Gratuitous Speculation on the "Nature" of...

I read two interesting articles this week discussing bisexuality in men and women.
This is obviously of great interest to me.

In How male bisexuality got cool the discussion is more about the legitimacy of male on male affection and less about sexuality per say... Because the idea here is how it looks and not the way people identify - behaviour is not identity.

It’s an emerging version of male bisexuality that’s more pose than sincere. The celebrities who engage in it take pains to make it clear they’re straight—half-ironically goofing around, often as a blatant grab for attention.
[...]
Gay men have long fetishized straight guys, but what’s happening now goes beyond that. It’s not just about being seduced into a same-sex encounter, but about men claiming bisexuality or bicuriosity on their own terms.

What I emphasised is really, really shitty.
Excuse me, what?
Personally, I think society has hard wired men queer or not to Objectify their, ha, objects of desire, that is however not my point. You can't really "tell" if a man is gay or straight unless he signifies it in an explicit way - lots of gay men "pass" as straight and lots of straight men are sometimes "confused" as gay. To say that, historically, Gay men have fetishized straight men is very homophobic because it's just another way of saying - gay=feminine and they only desire straight=masculine... basically a retelling on Inversion. Not to mention, that gay men who were isolated from queer community didn't actually have anyone else to desire, lets not forget that little tid bit.

[...]Somewhat surprisingly, women, too, are increasingly open to dating—and are sometimes specifically attracted to — bisexual guys

'Cause god knows that straight men are all hearts and flowers when it comes to sex and sexuality. Men who are not mono-sexual or have experienced sex that isn't just intercourse will very likely be open to a relationship that isn't utterly phallo-centric.
Shocking.
I know.

with all that, the article is incredibly dismissive of actual same-sex encounters and bisexual identity continuing the idea that bisexual people are indecisive, slutty and incapable of settling down.

It may be "cool" to toe the line and gush about the your best mate's suit etc. But I've yet to see bisexuality presented as anything other than part of the American celebrity freak show.

Go watch Torchwood, it's British.

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In Why women are leaving men for other women (full length here) the discussion is an attempt to explain the phenomenon of women's changing orientation... despite the bisexuality in the title, I felt that the article was both misogynist and biphobic.

Women as a rule have a wider range of acceptable behaviour towards other women than men have, such is the nature of an oppressed group.
However, when society tries to push women "switching teams" as both surprising and natural, in the same place, something sounds fishy to me.

Certainly nothing is new about women having sex with women, but we've arrived at a moment in the popular culture when it all suddenly seems almost fashionable -- or at least, acceptable.
[...]
[E]xperts like Binnie Klein, a Connecticut-based psychotherapist and lecturer in Yale's department of psychiatry, agree that alternative relationships are on the rise.

"It's clear that a change in sexual orientation is imaginable to more people than ever before, and there's more opportunity -- and acceptance -- to cross over the line," says Klein, noting that a half-dozen of her married female patients in the past few years have fallen in love with women. "Most are afraid that if they don't go for it, they'll end up with regrets."

Adrienne Rich in her canonical text Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence writes about the institutions of heterosexuality (romance, marriage, etc) and how it subjugates women economically, sexually and all the other ways women have historically suffered under the burden of heterosexual desire.
More and more women today do not have to suffer under that burden and the camaraderie of other women is very appealing.

In a 2004 landmark study at Northwestern University, the results were eye-opening. During the experiment, the female subjects became sexually aroused when they viewed heterosexual as well as lesbian erotic films. This was true for both gay and straight women.

Among the male subjects, however, the straight men were turned on only by erotic films with women, the gay ones by those with men.

"We found that women's sexual desire is less rigidly directed toward a particular sex, as compared with men's, and it's more changeable over time," says the study's senior researcher, J. Michael Bailey, Ph.D. "These findings likely represent a fundamental difference between men's and women's brains."

Yeah... not really.
Disregarding of course that we grow up in a society in which women's bodies are hyper sexualised and objectified every where we go. Women as well as men have been surrounded by images of women as sexual and available... the effect is prominent in all genders.
This doesn't mean women are naturally "bisexual".
It means women are socialised in a society in which we are taught that women are sexual objects.

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Male bisexuality is seen as a freak show.
Female bisexuality is seen as the natural order of things.
And of course the gender binary and dichotomy is prominent in both these articles. Gender and sex variance pretty much a myth.
Yeah.
There is work to be done.