As I have mentioned several times before, I’m a routine lurker (and very infrequent poster) on Lex, a queer text-based dating app that I have a love/hate (but mostly hate) relationship with. I could talk a lot about Lex (and often do!), but that’s not really the point of this newsletter. The reason I bring Lex up is because there’s a certain breed of post that pops up again and again, the “no one is monogamous anymore!” post. I despise these posts, second only to the “no one is poly here!!!” posts (and the fact that both exists suggests that people are just really not actually paying attention to anything outside themselves. But I digress).
This morning, I came across a particularly irritating take on the “no one is monogamous anymore!” post. “Too Boring For This App,” the headline declared, before going on to announce:
Just want an old-fashioned, intellectually stimulating monogamous romantic relationship with a masc person of any gender 35 or older where we do boring things like go to museums, eat out, walk in the park, see movie as, comfort each other come what may. Guess I’m barking up the wrong tree huh?
Reading through that ad, I got so irritated. It was partly because I hate when people whine on Lex — buddy, we’re all sad and lonely, that’s why we’ve been reduced to using a text-based dating and community app — but also because what this person is presenting as some rare unicorn of a request is literally the very relationship framework that all of society is set up to encourage and endorse. You think it’s challenging to find someone to be boring and monogamous with? Imagine what it’s like to look for anything even slightly more off the beaten path (contrary to what some people may think it is not actually that easy to get a queer polycule up and running). Imagine what it’s like to not just be queer, but to be actively pushing against the strictures of a culture that defaults to, and exclusively supports, monogamous partnerships.
Anyway. As I was being irritated about this, it occurred to me that what I was feeling — this frustration that someone had to center their very unremarkable loneliness in such an aggressive way — was, perhaps, not unlike the frustration that many queers express about the stereotypical Married White Cis Bisexual Who Is Sad About Not Being Seen As Queer While In A Mixed Gender Partnership™️ complaint that is often forefronted as the end all, be all of bi people’s experience of oppression.
And — and please actually read my full argument before getting annoyed at what I’m about to say — I gotta say those queers have a point? If you are a bisexual who is happily (and heterosexually) married, white, cis, and financially well-off to the point where your primary experience of biphobia is being sad that people don’t realize that you’re bi, then, yeah, you probably don’t need to be the center of the discussion on biphobia. You, a bi person, absolutely suffer in a biphobic society, but the specific way that it is manifesting in your life, personally, is maybe not the one that needs the most attention paid to it. (To be clear I also feel this way about a lot of cis white married rich gays who whine about inane shit.)
But (and this next bit is why I wanted you to keep reading before you got annoyed at me): the problem with so many discussions of biphobia is that they assume that all bisexuals are that happily (and heterosexually) married, white, cis, financially well-off person. I mean, I’m certainly not: while I check off many of the boxes of a stereotypical bi person, I’ve never been married and haven’t been seriously partnered in years. And happily married is doing a lot of work as well: I just stumbled on a paper that suggests that marriage actually makes bisexual health worse, not better; surprisingly enough, bisexuals in mixed gender partnerships tend to fare worse than ones in queer ones.
One of the core truths that I keep coming back to is that we often confuse the bisexuals who have the privilege to be visibly and openly bisexual — namely, white cis women in healthy and serious relationships with cis men — with the sum total of bisexuals, period. And I think that’s part of what leads to this “all bisexuals want to do is whine about how no one sees them as bisexual” shit. The people who have the resources — emotional, social, financial, etc — to talk the most about bisexuality and biphobia are also often the ones the least affected by it, and because we don’t have a robust framework for discussing biphobia the conversation atrophies to… sheerly the dumbest stuff possible, which reinforces the widespread belief that biphobia is petty and dumb.
And yet. You don’t get the stats I’ve seen for bisexual well being — the higher poverty rates, the increased risk of mental illness, the subpar health outcomes, the elevated rates of sexual assault and abuse — when the only problem faced by bisexuals is not being seen as bi. There’s a whole iceberg of bi experience, of bi pain, that is not being looked at; the tiny speck of conversations about whether or not bi people are seen as bi is just that one visible bit above the surface.
And we owe it to ourselves, to our community, to do better, to look for more. We owe it to ourselves and to our community to improve the conversation about biphobia, to stop fixating on the easiest things to talk about, and start looking at the various ways that bisexuals, as a whole, have been set up to fail.
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wrt to the sentence
“The people who have the resources — emotional, social, financial, etc — to talk the most about bisexuality and biphobia are also often the ones the least affected by it,”
I think in addition to this, lots of bisexuals don’t have the language nor the awareness that a lot of the issues they’re dealing with is connected to larger systemic issues affecting all bisexuals. a bisexual w mental health issues will be unable to realize that their bisexuality may have something to do w it until they realize that it’s endemic amongst all bisexuals. it also doesn’t help that bisexuals are not as organised into a community nor is it easy find other bisexuals irl given how many of us are not out. it’s really insidious i think.