Why I Have Difficulty Considering Myself Bisexual

(Was going to put this on my pseudonymous blog and decided to hell with it, I want to hear from my friends about this. May be more PG-13 than usual.)

To be clear, I have no problem with "bisexual" as a descriptive label. I have a boyfriend and two girlfriends [-1]; my behavior is clearly bisexual. [0] I do sometimes have difficulty taking on bisexuality as an identity category for myself. I've always had difficulty with the label "bisexual" even though it was the first alternative sexual label I took on myself. Here's a hilarious-awkward timeline of my reasons for not calling myself bi:

• When I originally tried to come out to people at around fifteen --- my senior year of high school --- they denied that bisexuality existed, and told me that I was gay, and that claiming bisexuality was just a way to hedge around my own internalized homophobia. (Except they didn't use that language at the time.) For some reason, I absorbed this idea and repeated it to myself and others.
• For a while in college I claimed to be "bi until graduation, except in reverse" as a way to excuse my obviously not-strictly-homosexual behavior. I'm not sure anyone bought this one.
• When I started to transition, I had this bizarre theory that I was queer both as a man and as a woman and that my sexual orientation was shifting and confused while I was in between genders. Therefore I was attracted to people from both genders, but only because I was both genders, and once I stopped being both genders, I would only be attracted to women? This is slightly less crazycakes than it sounds, but still rather silly.
• After my first serious attempt at a non-monogamous relationship went horribly south, I concluded that it was impossible to be bisexual, because my mystical One True Love could only have one sex/gender [1] and once I found them I would know what my sexual orientation was. ...What? Rachel, you seriously thought this for like three whole years? I have nothing to say in my defense other than that I am better now.

For the last while I've taken to calling myself "queer" on the grounds that it's a good label for "it's complicated and not heteronormative," and that's still the closest I come to something I am comfortable calling myself as an identity category. Generally if I want to identify as anything surrounding my sexuality, it's about what I do and not whom. I've been thinking about bisexuality recently because of my schoolwork and some conversations with friends, though, and because it's a label that other people have been putting on me because I am interacting sexually with people of more than one gender. I've been thinking, then, "Okay, what would it mean to take this on as an identity? Is it a useful identity for me? Is it a useful decriptor?"

The last question is easiest so I will approach it first. It is a useful descriptor at a far-distance level, because it is more specific than queer, and because using that descriptor or a related one helps to combat bi invisibility in queer circles. This battle is much more won in my social circles than it is in other queer social circles; I really have no idea where it stands in academia and theory-land. (Although one classmate's eagerness at discovering I had partners of multiple genders suggests there is still work to be done, and I have seen very limited academic work on bisexual queerness.) Closer in I suppose it is a useful descriptor for people who are thinking "Is Rachel potentially interested in person X?" in that it proves that the answer to that question is not dependent on gender.

Except that it totally is --- or at least it is dependent on some intersection of gender and sexed embodiment.

I largely don't care what's in someone's pants [2]; everyone I've interacted with has been awesome in some ways and challenging in others and I am grateful for the privilege of interacting with anyone at such a private level who I care for enough to reciprocate interest. I guess in that I find variety nice, that points toward bisexuality! But I do care about other aspects of sexed embodiment, like voices and skin texture and body hair and smell. In most of these contexts, except maybe voice, I tend pretty strongly towards preferring female embodied characteristics --- smooth skin, less hair, and not smelling like man. (I don't know how to better describe it. There is a family of smells I associate with adult human males that I find largely unpleasant.)

Sometimes I choose to be physically intimate with people who have those qualities anyway. This could be because I love them dearly. It could be because there are other things about them whose positive-attractiveness cancels out the negative-attractiveness of dude smell or whatever. It could also just be because I have chosen to not care for an evening. These are all choices. While sexual orientation at some level may not be a choice, and does not feel like one --- I don't choose to be attracted to long hair or smooth skin or cat ears or whatever --- sexual expression is something I choose and want to continue to claim and possess as a choice that I can make on a daily or lifelong basis. If I have an innate sexual orientation that I cannot change, it is probably pretty close to "lesbian." [3] I'm not sure that this idea of an innate sexual orientation is a terribly useful one for me, but if I'm going to define one, I'm not sure it should be "bisexual."

That said, I don't have a better term. The most obvious thing to suggest would be a Kinsey 5, but while I guess that could be a useful broad-strokes description of behavior, I don't feel it's accurate at an identity level. I'd rather think about it in terms of magnitudes; the magnitude of my attraction to female body characteristics is generally positive and the magnitude of my attraction to male body characteristics is generally negative, but there's a lot more to attraction (especially for long-term partners versus Random Dude/t/te At Party or something) than body type, and sometimes the magnitude of the vectors adds up to very positive even when there are one or two negative vectors in there like "covered in body hair." This is potentially related to Violet's excellent "Vector Identity Theory," although the specific formulation she provides is related to gender identity and not sexual partner choice. [4]
So uhhhhh... what do y'all think?

[-1] Don't feel bad, I can't keep track either. I discovered I had the second girlfriend by reading a third party's LJ.

[0] OK, I have a little of a problem. I wish that the term "bisexual" didn't reinforce the idea that there are two sexes, and that you can be attracted to either or both of them (or neither if you're on the ball and recognize asexuality as a valid identity-zone for people to inhabit). There aren't two sexes, at least not when you get down to individual cases, and attraction is crazy mad complicated, and if you accept that gender and sex aren't the same even if you believe they are related, then bigendersexual and bisexual aren't necessarily the same and "pansexual" or "omnisexual" starts to look better, except that then you're throwing away all of the work done by bisexual activists to try to get bisexuality recognized at all, and you open up the can of worms and each worm is holding a barrel full of disappointingly serious monkeys. If you could do me a favor and accept that when I say "bisexuality" I mean "bi/pan/omnisexuality" that would be awesome.

[1] A problematic assumption in and of itself.

[2] To the extent to which I do, it is none of the internet's business.

[3] I doubt that I do, in a lifelong sense, because of how often this has changed for me. However, if I do have one, the last five years or so of data suggest it's oriented mostly toward an approximation of "woman."

[4] "Sexual object choice" is arguably the term of art, but my sexual object choice usually involves going to hardware stores, while my sexual partner choice involves going to coffeeshops.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/66818.html.