Although I am a person who used to regularly perform in comedy shows and has professional comedian friends, I am not regularly given to watching standup specials (I’m more into watching stuff with a plot). So I did not watch Hannah Gadsby’s Something Special when it dropped this past spring, and only really learned of its contents earlier this week, when I saw a clip from it on Instagram (Instagram reels are how I consume most standup. I’m sorry.).
The clip in question begins with Gadsby talking about their wife. “I like to brag that I married a bisexual woman,” they open. “Because it upsets a very particular kind of man… that I enjoy upsetting.” Gadsby’s wife, they continue, chose this instead of that, and there are men who simply cannot handle that.
I have to assume that Gadsby’s wife signed off on this joke, that she found it funny enough to allow her spouse to make the joke in a special that would be broadcast to millions of Netflix subscribers, that would be written about in the press, that would be cut up into little pieces and regurgitated for people like me on Instagram and TikTok. I have to assume she gave her consent for her identity to be used in this way, because if she didn’t, and Gadsby just made the joke publicly, in a standup special, without asking their wife… ugh.
Friends, I fucking hate this joke. I hate everything about it. I hate that it presents Gadsby’s wife as a prize to be won. I hate that Gadsby’s wife’s bisexuality is a prop, a way to needle straight men, rather than an integrated part of her personality. I hate how heterosexual the joke is (and truly, it is)*.
But most of all, I hate the way this joke frames itself as love.
Because that’s how it’s supposed to read, right? For bisexual women, who are so often debased and rejected by queers, it is supposed to feel gratifying to be held up as useful, even desirable. Unlike many of their queer peers, Gadsby does not see their wife’s history of a boning men as permanent stain; to the contrary, they see it as a boon. They see it as something to brag about. If you are used to feeling marginalized and despised, this is, I think, supposed to be flattering. It is supposed to make bi women — it is supposed to make me, and maybe you — feel loved.
And yet what is the brag, in the end? It is not “my wife is so cool and interesting,” or even anything about the wife herself**. It is “my wife’s sexual history enables me to piss off people who I don’t like, people who have been mean to me.” Or maybe: “my wife’s sexuality enables me to feel superior to the people who have told me my whole life that I am inferior.”
It is Gadsby’s wife’s sexuality as a boost to Gadsby’s ego.
Which is, for all of Gadsby’s queerness, a very heterosexual framing of bisexuality. (I told you I would come back to that point.)
I mean, very literally, that I could absolutely imagine a straight man telling this joke with a slight reframe. Indeed if we dig through every hour that every stand up has ever told, I bet we would find some straight man, somewhere, talking about how it’s great to have a bi wife because she could have dated a woman and yet she chose you, because she, I dunno, gave you the thrill of knowing that your head game was better than a lesbian’s, or at least not so bad that it was a dealbreaker. A bi wife, not as an individual woman who you love who happens to have expansive gender attractions, but as a prop to boost your ego because she had a range of options and she chose you and not one of the people you desperately want to feel superior to. This is literally the logic that Holden employs for a brief moment in Chasing Amy, logic that we are supposed to understand as a sign that he is a bad and broken person.
And like I said: this is not love. It is, at best, biphilia — the inverse of biphobia that, while it presents itself as positive and celebratory, is really just the same reductive and flattening method of dehumanization, just wearing a different hat. I do not like it. I do not find it flattering. And I do not think that bisexuals should settle for it — I do not think that we should ever confuse biphilia with actual love.
* Gonna loop back to this in a sec
** Feels like I should mention here that I know she has a name and that I could easily look it up but I don’t feel like doing that because this isn’t, in the end, about the wife as a real person
Leave a Reply