My dear friend, the comedian Mike Brown, who you may be familiar with from his time as a correspondent on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, has a standup bit that I am 100% about to mangle.
The joke — which will hopefully exist as a clip online one day, so you can watch it yourself rather than having the subpar experience of me recounting it through text — goes something like this:
There are too many identities these days! It’s just too confusing. We really need to simplify things and bring it all back to the basics, i.e.
Trying to fuck and not trying to fuck.
Mike goes on to give examples (At work? Not trying to fuck), but I think you get the gist. And while it is, of course, a joke, it’s also just such a perfect breakdown of how I wish the world actually worked.
Like, what does it matter what genders of people I’ve been attracted to are if I’m not trying to fuck you, you know? To say that I am attracted to “men” or “women” or “non-binary people” is not to say that I am attracted to any one man or woman or non-binary person in particular, you know? Why are we pushed to talk about our sexual attraction in terms of this half of the planet or that half of the planet when it is always (always!) more specific than that?
To put it another way: in an earlier era, back when I had yet to unpack my internalized biphobia and still felt awkward about full-throatedly IDing as bi, I would often approach National Coming Out Day in a half joking manner. One year I tweeted that I was coming out as “attractiveosexual” — which, as I explained in the tweet, meant that “I like any and all attractive people.” The obvious joke here to me was that, you know, everyone is an “attractiveosexual”: we’re attracted to the people we find attractive. Why does gender have to be the primary way that we frame it?
And like, I know that so much of this is just a hangover from a heterosexist society that polices and criminalizes people having “the wrong kind” of sex, that we have to boldly own the fact that we’re into our own gender, or into multiple genders, because of all the time society devoted to telling us that we were wrong and bad for doing so. But at the same time: how dull, how boring, to be constantly defined by your oppressor, you know? How utterly exhausting to have to build a whole identity around liking more than one gender simply because society told you it was wrong to have those attractions.
It is, perhaps, weird to kick off Bi Awareness (Visibility?) Week by trying to undermine the whole concept of identifying as a bisexual in the first place, but honestly, I sometimes think that’s the only way through. Like, yeah, sure, if we must put on color coded hats that tell everyone what genders we’ve banged, then sure, make mine the bi pride colors, please. But wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where everyone was just attractiveosexual; a world where we were just trying to fuck/not trying to fuck, with the freedom to shift and evolve the boundaries of each category without any worry about how our current attractions map to our past our future ones?
I think it would be great, anyway.
PS My bi(rthday) is Wednesday! I’m going to be 41! Feel free to shower me with cash!
Brilliant writing 🤩
Bi on your own terms, not defined by the oppressor
love it, resonates
Trying to fuck/trying not to fuck...perfect!! It occurs to me that most of my incessant talk about sex and sexuality during my life fits into a couple of loose categories. Category 1; letting people know my attractions and proclivities so as to attract and find like-minded folks. Category 2; talking about MY sex and sexuality and, more broadly, sex and sexuality in general as a process of owning who I am and casting off shame. In many cases in the past this took the dangerous form of measuring my worth against people's reactions to me.
I still talk a great deal about sex and sexuality. It's super fascinating and deep how complicated and unique are the things that turn us on...and off.
I agree...it doesn't matter the gender, genitals or style of dress of anyone we find attractive. It's just an aspect of being human. Religions, cultures and their power structures feel somehow threatened by humans experiencing the pleasure of which we are all capable. I aspire to keep trying to fuck...