People in the bisexual community have frequently noticed that bisexual men seem to be looked down upon much more than bisexual women. Or, at first glance, bisexuality in women is much more accepted and celebrated than bisexuality in men. Why is this? The following is an edited version of my answer to this question on the BiNet USA email list.
First off, let me make a disclaimer: I am not talking about all straight men here, just most of them. Thankfully many straight men to not subscribe to the insecurities I describe here.
It seems that the current understanding of women’s bisexuality is not threatening to straight men. In fact, it is far from threatening – the idea of bisexuality in women is useful to straight men in a number of ways.
First and most obviously, it provides straight men access to threesome fantasies. Of course, the bi women in these fantasies may only superficially resemble actual bi women. In other words, there is a certain sort of bisexual woman that these fantasies are evoking, namely a woman whose sexual and romantic interactions with other women are really performed for the pleasures of men. This false idea of bi women is also used to undermine lesbianism. For most straight men, the most threatening aspect of lesbianism is that these women are not available to them. However, if a man can imagine lesbians as actually being like bi women, and then imagine that the bi women are really just straight women with a slight bonus of doing threesomes, then lesbians somehow magically become available. It is possible to see this entire chain of logic hard at work in fake-lesbian and bisexual pornography produced for the straight male gaze.
Of course, actual bisexual women rarely resemble this fantasy. So while the vague notion of bisexuality in women is appealing to these men, the appeal ends the moment things vary from the fantasy script. For example, when she starts having sex with another woman without men involved in any way. The oppression of bi women therefore takes on a form that is fairly unique among queers: the straight world is all too happy to promote bisexuality in women, but it is promoting something that is not actually bisexuality (as it is commonly practiced), and it is promoting it for all the wrong reasons. I do not think that bi women have it much better than bi men.
Bisexual men are problematic because they directly threaten the heterosexual integrity of straight men, by blurring the border between straight and gay. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is: it is absolutely crucial to many straight men that they are not pushed to consider or defend their own sexuality. (This is a common strategy of oppression: the normative group maintains their power by not subjecting themselves to scrutiny.) Also, bi men might hit on them. Even worse, bi men might somehow travel undercover in the straight world, since they do not necessarily carry the markers or stigma of gay men. The “bi men are going to infect straight women with HIV” moral panics reflect this fear.
So in the ideal world of straight men, all the women would be bisexual and none of the men would be bisexual. Conveniently, some straight men (or at least people working for straight men) have produced “scientific” research that says exactly this, and then got the New York Times to print their conclusions (registration required). Isn’t that nice?
You might wonder why I have only been discussing the viewpoint of straight men. After all, aren’t they just one group among many others within the overall culture?
Of course, they are not. Our culture and institutions have largely been bought and paid for, and the owners are almost always straight men, and even worse, they are the particular sort of straight men who subscribe to the above notions. These are the people we see in corporate boardrooms and government positions, and they fully own the media, and have no qualms about using that ownership to dictate content. Even if we step away from institutions and obvious positions of power, straight men wield privilege that is not available to women or queers.
In sum, the general cultural attitude towards bi men and bi women is coming from only one place: the needs of straight men.
There is a common trap we fall into when discussing cultural norms and oppression that is managed via people’s attitudes. We assume that the culture is monolithic, and neutral. Of course, it is not. When referring to culture-wide attitudes, instead of asking “why to people think this?” it is often much more useful to ask “why do straight white men think this, and how do they export their opinions to the rest of us?”.
freaksexual 