First, the last thing I plan to say about threesomes for the foreseeable future:
The problem with any Discourse™️ around bi women and MFF threesomes is that whatever way you slice it, you have a bi woman being victimized by another bi woman. If you take the side of the beleaguered and harassed potential thirds, then you’ve slotted the bi woman threesome seeker into the position of villain. If you argue that women seeking out a threesome with their male partner are just ladies trying to have a good time, then you’re casting the women who feel put upon and objectified into that slot. You could — as I sometimes do, since it was an experience I lived through — frame the whole thing as a man manipulating two women to serve his own selfish ends, but that removes all agency from the women involved, which is its own problem.
And yes, of course there are plenty of MFF threesomes where everyone has a great time and it’s wonderful but those are not the threesomes anyone does Discourse™️ about.
The problem with talking about these threesomes and the ways they go awry, in other words, is that it is impossible to frame all bi women as a united front here. A bi woman is always the villain, a bi woman is always the victim. Threesome Discourse™️ is, inevitably, a site of intracommunity violence, and it is always going to sap my energy and exhaust me, because I do see all sides. I do feel empathy for everyone — and I have that on top of my own trauma and my own baggage that makes all of this not just a thought exercise for me, but something that I feel, deeply, in my bones.
Anyway. That is, as I said above, the last thing I plan to say about threesomes for the foreseeable future, unless it is to talk about how more people should be talking about an MFF threeway where both ladies are wearing strap-ons and do an Eiffel Tower over the dude, because, come on, more people should be talking about that. But I do think this is a useful jumping off point for another topic, a topic that I do want to talk about, which is intracommunity violence.
Every marginalized community I am a part of — and as a queer bisexual Jewish woman (and a descendent of Holocaust survivors at that), I am a part of several — likes to position itself as a united front, with someone inevitably offering themselves up as a Representative of the Community™️ who can speak to its broad collection of needs, usually by presenting said group as a permanent underclass that has exclusively been wronged. But this is, of course, a farce: none of these groups are actually unified, and all of them contain both victims and victimizers. Indeed, all of them engage in intracommunity violence. Women hurt women, Jews hurt Jews, queers hurt queers, and yes, bi people hurt bi people.
I’ve mentioned before that my abuser was a bi man, that both his bisexuality and mine were woven into my experience of abuse. That’s just one experience of intracommunity violence — and there are many others, including but not limited to transphobic cis bisexuals, or white bisexuals who erase and drown out their colleagues of color, or the hyperqueer bisexuals who position their heteroromantic counterparts as traitors — but it is one that has been incredibly instructive for me, personally. What does it mean to say that I stand with all bisexuals when my life was nearly destroyed by one? What does it mean to present bisexuals as a permanent class of victim when I know exactly what it is to be victimized by one?
And the thing for me, ultimately — which is the thing that shapes so much of my politics — is that I do not believe that membership in a marginalized group lends anyone a permanent status as a victim. I do not believe in victimhood as an identity, really. To say that I am fighting for bi people is not to say that Bi People Did Nothing Wrong™️ — a statement that is baffling in its fundamental dehumanization of bi people, quite frankly. To say that I am fighting for bi people is to say that I am fighting to dismantle structures that disproportionately harm bi people. It is not to say that bi people are somehow perpetually innocent — least of all when it comes to our interactions with one another. It is not to say that all criticisms of bi people (and especially bi individuals) are inherently biphobic — because if we cannot criticize our own, well. That way lies madness (as evidenced by, for instance, ultra Orthodox Jews who insist that members of their community criticizing their schools for violating the law by refusing to provide students with their legally mandated secular education is … antisemitism).
Which is also not to say that criticisms of bi people are never biphobic, either! I always struggle with public discussions of Kyrsten Sinema, who absolutely sucks but also seems to be a magnet for both sexist and biphobic criticisms. She sucks and deserves criticism, and yet I cannot help but be sensitive to the ways in which she is criticized; the ways that I myself might criticize her. What does it look like to call out another bi person for doing harm without falling into the trap of doing a biphobia, without using their bisexuality against them? (To say that the criticism is coming from inside the community is, itself, not necessarily a defense given, well, everything I said above about intracommunity violence.)
You could drive yourself crazy thinking too deeply about this; to be honest, I myself have. And again and again, the only thing I can come back to is that people need the freedom to live their lives, and people need to work to not harm other folks, and that biphobia harms us all by reducing personal freedom and alienating bisexuals from community support. That’s the best I have right now. Hopefully, for today, it is enough.
I know I have been on a commenting a spree today but I just wanted to let you know I cannot stress enough how cathartic your newsletter is for me & how much it makes me feel seen, heard & understood, & also question my own biases & beliefs. have a lovely day whenever u see this 🤍