Female Adolescence: Difficult for Heterosexual Girls, Hazardous for Lesbians

I' d rather you be a prostitute than be a lesbian. You could be a murderer. You could be a prostitute, and that would be fine. We'd still love you.

Developmental theories that describe the process of adolescence for girls assume heterosexuality (Blos, 1962; Erikson, 1968: Ollech and McCarthy, 1997). What about this process for a subset of adolescent girls, those who begin to identify attractions for other girls and eventually identify as lesbian? The focal development task of adolescence is a “second individuation,” a reworking of the earlier oedipal drama, with new resolutions attempted and integrated. Individuation is facilitated through gaining satisfactory and ever more complicated notions about love, affection, and sexuality. Central to facilitating this process are peer and social experiences and family values as they impact on the ego in its progressions and regressions (Erikson, 1963, 1968). For lesbian-identified adolescents experiencing same-sex attractions, the “trying on” of sexual roles, peer and familial affirmation of one's emerging sexual feelings, and the typical behaviors associated with promoting one's evolving sexual identity (e.g., dating, locker room talk) are probably much different from those of their heterosexual counterparts. This paper discusses normative, female, heterosexual adolescence, and the social and cultural demands that reciprocally influence intrapsychic demands and processes. These are then compared with and contrasted to the