The Bisexual Dude: The Privilege and the Persecution

Okay, so, bisexuality. In women, society's pretty cool with it (to an extent). There's a few reasons for this:

1. It makes sense from the patriarchal view. Women's bodies are not necessarily the bodies of human beings, they are objects of sexual desire. You are 'supposed' to see a woman's body and think "Yes. Sex should be done to that." Thus, if a woman thinks that, well that's fine. That just makes sense.
2. Two women being together is 'super hot'. A woman's sexuality is, of course, a performance for the men. I mean, that's the only reason women have orgasms, right, just to let a dude know they're doing something right? And if a lady is doing it to another lady, well holy crap that's just the best thing.
3. There's the Victorian view that hey, who cares, it doesn't count anyway. Sex without a penis isn't sex. It's basically the same thing as having a knitting circle. Those silly women can go do whatever the heck they like together in (or out of) their frippery, in the end they need penises, duh.

Pictured: Deviant Frippery

(Note: This is totally overlooking the challenges of being bisexual and female. It's not all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. A bisexual woman is likely to be accused of just faking to get attention, for instance, among a billion other things involving the intersectionality of just being a woman or being bisexual and...yeah okay moving on.)

But you're not supposed to sexualize men. It's just not done. So a man looking at a dude cannot appreciate him as a sexual thing. And if he does, there's only one conclusion to make: dude, you're super gay. The bisexual man, then is just a dude who is kidding himself about being gay and, the even worse part is, he gets it from both sides(phrasing!). So the bisexual man is persecuted in this sense because he's not allowed to express attraction to dudes.

But then, he gets the privilege of: hey! He doesn't have to! He can live his entire life ignoring sexy sexy manbodies and just be with women because that's fine too. He gets the privilege of living in the closet, unchallenged. Which makes it even harder because, man, there's probably so many bi dudes out there who just don't bother to be visible because why bother. Which means the ones who are visible look like an even smaller group. And so one and so forth and everything is terrible.

Terrible!