that you liked, or even loved, this myTake nearly as much as I did writing it!
I LOVE YOU!
#Lesbian #IsleofLesbos #Sappho #Lesbos
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