“Sure, we’ve been together for a year but I don’t care if you continue hooking up with girls. Like I don’t consider that cheating.”
“Girl just stop trying to be spicy straight or gay. Just because you make out with girls or have girl crushes that doesn’t change the fact that you are actually straight.”
“Am I really bisexual or am I just straight and think women are hot? Do I actually like girls and guys or is liking girls just a phase? I find guys hot but I’ve only hooked up with them and haven’t with girls so does that mean I’m straight and not bisexual? Am I bisexual? Am I not? “Am I just gay?”
“It’s just a phase.”
“I don’t date bisexuals… they always cheat. And who knows what they’ve done or where they’ve been.”
“Oh, you’re bisexual? That’s hot.”
All of these interactions, thoughts, and words have led me to one conclusion: biphobia is so internalized and engrained into all of us that we don’t even recognize the ways in which we allow biphobia to thrive. It’s honestly a balance: the gays hate you and straight people don’t believe you. How cute! We as a society have become so accustomed to old ideals passed on from previous generations whether that a person, sexually, has to be either gay or straight with no in-between or that there are only two genders and the gender you are is what you were born as. Okay, we are getting a bit off-topic.
When it’s come to my own experiences with internalized biphobia, I constantly, to this day, question myself. I feel like I’m not gay enough to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community, but not straight enough to feel like I belong in the category of heterosexual. It’s not only a constant inner battle but a battle to find where I belong. Because that’s all we can ask for in life: to belong.
“When I first came out to some of my friends, they all thought I was lying and that I was straight. They would talk about me behind my back about how I was just trying to get attention and that I was straighter than a wooden board. Then when I finally got into my first serious gay relationship, she told me how she never dates bisexual people and that if a girl has been with a guy, she won’t date them or get with them. I constantly was invalidated,” (anonymous).
This being a common experience for most bisexual identifying persons further displays how big of a problem this is in society. Though most people don’t strive to be rude or invalidate another person’s sexuality, it is seen not as an insult due to the brainwashing that society has done to the general public.
OH YES, and you can’t forget the constant and mass sexualization of bisexual people, especially bisexual women. When I or my bisexual friends have told men their sexuality, lots of them ask for threesomes with you, them, and another girl. As if that’s the only thing that’s always on our minds or the only thing we ever want to do. Not only are we over-sexualized in real-life instances but additionally are due to the mass production and therefore consumption of girl-on-girl gay porn by straight men. These porn videos idealize lesbian sex and threesomes with two women and one man. Part of the problem may be that men start watching porn at a very young age and their brains are programmed to believe that this is how sex truly is and how it should be. I believe this leads to the fetishization of bisexual women later in life whether this is in high school, college, or other stages in life. This constant fetishization makes me, a lot of the time, feel ashamed to be bisexual because I am considered overly sexual or promiscuous or more.
But hey, we are told to get over ourselves and just accept that this is something we have to constantly put up with. I don’t know about every other bisexual person, but personally, I am fed up with this and ready to start standing up for myself. My friends seem to feel the same way, which makes me hopeful for the future. Especially when it comes to destigmatizing the B in LGBTQ+.