I remember numerous months ago when a study came out showing that of the people now identifying as LGBT+, most of them were bisexual. Somebody commented something along the lines of “this kinda proves my theory that everyone is bisexual.” I’ve seen this sentiment before then, though.
I have mixed feelings: most of the people proposing this are themselves bisexual and usually saying it in good faith. I have little doubt that there are more bisexuals than we think, too; they hesitate to identify as such due to factors like stigmatization and unawareness.
Even so, this suggestion still rubs me the wrong way: it invalidates our own identities and implies that we “just haven’t found the right man yet”, like we only need to subject ourselves to dozens of guys (either in person or from photographs) and eventually we’ll win the lottery. There are plenty of other things that I would rather be doing. I suppose that somebody could argue that I must be bisexual because umpteen years ago I found a few guys attractive, but that categorization would be so misleading as to be useless.
What do you think?
(Sorry I saw this cross the lemmy timeline and I found it interesting). I'm a gay guy, but I feel that the sentiment that "literally" everyone is bisexual is an obvious nonstarter and dumb. My bi friends that have said stuff like that before are surely shorthanding that they think that many "straight" people are bi to some degree, and while I think that's closer to true, I also still think it's dumb and reductive. Sexuality is complicated and not beholden to labels, yet I feel I'm 100% gay, no leeway, same as you probably feel about being lesbian - I have to imagine most straight people are the same.
It seems paradoxical that in the land of infinite sexuality permutations, these rigid labels are accurate, but maybe it would only seem unintuitive on the surface. Who's to say that all these permutations are evenly distributed, or that they don't clump up around the extremes, and so on. We'll probably eventually know the actual statistics and maybe the science on how all this stuff works (maybe we already do - I'm dumb please forgive), but in the meantime people are just making some smudgy extrapolations based on their own experiences and the experiences of having many of their "straight" friends come out as bi when they're like 40+ years old. Many "straight" people probably didn't even know it was an option until they saw others doing so. I expect such extrapolations will die down pretty quickly after enough time has passed to make it clear the numbers aren't continuing to grow. My guess is people are just genuinely excited about the prospect that many people can potentially join them in being LGBTQ+, and aren't really thinking through the rest of the consequences.
Your last paragraph makes me think that the implication is that if you're even 1% attracted to men then you're being told you might as well date a man because that's the "normal" or "easy" thing to do which is super messed up also. Above all, no one should be dictating anyone else's sexuality, and if they do then you've learned a free lesson in who you can ignore.