It is hard to see outside yourself.
A further dismantling of the idea of the "universal" bi experience.
About twenty years ago, I went on a few dates with another bi woman who I met on Nerve Personals. Nothing really came of it, aside from her “lending” me a corset that eventually just became mine when we drifted apart, but there is one conversation that we had that has always stuck with me.
We were at Route 66, a Hell’s Kitchen restaurant that I am shocked to learn still exists, and she was sharing her feelings on sex with women versus sex with men with me. The way it basically broke down was this: sapphic sex was so much more intimate and required so much more of a connection with a partner. With sapphic sex, one had to be immersed in one’s partner, unlike straight sex, where you could easily bend over and tune out while getting pounded to high heaven by whomever happened to be behind you. You didn’t have to care about a male partner the way you might with a woman, basically — and that made her far more picky about girlfriends than boyfriends.
When she said this to me, it intuitively made so much sense that I just accepted it as a universal truth. Indeed it was only about fifteen years later, when I made an offhand comment to a bi friend about how much easier casual sex with men was as compared to casual sex with women, that I realized that maybe this was not how everyone saw the world — a message that was reinforced yet again, somewhat recently, when another bi friend commented that while she’s incredibly picky about the cis men she beds down with, she’ll basically “fuck anyone with a vagina.”
One of the interesting things about sex is that, despite the fact that many people do it, we are all only really privy to the intimate details of our own sexual exploits. Bisexual people get access to a slightly wider perspective by virtue of our expansive tastes — but even then, we are not experts on queer sex vs straight sex, or sex with one gender vs sex with another, so much as we are experts on how we, as individuals, move through these experiences, these expectations, these intimate encounters.
I think it’s easy to forget that in a world where, for instance, you see people going viral on Twitter with takes about how sapphic sex is all focused on the divine feminine, on intimate emotional connection and soul bonding, rather than crass considerations like fucking and coming. Is it like that for some people? Sure! But sapphic sex is also many other things, just like straight sex is, just like gay sex is, just like all sex is. What is sex but a blank canvas on which we paint the intricacies of our intimacies? Every one of us is an artist unfurling our own unique and beautiful encapsulation of the experience — and every one of us is bringing a complex cocktail of past encounters and present emotions and the specifics of our relationship with a partner (or partners) to whatever work of art we create.
Generalizations are comforting, of course. It is nice to see things like “sex with women” and “sex with men” and “straight sex” and “queer sex” as predictable, preset quantities. It brings some comfort to the utter terror of stripping naked with a person and being your most vulnerable self, a script makes everything easier. But this belief so many of us have that the script is somehow real, something biologically determined rather than just a convenience we rely on to make our lives easier? That’s no good, friends. And the more we allow ourselves to recognize that we can, at most, just generalize about ourselves and our experiences and nothing beyond that, well — it’s a scary world to confront, I get that. But it’s at least a much more honest one.
This really spoke to me