There seems to be an assumption that we’re all simultaneously bisexual, i.e. involved with both/all genders all the time, which would mean that by definition we’re also all very actively polyamorous. But any bi person who’s monogamous or dates people who are tends to be sequentially bisexual, i.e. practicing serial monogamy just like the ‘normal’ people, just without pre-filtering half the population from their potential dating pool solely because they have the wrong body parts.

I’ve literally seen bisexual people accused of lying about their identity if they’re only seeking partners of one gender at a particular moment in time (see: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/ ) which suggests to me that straight people lump bi and poly people all together, without considering the differences… although considering how all kinky people get lumped together, I guess that’s nothing new. ;)

To be brain-dead simplistic about the issue, one can say that women who identify as bisexual have an easier time of coming out about it because they just don’t face criticisms from as many fronts as men who identify as bisexual do. Specifically, bisexual women are stereotypically stigmatized only by lesbians, whereas bisexual men are stigmatized by both gay men and by straight men.

Speaking from my experience, this is partially true. I was rather stigmatized by the small lesbian contingent in my school when I started identifying as bisexual, but I also had issue with the straight guys and the straight girls. It was probably because I was the *only* openly bisexual girl in my peer group, and that confused/scared the hell out of everyone.(I’ve never had issue with gay men, however.) Until recently, when I started getting to know more people who identify as Queer, rather than anything else, I hadn’t felt comfortable in a community defined based on the gender of people I like to fuck. I never, at any point, thought I was gay or straight – I knew my preferences from a young age.

IMO, one of the problems with the bisexual ‘movement’, or groups, or whatever you want to call it, is that bisexual are marginalized by themselves, as well as others. LGBT had “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” as a rallying cry. They kicked in the door, and started to force the rest of the world to accept them on THEIR terms, or at he very least, to pay attention to them and what they had to say.

As bisexuals, what have we had to say? “Oh, we’re here too, but please don’t yell at us?” Bisexuality got tacked on to the LG movement, along with the transgendered movement, and thats great, because thats where the firepower is, but I think we’re really different. And I don’t feel comfortable, personally, trying to tack myself on to a group that looks at me as a slutty fence sitter who can’t decide what I want, thinks I’m going through a phase, or whatever. (that goes for the straight people too.)

I’m bisexual, and I’m different from someone who’s heterosexual, and homosexual.

I also think that we, as bisexuals, ought to proclaim it more.
When I was in school, I wasn’t just bisexual. I was flamingly, loudly, and openly bisexual. I kicked open the doors everyday, and said “Here I am motherfuckers, now deal with it!” until they did. Eventually, most of the boys stopped being intimidated, most of the girls dealt with whatever lesbian angst they had to, and I made them deal with me on my terms. Maybe it was able to happen like this because I am a girl, but I think (not to toot my own horn) that it had more to do with my bombastic personality than anything. When there was finally a gay boy in the school, he did the same thing. The guys were eventually forced to accept him on his terms (His terms being their girlfriends best friends, and the guy who blew the football team. Go him! Not that I wanted to blow the football team. Personally, I would have gone for the lax team or the soccer team. Those guys were much taller and skinnier and better looking.)

I think the bisexual community needs to break away from the LGT community, at least for a little while, until we find our feet and our voice. We need more bombastic people. We need people willing to kick the door open and get people to deal with them as a bisexual person. I think we need more bisexual men leading the charge, to take male bisexuality out of the shadows. We need a really hot male bisexual celebrity. Andy Dick is great, but he isn’t cutting it. I’m hoping we’ll find out Mika’s one of us, personally.

And we need a better flag. I’m not so much about the blue, pink, and purple triangle/stripes.

And I really need to stop leaving large comments that ought to be blog posts, but I’m too lazy.

Homophobia is a mess, and the particularly virulent and violent versions of it we see in American culture, let alone in more ‘traditional’ cultures, makes rational response to anything that has any hint of non-heterosexuality difficult to find in most spaces.

Gays are still not accepted in our culture as being on a par with straights. It’s better than it was in the 70s, but there’s still a way to go. But because of that, gays develop their own subculture – or more correctly, a series of subcultures. By defining themselves as members of this or that subculture, they tend to exclude others, especially others who don’t act gay.

You’re having sex with a MOTOS? Can’t get much less “gay” than that. You’re in the “other” box.

Bi is even an upsetting term to people who believe there are more than two genders. maymay, I’ve read your earlier post on how you see the term bisexuality. At this point, I would argue that the black-white, black-white-gray, or even location on a variable spectrum points of view are not as accurate as as a co-ordinate vector in an n-dimensional space.

I don’t have enough understanding of mathematics to fully understand what that looks like, but I do know what a coordinate vector and an n-dimensional space are and, if I understand this correctly, then I agree completely with what you’re saying here.

I still think there are limits of human computational power, and us adapting to these limits lead us to think in ways that are not accurate to the world […] Abstractions are a tool for our survival in the environment, but they are also a trap for our thinking – as are all tools.

Yup. That’s why I’m still using the word bisexual. ;)

Rhetoric is a hell of a tool, and I don’t think it should be dismissed summarily.

Oh, hell no, you’re absolutely right, SJ! I wasn’t at all dismissing the power of rhetoric. On the contrary, I think rhetoric is amazingly powerful, but like all other tools, it excels in some areas and is extremely weak in others. Specifically, rhetoric seems capable of incredible feats of persuasion, but incapable of analysis, and possibly also of explanation, of a subject. Rhetoric is useful but only effective for the purposes it excels at, very much like a hammer.

Every word having a specific, correct, exclusive meaning removes several forms of humor, all simile, all metaphor, and my intuition says several other things as well – including the idea of my intuition saying something, as my intuition is not a person that may speak.

I’m not sure how connecting words to specific meanings (as my friend remarked of Confucius’s preference) necessarily implies exclusive meanings, or meanings that lack intuition, or humor, or metaphor, and this misunderstanding is kind of a brilliant example of exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in that part of my post….

Both groups do process the world in binaries. Us and Them. If you aren’t us, you’re them. Like I said to Tyr recently, if you think about it correctly, there’s no them, just us. The manifold flavors of us, on the surface of the manifold of possible lifeforms, tiny specs huddled around brief, flickering fusion fires, candles of warmth kindled in the cold black depths of the universal night.

Both groups define themselves by the gender presentation they seek to shag. Both are circles in Venn diagrams. Both define themselves, and the complement of themselves, all others. The union of ‘straight’ and ‘not straight’ covers the whole diagram, just as the union of ‘gay’ and ‘not gay’ covers the space. But they think straight == not gay, and gay == not straight, and that’s their error, because the union of straight and gay does not include everybody. But they define themselves by these circles, and anything that questions how the circles work makes them uncomfortable.

I still think there are limits of human computational power, and us adapting to these limits lead us to think in ways that are not accurate to the world – because none of us can process the full depth and interconnection of the data that bombards our sensory inputs every moment of our existence. Abstractions are a tool for our survival in the environment, but they are also a trap for our thinking – as are all tools.

Also, I don’t like the idea of attempting to make a natural language as concrete and deterministic as programming languages. Every word having a specific, correct, exclusive meaning removes several forms of humor, all simile, all metaphor, and my intuition says several other things as well – including the idea of my intuition saying something, as my intuition is not a person that may speak.