mikroblogolas replied to your post: Re: Nixon, I fully support her right to define her own sexuality as long as she doesn’t try to erase mine, i.e. “I don’t pull out the ‘bisexual’ word because nobody likes the bisexuals.” (Source Towleroad. Ask filters links, but I blogged it earlier today.) Maybe if “nobody” likes us, media figures should stop acting like bisexuality is something to be ashamed of.
“bisexual” isn’t by default binarist. see my long post on this and a million other people’s discussions of it, as well as the definitions by a lot of bi orgs. some people use it to mean “two,” but a great number of people use it mean “more than one.”
Hello! Yes, I read your post a week or two ago, in fact, and it’s one reason I was quite careful not to say that ‘bisexual’ is necessarily binarist. Which I’m pretty sure I didn’t?
I think what I said was that the fact that there are more than two genders means we can’t assume that Cynthia Nixon is bisexual. That’s still true even though some people use ‘bisexual’ to mean ‘attracted to more than one gender’, because we can’t know whether she is one of those people. The only way we could say that she’s definitely bisexual (ignoring my other two reasons why we can’t) is if we were going to say not only that ‘bisexual’ can mean ‘attracted to more than one gender’ but that ‘bisexual’ always means ‘attracted to more than one gender’, or that ‘attracted to more than one gender’ is the only definition of ‘bisexual’. Which is, of course, not true.
Also I think it’s fairly evident that the term was not being used in that sense by either of the people I’ve been engaging with who want to call Nixon bisexual and want her to call herself that. John Aravosis, in a passage I quoted, said this:
What she means is that she’s bisexual, and doesn’t quite get that most people aren’t able to have sexual romantic relationships with both men and women because they’re just not into both genders. She is into both genders.
Doctordisaster made a post, obviously responding to Nixon’s comment that ‘nobody likes the bisexuals’, saying:
“Nobody likes the bisexuals”EVERYBODY LIKES THE BISEXUALS!
it may have something to do with the DEFINITION OF THE TERM
Which obviously makes no sense unless you think ‘the definition of the term’ is ‘has sex with everybody’. And, although there are people who use ‘bisexual’ to mean ‘attracted to more than one of the various possible genders’, there are, as far as I know, no people use it to mean ‘attracted to all possible genders’ except the people who think ‘more than one gender’ and ‘all possible genders’ are the same number, i.e. two.
