Life and the Mind

I am a big fan of a wide variety of
labels when it comes to sexual and gender orientation: butch, boi, femme, high femme, queer, top, bottom, gender queer,
straight, gay, bi, lesbian, transgendered, etc etc. I’ve never lamented
the alphabet soup character of the names of the groups in the community. Keep adding to the
list, I say. When it comes to names for sex and gender orientations, let many flowers
bloom. (That last phrase, by the way, comes from Mao, who would be rolling in his grave to see it used here. The orignal Chairman Mao saying is "Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend." Of course he weeded out and killed many of those flowers but I still like the saying and here I mean it sincerely.) But while I am a raging liberal about labels—call yourself what
you want, what makes sense to you and I will make a lot of effort to
understand—there are some labels that make less sense to me than others. Here’s
one: bi-curious.

Of course, there are contexts when
bi-curious makes sense. Teenagers for one. Speaking as a formerly bi-curious
teenager. Likewise, people in long standing relationships with one person and
who fantasize but haven’t the kind of relationship that makes exploration
possible. One could, in such a situation, reasonably wonder and be curious.  So there are people for whom the label makes sense.

My puzzlement
comes about with those adults, not in life long monogamous relationships, who
use the label bi-curious to mark a long-standing sexual orientation. How long
can you remain curious? If a long-time, maybe you’re not that curious after all.
Life is short. Find out. Are you
bi or aren’t you? A friend suggested that it was really code for something like
“weakly bi.” A label for the sort of woman who might kiss another woman if the
woman was really cute and if she’d had a lot to drink and better yet, if there
was an appreciative male audience.  Maybe
we need more labels, like “If the Girls Gone Wild cameras are rolling
bi-sexual.” But this bi-curious thing. I’m not so sure.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 8:42 am and is filed under Bisexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.