A Thing That’s Been Bothering Me

OK.

SO.

There’s a lot of erasure surrounding bisexuality in our culture, and that’s a bad thing. People equate bisexuality with indecision and fence-sitting, a sort of sexual dilettantism that’s more a phase than a genuine orientation; yet at the same time, it’s promoted in unhelpful ways, predominantly in contexts where conventionally attractive bi women are presented as male sexual fantasies (such as Olivia Wilde’s character in House, Remy ‘Thirteen’ Hadley), or where bisexuality is fetishised and exoticised as a quirky-but-desirable attribute for the viewer to unpack, rather than as a complex character attribute in its own right. It’s also often used as a sort of, for lack of a better phrase, queerness lite – as though a bi person’s capacity for hetero attraction somehow softens or normalises the otherness of their same-sex feelings, and thereby makes them a more relatable character than someone who is ‘only’ gay, because both gay AND straight people can identify with them.

Which may well be true; and that’s not to say that such characters are necessarily bad or badly written – it’s just that, very often, bisexuality is treated as some sort of sexual midpoint on a set sliding scale between STRAIGHT and GAY, which leads some creators to view it less as an actual orientation and more as a narrative compromise, as though they’re ordering medium chilli sauce to go with their group serving of literary nachos rather than mild or spicy, because that what you do when people prefer extremes: you pick the middle. The idea that bisexuality isn’t the middle, but is a separate thing in and of itself – the third point of a triangle rather than the midpoint of a straight line (assuming you still think there’s only three types of orientation, that is; which, yeah, no) – seems rarely to be considered; and as such, the idea that bi people constitute a separate audience in their own right, rather than being a compromise between two different audiences, is often overlooked.

Thus: as much as I love reading SFFnal stories where bisexuality is the cultural norm because orientation isn’t a big deal in a particular fictional society, I also feel kind of weird at the idea that everyone would suddenly be bisexual just because QUILTBAG persons are no longer stigmatised. Like, yes, OK: in a sexually fluid society, more people would definitely experiment, while those who might otherwise be moved to repress their sexuality would have no reason to do so – and in that sense, there’s obviously going to be more non-straight sex and relationships going on than if you took the same group of people and put them in a straightwashed setting. But the idea that, in the absence of straightness as a default, the extremes of gay and straight would just slide towards the middle and lead to a net increase in bisexuality? Is itself a perpetuation of the idea that bisexuality is a midpoint rather than a distinct orientation, and therefore a culturally conditioned form of sexual compromise rather than an innate preference.

And that bugs the hell out of me. Because, look: in my teens and early twenties, I openly identified as bisexual. I stopped, not because I magically stopped finding women attractive, but because I’m now happily and monogamously married to a man, and I’m yet to find a way to mention those two facts in tandem that doesn’t leave either me or the other people in the conversation feeling super-awkward – like, it’s not an irrelevant part of who I am, but it often feels irrelevant, because there’s a little voice in my head whispering that, well, you married a guy, and so therefore you CHOSE STRAIGHT FOREVER (and anyway, it’s not like you ever really dated any girls the way you dated guys, so clearly it doesn’t count). And if you want to get all Kinsey about it, yes: I have a history of being more attracted to men – or rather, of being more attracted more often to men – than to women. But sexuality is complex, and if you’re measuring the so-called validity of someone’s orientation by how often they’ve either felt or acted on their attractions, then you’re doing life wrong, not least of all because it’s not your place to decide the realness of another person’s feelings.

Nonetheless: I mostly tick ‘straight’ on forms about my orientation, and I describe myself as having straight privilege, because to all intents and purposes, I do. I’ve also described myself as straight online, for much the same reasons listed above. Being bi means that any disclosure of your orientation is pretty much guaranteed to be viewed through the lens of your relationship status; as though being single somehow makes you more bi – because you could potentially hook up with anyone! – whereas being in a monogamous relationship, or married, or whatever, makes people think you’re either just saying it for dramatic effect (because CLEARLY, you’ve already made your choice, rendering the question of your former preferences moot), or – more worryingly – as a backhanded profession that you’re open to being unfaithful to your partner, because why else would you bother mentioning being attracted to someone other than them, even hypothetically?

Which means that, on a daily basis, in casual conversation, it feels disingenuous to refer to myself as bi, even though I’m still the same person inside. And there’s also a professional element, too: precisely because I appear to be straight, whatever that means – hell, because I so often self-describe as straight, as per the above – there’s a very real sense in which I’d feel like I was mocking or diminishing the struggles of openly QUILTBAG persons, but especially QUILTBAG authors,  not to be judged by or rejected because of their orientation, were I to put my hand up and say, hey, I’m not straight, either. And yet I stopped calling myself bi, partly for the sake of convenience, but mostly because I feel awkward about how the term applies to me, with everything that connotes. I don’t know how to say it, even – and when I started writing this post, I didn’t even realise it was something I wanted to say.

But now I’ve reached the end, and I’ve realised that yes, it is – because the very fact that this is a thing that I think about, that it actively bothers and upsets me and sits at the back of my mind, telling me I can’t possibly be what I think I am, is proof of how difficult, how pervasive, the eliding of bisexuality can be. Problematic depictions of bisexuality bother me, not in the abstract, as yet another thing that our culture so often gets wrong, but because they bother me, personally: because those selfsame problematic depictions, and the culture they both reflect and create, are a good 90% of the reason why I find it so damn hard to say something comparatively simple – I am bi – without feeling like an imposter; like I should also, simultaneously, be citing my personal history as evidence, or apologising, or otherwise contextualising who I am for the comfort and convenience of the listener, because it’s a loaded thing, and I just… I’m sick of it.

So, yeah. I didn’t mean for this to end up a confessional, but I guess it has. I’m Foz Meadows, and I’m bisexual: I might not always say so in conversation, or when asked to fill out a form, but I am – and now there’s a record of that. I don’t know what that’ll mean to you, if you’re reading this, but right now, I feel a lot better for having said it; not because I’ve never said it before, but because I’d stopped saying it for reasons that have nothing to do with who I am and everything to do with what I’ve felt culturally pressured to be. Which doesn’t mean those pressures have magically vanished, or that I’ll never succumb to them again. But it feels both important and necessary to acknowledge that they’re there, and that I’ve been influenced by them; and to say that, if you’re feeling similarly frustrated or confused, then that’s OK – and you’re not the only one.

Realism & Outliers

Three days ago, Kameron Hurley wrote an amazing piece on the erasure of women’s stories in particular, but especially their contribution to combat, in the course of which she linked to something I wrote last year about default narrative settings. The response to her article – and, by way of the domino effect, to mine – has been overwhelmingly positive, which is both encouraging and wonderful. This being the internet, however, there’s also been some reactive dissent, some of it outrageously trollish (as per one Redditor’s complaint that “not every book has to appeal to females and you have the entire romance genre if you want to read from a females point of view,” which, AUGH), but also a special type of defensive hostility that manages to completely miss the point – in this case, for instance, by asserting that, as the majority of soldiers are still male, it’s a fantasy to pretend that the female ones matter. And as this is an argument whose variants I’ve encountered a lot – not only in response to my PSA post, but generally elsewhere – it’s one I’d like to properly address.

So: Yes. The majority of soldiers in history have been male – that fact is not in contention. Nor am I arguing that women in history never experienced sexism, or that discrimination on the basis of race, class or sexual orientation never kept anyone down. What I am saying, though, is twofold: firstly, that our popular notions of how historical prejudice worked are not always accurate (or are, at the very least, prone to oversimplification), and that this is worth examining, especially in instances where most of what we think we know about history comes from fictional extrapolations of it which are themselves inspired by earlier fiction; and secondly, that acknowledging the reality of historical prejudice is neither the same thing as saying that nobody ever overcame it, nor as believing that such prejudice is inherent to every possible permutation of sentient society. By which I mean: whatever you believe about history, unless you think that human beings are predestined to perpetrate specific injustices regardless of the setting in which they find themselves (which is incredibly depressing, and also intellectually suspect, when you consider the extent to which culture is shaped by context), then admitting the existence of historical prejudices doesn’t obligate you to incorporate them in your fictional worlds.

But, says my hypothetical interlocutor, what about realism? Aren’t all these examples you’re giving me about lady soldiers and crossdressing spies ultimately just outliers and exceptions to the norm? 

To which I say: if your definition of realism hinges on idea that foregrounding a perceived minority is inherently unrealistic, then firstly, I’m going to question whether you’ve ever actually read a fantasy novel, and secondly, fuck you.

No, seriously: have you ever fucking read a fantasy novel? All the oldest, most beloved tropes of epic fantasy are predicated on the idea of taking some impossible scenario, unusual person and/or mythical creature, and then writing an entire fucking story about them – preferably all at once! You think real history was littered with bastard princes raised in secret by wise monks or noble farmers and then sent off on quests to obtain the Magic Sword of Destiny? You think sexy assassins are ten a penny? Do you even know how many fantasy stories explicitly establish the incredibly rarity of dragons, and then spend the rest of the fucking novel trekking to meet them? Are you even reading the same genre as me?

Fantasy is all about foregrounding outliers – quite often, in fact, it does little else. So when you sit there, straight-faced, and tell me you couldn’t get into Novel X because the main character was a black female pirate and that’s so unrealistic, what you’re actually saying is, the only exceptional people I want to fantasise about are the ones who look like me. Because the thing is,  if you’re making this argument in the first place? Then the chances are astronomically good that you’re either a straight white cisgendered male or someone who checks at least one of those boxes – which is to say, someone who sees themselves so well represented in narrative that it’s downright unusual to encounter the alternative. And thanks to the prevalence of those sorts of stories, it’s easy to slip into justifying their monopoly by assuming that any departure from the norm would be, on some fundamental level, unrealistic. I mean, why else call it normal if it’s not the base state of being, right?

Except, no, it’s not. On a global scale, white people are an ethnic minority. Women make up half the population of Earth. Straight away, that’s two of your apparently immutable majority axes defeated by basic math – and as for the rest? Let me put it this way: of all the people on this planet, two percent are naturally blonde, while one percent are natural redheads (and before you ask, no: that doesn’t correlate directly with having light skin – genetically, you can have pretty much any combination on offer). That might sound like a comparatively small number – and yet, if I were to do a random tally of the number of blonde and redhaired protagonists in SFF novels, I’ll bet you I could hit over a hundred just from the books in my house. Given that there are at least as many QUILTBAG persons as redheads worldwide – if not more than all the blondes and auburns put together, the data being understandably hard to measure – then statistically, they ought to have equal representation in the foreground of SFF novels. That would, after all, be only realistic. And yet, if I were to do a similar sweep of the books in my house, I doubt I’d find even a quarter as many such protagonists. We foreground what seems realistic to us, is what I’m saying – but that doesn’t mean our perception of reality is either all-encompassing or accurate.

 

So, yes. Sometimes, when we’re talking about amazing women or queer individuals in history, we’re talking about anomalies. Sometimes – but not nearly as often as you’ve been trained to think. And even if they are outliers, who the fuck cares? Stories about determined underdogs overcoming adversity to do awesome things and make their mark on history are some of the best ones out there. But you know what? That doesn’t make them the only stories you can realistically tell about members of perceived or actual minority groups. The fact that there were incredible women in history who took up swords and played at politics doesn’t diminish the narrative potential of those women who managed their families and held the fort instead – in fact, those two groups aren’t even mutually exclusive. Human beings are versatile creatures, and as rich a source of inspiration as history is for SFF stories, it’s not the be-all, end-all of what’s possible. The only limit is your imagination – or rather, the biases with which you’re content to constrain it.