Let's talk about porn.

Bi porn, specifically.

Earlier this week, I fell down a rabbit hole of link clicking that led me to this piece from Mashable’s 2022 Porn Week (did you know they did such a thing? I did not) that posits the question “Is bi porn problematic?”

When I opened the article, I assumed — as anyone who has had their brain rotted by years of covering the mainstream adult industry would — that the piece was going to be addressing the genre that the the porn world refers to as “bisexual porn.” Which is to say, I thought it was going to be about porn where male performers have sex with men as well as women. Because in the adult industry, that’s what people mean when they refer to a porn scene as “bi.” A scene where a woman is sexually intimate with men and women? That’s considered straight porn — possibly because the viewer is presumed to be a straight man, though I think more likely because in porn terms, a woman’s sapphism is not seen as a threat to her heterosexuality. (Notably, lesbian — or often “girl-girl” — porn can be called that even though no one assumes that lesbians are the intended audience; any porn scene with a trans performer in it automatically becomes trans porn even though the majority of it is shot with a straight cis male audience in mind.)

So it was a surprise to see that the bulk of the piece was actually talking about the representation of bi women in porn, which is really to say the representation of women in porn, since in porn, all women are assumed to be bi (which, honestly, kind of negates the identity, especially since they’re not really assumed to be bi, not in any way that implies agency or a potential threat to male sexual dominance). Indeed, the sole mention of male bisexuals comes in one paragraph towards the end of the piece:

Often, bisexual men are left out of the discourse. 

"Unfortunately, a lot of porn does not represent male bisexuality. Instead, it mirrors society and other industries. The porn industry still reproduces homophobia and punishes male bisexual performers. Luckily, things are changing for the better," Paulita, founder of porn site Lustery, tells me.

This is true, sort of, except that if you search “bisexual” on Pornhub, you will find yourself staring at a bunch of scenes of bi male porn, because that's what “bi porn” means to people who are looking for videos on Pornhub. I know this is true, because I just checked for myself. While it’s true in broad terms that male bisexuality is stigmatized in the adult industry (though the independence granted to performers by OnlyFans is chipping away at that) it seems weird to write a piece about “bi porn” and then insist that the kind of porn that shows up when you search for “bi porn” on a porn site doesn’t exist. (Truly, did the author of this piece actually do a single google search for “bi porn” before writing, I think not.)

To be honest, I don’t feel like the piece is actually engaging with the porn industry’s conception of bisexuality as a whole. What’s really being talked about here is threesomes, and specifically MFF threesomes (which are the majority of what shows up in a Pornhub search for “threesomes,” yes), which the the author confidently notes are “(pretty much) the sole portrayal of bisexual sex on tube sites.”

Which, what?

I guess there are two things going on here: if we’re talking about the representation of bisexuality in the context of a single porn scene, then it’s hard for me to imagine how, exactly, one would “represent bisexuality” without resorting to a threesome or group sex, because having someone have sex with multiple people of multiple genders in short order is kind of the only way to communicate bisexuality within a single scene. I guess you could do a scene where someone has two back to back but not intersecting trysts with partners of different genders? But that’s kinda just… two porn scenes glued together, isn’t it. Which brings me to my next point.

If we’re talking about the representation of bisexuality in porn in a more meta sense, and by looking at the cumulative arc of a performer’s career, considering scene after scene after scene (the way one, might, perhaps, look not at how many threesomes a bi person has had but at their lifelong long patterns of attraction and relationships), then it’s bizarre to focus on threesomes as the primary representation of bisexuality because, uh, they’re not.

I just clicked on the names of some of the current trending performers on Pornhub; every one of them had shot both boy-girl and girl-girl scenes (and usually some threesomes, sure). Because that’s literally how you build a career in porn as a woman, regardless of whether you are actually bisexual or not. You shoot scenes with other women and you shoot scenes with men. Some performers (especially ones with jealous boyfriends) will only do girl-girl, but it’s relatively rare for a woman to only shoot boy-girl, at least from what I saw in my numerous years covering the adult industry. And while I think that the expectation that women will all automatically do girl-girl scenes is one warranting deeper analysis in terms of what it says about the assumption that all women are “secretly bi,” or that female bisexuality is about male voyeurism, I think it’s also evidence that there’s plenty of representation of female bisexuality in porn that exists outside of threesome scenes. You just have to, you know, define “bisexual porn” as “performers who’ve shot different scenes with different partners of different genders” which is, again, basically all female porn performers.

Which, again, isn’t even how the industry defines “bisexual porn.” That’s MMF threesomes where the dudes break the golden rule.

Anyway. I do think there is a lot to be said about bisexuality in porn, both as it’s represented in pornography explicitly labeled “bisexual” and pornography which is not. Because mainstream porn is little more than a florid, no holds barred depiction of the id of society at large; and its insistence that men who “cross over” from gay porn to straight are vectors of disease to be treated with suspicion while everything about women’s sex lives is about male enjoyment, even the parts which don’t appear to involve men at all — I mean that’s telling a very clear story about how society sees bisexuality, period. And it goes so far beyond just what happens in some threesome scenes.

You just, you know, have to actually know something about porn to realize that, I guess. Which for some reason never seems to be a requirement for journalists who get paid to write about porn.

The B+ Squad knows what it is talking about.