There are 3 alternatives for this woman, 1) Xanax prescription, 2) an “actual lesbian girlfriend.” and 3) actually communicating with the woman she’s sleeping with. I can see how he could miss the third one, I mean I always resort to either drugs or dumping my lover when I get anxious, so maybe he does too. She’s not nervous about dating a bisexual (at least she wasn’t before this asinine advice) she’s nervous about being asked to do a threesome with someone she isn’t attracted to. There may be many reasons for this, so reasonable, some not so much but the key is communication, thought, more communication, more thought then action.

I agree with Becky; this is just damn good taste. (Ah, “hot is hot,” the bisexual warcry.) Cheers.

I used to play the ‘monosexuals are kidding themselves’ card until I met some very mono folks. People who just don’t get that you can be attracted to both genders physically & emotionally. Yes I dated a few folks like this who felt threatened - not because I wanted to have sex with someone of another gender, I didn’t - but because I felt the attraction in the first place.

I think folks like Dan need to realise that being Bi is a sexuality attractor like being straight or lesbian/gay. If you are Bi you can try as pass as straight (or gay/lesbian) but at some point you will give the game away.

A lot of Bi folks I know play with gender identities and roles in a way you don’t see so often in the lesbian/gay world. The ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ music & club scene are a haven.

But in a way Dan is right. My advice to bisexuals is to seek relationships with other bisexuals of either gender. Then when you suggest the bi-threeway even if they don’t say yes at least they will understand the attraction.

Maybe the bi people you know were incredibly lucky in being able to come to grips with their identities with little urgency, stress, anxiety, fear, or impact on the very core of their being? Or maybe I and most of the bi people I know were peculiarly unlucky?

My understanding is that women who identify as bi are actually more likely to have long-term female partners than male partners, which sinks the statistical likelihood based on potential partner pools. Further, Lisa Diamond’s research (amongst others) shows that women who identify as lesbian are likely to show some pattern of bisexual patterns of attraction (come on, how many lesbians and gay men do you know who NEVER hook up with someone of another sex/gender identity?) - and I tend to believe that it’s this, on top of the desperation to police the community boundaries to make it a safe place for lesbians and gay men because the straight world is so scary that can make some lesbians and gay men so very angry and hostile towards bi and trans people.

We live in a world where things are often presented as either/or: You’re with us or against us, it’s us or them, it’s one thing or the other. They had to fight for their identities, they had to fight for community and safe space… and they may have had to deal with a body that sometimes betrays their ideas of being “gold star” lesbians and gay men by being attracted to the “wrong” sex. And, as someone who struggled mightily with her orientation, the more you try to suppress important things about your self-image and identity, the less tolerant you are of important things about others’ - because if it’s OK for them, it might be OK for you, and it causes too much scary cognitive dissonance to deal with. That’s a simplistic take on how fear about yourself gets projected out, but when you add it to cultural pressure to be one thing or the other, the fact that the world is set up to privilege some kinds of relationships and not others, the pain and baggage that people almost always bring to relationships of any type, and the tendency for marginalised groups to shoot ourselves in the feet by insisting that people have to be Purer Than Thou to be part of our party, it’s maybe not such a bad working model.

“Either learn to accept the differences in your partner’s sexuality comparative to your own, or find someone with more similar sexual preferences.” The Xanax comment corresponds to the first, the lesbian comment to the second.

That’s it, really. This is advice he repeats over and over again in every applicable situation. I think he was so short about it because he’s so used to giving this kind of answer.

I think you’re starting at shadows. “Actual lesbian” in this case means a female attracted exclusively to females - a female bisexual isn’t a lesbian. That would be the point of the separate category. I don’t think there’s a slur there, and I’ve been looking.

I’m happy you love my comment! However, I worry I didn’t explain myself clearly, as I don’t believe either of the things you mention to be ‘privileges;’ I meant only that bisexuals have the privilege of expanded choice, and the privilege of passing as straight, if they want to. Obviously, they shouldn’t have to, but generally speaking, the process of coming out for a bisexual person isn’t as urgent or as central as it is for an exclusively gay person.

I don’t believe this idea is disrespectful, even if it is sometimes named in lists of anti-bi ideas that are disrespectful. Of course bi people deserve respect! It would be pig-headed, though, not to acknowledge that some people express respect as jealousy. I get the sense that this is what you’re so sensitive to.

The difference between “same-sex marriage” and “gay marriage” is tiny and entirely semantic. I can’t think of a gay person who cares which term is used. Maybe gay organizations have some sort of agenda in preferring one over the other, but if these are the same gay organizations that can’t assure same-sex marriage in California, I wouldn’t worry too much about their overarching cultural influence. You can sleep safe.

I don’t know about Bailey’s research, and I’m only familiar in passing with Dan Savage’s history of dissing bi people. Apart from that context, though, the advice he gives here is what this girl needs to hear.

I just love the “hetro-privilege” comments. Is this the privilege of being suspect by both the gay & straight communities, or the privilege of living in the closet?

Don’t we deserve the same respect we give the our monosexual friends? What really gets me is that LGBT organizations can’t even say “same-sex marriage”. If they can’t understand that not everyone in a same-sex relationship is LG, what does the B in LGBT even mean?

I have a theory about that, actually!

Suppose I’m a bisexual woman. Suppose I’m equally attracted to both men and women. Suppose, further, that the “1-in-10 people are gay” statistic is roughly correct (though I’m not sure exactly where bisexuality fits in there). Anyway. This would mean that 9 out of 10 men I encounter are potentially attracted to me, while only 1 in 10 women are potentially attracted to me. That means a male crush is 9 times more likely to return my feelings than a female crush! So it wouldn’t surprise me if, say, 90% bisexual people end up in het relationships — it’s all about the probabilities!

(My theory also has no basis in actual research, of course!)

The hard part of an advice columnist’s job is making educated assumptions about the people who write in. As a rule, people seeking advice are embarrassed, so they omit and elide important information. Ostensibly, Dan’s job is to answer his readers’ questions; actually, his job is to rephrase their questions in ways that make the answers self-evident. I’ll concede he sounds a little presumptuous in the advice you quote here, but honestly, unless you’re 80 years old, wisdom and glibness are twins.

If you can agree to forgive his tone, you’ll see that the advice he gives is excellent. Here is a college-age girl who identifies as a lesbian. How long has she been calling herself that? Since high school, maybe? So, here is an inexperienced lesbian who is spooked by her bisexual girlfriend’s desire to invite a man home, to the extent that she solicits advice from a sex columnist (her friends were that unhelpful?). We can be sure that this is a girl who is insecure in her relationship, and we can assume that she is insecure in her sexuality, too.

Dan Savage imagines her coming out not too long ago and remembers his own experience of coming out. There are a million tiny feelings he can reliably project onto this girl: a sense of doom and of no return, her self-hatred for letting her parents down, that singular mix of shame and relief she felt when she told her best friend. It was traumatic and exhausting for her to get to the point where she could call herself a lesbian. It was an enormous, defiant act of will. And it was so recent!

I promise you, this girl’s identity is still fragile. She isn’t totally sure yet that being true to herself was worth the trauma. Bisexual people face their own problems, to be sure, but they have the privilege of casting the anchor of heteronormativity at will. I don’t mean that bisexual people are opportunists (neither does Dan, I don’t think); I just mean that they can give their parents grandkids without betraying themselves.

When a college-aged lesbian has a bisexual girlfriend, part of the attraction is rooted in jealousy. Please consider how much of her identity the lesbian has had to jettison in the past few years. She idolizes and envies her girlfriend for her ability to pass as straight. What’s worse, a lot of her self-worth is based in her ability to hold her girlfriend’s attention. She thinks, “It would be so much easier for my girlfriend to date a guy. It says great things about me that she is willing to give up convenience in order to date me.” This isn’t a wholesome train of thought, but it is a natural part of learning how to be comfortably gay. What a kick in the teeth, then, to think that having a guy there would be an improvement.

Judging by the edge to his tone, Dan Savage knows from personal experience that this poor, gay girl is about to be sad and/or single. The Xanax part was a little snotty of him, but he is right on about finding another lesbian to date. As long as she’s with her bisexual girlfriend, she’ll continue to define herself in terms of someone else’s straightness. Maybe she can try a bi girl again in grad school.

Am I off-base here?

Adam

P.S. After I wrote this, I was worried my reasoning was a little too hypothetical, so I ran it by a black, straight, female friend of mine. She said, “Yeah, it’s kind of like dating a light-skinned guy who leaves you for a white girl.” I’m not gonna touch that one.

‘Real’ lesbianism isn’t invovled in the original question. Polywhateverism was. ‘My girlfriend has suggested a three-way and I don’t wanna’ is the root issue. Even if the poly.. has been in the open, the issue is: ‘My girlfriend has suggested a three-way with X and I don’t wanna.’

So, a ‘really monogamous’ girlfriend, or a girlfriend with polywhatever tendencies predefined to ‘really match’ yours is the issue.

(writing as a het boy with monogomous/bi girlfriend)

on the bi-scale, i’m a LOT more straight then my wife. it’s no real secret to either of us. and if I wanted a dude in our relationship, she’d be nervous (and rightly so, i’d think) that she wasn’t “enough” for me. and she’d be really hurt–whether or not i wanted her there as well. It’d be one thing if i wanted another woman–my wife could conceivably feel that this new chick didn’t have anything she didn’t have, and/or couldn’t give to me. A dude, though–knowing that I actually am (generally) more attracted to men…she’d have a right to be pissed off, I think.

and that, I think is at the heart of the bi-phobia in the queer community. it’s not the privilage of “passing” (though that’s part of it), it’s the idea that the person you are dating might not actually be able to satisfied by what you’ve got to offer. ever. and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

this isn’t saying that savage doesn’t have some (lots and many in varied forms) issues with us bi folk–but I think this time he’s right on. if you worry a lot about your partners leaving you for the opposite sex, because you see it as something you CANNOT help, fix, or compete with–it is better to date folks who aren’t as likely to date outside their own gender.

some of bi-girls, even those of us in long term, monogamous relationships with other girls–well, we’re bi and we identify as such. I’m not a lesbian, real or otherwise. I was more likely to marry a dude–I just fell in love with the awesomest woman on the planet, and that’s been that.

so, here–Dan Savage is right on. if you are dating somebody who cannot be satisfied by what you have, and you are not willing to try to compete…

go on, date the kind of person you wanna date. Don’t run the risk of playing second fiddle to somebody with a completely different set of fun-bits that you can only approximate.

There was that time he gleefully joined in shaming women for their body fat (this continued the following week).

And there was his incredibly divisive, minimizing, and privileged take on Prop 8 and Black folk.

The one in which he blames a woman for choosing an abusive husband, all but calls her damaged goods, and then goes on to dismiss the abuse as a lie because the descriptions of the abuse are “too perfectly monstrous” really pisses me off.

I would imagine that there are more examples of Savage being an asshole, but I try not to read him, so this is all I’ve got on hand (other than the biphobia of which you seem amply aware). And it isn’t that I don’t like your rebuttal above—I do! And it isn’t that I don’t recognize that Savage has said useful, sensible things—I do! Yet, I feel that a lot of excuses and exceptions are made for him because he can be a such a great sex columnist. But his utility can only excuse so much terrible bullshit, no? Surely there is someone out there (cough, cough YOU) who can be a great sex columnist without also being a deplorable asshole?

I thought I was unshockable, but that’s just gross ;-)

I wish I could figure out what Savage’s problem is with bisexuality. I love him to pieces on just about any other subject, but it’s like he has a complete blind spot with this. As though he thinks we’re making it up, and if we just *tried*, we’d “know what we really were”. Sad.