Bimisogyny vs Bimisandry

There is a difference.

When I talk about the forces that oppress bi people, I generally use the catch all “biphobia,” but as a bi woman, and a cis bi woman specifically, my primary frame of reference here is bimisogyny (and, again, the specific flavor of bimisogyny that is experienced by cis women). That is my starting point, that is my lived experience: I can witness what other bi people go through, and I can theorize about it, but I can only directly speak to bimisogyny as I have experienced it.

And thus I think it is worth taking a second to clarify these terms, to explain the contours of these specifically gendered forms of biphobia, to observe what it is that sets us apart even as we are united under the broader umbrella of biphobia writ large.

So let’s begin with bimisandry, the flavor of biphobia that people are often most willing to acknowledge as real (I mean if they’re willing to acknowledge that biphobia exists at all). I personally think of bimisandry as a form of hyperhomophobia: not simply a hatred of gay men, but an almost pathological fear of the gayness that might be lurking everywhere, under cover of dark, secretly infiltrating heterosexuality with an intent to take it down. Bi men are assumed to be secretly gay both because people just don’t believe that bisexuality exists, but also because they are imagined to be covert agents from the gay world, here to ruin the lives of poor straight women, whether by cheating on them with men or contaminating them in some way (hence the grotesque paranoia about bi men being vectors of disease who bring HIV into the straight community).

In the gay community, bimisandry seems to be less intense (though again, I can only speak to this as an outsider looking in) — rather than double agents intent on bringing down the whole organization, bi men are spoken of as noncommittal, as in a phase, as probably closeted and untrustworthy. None of which is to downplay the bigotry bi men face from other queers — but it primarily seems to be an impatience with these men for holding on to the facade of interest in straightness well past the point when they should be giving up the game.

Bimisogyny, on the other hand, feels less rooted in homophobia, and more like misogyny taken to a poisonous extreme. In the straight world, this manifests as bi women being reduced to nothing more than playthings; super sluts whose primary purpose is to fulfill male sexual fantasies — whether that means group sex, or going to strip clubs, or being one of the boys but also a girl who you can fuck*. Bi women, as I have noted before, face a far higher risk of intimate partner violence and sexual assault than our straight and lesbian peers; certainly, this assumption that we are not people, but sex toys, exacerbates those rates of abuse**. Even when our bisexuality leads men to believe we’ll cheat, it often feels like a metastasized version of the paranoia many men inflict on their straight partners — it’s just instead of preventing us from hanging out with other men, they insist we can’t hang out with anyone, as people of all genders now pose an adultery threat.

And while it might sound odd to accuse lesbians of misogyny, well, the bimisogyny that comes from queer communities is (surprise!) rooted in misogyny as well. How else can we explain this conviction that bi women do not exist as individuals, but are merely extensions of our sexual partners (who are, of course, always assumed to be men)? How else can we explain that when bi women are victimized by men, we are seen as “asking for it” because we were stupid enough to not fully commit to lesbianism? This conviction that bi women are permanently tainted by penises, that we contaminate the spaces we’re in by the ghosts of the men we’ve fucked — that’s not a hatred of men. It’s the same grotesque purity politics peddled by abstinence only sex ed programs across the country. It’s misogyny.

These are just the basic frameworks though. There are, of course, other variations and manifestations: bi people of color***, trans bi people, bi people living in poverty — name an axis of oppression, and there’s a way that it affects a person’s experience of biphobia (generally for the worse). I can’t speak to all of these, but I am always eager to learn more. (Seriously, if you want to email me to tell me more about how you, specifically, experience biphobia, I will absolutely read it and, with your permission, possibly even share it here!)

PS I’m heading to the West Coast for a vacation tomorrow so this newsletter may be more sporadic for the next week but I will do my best!

* I could write a whole thesis on how Lily Aldrin from How I Met Your Mother is a pretty gross manifestation of a straight man’s fantasy of a bi woman.

** With regards to rape specifically I suspect there is some element of “corrective rape” involved — i.e. an attempt to sexually assault the gayness out of us — but my primary experience has been with men who assume that because a woman is bi she has no boundaries at all.

*** I always want BIPOC to mean that