Bending The Straight: Why Do Men Date Bisexual Women with Little to No Introspection?
by Ijeoma Opara
I think that to some degree, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, there are parts of our identity that are not limited to the rigidity of gendered frameworks that we are taught to adhere to. And that scares a lot of us.
But why? Why limit ourselves to the binary of gender when we know that human experiences do not have to encapsulate the mundane? It’s 2022. Has the pandemic taught us that time is limited and that living our truths could not be more essential to survival? Yet, we still seem trapped in the same cycles of disappointment, failure, frustration and yearning for something more. And so, after a drunken evening with girlfriends who have mainly dated men, we came to a solid conclusion: straight men can only love queer women as so much as it serves them. Central Cee’s viral lyrics ask how can he be homophobic when ‘his bitch is gay?’ And before the naysayers and the men apologists come rushing, we can acknowledge that #NotAllMen are selfish, myopic lovers. But this article wouldn’t exist if it weren’t a pervasive issue. So here we are, addressing the elephant in the room at the end of South Africa’s Pride Month.
Engendering the paradoxes
In the Netflix series Sex Education, a character called Jackson struggles with coming to terms with Cal’s queerness (specifically, them being non-binary). After mutual attraction develops between the two, Cal posits the idea to Jackson that he would be considered to be in a queer relationship if they were to pursue anything further. This idea baffles Jackson, as how they are experiencing Cal’s gender goes beyond what they understand of the world. It challenges Jackson’s meaning of his own identity and how it ties to his masculinity. This story is only a fictionalised one and plays out in real life too. According to renowned masculinity scholar Kopano Ratele, contextualising love within our needs is essential to survival: our health and social welfare tie into our innate desire to give and receive love. However, men suffer from a sense of dispensability, which feeds into isolation and not belonging. As a result, men are often left to their emotional devices and struggle to assimilate love into their needs. Paradoxically, heteronormativity places the desires of men at the centre of everything. Men’s feelings, aspirations and overall existence are inherently tied to the nature of heterosexuality at its core, despite similar experiences of lovelessness within men’s friendship circles and communities. With that in mind, it becomes complicated when queer women enter relationships with heterosexual men. Reimagining expectations surrounding gender dynamics become an unexplored territory, and power dynamics shift as the contestation of power becomes liminal. There are blurred lines between what is expected and what occurs, as heterosexual love is typically operationalised through consumptive means — a draining of sorts, whether it is consciously done or not.
We know that the current state of women’s pleasure has decentralised the erotic and is served as what Audre Lorde calls a ‘plasticised sensation’- there is no meaning in it beyond a numbing act of pleasurable servitude. Both bi women and men who have the hierarchical safety of heterosexuality need to make more effort to expressive themselves authentically in their relationships. Of course, I am aware that this discourse forms partial frustration for lesbian and other queer bodies, who do not have the time or energy to help bisexual women navigate their sexuality at their own expense. Many women who do not date men are tired of the same dynamic, where a bisexual woman, at the end of the day, will pick a man over a woman to form a partnership with. And I think many bisexual women need to look in the mirror and be very honest about who they are. Why are they willing to hurt others because the hierarchy of oppressions allows them to ‘cross the line’ freely with no accountability? What sense of validity is being sought in continuously choosing to date men? And what will it take to explore true, authentic freedom? The act of divine self-autonomy? There needs to be a reckoning.
Jasmine Andersson wrote in her Vice article, ‘How Queer Get into Straight Relationships’, that for many bi people, finding an authentic way to express themselves within their relationships is worth the effort it takes. But this effort should not have to be limited to queer people. There is a shift in the beauty politics of men, where queer aesthetics have come to the forefront of what is considered stylish. It is reported that men have never felt more alone than ever before. Redressing masculinity will need to be a priority for the overall well-being of men — but that has to come from them. The labour of that can no longer fall on the queer women in their lives without enabling cycles of toxicity to continue. It is not only an exhaustive performance but one that comes at the expense of our identity (which still requires its work). We are all reckoning with different aspects of our identity and who we are. Suppressing these conversations only further pushes them into the shadows.
