(thump!)
That was me, fainting from astonishment. Could it be trooooooo…?
I did not make that headline up for the purposes of this post. No, that is actually, really the headline of this article from MSNBC Health.
Bisexuality.
I tend to subscribe to the theory that human beings* are innately bisexual as a group, with massive individual variance in degree of bisexuality.
I have a close female relative who has been married twice (to men) and sometimes does indeed want a man, though overall she prefers women; I have another female relative who has only dated one man and definitely, strongly prefers women; I have two female friends who had a very close relationship that sometime spilled into the sexual before one of them married–the one who married genuinely has no preference between men and women, the one that is still single has a definite, strong preference for men. Then there’s me–of the about 1,000,000 sexual fantasies I have had during the course of my lifetime thus far, probably about 10 of them have involved women, and those 10 fantasies also constitute the entirety of my intragender sexual experience.** So when I saw this headline, my first reaction was confusion. Why would anyone think it WAS a phase..? Isn’t it just what is?
Then I remembered two things.
Firstly, this:
Hot young chikkx tonguing on the dance floor! to quote the subject line of one of the latest batches of spam to find its way into my inbox.
The close female relative of mine I first mentioned is also fond of pornography, though finding genuine good lesbian pornography, she used to tell me, was a challenge. That was over ten years ago and I was fairly fresh out of the Army and I said, “Clearly you are not looking in the right places ’cause trust me, there is lesbian porn EVERYWHERE–”
“No,” she said patiently. “What’s everywhere is heterosexual male fantasies of what two women–not REALLY lesbians because the male viewer definitely wants the option to join in whenever he feels like it–would do together.”
Or, as the article says:
Bisexuality in women could be a lifelong sexual orientation, not a phase, a new study suggests. The finding runs counter to the idea that bisexuality is an experimental or transitional period for women who, for instance, are uncertain or have fear of commitment.
“There were clearly some theorists who suggested that bisexuality is a transitional stage, but that was largely based on anecdotal, rather than empirical, data,” said psychologist M. Paz Galupo, director of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) Studies at Towson University in Maryland. “This view is popularized, also, by the stereotypes that our culture holds regarding bisexual individuals.”
It amazes me that we dignify the proponents of this idea as “theorists,” but then again, that’s no more bizarre than calling Creationism a “theory.”
As it turns out, bisexual desire ISN’T something that women feel because they are trying to turn men on, or because they are afraid of men, or–! Is it so hard to believe that a woman’s innate sexual feelings weren’t placed there nor are sourced from the existence of the monolith that is man? That she is not desiring whom she is desiring or performing the sexual acts she is performing every second of her life for the vast, omniscient masculine audience? For without men, a woman’s sexuality does not exist as an indepedent entity–it is solely a reflection of or a reaction to men? If a tree falls in the forest and a man isn’t there to hear it, does it make a sound..? Apparently not, according not only to popular culture, but to scientific theorists.
Secondly, this:
“One challenge facing bisexually identified women is that their identity is challenged by others,” Galupo told LiveScience, “and that identity becomes assumed based on the relationships that they form — either lesbian if in a same-sex relationship or heterosexual if in an other-sex relationship.”
Back to my close female relative–while she was married to her second husband, she had affairs with at least two women. Her husband was aware of them. She told me that it didn’t bother him, because he didn’t consider it “cheating.” After all real sex is something that has to involve a penis-bearing person in some capacity! (Harking back to point 1, above. Sigh.) However, her second relationship ended badly. Why? Because her lover got angry at her for having a sexual relationship with her husband…not because she was jealous, apparently, but because she just knew that my relative didn’t really want to have sex with him and was obviously just caving into what society expected of her–she was allowing herself to be brainwashed into thinking she wanted a man and in total denial that she was, in fact, a lesbian. My relative was quite sure she wasn’t a lesbian–not because she had any problems with the idea, but because she genuinely sexually desired men as well as women. But her lover couldn’t, wouldn’t believe that. My relative told me, with an air of sadness, that she had encountered this attitude before.
So. I believe, as I said, that we’re all basically bisexual. Some of us, like me, are so heavily oriented towards the opposite sex that we can reasonably be called heterosexual, and some are so heavily oriented towards the same sex that they can reasonably be considered homosexual, but these are in no way absolute, concrete definitions–they are tags for convenience only. Why is it so impossible to accept that human sexuality is a fluid thing? Is our need to label ourselves and others so great? Is it such a threat to the patriarchal structure of most of human society?
*I haven’t ever personally known a man who openly admitted to being bisexual. However, I observed enough group porn-viewing behavior during my Army days and surprised a few confessions out of a drunk specimen or four that I am relatively sure that innately, men span the same sort of spectrum as women.
**Other than passes made at me, of course.
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