A Note on Being Bisexual
A year ago my ex-boyfriend yelled at me in the car to admit my bisexuality when I wasn’t ready to tell anyone, and then he wondered why I was crying. That was the beginning of my coming out story. The majority of the sexual activity in life happened when I was heterosexual, and in complete honesty women make me shapeshift into a life-size adoring heart-eye emoji with shaky knees and the inability to string together a sentence. After finally telling people what I’d known since I was six years old, I experienced what I’d seen all my non-heterosexual friends go through; being sexualised for my sexuality.
The weirdest part of it all was being sexualised into scenarios I’d never even been in myself. The most common of these was the threesome. Anyone can feel attracted in different ways to different genders, and can have a variety of preferences. For example, after telling someone I’m bisexual and having them respond with “so can we have a threesome?” makes me feel absolutely zero attraction and preference towards them for the next Millenia. There’s nothing wrong with a threesome, but there’s everything wrong with assuming someone is interested in having one because of their sexuality. Individual boundaries will always exist within a person, and what’s drool-worthy for some can make others want to throw up on the curb like a fresher outside Bar 101.
After gossiping with my non-heterosexual friends it’s clear that it’s not just the pushy bar-goer, or the slightly creepy friend, who push their fantasies onto us. In reality, some of the worst experiences we have come from our nearest and dearest—our partners. The idea behind what I like to call ‘partner-exclusivity control’ is that it’s okay to fool around with a different sex to your partner, as long as they get all the juicy details or can “watch”. If that works for you, go for gold! It’s an amazing thing to have mutual trust and feel comfortable in your sex life with your partner. For others who don’t enjoy that, our sexuality shouldn’t be an experiment. Don’t make a hypothesis of what you want to happen, don’t try to control a methodology to reach your desired conclusion. Stop putting constraints on people’s sexuality just to make it enjoyable for you.
At the most basic level, hearing “just don’t have a crush on me!” from someone of the same gender was never a phrase I thought would become my pet peeve. Well, here we are. If I liked you I’d paint a picture of you and adore you until my impending doom, Dorian Gray, but I don’t even like your tone right now. Bisexuality doesn’t mean you’re hypersexual or fall in love with every same-sex person you meet. We’re just people, we love who we want how we want to, and no part of our sexuality is ever going to change the extremities to how we do that.
At the end of the day, we’re all sitting on a little rainbow spectrum, and you should never assume what someone is interested in doing from where they sit on it. In the words of Zanele Muholi, “If I wait for someone else to validate my existence, it will mean that I’m short changing myself”, because it’s not up to anyone else except you and Paris Hilton to decide what’s hot and what’s not. And before you say it, I will: It’s not all heterosexuals. But, if it’s enough to make me feel I have to write this, then start respecting that other people’s attraction is not for your pleasure… it’s for theirs.
