What is lesbian bed death and does it really exist?

If you, like me, heard the phrase ‘Lesbian Bed Death’ and jumped to all kinds of horny interpretations of the term, then I would like you to stop reading this article right now. It is much more fun to imagine Lesbian Bed Death as a promise to shag everywhere but between the sheets. Maybe it could even be a sequel to Death Proof, arguably the best Tarantino film if you like girls, stunts and revenge – which the common GAY TIMES reader certainly does. Unfortunately, dear reader, the opposite is true Lesbian Bed Death refers to a diminished or completely devoid sex life between two women in a long-term relationship.

The term originated in 1987, because of the studies done by social psychologist Philip Blumstein and sociologist Pepper Schwartz that suggested that lesbian couples engaged in less sexual activity compared to those in heterosexual relationships, Angelika Koch – the relationship and breakup expert for LGBTQIA+ dating app Taimi – tells me. But sex stagnating after a certain number of years sounds like an inevitability for any committed couple after a few years – what makes it so different when it occurs to queer women?

Frances*, a 30-year-old insurance agent who is currently undergoing a bout of bed death, qualifies this stereotype as separate to poor sex lives in other kinds of relationships. She explains: “For hetero couples, there’s this expectation that dry spells will happen but, because so many people view gay couples with a lens of perverse sexuality, there’s an expectation of hedonism and constant sexual pleasure.” She continues, “Essentially, life gets in the way. I think most couples face this but for queer women, it holds a greater stigma to not engage in sex. In a relationship with two women, it can be seen as a failure when it’s just something that happens in most couples. I also feel that women are better at understanding that their partner’s bodies are not merely there for sexual consumption so the pressure to have sex a prescriptive amount of times is not there the same way as it can be for hetero couples.”

23-year-old Suzanne* agrees with Frances’ assessment, adding that “There’s this reputation that queer women/lesbians have about having loads of really great long sex all the time – which I think makes it harder to talk about ‘dry spells’ and also adds a sense of pressure that other couples don’t experience.” Report after report comes out almost annually exposing lesbians as having the best sex out of all, with statistics confirming women in homosexual pairings have the most orgasms during their sexcapades compared to any other kind of coupling.

However, Suzanne also attributes the singularity of the Lesbian Bed Death stereotype to the specifically intimate nature of sapphic relationships, noting “the emotional charge is a huge element of wlw sex, so I’d say the ‘blow’ hits harder when one person in the relationship feels sexually ‘rejected’.”