It's a sad reality that many people remain insistent on seeing human sexuality as something that can be easily broken down into two camps, the “straights” and the “queers.” This is stupid for so many reasons — not least that it relies on a Western and specifically Christian understanding of sexuality and gender in order to be enforced, and once we start factoring in the numerous cultures where same sex intimacy and non-binary genders are de rigueur it all kind of falls apart* — but, regrettably, it is how a lot of people view the world.
And because it’s how people view the world, bi people are often left in a challenging position. Yes, we’re queer — at least insomuch as we are definitely not straight — and yet many of us spend at least part (if not the majority) of our lives in straight spaces, dating straight people and living in accordance with their understanding of the world. It’s not unusual for bi people to see ourselves as permanent outsiders bouncing between these two camps, travelers with no home who go back and forth between other people’s countries depending on our whims.
Or, if you will, a vector between straightness and queerness.
The most common way of framing bi people as vectors is an unambiguously negative one. During the height of the AIDS epidemic, bi men were frequently accused of funneling HIV from the gay world to the straight world (and, to a lesser extent, bi women were accused of introducing it into the lesbian population). More recently, this “bi people as a contaminant” idea is talked about in more abstract ways — bi women polluting queer spaces with straight boyfriends being the one that most readily comes to mind — but it is still very much present.
However.
There’s another way that bi people, or at least bi women, are treated as a vector, and this one is ostensibly positive, though I would argue that once you scratch the surface it is not, in fact, positive at all.
To wit, take a look at this post I saw on Instagram:
In theory, this is positive, no? It depicts bi women as Kate McKinnon! Who doesn’t want to be Kate McKinnon, let alone a Kate McKinnon who is being lovingly adored by Ryan Gosling? And the general vibe is clearly intended to be positive and affirming: bi women! We make our straight boyfriends better, and they love us for it!
But oh my god, I cannot stress how much I hate this.
There is nothing flattering about being a vector — whether a vector of disease (literal or figurative) or a vector of positive ideas and influence — because to be a vector is, fundamentally, not to be a person. A bi woman who is being celebrated for exposing her straight boyfriend to better politics, better ways of being, is a bi woman who is being reduced to a conduit through which politics and culture flow in order to edify and improve straight men.
I fucking hate it.
It’s like Manic Pixie Dream Girl + “I can fix him!” but with a bisexual twist: bi women using our vaginas to get straight men to see that there are better ways of being. It feels like an attempt to justify the “betrayal” of fucking straight dudes by positioning it as a service we are doing for the queer community — don’t you see, we’re missionaries of queerness, spreading its gospel one fuck at a time.
I get so disgusted by this idea that it’s hard for me to express what it is, specifically, that sets me off in a coherent way, so I’m going to try to break it down point by point in the hopes that that will help me more clearly communicate:
I am not here to fix men. Like, full stop. It’s not my job. If I want to fuck a trash straight dude, that is my business and my business alone. If a straight dude wants to learn about queer culture because he likes me so much, then fine, but it’s on him to educate himself, not on me to put together a slideshow of Queerness and Progressive Politics 101.
Not all bi women have good politics! Bari Weiss exists!
Bi women don’t help straight men, straight men harm bi women. This is probably the one that makes me the angriest. Bi women face a much higher risk for abuse and assault than our straight and lesbian peers, and it is men — and especially straight men — who post the biggest danger to us. There is something so vile about framing a population highly likely to be raped and abused by straight men as the “saviors” of straight men, like, if anything, straight men should be saving us from them.
You don’t need to justify your desire to date straight men. You just don’t, okay? The person I have felt the closest to, have come the closest to dating, in recent memory is a straight man. It is what it is. I could tell you all the reasons why this straight man is different from other straight men — in some ways he is, in some ways he isn’t — or talk up how great he is, but honestly, who gives a fuck? It’s not really any of your business who I feel close to, who I feel connected with. Indeed, I would argue that a major component of queer liberation is that it’s no one’s fucking business who any of us bed down with. If you want to fuck a straight dude, that’s enough. You don’t need to turn it into some whole thing about how you’re “improving” him — not least because that’s an impossible goal. If he wants to improve, he’s gotta do it himself.
Anyway. I think that sums it up. Smash the binary and toss that vector framing in the trash, people! We’re not traveling between “two worlds” because there aren’t “two worlds.” There’s just one world with endless amounts of sexual diversity.
* Yes that’s a whole other essay
PS I’m going on a much needed family vacation this week, which is also going to be a little bittersweet because my dad was still alive when we planned it, and it’s the first big family trip without him. All of which is to say: I probably won’t be posting as regularly, but it’s just because I will be too busy sunning myself by a pool or paddling around the Chesapeake Bay.
F-ing perfect, thanks! I hope the time with your family is restful, sad & healing in all the right ways.
Have a lovely rejuvenating time. This was very cogent and well said.