[This is the soundtrack to this essay]
I am often befuddled by how much time and energy is spent attempting to decipher queerness, and bisexuality in particular, for a mass audience. And even more than that, I’m befuddled by the anger some people express when other people simply fail to grasp the nuances of their sexual desires and attractions. Is it oppression to not be understood? Or is it … something else?
I mean, sure: it is nice to be understood, or at least to feel understood, since the two things aren’t always one and the same. But the assumption that being understood is a precondition for liberation feels off. Maybe more than that, it feels like making “understanding” a precondition to having one’s humanity recognized leads to a flattening of the diversity, the complexity, of human experience.
What I’m getting at here, I think, is that every time I see someone try to “explain” bisexuality I get very, very tired because the explanations always reduce us in an attempt to make us legible to a mass audience. You have probably heard the line about being bisexual being no different from being attracted to both blondes and brunettes, or some other comparison that attempts to strip the “multiple genders” bit out of being attracted to multiple genders, and while I must applaud these “we’re just like you” efforts for at least trying, I also find that — well, no, being attracted to multiple genders isn’t like being attracted to blondes and brunettes. There is a significant difference to my attraction to this gender versus my attraction to that gender in a way that doesn’t exist when one object of affection has yellow hair and the other brown. You can’t understand bisexuality without the “attracted to multiple genders” part. It’s the whole fucking thing.
And I do think that means that monosexuals — that anyone who struggles to comprehend what it is to have the capacity to be attracted to more than one gender — are not going to understand bisexuals, at least not in any real way. I do not think there is an analogy that can make it click, because analogies necessarily exist at a remove from the real thing.
But — and this is the important part — I think that’s okay. There are many things in this world that I do not understand, and I still manage to respect them and allow them to go about their day. As a bisexual, that feels far more important (and far more attainable) to me than understanding. Just let me be, you know? It’s a waste of everyone’s time for me to try to figure out how to render the inexplicable explicable. What if we just accepted that, and stopped worrying about other people’s business?
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