My inbox continues to be filled with — often panicked, often right wing — reactions to Gallup’s (honestly really predictable, given trends of the past few years) report about an increasingly LGBTQ, and more specifically, increasingly bisexual America. I’m not going to link to any of them — why would I clutter your brain space with that garbage? — but you will not be surprised to learn that many of them are fixated on the more than 20% of Gen Z women who identify as bisexual now. You will not be surprised to know that many people are convinced that this cannot be true, that it must be due to peer pressure, to porn, to young women being too fucking dumb to know if they’re actually attracted to someone, to anything other than “yep, if you make it safe to be bi, more women will say they are bi.”
It is relatively easy to map American history into rough periods that correlate to moments of bi fascination and a subsequent bi backlash. Sexually fluid rockers of the 1970s gave way to the HIV-fueled anti-bi panic of the 1980s; the bi activists of the early 1990s gave way to the “bisexual chic” of the latter 1990s and early aughts, who themselves were cast aside in favor of the Born This Way™️ that undergirded the fight for marriage equality. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that we started seeing more nuanced and positive bisexual representation in media after same-gender marriage had been secured — nor should it surprise anyone that we are, again, either at the beginning of or well into yet another backlash. (History only becomes clear in retrospect.)
But. The fact of the backlash isn’t really what interests me. It is what it is. What I find worth talking about is how gender specific bisexual backlash often is — and the ways in which a backlash against bi men necessarily looks different from one against bi women.
The fear of a bisexual man — the fear that stirred up panic throughout the 1980s, as the HIV pandemic cut across the globe — tends to be rooted in a fear of men causing harm to women. The most literal iteration of this the aforementioned HIV panic, in which bi men were cast as vectors of disease, conduits through which HIV could enter the straight community and devastate poor, innocent straight women. The bi man is bad because he might be secretly gay, because he might cheat on his wife with another man, because he’s luring ladies into thinking they have the perfect hetero life while cruising at truck stops on the side. While I’m sure there is anti-bi sentiment within the gay male community (I’m just not as privy to it for reasons that should be obvious), there’s a lot less mainstream handwringing over how a gay man might feel if a bi man leaves him for a woman.
The fear of the bisexual woman, on the other hand — well. While we do see lesbians presenting bi women as vectors of disease, as natural heartbreakers doomed to leave you for a man, that’s not the dominant narrative in the current backlash. That’s not the cause for concern that we see rippling through the mainstream papers as people struggle to digest that over a fifth of Gen Z women apparently identify as bi.
No while straight society frets about the bisexual man perverting others, the fear with the bi woman — and particularly the young bi woman — is that she has been perverted. It must be TikTok, it must porn, it must be media that has led her astray. She is too weak-minded to know what she wants, she is a follower just parroting what she sees in the media.
If this reminds of you of recent discussions of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” and the “young girls” who were “tricked” into seeing themselves as trans by the internet, well. That’s because they’re the same phenomenon. We are a society that does not believe that AFAB* people have the capability to know themselves and discover their own queerness — the bi woman, the trans man, must necessarily be the “young girl” who is led astray. AMAB people, on the other hand, get coded as violent threats to cis women — whether through upping their chances of contracting an STI or by, uh, just existing as trans women.
The backlash narrative isn’t rooted in any reality; it’s hoary gendered stereotypes that people grasp for to make sense of their panic and discomfort. And for some reasons, those tired stereotypes always seem fixated on the idea of AFAB people as hapless, helpless, permanent victims.
* I’m aware that the “assigned female/male at birth” terminology has fallen out of favor but it seems like the best way to talk about the fact that transphobic rhetoric insists on gendering young trans mascs/men as “our lost daughters”
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