With allies like these...

Please stop "busting" myths

Well, here we are, almost to the end of Bisexual Visiwareness Week, which concludes tomorrow with Bisexual Awaribility Day. It’s been relatively underwhelming!

I mean, it was a good week for me personally: I turned 41 and people gave me gifts and I got to see Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway (Daniel Radcliffe! Jonathan Groff!). But in terms of The Bisexual Community™️, I would say this Visiwareness Week did not accomplish much. My Google alerts for bisexual and bisexuality didn’t look markedly different than they usually do. There didn’t seem to be any big bisexual packages from legacy pubs. It was just… business as usual.

Which… I mean honestly I’m a little torn about. On the one hand: If people were still pretending to care about Bisexual Visiwareness Week I might actually have been able to place some bisexual stories! Editors might have given a shit about my bisexual takes! It would have been very nice for me, personally.

But on the other hand — given the quality of most coverage of bisexuals and bisexual issues, maybe it’s… for the best that the media is sitting this one out. A girl can only read so many listicles about Bisexual Myths™️, you know? Especially since at some point it starts to feel like those lists are just reinforcing the myths they claim to bust: how many times can someone read about how bisexuals aren’t dirty, nasty, cheating sluts without, uh, thinking that perhaps the lady doth protest too much?

And also… I just… I just don’t feel like people understand what bisexuals actually need*. There’s this assumption that we need to be normalized, documented, explained — that we need to be scrutinized by anthropologists and written up in a series of papers. There’s this assumption that our freedom comes through the most exacting of classifications — hence this bizarre “debunking” article that tells its readers that it’s a myth that “bisexual people are the same as pansexual people,” which… what? Who is this even for? How is the blurry line between who IDs as bi and who IDs as pan in any way important (let alone worth elevating to Bisexual Myth™️ status)?

I mean, honestly though: I think there are a couple of overlapping issues here. I think that, for starters, people don’t like to think too deeply about the reality of bi oppression — about the poverty rates, the suicide attempts, the shitty health — because it doesn’t vibe with their understanding how the world works. Bisexuals, oppressed? What next, are you going to tell me that nonmonogamous people are structurally discriminated against by a system that insists that only monogamous partnerships are legitimate and deserving of legal protection and rights? It’s one thing to think of bi hardship in the sense of “oh, people are kinda mean to bisexuals and that’s shitty.” It’s another to really wrestle with the contours of what it means for bisexuals to be socially isolated from support systems, shut out of resources, and bombarded with messages about how terrible we are — to contend with the fact that bi problems extend beyond “need a different hair cut so people know I fuck multiple genders” or “can’t bring my boyfriend to a party.”

And I also think that, well — the ultimate solution to this is one that a lot of people don’t like. Right now, progress is framed in terms of bisexuals coming out: the first openly bisexual this, the first openly bisexual that. I’m totally for it — I think the lack of out bisexuals is a problem because of the way it suggests bisexuality is somehow shameful — but I also feel like it puts the onus on bisexuals; forcing us to put our private business in the public square, forcing us to plead with the masses to recognize our humanity (this is probably why it’s an appealing strategy for those masses).

What if true progress isn’t about decoding bisexuals, but about dismantling the system that centers people’s sexuality in the first place? What if bisexuals would be most helped, not by a system that forces us to stand up and be counted, but by a system that acknowledges that there are many ways of being sexual and they’re all wonderful and individual people’s proclivities and alignments matter about as much as whether or not we’re Team Pizza or Team Hot Dog?

It seems so simple, and yet it’s a much harder, much more radical ask — one that asks us to fully divest from the heteronormative mindset, not by accepting that being gay or bi or ace is valid, but by accepting that it doesn’t matter. By accepting that trying to figure out the gender of someone's sexual partners within the first few minutes of meeting them and then basing your entire assessment of their identity on that alone is actually… a pretty heteronormative worldview, one that insists that sexual identity and behavior must name itself, must be considered, before someone’s humanity can be approved.

And don’t get me wrong: I’m just as guilty of that mindset as everyone else. I am still listening to ignore the little voice instructing me to put everyone into boxes based on who and how they fuck. But after almost a year of this newsletter (tomorrow is its first anniversary!), I just can’t shake the feeling that that, more than anything else, is the necessary work.

But, you know… it’s kind of hard to build a week of media blitz around that.

* I mean, a lot of bisexuals don’t understand why bisexuals actually need, which is probably contributing to this mess that we’re in.