Culture » March 16, 2007

Bisexual Healing

By Jessica Clark

Feminist pop culture icons: Buffy, Ani, Ellen

Cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business,” according to feminist author Jennifer Baumgardner.

She should know. Since 2002, Baumgardner has been spearheading the confessional “I had an abortion” campaign—most recently captured in the documentary film Speak Out: I Had an Abortion (www.speakoutfilms.com)—and in her new book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, she’s tackling a topic that makes both straights and gays wince: the explosion of young women experimenting with bisexuality.

“The label bi sounds bad,” writes Baumgardner, “because at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible and disparaged social group.” And yet, she notes, according to Alfred Kinsey’s famous studies (and a more informal survey of Nerve.com personals), more than 30 percent of women have had or seek same-sex encounters. In the past decade, they have become nearly de rigueur on liberal arts campuses, inspiring the disparaging acronym “LUG” (Lesbian Until Graduation). Why?

Porn-inspired dorm fantasies aside, the rise in bisexual experimentation among young women, Baumgardner argues, is indicative of their desire for equality in romantic partnerships—and they bring these “gay expectations” back to their encounters with men. Not just lusting after “anything that moves,” as the stereotype goes, young women who “look both ways” are interested in romance, in being understood completely and treated as full people. Bisexuality, writes Baumgardner, is as much about “crazy, overwhelming, cue-the-orchestra love” as it is about “hot, messy, cue the Led-Zepplin-record sex.”

Many of Baumgardner’s theories are drawn from her own experiences, both as an openly bisexual woman and as a feminist writer who noted the rise of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender activism on college campuses while on previous book tours with writing partner Amy Richards. Though she shares the values of the larger “queer” culture, she eschews the term itself, noting that younger activists tend to use it, but she isn’t comfortable doing so. In Look Both Ways she tells her own story, and reexamines the stories of both contemporary and second-wave feminists who have had relationships with both women and men. For Baumgardner, life narratives are key to understanding and defining one’s bisexuality. She argues that a person’s sexual identity is formed from cumulative sexual experiences and attractions, rather than who is one’s partner at any given time.

“People who look both ways deserve to have a sexuality that originates in them, not one that’s a reflection of who they are currently sleeping with—a core of sexuality that is our own,” she writes.

As a lover of complex stories, Baumgardner cooks up quite a stew for the reader: a pinch of Freudian psychology; a dollop of passionately retold feminist history; a cupful of pop culture icons like Buffy, Ellen and Ani; and generous portions of personal anecdotes, including her own dalliances with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and her trouble achieving orgasms with male partners. The effect is a bit like a late-night grad-school gabfest: revealing, smart, titillating—and, yes, sometimes cringe-inducing. Along the way, she brings up topics that most feminists would rather let lie, such as her own internal prejudices she encountered in the relationship with her first girlfriend, Anastasia, whom she met while working at Ms.

“With Anastasia, the relating was very intimate,” she writes “but too similar, too familiar. There was almost a lack of respect on my part, a bit of misogyny. Anastasia was so delectable, but also, like Ms., a ghetto—too confining, over-populated, under-resourced, and undervalued—a margin that is expected to hold too much.”

Passages like these add depth to Look Both Ways, as they cut straight to the heart of many young women’s fraught relationship to both feminism and their own femininity. While Baumgardner acknowledges and honors the powerful role that feminism has played in the lives of generations of American women, she also recognizes that the movement has lost steam as women have gained more power. Like the second wave feminists who came before them, young women exploring their sexual identities are idealists—but they are less hampered by a rigid code of political conduct that forces them to forswear men entirely. Once-revolutionary women-only spaces like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival have become quaint and claustrophobic. Yet, individual women must still grapple with stereotypes and glass ceilings. Baumgardner deals with this tension by recasting feminism as both a crucial lesson and a phase, “a stage of development … like puberty.” She values the time she has spent in women-only spaces and relationships. However, she suggests that dwelling in a sense of oppression ultimately “fetishishes male power, making it larger than it is.”

While experimenting with same-sex relationships can reveal internalized prejudices for women, it also allows them to play with male roles—including sleeping with and even objectifying women—demystifying masculine power. Such freedom from traditional interaction patterns can be liberating and instructive. Baumgardner notes that feminism has too often downplayed the pleasure of personal sexual expression and display. She calls women’s reclamation of the objectifying gaze “defanging the babe.”

Baumgardner places Look Both Ways squarely in the feminist tradition by framing the struggle for civil and social rights as a historical progression. For her, fighting for bisexuals to be recognized and treated as equals in their own right is a feminist impulse, as it extends the battle for personal freedom to a still-maligned group. In her own life, Baumgardner notes, it accords with her desire for inclusion. She writes, “I don’t want there to be a space that I don’t have access to.” While this need has inspired her feminism, she notes, “it is the GLBT movement that is changing the world right now—as opposed to feminism, which is embedded in our culture and laws, and in many ways is much less visible.”

Perhaps it’s this currency, this political frisson, which makes bisexuality sexy to young women, along with its lingering whiff of taboo. But for how long? After all, according to Baumgardner, the end goal is not the endless production of ever-more-boutique political movements, but the serial dissolution of movements, allowing each of us to be socially recognized as “complex individuals.”

She suggests that such progress can be judged, in part, by the way that minorities are treated in popular media. Take the trajectory of gay television characters as an example—from the mincing queens and bull dykes of comedy to the courageous martyrs of the AIDS era, through a phase as “chic” mascots in the ’90s, to more recent roles as everyday characters with human foibles. Baumgardner offers the example of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” as a parable. Just as this series ends with the birth of many slayers, freeing Buffy from the burden of individual heroism, she suggests, the acceptance of contested identities by the larger population frees activists from the burden of heroically embodying their race, class or sexual preference.

Baumgardner began her project just before gay pop culture became ubiquitous. “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy did not exist, nor did The L Word. … Ellen did not have a great new talk show that proved how popular she was despite being gay. Gavin Newsom hadn’t yet rushed gay marriage out of the land of theory and into the messy world,” she writes. She suggests that even current controversies about gay marriage have widened acceptance. “All of the news stories about gay marriage, for instance, make people who wouldn’t normally talk about gay people or rights talk about them. I have to believe that it leads to the next steps of liberation, the ones where gay people aren’t a cute cultural topic or a fad to exploit.”

Rejecting the pressure to be a “model” feminist or lesbian, Baumgardner counterintuitively champions the virtues of entitlement and the messiness of authentic personal discovery. Her discussion of the privileges of bisexuality is sure to raise the hackles of gay and feminist activists, but its one of the most interesting moments in the book. By looking both ways (both physically and metaphorically), bisexuals are able to pass as straight. Because of this, she argues, they expect and demand equality and acceptance to an extent that earlier generations of closeted gays and lesbians couldn’t. In this, they are much like the young women who embody feminist ideals while turning their backs on movement dogma.

“It’s the tragic part of being gay (or thereabouts) that I don’t want any part of, honestly,” writes Baumgardner. “It’s not so much that I am afraid of it. It’s more that tragedy is not the whole story and, like focusing on back-alley butchers to justify abortion rights, it’s over-told.”

Parodoxically, she suggests, the end result of so many young women looking both ways may be to allow gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals and everyone in between to develop “straight expectations”—the assumption that they will be seen and treated as fully human no matter who they sleep with.

Baumgardner says that she hopes her book will validate the experiences of young women, providing an opening for identification and quintessentially feminist consciousness-raising. While she is sometimes embarrassed by revealing the details of her life, she told me, “I think the shame is not OK, it’s going to hurt me.

“It’s my experience that if you’re bold enough to have the conversation, incredible things come out of it.”

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  “she’s tackling a topic that makes both straights and gays wince: “

  Not me, i think it is hot! Me and two bi ladies enjoying each others company. . .

  Buffy was a great show. She was portrayed as a real hero, but with real flaws.

  Posted by wolf on Mar 16, 2007 at 12:49 PM

  Before the right wing think tank knuckle heads contaminate this post, I would like to make some important comments about his topic.

  People tend to confuse sexuality with the body itself. Even the terms homosexuality and bisexuality imply reference to a binary sex dichotomy. You either have sex with a member of the opposite sex, same sex, or both.

  Sex is an act that offers a plenitude of sexual experiences, irrespective of who you are having sex wtih.

  The politicization of sexuality is largely in response to the heterosexual norm which places the gendered body at the center of the sexual experience, which not only places limitations on who you can have sex with but when and for what purpose you have sex.

  The argument becomes less about sexuality and more about the body and the ideological beliefs that govern the body.

  Posted by Epistrophy on Mar 17, 2007 at 10:37 AM

  “The politicization of sexuality is largely in response to the heterosexual norm which places the gendered body at the center of the sexual experience, which not only places limitations on who you can have sex with but when and for what purpose you have sex.”

  This is “postmodern” philosophy at its most inane.  The reason a “heterosexual norm”, as you put it, developed is because it is how our species reproduces.  If Cro-Magnon man had not developed a “heterosexual norm” we would have died out 35,000 years ago.

  But then I’m just another right wing think tank knuckle head doing his best to contaminate this post.

  Posted by chopper on Mar 17, 2007 at 12:00 PM

  Heterosexuality became the norm because the population was under constant threat of extinction.  Today the threat is overpopulation, hence the proactive normative alternatives to heterosexuality.  Of course, you rightwing think tank knuckleheads would rather react to the problem (than proactively prevent it) with wars, revolutions, famines, epidemics and ecological disasters.  After all, it’s the American way.

  Posted by Major Major on Mar 17, 2007 at 8:54 PM

  “Heterosexuality became the norm because the population was under constant threat of extinction.  Today the threat is overpopulation, hence the proactive normative alternatives to heterosexuality.  Of course, you rightwing think tank knuckleheads would rather react to the problem (than proactively prevent it) with wars, revolutions, famines, epidemics and ecological disasters.  After all, it’s the American way.”

  Don’t be too sure about overpopulation being the problem.  Almost all advanced societies have fertility rates well below replacement levels, with some, such as Japan and parts of Western Europe being in virtual death spirals.  European social security programs will be in deep trouble in the coming decades, as they will have aging populations with a declining work force supporting them.

  Since socialists of various stripes carried out the greatest mass murders in the last century I’m not quite sure why you see wars and revolutions as being a rightwing problem.

  Posted by chopper on Mar 18, 2007 at 2:20 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 79 posts.

Also featured Counterinsurgency 101
The Health Care Monster Returns
Reclaiming What Makes Us Human

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Jessica Clark

• The New Cartographers
  What does it mean to map everything all the time? Posted on February 29, 2008
• iPower to the People
  The perils and promise of point-and-click politics Posted on November 26, 2007
• Blogs Up, Hacks Down
  The appearance of seven Democratic presidential contenders at the YearlyKos convention demonstrated that the Kossacks and fellow A-listers--along with what the Liberal Blog Advertising Network calls their 3 million daily readers--are now ensconced as political playersPosted on August 14, 2007
• Chasing the Green Pound in London
  Forget "I am not a plastic bag" campaign, Spitalfield's Market is where to find London's genuine eco-friendly fashionPosted on June 1, 2007
• Boomsday: Bankrupt Satire
  Libertarians are a strange lot. Their targets often seem reasonable; their solutions… morePosted on March 30, 2007