Episode 33 | Advice Quickie: Coming Out As A Bisexual Guy When You’re A Swinger
This quickie bonus episode represents a great collaboration between Ending the Sexual Dark Age and Life on the Swingset. The Swingset pitches in to answer a question from an experienced swinging guy who’s concerned about coming out to the swing community as a bisexual. Many thanks to Cooper, Ginger, Dylan and Shira for lending a hand on this one.
Show Links:
Life On The Swingset
Direct Download: Sexual-Dark-Age-033-Advice-Quickie-Bisexual-Male-Swinging.mp3
Thank you for organizing this, JV. Right after I posted it, I realized it probably should have been posed to LotSW directly. However, at the time I still hadn’t listened to any of their pod-casts. I kinda got a good laugh out of it too, because when I saw the title I expected something a bit more generic, but including some of my thoughts. I actually told the Mrs. that “it looks like there was some decent demand for answering questions like mine.” I was not expecting my novel to get torn apart.
Thank you again
B
No problem man, I’m happy we could help and this turned out really cool the way it went down. We always try to address listener questions directly when possible, and I assure you there are more guys than you think wondering the same thing…I’m sure plenty of other people in the audience got some helpful advice out of this 🙂
Here’s a good link on bisexuality: http://www.bisexualindex.org.uk/index.php/Articles
I’ve listened to a few of your podcasts on bisexuality and you seem to think that biphobia is primarily directed towards men. I think that bisexual men and women actually face different types of biphobia.
This quote from the blog No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? sums it up pretty well: “One of the most common biphobic narratives is that the penis is what counts. A woman who has sex with men is really straight, even if she also fucks women; a man who has sex with men is really gay, even if he also fucks women. If a man fucks a man, even once, he is forever corrupted from the heights of heterosexual masculinity. It’s the new One Drop rule.”
Our culture often views things from a heterosexual male perspective, so female bisexuality is more acceptable on face value because it is ‘hot’. But this seems to fall under the mentality of ‘it’s okay for girls to like girls, as long as a man gets to join in or watch.’ There is also the attitude that bisexuality is simply a form of experimentation, before the woman eventually settles down with a man. Bisexuality is not respected as a complex sexual and romantic orientation equivalent to homosexuality or heterosexuality. Instead, a woman’s bisexual sexual and romantic orientation is often reduced to a male fantasy. Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with swinging or threesome’s, these fantasy revolve a round male pleasure rather than the woman’s own desires.
In general, biphobia seems to result from the desire to categorise people in a binary way (e.g. male/female; gay/straight). Most people don’t seem to understand the differences between and complexities of sexual orientation, romantic orientation, gender identity, biological sex and gender expression. Perhaps if people understood these better biphobia, cissexism, and heterosexism wouldn’t be such big issues.
Personally I think of my sexuality in this way:
-Most people aren’t attracted to everyone, rather, there is a subset of people that they experience sexual and/or romantic attraction towards.
-Each individual’s group of people that they are attracted to has a different break down of demographics.
-A person might tend to be more attracted to people with certain characteristics, like blonde hair or an extroverted personality.
-Some people will have only women, only Asian people, only under 30s etc. Other’s will have more variety.
-The group of people I’m attracted to includes men and women. This says nothing about the number of people I’m attracted to, or that I will automatically be attracted to certain people. Likewise, it is not a sexuality in between homosexuality and heterosexuality. It is my sexuality and it is not exactly like anybody else’s.
I would like to add that I don’t in any way wish to erase the experiences of men who experience biphobia. I simply felt that my comment might offer a different perspective on how biphobia can affect women.