Goose of Living In Outlaw Territory has a cool post about the conundrum of being an adult bisexual. Her point that bisexuality collides not with heterosexuality but with monogamy is pretty interesting.
I would argue that one of the main reasons it is so hard to be bisexual and out is monogamy. If I am married to a man. Well….um. I’m married. To a man. In order to have a lesbian relationship in a pretty mono world, I’d have to break up with him (or cheat on him) and get together with a lesbian who is ok with bisexual women. Well, what to do if I also fall in love with a man? The issue becomes one of longevity. Am I more straight cause I’ve been married to a man? Or am I more gay if I suddenly divorce and plunge into the queer world?
I think I’ve heard this objection raised before and the reply was straightforward: bisexuals, like heterosexuals, can be attracted to more than one person but still be monogamous. The flip side, judging from laws going back as far as we’ve got records, is that non-monogamous people can be attracted to more than one person and not be monogamous. In which case it doesn’t really matter whether they’re attracted to only one sex or more than one.
I think it might be intuitive that if you’re bisexual that means you require one of each partner, and if that were true then yeah, that would tend to rule out monogamy. And so since orientation and monogamy are separate dimensions you’re probably not going to see a lot of correlations. Or more accurately, since you’re really not going to be able to tell monogamous bisexuals from monogamous gay or straight people unless they tell you, the casual data people draw any correlations from are likely to be incomplete.
Submitted by 3117 (not verified) on Thu, 2009-08-13 20:22.
The intersecting responses of stuff around bisexuality and nonmonogamy are fascinating and (as far as I can tell) mostly annoying.
Most of the bisexuals I know well are of the "I'm attracted to people" variety rather than the "I'm attracted to men and I'm attracted to women" variety; those that are monogamous are really, really aggravated by the notion that this has any conflict with monogamy at all.
Meanwhile, I've heard stories of nonmonogamous bisexuals having people seem perfectly fine with their nonmonogamy up until they realised that the bisexual in question had two partners with the same genitalia. Apparently nonmonogamy is okay if one's looking for different genitals, but not for any other reason.
Mistress Matisse wrote about another way the intersection falls out, what she and others call a "one penis policy"; I wonder what some of that looks like to you.
Meanwhile, I'm someone with two "types" that she's attracted to, which would be a legitimate orientation in some people's eyes if those types were phenotypic, making me a one-of-each bisexual; since it isn't, I've been told flat out - by other poly people, even - that my attraction patterns don't exist.
Funny place, the world.
(Captcha: 060 fathers)
[Ooh, I bet that "I'm bisexual and I have two partners of gender XYZ" really catches people off guard. The one-penis policy sounds a bit unfair to those (bisexual... or not) who, y'know, really like penises. Which brings me to your point about having two "types." Heck, *I* have more than one "type" and I'm not even bisexual! And I *am* monogamous. Which is why it seems really silly to imagine that, beyond a somewhat larger pool of possible partners, bisexuals would be any different. Thanks, Dw3t. --fl]