Essay (Patreon)

Sorry I haven't published much, I've been doing a lot of year end stuff; planning for next year, repairing costumes, cleaning the apartment, riding the bus down to MD to see my parents. 

Not much of it has been pretty creative or interesting (I think. If you want to hear about my planning for next year, or how I'm trying to make my house NOT a pig stye, or the ridiculous things I do to repair costumes, let me know! I also got drunk with my parents and went on a tear about what I find fascinating about Edgar Allen Poe. I thought that might be worth recreating for a video here. If you want to see that, tell me!) 

But while I was riding the bus yesterday, I managed to polish up an essay on bi-phobia that I want to start pitching to publications. I think this is the year I start trying to get paid for writing so I'm compiling lists of articles I want to write, places I want to pitch, and how much those places pay. This certainly won't pay enough to be a full time job, but it could be a decent income stream, especially since writing doesn't take as much out of me as burlesque does.

Let me know what you think, and if there's a website that you think might want to publish this. 

I’ve heard it a dozen times but I’m still always a little surprised when I hear someone say “Bisexuals don’t exist.” My first impulse is to look incredulously at my own hands, and poke myself to make sure I haven’t suddenly been snuffed out of existence. I somehow always remain corporeal. My second impulse is to heave a deep, exasperated, sigh and think uhg, people still think this?

In the latter half of the 90s I was in high school and all of my friends were bi. Maybe that’s because I was in a very liberal town and went to an even more liberal school, but it just seemed natural to us. We were teenagers, so this bisexuality was largely theoretical. We were bi inasmuch as one can be bi when one is barely sexually active. Most of my friends were virgins and still thinking of sexual activity in terms of “bases” but we often made it clear, often just with words but sometimes with actions, that we would be happy to round those bases with people of any gender. We were too young to put it this way, but I think we all felt that we were just starting to figure out what sex and sexuality was so automatically ruling out half the population seemed a bit silly.

I first encountered biphobia when one of my less liberal classmates said she would never date a bi-guy because she didn’t want a dick inside of her after it had been in a butthole. I wonder how things went for this young lady when she found out that women also have buttholes. I wonder what happened when she realized that she, herself, had a butthole and odds were good that someone she dated would want to put his dick in it. Talk about a rude awakening.

I never encountered that particular strain of biphobia again but I have to say I think all bi-phobia is based on equally erroneous assumptions. But it still persists. And it is pervasive. It’s just as prevalent in the gay community as the straight community. People who actively fight for gay rights and trans rights, and accept every kinky/poly/genderqueer orientation you can name will still openly say “I don’t date bisexuals” or “Bisexuals don’t actually exist.” Otherwise rigorous historians are still quite committed to bi-erasure, declaring famous bisexual figures of the past either gay or straight, despite obvious evidence that they slept with people of varying genders.

I took to the internet to find as many arguments against bisexuality as I could, mostly to refute them, but also to see if I could find a reason why they endure. I’m going to skip over any “homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of god” type arguments because if you think that, I honestly don’t know how you’ve made it this far into the article. Pretty much all the arguments I could fins against dating bisexuals boils down to

1: Bisexuality is just a phase. This tired old idea usually takes the form of “all bi men are ‘really’ gay and all bi women are ‘really’ straight. In the gay world this often morphs into “All bi people are really straight.” No one ever seems to think that all bi women are “really” lesbians because, you know, who doesn’t want a penis, right?

Do I even need to say why this is ridiculous? Sure, in a world where people are expected to end up with a monogamous life partner, a lot of bisexuals will end up with a single partner. And it’s statistically probable that their partner will either be male or female. That will make them easy to label as “straight” or “gay” but that doesn’t change their actual sexual orientation. Sexual desire that you don’t happen to act on isn’t nullified after a certain point. There’s no statute of limitations on sexuality.

And I hope this goes without saying, but sex without penis is in no way less legitimate or enjoyable than sex with a penis. Dicks are just one item on a varied menu of erogenous zones and sources of pleasure. Some people like them, some don’t. Whether or not they do has only minor bearing on their sexuality.

2: Bisexuality is Greedy. Every time I hear this I’m forced to wonder, are these people only straight because they think its… polite somehow? Like sexuality is some kind of tea party where you simply couldn’t take another scone! Not with all these other guests waiting to be served! I don’t think Miss Manners covered this. 

This seems tied to the fear that gay people are attracted to every member of their gender. Gay men are attracted to all men. Bisexuals are attracted to everyone who has ever lived. Only straight people are allowed to have individual tastes for some reason. Again, this is pretty plainly ridiculous. Bisexuals date exactly the same amount of people that everyone else does. Their dating pool may seem larger but, really, it is subject to the same restrictions as everyone else (i.e. People they’re attracted to, who are nearby, available, and attracted to them.)

3: Bisexuals should have to pick a side. Our society is just so committed to its binaries, isn’t it? You have to be gay OR straight, you have to be male OR female, you have to be with this person OR that person. Why? No one is demanding that you only like blue OR green, hamburgers OR pizza. Of course not. But no one has centered our society around the supremacy of hamburgers over pizza. If they had, maybe we would have people insisting that they only really like hamburgers because only a deviant would want pizza. And maybe there would be pizza rebels who were so committed to the pizza cause that were afraid to admit that sometimes they felt like eating a hamburger.

In the one episode of Sex and the City acknowledges bisexuality’s existence, Carrie posits that “sexual flipping” will somehow obliterate gender. This same argument has been used to rail against women wearing pants, men shaving their faces, women having jobs, anyone getting in vitro fertilization, and a host of other things that have become quite common. Somehow gender has endured. But even if it didn’t, well, so what? The sun would still rise on a world without gender. People would still have jobs and families and hobbies. We’d all just be a little less worried that our clothes matched our genitals. Hardly seems worth the fuss, does it?

But there’s an assumption that I think underlies all of these fears. The idea that our  lovability is tied to our ability to perform our gender well. 

It’s an idea so old and ingrained, we never say it out loud. But it’s the foundation for every joke about a wife’s bad cooking, or a husband’s laziness. We laugh because a good husband would work harder and a good wife would be a great cook. Their marriage would be happy if they just played their parts better. It’s the basis for every story where and ugly duckling has to become beautiful in order to be loved and every romance that hinges on a man having to show bravery to win the heart of a woman. 

We tell ourselves “If I diet more/If I earn more/if I fuck better my partner will never leave me.” We are made jealous by people that we think would be better mates than us. We tell ourselves that if we are the “right” kind of girl or the “right” kind of guy, we will get the partner we want and they will love us forever. Almost every love story is based on this assumption. Like most assumptions, it is wrongheaded. A partner may leave us  or reject us for any reason and often that reason won’t have anything to do with us. The only real security a relationship can have comes from love and intimacy. True love comes from a partner that loves every part of you, not just the attractive parts. And true intimacy only comes from your partner seeing every part of you. Intimacy is what happens when the performance ends. That is a very vulnerable position to be in, largely because it lacks control. When you show your partner your core self, you have no control over whether or not they’ll love it. And if they don’t, you can’t change it. That’s why it is rare for relationships to get to a place of real intimacy. 

By comparison, a performance can be changed easily. We soothe our insecurities by striving to better perform our gender. We can change our hair, our physique, our clothes, our behavior. In a superficial relationship, this is what we obsess over. “What clothes should I wear?” “Which one of us should pay for dinner?” “Will my partner love me if I call them first?” “Will my partner love me if I fart in front of them?” We convince ourselves that if we just look and act the right way, we will be lovable. We will beat out the competition and win our love.

But if our partner is bisexual, we no longer have that comforting delusion. No matter how well we perform our gender, our partner may choose someone who’s performing an entirely different gender. And how can we compete with that? To be comfortable with a bisexual partner, you have to be comfortable with yourself enough to trust your partner to love you and not any kind of performance. That takes a lot of confidence. It’s a lot easier to believe that a bisexual partner is really straight or really gay. It’s so much easier to dismiss them as too greedy or untrustworthy to date.

But what would I know? I'm just a greedy, confused, bisexual. I probably don’t even exist.