A Defence of Trendy Bisexuality

    The only thing trendier than bisexual girls is being really sick of trendy bisexual girls.  I first became aware of this in 10^th grade, in math class, when I overheard some girls gossiping about other girls, and asked someone what they were talking about.  She told me that this one group of girls had been going to parties and making out with one another.

    I was immediately uncomfortable.  This information made me too excited.  I had no idea that girls—pretty girls, actual girls—were allowed to do that.  I was thrilled.  I wished I were one of them.  I didn’t even really know why I so suddenly and uncontrollably wished that I were one of them, but I was embarrassed by my reaction.  As casually as I could, I asked the girl relating the gossip to tell me more.

    “It’s really gross and offensive,” she said.

    “Yeah,” someone else chimed in. “I can’t believe they’re doing that.”

    I grew up in a hyper-liberal environment, and was always ready to defend against even the smallest seeming whiff of homophobia.  Trying to make sure my indignation read as a good liberal defense against homophobia and not the Ohmygod are we allowed to kiss girls? I want to kiss girls! that it actually was, I asked “What’s wrong with that?”

    “It's that they’re doing it just to get guys’ attention.”

    “Oh,” I said.  “Yeah, that’s totally gross.”  I grew up in a hyper-liberal environment, and just like I knew that all homophobia was wrong, I also knew that whenever a woman did anything to please a man, it was bad and offensive.

    I had my first bisexual experiences in college, which makes me just about as unique as everyone else ever.  At some point sophomore year, I came home from a party and announced to my boyfriend that I'd been making out with the preeeeeettiest girls.  Obviously, I expected him to be thrilled.  Instead, he got mad and lectured me for weeks about how my “sexual dilettantism” was dangerous and offensive.  (He said so again when I tried to talk to him about being kinky.  Eventually I did the logically inevitable thing and cheated on him with a lesbian with whom I had really kinky sex.)

    Recently I was talking to my best friend, and she said “I only really like having sex with women when there’s a guy involved.  I’m not really that into girls on their own.  I know, I know—that makes me a bad feminist.”  And I got really mad about this whole thing, and thought it might be time to go home and write an essay about it.

    Trendy bisexuality is defined pretty clearly by the three anecdotes offered above.  It’s the kind of bisexuality in which a girl has sex with, hooks up with, or makes out with, other girls to arouse/get the attention of a guy (or guys) watching, or because she wants to be able to say she’s bisexual as she knows it makes her sound sexier to guys, or just because she’s heard that it’s cool to be bi now.  It’s distinguished as “trendy” bisexuality to indicate that these girls only do it because it’s “cool” and because lots of other girls do it.  The term “trendy bisexuality” is meant to be insulting, and women who self-identify as “trendy bisexuals” only do so in a self-effacing, deliberately ironic way.  It’s also the sexual choice currently most maligned and objected to by otherwise sexually open and progressive Liberals.  It’s the girl in the bar who gets drunk and tries to make out with other girls, but only when guys are looking.  It’s the girl who likes to talk about all her experiences with women, but only brings these things up when there are guys around to react to them.  It’s the girl who makes out, or even has sex, with her female friends if her boyfriend or their boyfriends are also involved, but has little or no desire to have sex with those same girlfriends when there isn't a male audience.  It’s the girls who wouldn't have been attracted to other girls on their own, but jumped on the bandwagon because all the cool kids are doing it.  It’s female/female sex as a performance. 

    Or, at least, this is how P.C. feminism likes to portray it.  P.C. feminism, obviously, objects to female sex as a performance for a man.  It says that this type of sexual behavior is artificial, is a woman being taken advantage by and compromising herself for men, and is a display of women’s participation in their own patriarchal oppression.

    I’ve been a trendy bisexual for a few years now, and I’ve gotten over making fun of myself for it and apologizing for it.  I’ve started to find the objections to it deeply offensive in a way that’s revelatory of the left-wing cool kids’ larger problems with sex and sexuality.  It may be the cool kids who are trendy bisexuals, but the even cooler kids (or, at least, that’s what they'd have you believe) are disgusted by trendy bisexuality.  It’s difficult to argue against this stance, because at first the people objecting seem to be on our side, protesting the irresponsible behavior of stupid people.  But I think, if you look a bit closer, every objection to the practice is deeply problematic, and reveals the way in which Liberalism is being taken over by moralizing prudishness that sounds a whole lot like the very things we’re supposed to be protesting.

    The basic idea at the ostensible heart of these arguments appears unobjectionable: Women do it even though they don’t like it.  Now, of course, women shouldn't do things that they don't enjoy or want to do.  People shouldn’t do things they don't enjoy or want to do.  A girl shouldn’t kiss another girl if she doesn’t want to kiss her.  No-one should kiss anyone they don’t want to kiss, and they shouldn’t do it again if they didn’t like it the first time.  I don’t think there’s any way to disagree with this.

    But I also don’t think that this objection encompasses the experience of every woman who is sexual with another woman in part or primarily because it turns on a guy.  It also makes vast assumptions about what women like and what it means for a woman to be enjoying herself sexually.  First of all, the fact that she’s doing it because it will turn on the guy doesn’t mean she can’t be turned on by it herself.  And even if she wouldn’t be turned on by having sex with this woman if the guy weren’t present, this doesn’t mean she isn’t enjoying having sex with the woman in the presence of the guy.

    I think feminism’s objections to trendy bisexuality stem from its own sexual-expectation double-standard in which women are favored over men.  This is the double standard, mentioned in my last essay, in which women are obligated to be completely selfish in bed, and are “being taken advantage of” if they aren’t, but men are obligated never to be at all selfish, and are assholes if they have any desires beyond pleasing the woman.  If a woman doesn’t make sexual demands, then she’s letting a man use her and take advantage of her, and if a man does make sexual demands, then he’s an asshole. 

    This makes for nothing but resentment and bad sex.  Good sex, to say nothing of all other personal interaction, comes—as should be so obvious that I feel idiotic typing it—from equal give and take.  But, from the viewpoint of P.C. Feminism, “equal give and take” for women seems to be defined as “total demanding entitlement,” and “equal give and take” for men seems to be defined as “absolute selflessness.” 

    The majority of people objecting to trendy bisexual threesomes or group sex or even just making out are missing something essential: It does, and should, turn an individual on to make someone else turned on.  This is good and right and normal and how it should be.  I believe that I’m legitimately attracted to women, and I have had experiences with girls in which no guy was involved.  But I also know that I’m far more attracted to men and that a greater percentage of my sex fantasies are about men, and the majority of my experiences have been with men.  I’ve also quite often been with another girl in front of a guy.  And in many of these experiences, part of what turned me on, one of the components that added up to the whole thing’s being hot, was the fact of how turned on the guy was by watching me and another girl—and there’s nothing, logically, that should make that experience invalid.  I am also honestly turned on by my legs in stockings.  Stockings have no solipsistic function for me.  It’s almost certain that I never would have started wearing them if I hadn’t known it was something to which men responded.  The wearing of stockings can be defined, therefore, as something I do solely to attract or turn on men.  But I am also legitimately turned on by stockings, on my own legs, independent of any actual experience with a man.  I am turned on, in a way that is absolutely perfectly self-serving, by the fact of other people’s attraction to me, and I think this is a far more universal experience than is usually acknowledged.

    For this reason, bisexual behavior for the purpose of exciting a guy is no less valid than bisexual behavior as a result of being interested in a girl (which is not say that the two are mutually exclusive—but I've decided to trust that you're smart enough to get that on your own).  They’re two different things, and yes, in a perfect world of perfectly precise language, maybe we’d have two different words for them, but there’s no reason why one is more “right,” or why the other makes you a “bad feminist.”  Sex is about being turned on by the fact that your partner is turned on.  Men are required to believe this, and women are told that it’s wrong to believe this. 

    But man-hating rhetoric is useless unless you really never mean to have a meaningful interaction with a member of the male gender (in which case, good luck).  If you’re at all attracted to or interested in men, especially if you think you’re going to fall in love or lust with one, then you need to start letting go of a feminism that says any anti-male action is good, and any pro-male action bad.  It’s an easy trap into which to fall, an easy philosophy to pick up and run with; the rage to which it gives permission feels at first like an enormous relief, the release of a pressure valve.  There is something wonderful about being justified in absolute selfishness, being angry all the time and right for being so.  There’s also something insanely childish about being these things.  Entitled rage is simple, and useless.  You’re going to have to grow up and deal with it, start trying to figure out which men are the good ones, believe that there are in fact good ones and allow them to exist, rather than mowing them down with rage that sends them running to the comforting, waiting arms of their misogynist brothers.

    Male desire is not evil.  Male sexual desire is not the impulse to take advantage of and degrade women.  Everything men want is not designed as an insult to women.  Yes, seeing two women together is possibly the most popular male fantasy that exists.  This could be because the attention of two women is ego-gratifying.  It could be because women are the most beautiful thing on the face of the earth, and therefore more of them are more beauty, beauty to the exponent.  If one woman = Awesome!, then two women doing it = Awesome!²  It could be because that’s what men see most often in porn (or, more likely, the fact that they liked it already is why it’s in porn).  It could be for a million reasons, but it is not because it’s the most degrading thing the men could come up with in some evil conference room somewhere.  I believe the guys who tell me they’re incredibly turned on by eating pussy, and would be thrilled to do it all day long.  I also believe that if they had no idea or indication that women were turned on by receiving oral sex, they would never choose of their own accord to eat pussy.  That doesn’t make them oral dilettantes.  It doesn’t mean they’re being taken advantage of by women, either.  It means they’re turned on by their partner’s arousal, which is simply how sex works.  Beyond that, sex is absolutely nothing but a race for orgasm, and as great as orgasms are, I think at least most women, if not everyone, would say that if absolutely decontextualized orgasms were all we wanted out of sex, were the only physically enjoyable thing about it, we would stay the fuck home and masturbate every single solitary moment we weren’t financially obliged to go to work in order to pay rent and feed ourselves.  

    The next, and seemingly more valid, objections to trendy bisexuality are those of people who claim, along with my ex-boyfriend, that such sexual dilettantism is dangerous.  Their reasoning is that trendy bisexuals often end up leading on a woman who is legitimately interested in women, and that woman gets hurt.  This is that always-in-bloom complaint about using people: “Well, the problem with casual sex is that you’re using someone”… “But if you have sex with a girl to turn on a guy, you’re using the girl, and that’s wrong”…

    It’s a linguistic choice to which I severely object.  All human relationships are use.  Even when we fall madly in love and commit to someone and stay with them our whole life, treating them as well and beautifully as we’re able at every moment and receiving the same in return, we're still “using” them.  That’s two people using each other for love, for enjoyment, for comfort, for partnership.  Family may be the truest and least corrupt relationship available to us, but we use our parents, and they use us, and our kids will use us in turn, and it’s not because they don’t love us; it’s because that's how love works.  Love itself is use.  We desire to gain from a relationship, enter the relationship in hopes of fulfilling that desire, and stay because we’re gaining from it in the way we’d hoped to.  Sex works this way as well.  How could it not?  Of course sex is using someone—that's what sex is.  You get something from having sex with someone; you get orgasms and fun and arousal and all sorts of other things.  Saying “you're using them” is a stupidly redundant and meaningless accusation.  You might as well say “you are interacting with them.”  What people actually mean when they make the accusation of “use” is not use, but the misalignment of desire.  Use is only hurtful when one person wants something different from what the other person wants, and unhappily settles for less.  Use is only hurtful if the participants don’t gain equally, if they are attempting to use each another for incompatible things.  The easy solution here is that everyone should honestly state their intentions in clear language, so that the other person can decide, based on their intentions, whether they want to enter into some kind of a relationship.

    Right.  And it would also be nice if John Lennon were still alive and was my best friend.

    A lot of women honestly want to experiment with bisexuality.  They don’t know whether they like girls or guys or both, and they’re doing the best thing you can do in that situation, which is to learn by experience.  They don’t always clearly communicate their desires first, because they don’t really know what those desires are (that’s the whole point of experimentation), and second, because they’re embarrassed by their inexperience and uncertainty, a situation with which we’ve all got to sympathetically identify in one way or another.  Yes, because of these things, many women don’t clearly communicate the fact that they’re experimenting with bisexuality to the women with whom they get involved, and when the experiment goes awry, the girl with whom they were experimenting gets hurt.  But haven’t I already made the point that that's how sex works!?  The overarching answer to the concern of “someone will get hurt” is that it’s sex!  Someone always gets hurt!  It feels really great, and then it confuses you, and then someone gets hurt, and then everyone deals with it.  There’s pretty much nothing you can do to prevent that.

    But really, what sinks this complaint is that trendy bisexuals are pretty clearly distinguished from serious lesbians, usually by the fact that their boyfriend is standing no farther than a few feet away.  It’s also pretty easy to tell how experienced a woman is with other women even just from kissing her.  When a girl who’s exclusively into girls says she has been led on and hurt by a trendy bisexual, it’s difficult to believe that the aggrieved lesbian could have had absolutely no idea what she was getting herself into.

    This leads to another objection to trendy bisexuality—the argument that trendy bisexuality is an insult to and degradation of “actual” gay female sex.  Again, this sinks easily because it’s predicated on faulty and unnecessary premises.  Trendy bisexual girls aren’t claiming to be lesbians.  They aren’t making a mockery of lesbian orientation by saying that that’s how they identify and thereby representing the entire orientation.  It’s not an insult; it’s a choice that’s different but related, in that both orientations share some objects of desire and activities.  A trendy bisexual girl who secretly has threesomes, but is homophobic in public with her girlfriends is an insult to real lesbians, yes, but that's not because she’s a trendy bisexual; it’s because she’s an asshole.  If you want to have sex with women, and have no interest in including a man in that sex in any way or at any point, then that’s fine, and moreover, it doesn’t have anything to do with girls who want to be with women and men at the same time, or girls who want to do so primarily because it’s the guy’s fantasy.  This objection, while it at first seems almost impossible to criticize, comes back to the man-hating theme.  There are women who exclusively sleep with women and feel violated by the idea that other women would do the same things they do, but include a guy.  They’re pissed off that their legitimate, intimate sexual practices are imitated by couples looking to “spice up their sex life,” or “try something new and crazy.”

    Except if you scratch the surface of that complaint, it makes no damn sense.  I like teacher/student role-play a whole lot.  It would not be wrong to say that it’s the foundational practice of my sexuality.  I am intensely and personally committed to this sexual practice for all sorts of reasons (both my parents are teachers; I grew up on a high-school campus and all the first attractive men I saw were teachers; my first conscious sexual fantasies were about the movie Dead Poets’ Society).  I also understand that lots of insipid couples who aren’t wildly intelligent and don’t give a shit about education or the study of literature try out this role-play because they want to “spice up their sex life” or “try something new and crazy.”  Do I care?  No.  Why the fuck should I care?  It has nothing to do with me.  They aren’t coming into my bedroom and telling me to stop or change what I’m doing.  And trendy bisexuals aren’t trying to change actual lesbian sex.  They aren’t starting some movement to insist that women can only have sex with women when it’s done to turn on a guy.  They’re just saying that that’s what they choose.

    Women who feel that men’s arousal by lesbian sex is an insult to real lesbian sex are obviously women who think male desire is by nature offensive and degrading to women.  It’s totally possible, obviously, to choose never to have sex with men without hating men.  But women who claim that a heterosexual appropriation of lesbian sexual practices is an insult to lesbians clearly think that male desire is an insult to women. Yes, if you’re an attractive lesbian, most men probably would be turned on by what you do in bed.  But that doesn’t mean that they’re standing there in your bedroom heckling you and jerking off.  Just because men are turned on by lesbians does not mean they assume all lesbians are having sex merely to turn them on.  Any man who thinks that any woman who has sex with another woman ever is always doing it for his benefit isn’t a product of the high-profile trend of female bisexuality; he’s a retarded narcissist.  Men will always be turned on by two women getting it on with each other.  I return to the mathematical logic of one woman = Awesome!  Two women doing it = Awesome!²  If a man thinks two women together are sexy and encourages women with whom he’s involved to get it on with other women, it doesn’t therefore mean he’s entitled to participate in any and all sexual encounters involving two women.  Do you think that if you let your boyfriend fist you, he’s going to feel entitled to go up to strangers on the street and demand to put his fist inside them?  No.  No, he is not.  Women seem to forget that they have both the right and the ability to say yes or no, and that a man wanting something is not the same thing as that man forcing them to do the thing that he wants.  Everyone has the right to answer any question in whatever way they please, but no-one can claim the right not to be asked the question in the first place (except children, who are not psychologically equipped to comprehend or consent to sex; but if you are an adult, you should be able simply to say “no” to something you don’t feel like doing—with attitude, if necessary—and then get over it).

    I think trendy bisexuality troubles people because it compels us to examine how we should define female sexual orientation, and whether it needs to be defined differently from male sexual orientation.  The question that constantly comes up for me while writing about sexuality, while watching porn, and while hanging out with more than one attractive man at once is: why isn’t there trendy male bisexuality?  I mean, seriously.  I’m sure more than a few women join with me in asking why the hell their attractive male friends don’t make out with one another to impress girls?  Why don’t men grope each other at bars to get the attention of girls?  Why can’t I ask my boyfriend to bring along an attractive male friend of his (and, preferably, for them both to dress up in sweaters like the ones in Dead Poets’ Society) when he comes over for sex?

    The easiest answer is to declare that male and female sexual orientations don’t function differently, but that rather, of course, it’s the fault of “society” (groan) and “the media” (double groan).  Heterosexual women enjoy sex with men; therefore the “Awesome²” equation must prove true for women as well.  The difference, this argument would say, is that men’s sexual desires are permitted—and, in fact, obligated—to be loudly public and culturally ubiquitous, whereas women’s sexual desires are only public when they’re in the service of women seeking financial gain or emotional security through sex (men are supposed to want to fuck everything that moves; women are supposed to want to get married).  Therefore, the images of sexuality and, following that, the sexual practices, that become trendy are those predicated on and determined by popular male sexual fantasy.  Porn is marketed primarily to men because men are allowed to like porn and admit that they like porn.  Therefore, most porn caters to male desire, fetish, and preference.  The argument can be made that female bisexuality is merely popular because of the cultural dominance of male fantasies.  Following from that, the cultural popularity of the image of two women together, made ubiquitous by porn marketed to straight men, permits mostly hetero-identifying women to mess around with one another with little fear of a negative reaction from men.  In short, that means that if a guy messes around with a guy, everyone still assumes that he’s gay, but if a woman messes around with a woman, everyone’s still happy to believe that she’s straight.  I’ve heard plenty of women say “Oh, I’ve had sex with girls but I’m straight” (note: That is a pretty ridiculous statement), but I can’t even imagine a man saying the same thing about having had sex with a man.  The straight men I know who’ve even kissed a guy are pretty damn impressed with themselves for their willingness to experiment.

    This line of argument says that men wouldn’t say or be able to say such a thing because society allows and expects women to be sexually fluid, but doesn’t allow men the same leeway.

    But saying that men and women would be equally sexually fluid without the strictures imposed by societal judgment seems, if nominally accurate, far too easy an answer.  The issue of bisexuality brings up the essential differences between male and female sexuality.  As the lovely Pornbaby, with whom I made out at a bar the night we met, says in a fantastically edifying blog on this subject, sexuality is actually where the literal difference in male and female biology is located.  The study that Pornbaby cites is one that showed men to have hardwired, binary responses to heterosexual or homosexual images (i.e., they either became aroused by men or by women, with little gray area or overlap), whereas women’s responses were far more fluid, and female arousal much more difficult to track in a statistical, mathematical way at all.

    To rather grossly, but not inaccurately, simplify, the difference may be that male desire is primarily visual, whereas female sexual desire tends to demand a narrative.  Most men I know have to use visual stimuli to masturbate, but most women I know masturbate through making up a story, and are more likely, if they use external stimuli at all, to prefer written porn to visual images.  Men can usually get turned on just by looking at an image of a hot girl with no context to it, but I’m turned on when I look at a picture of Daniel Craig because I know he played James Bond as an unpolished and dangerously rage-prone neophyte spy who didn’t give a shit how his martini was made, not just because he has blue eyes and pretty muscles.  Many women, especially those who identify and/or practice as bisexual, define their sexuality through conscious emotional or intellectual choice.  Male sexual desire seems to function in a way that allows far less conscious control than women’s does.  Women seem to be more capable of deciding how to define their sexuality based on which experiences in their past have been most positive; if they’ve had better experiences with girls, they choose to sleep primarily or exclusively with girls.  I think this concept would sound fairly implausible to most men in terms of defining their sexuality.  You very rarely hear about men who are so fed up with girls that they decide to try to be gay, whereas it’s a line common to the point of cliché for women.

    Female homosocial behavior has for generations lent itself naturally to a kind of casual and expected female bisexuality.  I remember uncomfortably noticing the fact that I was attracted to other girls when, around age twelve or so, my female friends would all lie on top of each other, cuddle, hug and touch one another in playful, if not blatantly sexual, ways.  Women expect and are used to a kind of physical intimacy with one another that men would never imagine in male friendships.  There are no cultural myths about men practicing kissing on one another, or hanging out half-dressed talking about sex when they sleep over at one another's houses.  In fact, the “sleepover” as a thing that teenage friends do is an exclusively female concept.  Anyone would assume that two guys who said they were going to “have a sleepover” were going to have sex with one another, whereas it’s an expected, popularized and supposedly non-sexual part of adolescent female friendship (of course, teenage male friends do sleep over at one another’s houses, but tend to use the term as a verb—“I’m sleeping over at,” or more commonly, “crashing at Josh’s place”—rather than a noun—“Josh and I are having a sleepover”).  One of the reasons the male fantasy of ultra-feminine girl-on-girl sex may have gained so much popularity is that women flirt constantly with exactly that image in much of the expected actions of female friendship.  While a lot of my personal sex fantasies are about a male distaff of this in which male friendship is ambivalently sexualized, such a distaff doesn’t have the cultural acceptability or logic that inherently sexualized female friendship does.  We expect women to be kind of sexual with one another in almost all their interactions, and therefore, the transition from heterosexual homosocial female behavior to bisexual female sex is a very easy and natural one.

    The actualities of gay male sex versus lesbian sex also come into play when considering the reasons female bisexuality is trendy in a way male bisexuality isn’t and hasn’t been since the Golden Age of Greece (or maybe the ’70s).  Lesbian sex is far less necessarily physically threatening than gay male sex.  Penetration isn’t a requirement for two women to have sex with each other, whereas a man who identifies as bisexual is basically saying he’s willing to take it up the ass.  It’s a lot harder to flirt with a sexual identity that necessitates anal sex, especially since straight men aren’t using to being penetrated at all (I have stuff to say about strap-ons, but that may just be a whole essay of its own).  The change in the physical particulars of sexual experiences, of what sex actually is, physically, between straight and gay male sex is much more extreme than the comparable change between the particulars of sex in female heterosexual sex and lesbian sex.

    The differences in the actualities of sexual practice also bring into play women’s learned sexual insecurity versus men’s learned sexual confidence.  This inherent difference in how the two genders learn to approach sex influences the popularity of female bisexuality and the parallel rareness of male bisexuality.  In bringing up women’s sexual insecurity, let’s be clear that I’m not talking about the “girls with low self-esteem” argument against female bisexuality, which says that girls only hook up with other girls in order to please guys because they have low self-esteem and don’t respect themselves.  I’ve already addressed that utterly fallacious argument in the earlier section debunking feminism’s arguments against trendy bisexuality.  Girls who have low self-esteem do a lot of things.  Some girls have low self-esteem and therefore have promiscuous sex.  Some girls have low self-esteem and therefore refuse to have sex at all and write feminist theory about why all sex is bad and wrong and evil.  It’s a problem that manifests in all kinds of different ways, but people like to think, because it’s easy and people are lazy, that they can ascribe a particular behavior with which they personally disagree (promiscuity) to a particular affliction (low self-esteem in girls) as though the two were related by some mathematical truth.

    No, when I bring up female sexual insecurity versus male sexual confidence, I mean that men are taught to be predators whereas women are taught to be objects of desire.  A man watching a video of two lesbians having sex interpolates himself into the situation, because the way guys get laid is by asking for sex, operating on the assumption that they are sexually required by women—which is fine because, if men didn’t allow themselves to believe this, no-one would ever get laid.  This is because women are taught that we’re not supposed to be the aggressors.  Male sexual confidence is, again, not an insulting example of how male entitlement makes all men potential rapists.  It’s how heterosexual sex works.  Women, on the other hand, learn that we’re supposed to wait to be wanted.  Our role as the thing desired is more passive.  Most men react to being made to pursue sex in this way, and that reaction validates our assumption that this is how we’re supposed to act, reinforcing the behavior.  Therefore, a woman watching a video of two men having sex sees that those men are already being sexually satisfied, and are in no way pursuing her.  She assumes there’s no place for her in the equation, and therefore is less likely to be turned on, because she can’t as easily interpolate herself into the sexual encounter.

    Since I’ve brought up women’s learned sexual insecurity, which is a fact that, although not positive, must be acknowledged as true, I’ll go on from there to make another point about why trendy bisexuality is something that feminism should embrace.  Because women are taught to be objects of desire, rather than pursuers of sex, jealousy is rampant and incredibly ugly between women.  It’s a truth universally acknowledged that most women hate other women.  Because we’re not taught to actively pursue sex in the same way men do, we don’t learn to conquer sexual insecurity through taking action to get sex.  Instead, that desire and insecurity, not given the active outlet of pursuit, gets funneled into cruel, endless, passive-aggressive jealousy of and competition with other women.  Our internal, jealous, catty, pointless fighting is a great part of what fucks over feminism’s grand enterprises, and keeps women from uniting in strength.  And trendy bisexuality can work as a cure for female jealousy.  When other women become objects of desire and potential sex partners, they stop being The Enemy.  I’m incredibly prone to jealousy, but I know it’s a bad and destructive quality—and one of the most effective ways I’ve found to combat jealousy is to concentrate on my attraction to other women.  It’s hard to be jealous of a pretty girl while you’re making out with her.  Not only does this make my boyfriend’s attraction to other women seem natural and obvious and a silly thing to be upset about, since I feel the same way, it also makes me feel a whole lot friendlier toward other women.  Rather than thinking of them as potential opponents who will take sex away from me, I can instead think of them as the potential for more sex.  Trendy bisexuality allows us to appreciate other women for being attractive, rather than hating them for it.  By dissipating female jealousy, the trend of bisexual experimentation among women is one of the best things that has ever happened to feminism.  It could do a lot more good if feminism would start thinking of it that way.

    Though male bisexuality may never, due to simple biological differences, become as popular or common as female bisexuality, there has begun to be a greater vogue for it than there’s been in quite some time.  Male rock stars have at times bragged bisexuality as a way of demonstrating themselves to be all they can be sexually.  Daniel Craig (no, this essay does not have an overabundance of reference to Daniel Craig—there is no such thing) has been quoted as saying he thinks James Bond should have a male lover in the next Bond film, the idea being that in our current cultural climate regarding sexuality, a male lover would only prove Bond to be the absolute omnisexual master of seduction.  I have in fact gotten guys to make out in bars in order to turn me on.  Internet slash writing (porn written about existing fictional characters or even real celebrities) is most popular with heterosexual women writing gay male porn.  The reasons in the previous section detailing why female bisexuality will probably always be more popular than male bisexuality will likely hold, but perhaps rather than being only a trend among women, we should think of trendy bisexuality as a demonstration that feminism, gay rights, and such social justice movements have in fact had some of the impact for which we’ve been hoping and fighting.

    The fact that Liberals can find a reason morally to object to a form of greater sexual fluidity demonstrates the backward, insidiously destructive logic by which P.C. brings down Liberalism.  Fighting against homophobia and sexual discrimination is supposed to be one of the most old-school and obvious causes of the Left, and yet what else can we call any of the arguments against trendy bisexuality except sexual discrimination?  Sexual discrimination doesn’t suddenly become liberal if the discrimination is against something heterosexual men like.  Feminists and Liberals should uniformly celebrate the trendiness of female bisexuality as an example of greater sexual, and therefore personal, freedom.  As the trendy version of sexuality is one in which people are more concerned about being sexy than being defined as “straight” or “gay,” it creates greater permission to act on impulses, to try things out without having to define oneself by a single, rigid, and restrictive conception of identity.  What trendy bisexuality comes down to, when you turn the sound down on all the bullshit surrounding it, is greater freedom.  Freedom to make out with sexy girls in bars may seem like a pretty damn frivolous kind of freedom, but restricting it still means endorsing the restriction of sexual choice.  The next time you make out with someone of the same sex, I encourage you to yell “FOR JUSTICE!” at some point during the making-out.

    Oh, and if any men reading this want to get together, put some sweaters on, and prove to me that trendy male bisexuality is on the rise by acting out my Dead Poets’ Society fantasies, that would be a great victory for justice, too.  I'm just saying.

THE END
of
A Defence of Trendy Bisexuality

...but Sexa Rubelucia will return
in
I'm Done with Bust!

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