Category: Bisexual women

Bisexuality –Gender or Sexuality?

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I am a bisexual – I did not choose it, I was born with it. I do not even really have a choice on whether I will be attracted to a male or a female. It comes and goes almost like a bipolar experience, but I hate to use that comparison because there is an unspoken feeling out there that bisexuals are actually mentally unstable (my apologies to the wonderful and stable bipolar friends out there). We are not. We are just delightfully unpredictable, even to ourselves. So what does bisexuality mean? Is it strictly sexuality or is it more?

My daughter was having an evening out with female friends and discussing sexual behavior among young women when the host’s fourteen year old daughter chimed in. She stated that most of the girls in her school feel comfortable having sex with either guys or gals. My daughter and her age 35 + friends were shocked. This new sexual freedom among young women seems to be confirmed by a study by researchers at Boise State University that found that in a group of college heterosexual women, 60 percent were physically interested in other women, 45 percent made out with a woman in the past, and 50 percent had fantasies about the same sex.1

Is this bisexuality? Depends on your definition of bisexuality. If you mean sexual attraction and sexual experiences with both men and women, then it is bisexuality. But that reduces bisexuality merely to sexual behavior. I choose to believe it is much more than that, at least it certainly has been in my own bisexual life.

I could not find a similar study that identified the percentage of heterosexual males that experienced same sex attraction. Even if there was one, it would probably not be reliable because of male confusion and lack of disclosure. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Boise State researchers also found that men were more likely than women to report being “100 percent heterosexual” or “100 percent homosexual” continually throughout their lives. Most of the time we are lumped into the gay population. Most of the combined gay and bisexual statistics range from 2 to 5 percent. My guess is that gay would be 2% and bisexual males an additional 3 to 5%, but certainly not in the 40 to 50% territory. On the surface, this suggests a definite difference among bisexual men and women; however, my guess is that most of these young women eventually will gravitate to one or the other leaving a similar smaller population that continues to experience swings (pardon the pun) from one gender preference to the other on an ongoing basis for the rest of their lives.

I think we can safely conclude from these studies that there are a large number of people (mostly women) who experience a same sex attraction. We can call them bicurious and perhaps even bisexual, but not bioriented and certainly not bigender.

A true bisexual man is at least bioriented. At times we experience strong biological impulses to meet and mate with someone from our own sex. As a man, it gives me a sense of leaving behind my ego-mind and slipping into my biological, hormone based body to respond to the smells, feelings, strength, and pheromones of another man. At other times, I feel attracted to a well-shaped woman walking in front of me. Certainly when I am with my wife and we begin to cuddle and kiss, the lamp lights and my hormones are pushing me towards copulation. I need to feel the pull of my masculine sexuality, the need to dominate her body sexually as our sexual passions blend together. In other words I have a biological biattraction and biorientation towards both men and women.

But my bisexuality is so much more than biological attraction and sexual orientation. At times I feel an overwhelming drive to experience the feminine side of my being physically, emotionally, and sexually; in other words, I flow into my feminine gender is a full body and soul experience. This is when I feel a need to flirt and express my deeper emotions with my male friends. This is when I sometimes need to reach out and hold and hug a man from the heart in the hopes of feeling a magical moment filled with a sense of wonder and completion. This is when I feel the need to feel intimacy with a man and tell him “I love you”. But “I love you” means something different when I am with my wife. I also seem to have a need for a masculine biological/psychological base. I need to feel the power flow through my body as I reach out and hold my woman and feel her face against my chest and my arms wrapped around her body. I need to feel that I am the protecting husband and father.

I cannot truthfully even attempt to know how bisexual women experience their bigender but from studies I have read I believe they are more likely to seek a sexual/psychological base in either a same-sex or heterosexual relationship. They also appear to be more likely to seek deeper relationship in their “other” gender experience, rather than engage in casual sex like their male counterparts. In both cases bisexual men and women seem to need an intimate gender base that meets their needs for relationship, love, and family while maintaining a parallel drive for sensuous and even erotic pleasure in their other side. We do not seem to operate well on our own without a base. The world becomes too chaotic with constant confusion and pulling from the two sides of our nature. The hard part is to find a mate that understands our other side and is willing to give us the freedom to experience our bisexuality as a basic need of our bisexual gender. So there is a tendency to be dishonest and hide our bisexuality from our partners, and of course that leads to suffering and pain. On the other hand, as bisexuals, we are faced with the constant struggle to be true to ourselves, or should that read – to be true to “both selves”?

1 <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/20/study-more-than-half-of-women-attracted-to-other-women_n_1021730.html&quot;

Bisexuality and Health and Wellness

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual Education2 Comments

I have recently been appointed to the LGBTQ sub-committee of the Saanich Health and Wellness Committee in Greater Victoria, British Columbia. I am attempting to assist bisexual men and women in fitting in with our community. One of the things I have discovered is that we are not very vocal and not as well organized as the gay, lesbian, and transgender groups. There are a few scattered bisexual groups in the Greater Victoria area but there does not appear to be any concerted effort to identify problems and support one another with solutions (by my brief survey of other communities this appears to hold true around the world). What representation there is comes mostly from bisexual women. Men are clearly not visible, but then again that should come as no surprise. Yet, we do have major problems that should be addressed by the community.

Tari Hanneman, Deputy Director of the Health and Aging Program at the HRC Foundation, has stated, “Bisexual people are the largest single group within the LGBT community, but we’re not addressing their specific healthcare needs,”1 Hanneman’s study shows that bisexuals face elevated rates of poor health outcomes ranging from cancer and heart disease, to obesity, (all stress related) sexually-transmitted infections, and mental health issues. In addition:

 Bisexual adults have double the rate of depression than heterosexual adults, higher rates of binge drinking, and are more likely to engage in self-harming behavior, including attempting suicide;

 Bisexual women have higher rates of cancer than the general population of women, higher rates of heart disease and obesity than heterosexual women, and are more likely than all other women to suffer from mental and emotional stress;

 Bisexual men are less likely than gay or heterosexual men to get tested for HIV, leading them to be disproportionately affected by the infection; and bisexual people are less likely to be screened for the human papilloma virus (HPV), which can increase the risk of cancer in both men and women.

In her conclusion, she stated that the reality is that bisexual people face discrimination not only outside of the community, but also from within, and that the community often discourages bisexuals from engaging in and benefiting from the work that LGBT advocates are doing to address mental, physical, and sexual health. “Bisexual people often face outright discrimination when they come out in healthcare settings,” Hanneman said; “That can lead bisexual people to delay or avoid seeking care, or not disclose their identities to their providers. This can mean that medical professionals are not getting an accurate picture of what that patient’s sexual health needs are, or the mental or physical health concerns for which they may face heightened risk.”

The greatest risk to bisexual men, I believe, is in the area of mental health and suicide. It is very difficult to find information on bisexual men alone for obvious reasons; they do not like to disclose or take part in any scientific surveys; moreover, any attempts at suicide will not be attributed to their orientation. In a study by Paul et al, 2002, involving approximately three thousand gay and bisexual men, they discovered that twenty-one percent had made a suicide plan; 12% had attempted suicide (almost half of those 12% were multiple attempters). Most who attempted suicide made their first attempt before age 25. They concluded, “Gay and bisexual men are at elevated risk for suicide attempts, with such risk clustered earlier in life. Some risk factors were specific to being gay or bisexual in a hostile environment.”2 My personal belief is that bisexual men probably exceed these statistics by an additional two to five percent due to nondisclosure.

The saddest statistics are the ones that do not exist. We seldom talk about our problems and usually do not seek counselling from our friends and families, religious institutions, or community mental health institutions. The stresses build and build until we seek the final solution. Bisexual men are withdrawing into the shadows exposing their bodies to disease and their minds to stress and breakdown, and their lives to the hands of the dark executioner – their own tortured self. Time to stand up, I think, and be counted.

1. Lifter from http://www.bi-alliance.org Read More: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.92.8.1338

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2. Jay P. Paul, Joseph Catania, Lance Pollack, Judith Moskowitz, Jesse Canchola, Thomas Mills, Diane Binson, and Ron Stall. Suicide Attempts Among Gay and Bisexual Men: Lifetime Prevalence and Antecedents. American Journal of Public Health: August 2002, Vol. 92, No. 8, pp. 1338-1345.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.92.8.1338

Two Spirits

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logo_2Fresh out of university, I spent two years teaching and living on reserves in Northern Manitoba among the Cree and Chipewyan First Nations people.  It has profoundly affected me, giving me a broader perspective on the meaning and purpose of life.  It has taught me to accept every individual simply as they are without any form of judgement. As I set out to explore the meaning and nature of bisexuality, I have once again been reminded of the beautiful spiritual-social nature of the First Nations community before it was influenced by white man’s political-social views and its moralistic standards of sexuality.

Taking the lead from traditional Native Americans and Canadians, I do believe that I, and most other bisexuals, are part of a greater community of Two-Spirited people; we simultaneously house a masculine and a feminine spirit.  Ontario has explored the Two Spirit concept in an attempt to fully understand and support individuals within the LGBT community:

“Two-spirited” refers to a person who has both a masculine and a feminine spirit, and is used by some First Nations people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity….These can include terms such as the Lakota’s “winkt” or the Dinéh’s “nàdleehé”, both of which refer to men who fill social roles associated with women, or terms which refer only to sexuality, such as the Mi’kmaq phrase “Geenumu Gessalagee”, which means “he loves men.”[1]

So what have we learned from our Native Canadians about our bisexuality? Lots, we gain a view of bisexuality as a soul-trinity involving sexuality, gender, and spirit.

First of all, make no mistake, it is sexual.  “He loves men” means “He loves men”. We have a tendency in our WASP traditions to wax over the sexual part and focus on some kind of mystical spiritism.  That kind of paternalism is not doing the Two Spirit people true justice.  Sexuality is part of our being; it is a full body-soul expression of who we are.  One of the great warriors of the Sioux, Crazy Horse, is generally believed to have had a male lover.  He was far from effeminate and yet he had a love for men.  The beauty of the native cultures is that they have demonstrated a gentle acceptance of variations in people’s sexuality.  It appears that First nation’s people simply accepted without question or judgement that Crazy Horse loved a man, and that any man or woman could have more than one sexual preference.

In reading the work of Gabriel Estrada with the Navajo, I found this wonderful concept:

“Third and fourth gender roles traditionally embodied by two-spirit people include performing work and wearing clothing associated with both men and women. Not all tribes/nations have rigid gender roles, but, among those that do, some consider there to be at least four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, masculine man.”[2]

 The second lesson then is that First Nation’s people also recognized that Two-Spirited includes gender as well as sexuality. It appears that in the First Nation’s communities, all expressions of gender were generally accepted.  They understood that some men preferred to wear women’s clothing, work alongside the women, and help tend the children. There was no attempt to marginalize them or prevent them from influencing the young people within the community.

In our broken society, the only way for a Two-Spirited man to express his feminine gender is to cross dress in the privacy of his own home or in clubs that will accept his feminine expression.  My introduction to my feminine gender was trying on women’s clothing at age 15.  Later in my life, after my divorce, a spent a year enjoying cross dressing.  When I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the passable face and body of a woman looking back at me, I felt I had found my true identity.  I never did dare to appear in public in my feminine gender identity; that takes the kind of courage I was not able to muster. In our society, as soon as one has been identified as being transgender, he or she is often marginalized and their involvement in the greater society is restricted. My knowledge and experiences as an educator, a psychologist, and a spiritual guide would have been totally disregarded.

I have a gender foundation that has been pruned and shaped by my negative social experiences.  In my society I am merely that queer bisexual man who left his wife so he could have sex with other men. In my struggles, I was labelled by psychologists and psychiatrists as having a personality disorder with a gender identification disorder.  I saw myself as a disorder and a misfit to society.  When I left the pseudo scientific theories behind (tough to do because I was a psychologist by profession), I began to see my gender as a gift from the universe .  At that point, I no longer had a personality disorder as I was able to see myself and love myself as I am.

I came across this additional piece of information:

 “A direct translation of the Ojibwe term, “Niizh manidoowag”, “two-spirited” or “two-spirit” is usually used to indicate a person whose body simultaneously houses a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit”.[3]

In the First Nation’s communities, Two-Spirit people could have a different but definite role in the community. They simply accepted everyone’s contribution as a spiritual gift and allowed them to express their gender-spirit in any way they wished. They could be powerful warriors such as Crazy Horse, or “they were often the visionaries, the healers, the medicine people, the nannies of orphans, the care givers.”[4] Among the First Nations people, there is general recognition that those who have been blessed with two spirits have a special contribution to make to the health and wellness of the community.  The nature of the blended spirit becomes the essential factor.

In my case, I have a spirit that is a blend of my man-spirit and my woman-spirit.  It is this Two-Spirit soul that makes me different; that makes me special.  If I were a member of an historic First Nations Community, I may have been a wise man, a shaman or a healer. My male-female sexuality, two-gender, two-spirit identification has become a beautiful foundation where I can experience my world from two spiritual views.  I now have a unique way of seeing and feeling things that I can employ to help guide my community to insight and compassion.  I have two spirits

In my search of the literature I came across one disheartening trend.  Some First Nation’s people do not want the LGBT community to appropriate and corrupt the two-spirit concept, and I do not blame them.  Unfortunately, we tend to take and use a term to prove our need for special attention in the political arena.  This concept is too precious for that.  Likewise it is too precious to appropriate it and corrupt it to describe and justify our sexual preferences. Our sexual desires do not need to be justified; they are what they are.   This term is certainly not political; it is much more than just sexual, and even more than bisexual. It is holy.  It is spiritual.

 

[1] http://lgbtqhealth.ca/community/two-spirit.php

[2] http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Two-Spirit

[3] Estrada, Gabriel S. 2011. “Two Spirits, Nádleeh, and LGBTQ2 Navajo Gaze.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35(4):167-190.

[4] Roscoe, W. (Editor) 1988,Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. City: Publisher

How to Keep a Bi-man at Home

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual Education2 Comments

 
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The following has been written by my wife, who has tried to understand my bisexuality so that she can help me on my life’s journey.  We have consciously worked out our sexual passion  so that it can enrich our relationship.  Here is her advice to bisexual couples:

 

Intimacy requires emotional sensitivity and sexual compatibility.

Since a bisexual man is basically gay, he has a very active sex drive that needs to be met. At the beginning of a relationship he may be besotted with the woman meeting his emotional and physical needs. He may not pay attention to her having an average to low sex drive. Over time he may become aware of her lack of interest which may become the one reason that drives him back into the arms of gay lovers.

Couples in a bisexual relationship need to be sexually compatible if they want to flourish. ( Which is also true for heterosexuals.) There needs to be a willingness to bring in excitement based on knowing what turns the partner on. Bi men can instantly be ready to mate, and be unaware that their female partner needs emotional and physical stimulation to get aroused. If that does not happen she may become frustrated and withdraw or become a ‘routine’ partner.

Women don’t like being used as sperm ‘receptacles’, they want to be seduced and played with. A good lover needs to have sexual skills and a good knowledge of the most responsive and pleasurable spots on his woman’s body. The ecstacy/oxytocin he produces in her makes her want more and keeps the excitement alive. On the other hand there is nothing wrong with an occasional ‘quickie’, but the emphasis is on occasional.

Some bottom guys may take on the role of the female and expect the woman to initiate sex. This works when the couple have a heart to heart connection where the woman is keen on pleasing her man in a role reversal. It also requires knowing what her man likes. Frank and honest communication is the key to letting each other know what works.

Bisexual men seek out women because they want a heart to heart connection. Gay encounters can leave them emotionally empty and unfulfilled. Their beautiful sensitive nature wants to be nurtured and expressed. It’s the female partner’s privilege to meet that need by accepting and appreciating her man’s feminine side.

By being active sexual and emotional partners the need to seek pleasures outside the relationship can thus be greatly diminished. 

 

My response.

I dare not contradict anything said here (lol), but there is one note I would like to add.  In response to one of my readers, I have to agree to disagree that we are not necessarily “basically gay”. We are heterosexual and gay and really not either but a combination of the two and maybe not even that.  Like three out of four bisexual men, however, my fantasies tend to focus on male sex.  But, when it comes to love and intimacy I gravitate to women.  I am the only bisexual my wife sees so this is her honest perception.

Carol – A Study in Female Bisexuality

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual Education1 Comment

Carol is a movie based on a novel, The price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith. Carol and Therese are lesbian lovers. The movie (unlike the book) is played from Carol’s point of view with the assumption that she is the more vulnerable character (certainly a point to be argued). Even though the movie is widely acclaimed for its content and quality, I had difficulty defining my feelings and understanding of female bisexualism during the movie. However, I was challenged to try to see and understand female bisexuality, and discover the similarities between male and female bisexuals.

The first question then arises – are these women lesbian or bisexual? Carol is in the process of a divorce, and has a child, and is therefore by definition a bisexual woman.  Therese has a boyfriend, and according to her own admission has a hard time saying no, which I presume means she is also a bisexual.  Which of course, for women or for men, begs the question – according to label and definition, who is gay, who is lesbian and who is bisexual? According to my simple definition, if you are attracted to and can have sex with either men or women (and I assume enjoy it) then you are bisexual.  Beyond that point, your preferences may change and you make different choices, not to be bisexual because that is what we are, but we have the ability to enjoy relationships with either men or women.   At first Carol choses to be married to a man and chooses to have a child whom she loves dearly, but she  is willing to give up parental custody for the sake of the child, and in order to peruse her love for Therese. Therese has a boyfriend, makes plans to get married and live a straight life.  She is then overcome by her attraction for Carol and enters into a lesbian life, I assume because of her need for genuine connection and the opportunity to share deep feelings and desires.

As a man, I find it totally incomprehensible why two women would want to live together with such potential for emotional turmoil and chaos. So much easier being a man and being with a man.  Interestingly enough, Carol and Therese felt the same way; that is, they found living with a man so difficult and preferred the predictability of living with a woman – emotion, chaos and all. In my search of the internet I found this quote from a woman claiming to be straight but with bisexual tendencies, “I am attracted to the beauty of other women — and they’re so much easier to understand psychologically than men. We girls form deep relationships through friendships, which some say are the basis of love. And personally I believe that emotional connection and physical attraction are linked”[1]. Well, maybe for women, but not necessarily for men. I can be very attracted to a man on a casual basis without ever wanting intimate relationship.

However, I think it is important, as a male bisexual, to try to understand female bisexuality and why most bisexual women eventually give up on the heterosexual relationship and choose to become lesbians. First of all let’s look at the differences. Women are much more likely to be bisexual then men. I found a study conducted by researchers at Boise State University that found that in a group of heterosexual women, 60 percent were physically interested in other women, 45 percent made out with a woman in the past, and 50 percent had fantasies about the same sex[2]. The researchers also found that men were more likely than women to report being “100 percent heterosexual” or “100 percent homosexual” continually throughout their lives. This explains a lot about Carol and Therese and their natural attraction for one another. Women are allowed socially to hold hands, hug,  and even kiss in girl to girl relationships.  For boys this is a taboo.  A man is supposed to be a man.  Begs the question – are we all really bisexual in nature but straight or lesbian or gay only due to social factors? Perhaps for women, but I think there is more to it for men.  For men there is an animal competition to spread our genes around so the dominant genes will be passed on.  This means ‘women only’ as men cannot reproduce with another man.  Whereas women seem to be straight only about 40 to 50% of the time, it appears that men are definitely straight about 95% of the time, definitely gay 4% of the time and about 1% of the time they seem to be either-or.

Research suggests that gay men tend to engage in promiscuous sex and lesbian women tend to seek long term relationship[3].  According to my research (I know four lesbian couples), of the eight individuals, five started out in a marriage or heterosexual relationship and then settled into a long term lesbian relationship, two were dominant (butch) lesbians from adolescence on,  and only one started out in a lesbian relationship and then later got married to a man and had children.  From the research, and from my observations, some have definite lesbian desires starting at a young age but most come by it later in life, almost as if they choose to leave the straight and sometimes chaotic life behind and seek out genuine intimate relationship. On the other hand, most of the bisexual men I know have known from an early age that they had gay tendencies but also felt a strong attraction for women and a strong desire to marry and be fathers.  They live for years going from one to the other, usually intimately with their wives and casually with their gay lovers. When they divorce, they usually go gay and then many of them again seek out another heterosexual relationship.  It seems they cannot make up their minds. They seem driven to be both.  Men are true bisexuals.  Most women seem to feel the need to be one or the other.
Even though this movie indicates major differences between bisexual men and women, I do believe we have a lot in common.  Like Carol, we have a very strong urge to explore our gay or lesbian sexuality.  Like Carol and Therese, we find same-sex experiences sensuous and erotic. Like Carol, we come to a time in our life where sexual freedom of expression becomes a deep expression of our inner self, and we choose to leave the security of a marriage and strike off into the unknown in spite of the turmoil and pain it will cause.  Like Carol, we are caring people who do not want to hurt anyone, especially our children, but being true to ourselves becomes more important that being true to everyone else.

[1] http://www.yourtango.com/2011104439/study-average-woman-bisexual

[2] http://www.advocate.com/bisexuality/2015/08/26/study-women-are-more-likely-be-bisexual-men

[3] 2 Sanford et al, 2001; Kulkin et al, 2000