Can we not?

On bad listicles.

For a long time — the vast majority of the decades I have spent as an out bi woman! — I was pretty checked out when it came to writing about bisexuality. Then, last fall, I began writing short essays about bisexuality nearly every goddamn day. The motivation for these wildly opposed states, one in which I largely ignored anything anyone had to say about being bi, and one in which I made thinking about bisexuality a part of my regular practice, were ultimately the product of the same phenomenon: a lot of the public discourse about bisexuality is very very bad.

It is very very bad, and for a long time that just made me want to check out and live my life, and then, in my late thirties, it occurred to me that maybe actually a better move would be to try to improve the quality of the conversation. Because it’s not that there is no good writing or thought about bisexuality — I may be wildly egotistical, but I’m not conceited enough to pretend that I alone am saying smart things about being bi. There’s a lot of fascinating research, and decades’ worth of queer theory about bisexuality that’s really good, really thoughtful, really smart. It just doesn’t seem to penetrate the mainstream consciousness.

And perhaps it is foolish of me to even suggest that I could help turn the tides on that, but after many so many decades of silently ignoring what passes for mainstream bi discourse I just had to say something, because the stuff that’s promoted by the mainstream, even mainstream queer pubs — it’s just really bad. So bad. Honestly bad enough that sometimes I have to wonder if the whole thing is a psyop intended to make bisexuals look bad so that no one takes us seriously. Because, like… why else would you publish some of this stuff?

The latest object of my ire is a Pride.com listicle titled “7 Awkward Moments Only Bisexuals Have to Deal With.” The fact that this piece is on Pride.com — a website that mostly seems to traffic in celebrity gossip and listicles, a kind of gay BuzzFeed minus BuzzFeed News, I guess — is already a bad sign, but the premise theoretically has legs. Let’s talk about the unique, specific injustices endured by the bisexuals, right? Let’s talk about those bispecific anxieties!

This piece does not do that.

The first item on the list “the stigma,” feels kind of weird, simply because it’s hardly as though other queers don’t have to deal with stigma, right? But one can forgive this if we assume it’s a specific bi stigma that’s being talked about here (although how stigma counts as an “awkward moment” I cannot be sure). Hey we’ve got six more items on this list and maybe they just started with a dud, right?

But then we get to:

2. The couple crush

No, bisexuals don’t run all over the scene tracking down couples and soliciting threesomes. But often we will meet a couple and have an attraction to one or the other of the pair. And watching them figure out whom I'm crushing on while looking pointedly at my iPhone? Awkward.

I’m not going to lie: this was the item that inspired me to write this piece. Because WHAT???

In what universe are bisexuals the only people who have crushes on couples? A universe where all couples are straight, I guess, because… WHAT. I’m trying to understand how a writer for Pride.com, how the editorial staff of Pride.com, all signed off on a piece that ignores that gay men, lesbians, and even straight people can all have crushes on couples where both members are of the same gender. Making this even more baffling is that the copy on this item isn’t even about having a crush on both members of a couple, but simply having a crush on one of them and leaving them to figure out which one it is which… again, how is this a bi-specific awkward moment?

I will spare you the rest of the piece, which is just — honestly at this point I’m starting to wonder if the whole thing was just written in ChatGPT, because it’s really that bad. But then I went and asked ChatGPT to write a piece with the same title and while its version was dry and boring it might have actually been better?

Anyway.

I say it feels like a psyop because when most of what people see by and about bisexuals is this bad, this trivial, it’s easy to internalize the idea that bisexuals are, you know, embarrassing whiners; dumb dumbs who confuse people thinking we’re cringe for actual oppression. And I don’t totally know if the people writing this stuff think they’re actually hitting on the meat of biphobia, if they think they’re making a serious and valid point, or if… if they really are doing a psyop (sometimes it feels like they are!).

Because in a world where bisexuality is linked to so much suffering — poor mental and physical health, increased rates of abuse, higher likelihood of poverty — there is so much more to say than just “teehee, we have crushes on couples and that’s awkward!” And it would be nice if it felt like more places were willing to give us a platform to have those discussions.

But if not, well… at least we have Substack.