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| How freaking excited are you for next week's episode, bi kids?! |
Denialism is the act of repudiating the existence of basic scientific truths, often because that truth violates an individual's worldview. Denialism is rather common, some of the most prevalent forms being Holocaust denialism, AIDS denialism, and global warming denialism, the latter being so contentious at present that the topic is often called "global warming controversy" instead of "denialism" by popular sources despite the fact that no organization of national or international professional standing has maintained a dissenting opinion. When denialism confronts bisexuality, that phenomenon is called bisexual erasure. Bisexual erasure is the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or re-explain evidence of bisexuality in real life, history and the news, and/or academia.
Bisexual erasure has many manifestations. It often takes the form of simply overlooking bisexuals, be the intention malicious or accidental. For instance, bisexuals call out how they are being overlooked in the marriage equality debate. (Ironically, that article comes from the Gay and Lesbian Task Force.) Indeed, the ongoing use of the terms such as "gay marriage" instead of "same-sex marriage" by proponents and opponents alike erases bi people by failing to recognize that not all people who desire to marry someone of the same sex are homosexual. The terms "gay or lesbian relationships" and "gay adoption" have similar problems of inclusivity and vercity. On an even more foundational level, the phrase "gay community" excludes bi people, as recently demonstrated by an exchange between news anchor Don Lemon and a trans activist at an NAACP forum, which is particularly intellectually-feeble given the definition of the word "community." (The specific topic of trans inclusion is a whole other ballgame, one that I'll be writing about soon.)
Bisexual erasure sometimes takes the form of doctoring historical information to exclude the possibility of bisexuality. Alexander the Great and Eleanor Roosevelt are commonly "straight-washed" or "gay-washed," when their personal histories clearly indicate bisexuality. Anne Frank's burgeoning interest in the bodies of men and women was famously redacted by her father in early printings for bierotic content. Even historical social institutions such as pederasty often have bisexuality removed from their modern descriptions; historic pederasty is categorized as "homosexual" when, in fact, the vast majority of pederasts (the older men who took younger male lovers) were married to women and fathered children with them, while their young lovers were expected to grow, marry women, and later become pederasts themselves.
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| Alexander was a terrible movie. But Colin Farrell! Actress Angelina Jolie is bisexual. And Colin Farrell! |
In its most extreme form, bisexual erasure actually denies that bisexuality - and by extension bisexual people - exist. Unfortunately, my research finds that this kind of attitude is the most-prevalent form of bisexual erasure, meaning that bi people are most often subjected to the form of denialism that hurts most - the personal kind. This revocation of existence often takes on one of a few standard patterns. The most common pattern is monosexism, the fallacious notion that all people are either heterosexual or homosexual, nowhere inbetween. This ideology manifests itself in the strangest memes, among them the idea that bi people are gays "who are afraid to come out" or that they are really just inquisitive (and apparently hands-on!) straight people. A related view espoused more infamously in lesbian circles is the stereotype that bisexual women feign their bisexuality as a way of attracting male mates, and aren't "really" bisexual at all.
When erasure of bisexuality crosses the line between simple ignorance and pessimism about their character, bisexual erasure becomes the product of biphobia, the wider hatred, resentment, or aversion of bisexual people. Bi people have expressed that they are occassionally the targets of bigotry from both straight and gay detractors.
Malediction of bisexuals from gays has already been partially dicussed; however, there is more to develop. For gays, there is some research that indicates feelings of antipathy towards bi people from some their gay peers originates in a fallacy of accident on part of the latter: some homosexuals adopt bisexual identities as a transitional identity between the heterosexual identity assumed by cultural norm and their actual homosexual one, and, when they later transition from a bisexual identity to a homosexual one, they universalize their experience and thus assume that everyone with a bisexual identity is in the process of becoming gay. Thus, to a homosexual-identified person who has fallen for this fallacy, bisexuals do not exist. Unbelievably, I've heard this argument a lot from from gay-identified people I know, particularly from lesbian-identified women. The mythos of lesbians hating bi women is based in some truth: I recall a rather telling story of a local lesbian discussion group that ceased operation when new leadership suggested that the group's name be changed from Lesbian Chat to Women's Chat. Some members of the group - particularly older ladies - were furious that the proposed name change might suggest that the group welcomed bi women, and that was something those ladies simply couldn't accept! Likewise, pejorative gay community slang such as "lesbian until graduation," "hasbian," and "yestergay" expose other hurtful things bis endure from gay peers.
Malediction from their straight peers is, unfortunately, even more severe. In addition to all of the untrue and hurtful accusations orginating in gay communities about bi people, heterosexuals have had some particularly nasty (and unfounded) things to say about bisexuals. One of the most pervasive negative stereotypes about bisexual people is that they are "greedy." There is no scientific evidence to substanciate this claim. More dramatically, evangelists have infamously scapegoated bisexuals for transmitting HIV to heterosexuals. Epidemiologists have disproven this allegation by studying both the origin of HIV and the historical timeline of medical discovery.
The ignorant-to-hateful attitudes discussed here are behind the avowels against the existence of bisexuality found in the stupid headlines that began this discourse. (Wow, that was a Judith Butler sentence! Sorry, readers.) But the very idea that some researchers had to do a study to prove that people are truly experiencing the feelings they claim to feel is, frankly, pathetic. I mean, when was the last time you told someone, "I feel hungry" and they replied, "Hold on. I'll get my instruments to verify?" Never. And for that very reason - that we don't factcheck people's feelings because emotions are ineffable and understood to be a person's subjective truth - the fact that shit like this is newsworthy is both a total embarrassment and proof of the entrenched depths of bisexual erasure.
This blog wouldn't fulfill my definition of "positivistic" if it didn't offer practical solutions to problems. As the problem I present here is erasure of bisexuality, I suggest that you, dear reader (even if you are bi), undo some of that erasure by taking a few minutes to educate yourself about bisexuality. You could read about the history of the bisexual pride flag, literary depictions of bisexuals, watch a great It Gets Better Campaign video by the American Institute of Bisexuality, or even just see who's bisexual and famous. And make certain to check back here at Sexpertesse; next time, more on bisexuality!
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| Bi is beautiful. |
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