Let’s just start with something obvious:
Christian and Bridget Ziegler are terrible people.
I don’t feel like I should have to explain why; the very existence of Moms for Liberty is an answer to that question. Nothing I have said, or will say, is intended to dispute the basic fact that the Zieglers have done horrible things and caused massive amounts of harm to queer people in Florida.
However —
Actually, before I circle back to the Zieglers, I want to tell you something about a significantly younger version of me, the me that existed at age eighteen. She was openly bisexual (she had been out high school, since she was just fourteen), but she was also very inexperienced sexually, and deeply anxious about her own worth and desirability, which is why she was such an easy mark for an abusive man who she met on the internet, a man who very quickly became her boyfriend, and then her live-in boyfriend, and who she stayed with until about six months after her twenty-first birthday.
This version of me, a version I think about a lot lately, was a girl who was sexually curious but deeply insecure. She knew that threesomes were a cool, exciting thing that cool, exciting people did, and she knew that as a bi woman in particular, threesomes were supposed to be a way for her to experience both sides of herself simultaneously. She was also at least partly convinced that her older, more experienced, more worldly boyfriend was vastly more desirable than she was — that as a package deal, it was he, not she, who people would really want.
She also desperately wanted her boyfriend to love her, to be happy with her, to find her cool and sexy and desirable.
She was, in other words, a teenager who did not fully know herself, who was still figuring out her sexuality, who was desperately afraid that she wasn’t desirable, but who was curious enough to want to explore a wide range of sexual experiences and see if they were for her — which she hoped they would be, because she believed that being sexually adventurous was the same as being cool, and she wanted to be cool.
All of those factors were what led that younger version of me to consent to multiple threesomes — off the top of my head I do not know how many, and while I’m sure I could piece it together and give you an accurate count, I do not see the point. And all of those factors were what led that younger version of me to get exploited by her abusive boyfriend, who used her curiosity, her insecurity, her desire to please him to manipulate her into doing whatever he wanted, her own boundaries be damned. Who manipulated her into being a bait girl — an attractive, relatable woman dangled in front of potential victims in order to lure them into her abuser’s lair.
To say that I have complicated feelings about this long gone version of myself is an understatement. I feel protective of her, I feel embarrassed by her, I feel like I am watching a horror movie where I desperately want to stop her from walking into the abandoned house but know that no matter how loud I scream, her grisly fate will inevitably run its course. I want to defend her by saying that she wasn’t just some passive victim, that she wanted these sexual experiences, at least in part — and yet I also worry that that is not so much a defense as an argument for her culpability, an argument that the women she hurt by proxy have a right to be as angry at her as they do at her abuser. And I know that her pleasure was inseparable from her humiliation, her empowerment inseparable from her abuse, that everything was mixed up in a vicious and painful cocktail that I still don’t know how to process.
And — perhaps more upsettingly than all of that — I know that what this girl went through was not an anomaly. While I would not call her experiences universal to bisexuals, or even to bi women*, I know that they were far more common than she ever realized, that she was, not some isolated idiot dumb dumb who got exploited by an abuser, but an archetype of a young and vulnerable and sexually curious young woman for whom group sex experiences became a minefield. I know that there are other women who are, or have been, like her — women who get used as bait, women who are used to whitewash the reputation of their abuser, women who unwittingly trap other women in the same horrific dynamic that they themselves are trapped in.
Women who, while not exactly blameless, are also not exactly at fault.
And so to say that this story of Bridget and Christian Ziegler that’s been making the news — the story of an abusive man who used his possibly but also maybe not bi female partner to lure other women in for group sex experiences and then abuse and sexually assault those women — hits close to home is, perhaps, an understatement. It is not, as I truly hope you can understand, because I feel that Bridget Ziegler is a good person, and not even so much that I feel sorry for her, personally, but simply because seeing so many people treat this very common bi female experience as a joke or hypocrisy or a way to take the Zieglers down a peg —
It does not feel good to me to have one of the major traumas of my young adulthood flattened and reduced to a joke and dismissed as “right wing hypocrisy” simply because a version of it played out with two of the most noxious Republican assholes who exist in the current media landscape. And I suspect it does not feel good to other women who have gone through similar experiences. Not when the particulars, the complexities, of how our sexual curiosity is weaponized to enable sexual abuse go undiscussed. Not when the particulars, the complexities, of how we are set up to be victims who act as a conduit to other victims are barely legible even to ourselves.
There is, I think, a thoughtful way to talk about the Zieglers, about the way that their threesomes and Christian’s apparent serial predation are part and parcel of a larger cultural narrative of how abusive men operate and how they use women as tools. There is a way to talk about this story that both respects the many women who see themselves in it and refuses to let Bridget Ziegler off the hook for her abhorrent politics and the violence she has committed against LGBTQ people both in Florida and across the nation. There is a way to talk about this story in a nuanced and thoughtful way that does not simply fall back on “lol hypocrisy” or rely on the supposed scandal of a queerphobe doing queer(ish) sex.
I don’t see a lot of that in the media, though; not even in queer media (which is seemingly obsessed with this story). Which put me in a bind.
I did not want to write this essay. I did not want to have to reveal this things, let alone in this context. But I did not feel that I had any other options.
Like I said, they forced my hand.
* Universal bi experience is a myth
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