Who is a bisexual woman?

On the construction of bi womanhood.

Last week, in the course of writing about Alan Cumming’s consistently memory-holed bisexuality*, I posited that American society breaks bisexual men down into two broad categories: the “real” bi men, who are functionally straight men who are happy to fuck all comers**, and the “fake” bi men, who are just gay men in denial. For bi women, I think the calculus is even simpler: all bi women are fake.

To the extent that female bisexuality is believed to exist, it is mostly as an extension of a generalized female hypersexuality: women fuck women because we are evolutionarily designed to be passive receptacles of someone else’s sexual desire*** (or in another interpretation, women fuck women because men find it hot). Every few years, someone will release, or revisit, an academic study about how, unlike the picky penis, the vagina just gets wet for everything; if the vulva is so indiscriminate in its sexual arousal, then women’s sexual exploits can’t actually be taken seriously (obviously vagina == woman and penis == man is a trans-erasing oversimplification but literally everything in this framework is an offensive oversimplification so it’s par for the course) . A woman who dates women and men is presumed to be dating men but simply fucking women; and this, of course, makes her a straight girl who is just playing pretend. If there are “real” bi women, they are lesbians with a history of dating men — and even in those situations, the bisexuality comes with an asterisk, a presumption that the woman in question is merely a lesbian who was in denial the whole time.

I want to pause here and acknowledge an obvious contradiction in the framework that I’ve laid out. If being a hypersexual hetero renders male bisexuality “real,” then why are those men’s female counterparts “fake'“? I’d offer that it’s two-fold: firstly, that the taboo against gay male sex is so firmly embedded in our culture that any man who ventures that way necessarily queers himself****. And secondly, that lesbian sex is simply not understood as sex. Like what do the gals even do together, you know? Dress up in lingerie and hug? When all women are hypersexual but sapphic sex doesn’t count we find ourselves in a situation where, as Shiri Eisner points out in her book Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, all women are bi, and thus no women are. (Also feels worth noting that just because something is a cultural belief that doesn’t mean it’s in any way logically sound; many — perhaps most — cultural beliefs are shot through with internal contradictions but we cling to them all the same.)

In addition to being fake, bi womanhood — or at least explicit claiming of bisexuality as an identity — is presumed to be the domain of a specific type of woman, one who is well-off, college-educated, white, conventionally feminine, and cis. (Which, yes, describes me.) Who else, it’s implied, has the time to be so navel gazey as to turn their college sexploits into an identity, an axis of oppression? Who else is so pampered, so spoiled, as to assert what is functionally a sexual whim as an actual aspect of their personhood?

It should go without saying that I think this entire understanding of bi womanhood — both in terms of the “reality” of bi female identity and the assessment of who, exactly, is identifying as bi — to be total bunk. And yet it weighs on me all the same. How could it not? Even as a woman who is “allowed” to claim bisexuality, the drumbeat insistence that I was just a horny straight girl, that my sapphic attractions were simply a product of constant exposure to sexualized imagery of women, that any queerness was insubstantial and a ploy for attention***** — I mean I started to believe it. I really did.

I struggled to imagine another model of female bisexuality — and since I superficially resembled the stereotypical fake bi girl, it seemed pointless to even try, like it was even more navel-gazey to imagine I might be some different, special, kind of cis white bi girl. And so I ignored the obvious signs. I ignored how gay I had been as a teenager and early twentysomething. I ignored my discomfort with heterosexual domesticity. Most tellingly of all, I ignored how my insatiable desire for male attention, for male affection, was masking a disturbing imbalance: I needed men to love me twice as hard because I could not love them back, I could only reflect their desire for me back at them, could only deeply want to be wanted and confuse that with love.

Nobody had made me aware that the kind of bi woman I ultimately concluded I am — a woman-loving woman who enjoys occasional dalliances in the sandbox of hetero sex — actually existed, and so I spent an astounding amount of time not actually understanding what I was, what I wanted. I have to believe that I’m not alone in this — that other women struggle to truly understand the contours of their own bisexuality, or even to see themselves as bi in the first place. So many of us are laboring under the belief that to be bi is to be defined by our attraction to men, to be boxed in by the expectations of heterosexuality, and I am here to tell you, as loudly as I can, that there is no one way to be a bisexual woman, that bi women are infinite in our attractions and relationship structures and gender presentations.

There are, of course, the feminine bi party girls who are down for a threesome or a club make out but could never fathom actually dating another woman (and they, too, are valid); but there are also women like me, for whom sex with men is the fun party game and women the ones you really want to settle down and make a life with. There are butch bi women, and androgynous ones, and bi women whose gender presentation confounds the very logic and bounds of heteronormativity. And each and every bi woman has her own relationship to sex — one that can vary, not merely from that of other bi women, but across the span of her own sexual journey, where a past self and a present self and a future self might bear only the most superficial resemblance to one another.

These things I’m saying, I know they’re simple. Perhaps they feel obvious. And yet. I know I spent years walking around with the knowledge that bi women — that anyone — can be anyone they choose to be, sexually or romantically, and yet I did not truly believe it. At least not for me. I believed that other people could have this freedom, but that I, somehow, was stuck******. And so I want to give you the space, the breathing room, to consider the possibility that you, too, are stuck, that you are going through life using someone else’s instruction manual.

And I want you to know, to hear, to really believe this: bi women are infinite. Even if one of those bi women is you.

* Did you forget that he was bi already?

** Ha ha

*** How do two passive receptacles manage to break through the inertia and fuck each other? It’s a mystery.

**** This is fodder for another essay, but just to put out an example: when I expressed confusion at the assertion that HBO Max’s Peacemaker’s titular character was “obviously” bi in the text, folks mentioned a scene where he appears in bed with a male friend and a woman — seemingly ignoring that many straight men have MMF threesomes where they collaborate to fuck a woman but don’t touch each other, even though SNL did a whole digital short about this — and some jokes about male/male prison sex, which… like I said, it’s fodder for another essay. But the point remains, the merest suggestion of gay renders men queer in a way it doesn’t for women.

***** Which is why it should not come as a surprise that I wrote my first book about the lies women tell about sex. Buy my book!

****** Not unlike the voice in my head that says “Everyone’s body is a great body! … except for yours you ugly bitch.”