This is not the bi visibility we were looking for
Please don't weaponize my identity to harass celebs
There’s an article I was reading the other week — I think in the Daily Mail — that I have since lost track of; to be honest, I was only reading it because it popped up in my Google alert for “bisexual” and I wanted to see what, exactly, was bisexual about it in the first place.
The article in question, I should note, was about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s recently released memoir. And the bisexuality in question appeared in a parenthetical, after the author noted that Pinkett-Smith denied being a lesbian (she did not, the author noted, explicitly deny being bisexual).
There was something very gross to me about that use of bisexuality, and I was thinking of writing an essay about it, but then the Daily Mail (I think it was that outlet) piece got deleted from my tabs and I couldn’t find it and figured that was a sign.
But then, this Taylor Swift stuff started popping up in my inbox.
I should note right now that I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Taylor Swift. I mean, I’m certainly not a Swiftie, but I’m also not opposed to her or anything (it would be kind of pathetic to be a forty-one year-old woman taking a strong anti-Taylor Swift stance, I think). So do not expect me to have some deep knowledge of the lore of Taylor Swift: to me, she is simply a lady who recorded some songs.
But she is also a lady who — just like Jada Pinkett-Smith — has had charges of bisexuality weaponized against her, which I know because of several news stories recounting the prologue to 1989 (Taylor’s Version). As I understand the situation, a young Taylor found herself bereft at the public’s insistence that she must necessarily be romantically involved with any man she was seen in public with, and decided to switch to hanging out with female friends exclusively — only to discover that female friends were also assumed to be her romantic partners, no matter how much she reiterated that she is straight.
There’s a lot going on here: in general, I find it deeply creepy when people do slash fiction about actual people; the obsession with who celebrities may or may not be dating disturbs me in a way I don’t always know how to put into words, except to say that celebrities deserve privacy too, that having millions of people obsessively dissecting your personal life and making up theories about it is a deeply distressing experience.
But in this case it’s even worse, because it’s not just about people turning a total stranger’s love life into their entertainment. It’s bisexuality being weaponized to undermine people’s — and specifically women’s, I think gender matters here — self determination. It’s the specter of bisexuality as a way of denying someone control over their own narrative: sure, you say you’re straight (or, in Jada’s case, not gay), but can we really be sure you’re not bisexual? And if you’re bisexual, then it is once again open season on the rumors: if you are bisexual, you have no escape from people’s prying eyes.
It’s bisexuality — an identity which, to me, is supposed to be about freedom from societal expectation and judgment — flipped into a tool of the panopticon, bisexuality not as freedom from surveillance, but as an excuse for the most aggressive surveillance possible. Ugh, no thank you.
Just leave Jada and Taylor (and all the rest) alone, thanks!
I think with the Taylor Swift thing, it would be interesting to consider why she gets that treatment given that a lot of the time, women who are actually are bisexual struggle to have that acknowledged. Even when a woman is actively dating another woman a lot of people just assume they're friends. I haven't really heard of other straight female celebrities having so many rumours about them with other women. I just wonder if there's a reason Taylor Swift is on the receiving end of that.