Bi

The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality

Julia Shaw

• Éditeur: Canongate Books
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786898777
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Sexualité humaine en psychologie

A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2022: POLITICSBi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality explores all that we know about the world's largest sexual minority. It is a personal journey that starts with Dr Julia Shaw's own openly bisexual identity, and celebrates the resilience and beautiful diversity of the bi community. From the hunt for a bi gene, to the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, to asylum seekers who need to prove their bisexuality in a court of law, there is more to explore than most have ever realised.

1

THE BI OPTION

THERE HAVE BEEN suspicions that bisexuality is probably just a trend for almost fifty years. The US magazine Newsweek has even declared this boldly twice. In 1974 it published an article titled ‘Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes’.¹ Two decades later, in 1995, it ran a cover story with the headline ‘Bisexuality. Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges’.² New again?

These two articles have been widely mocked in bisexual forums. This is particularly true of the 1995 cover, which includes bright white lettering atop a photo of a woman with short hair wearing an oversized black suit and with her arms crossed. She has a guarded expression on her face and is positioned in front of two men in casual grey t-shirts who stare with emotionless expressions into the camera. The photo is so weird, and so over-the-top 90s that it seems almost satirical.

The article itself proclaims things like ‘bisexuality is the hidden wild card of our erotic culture’, suggests there is ‘an independent bisexual movement’, and allows a fifteen-year-old to debunk the myth of the hypersexual bisexual while simultaneously reinforcing it with the bizarre quote, ‘A bisexual . . . doesn’t have any more sex than the captain of the football team.’ Given that a key benefit of being the captain of the (American) football team is having lots of sex, I guess this kid is trying to make it clear that he is promiscuous, but not sexually excessive. The article also in various ways conflates polyamory, promiscuity, and gender fluidity with bisexuality. And it taps into the idea that bisexuality is on the rise with the sentence, ‘Many college students, particularly women, talk about a new sexual “fluidity” on campus,’ and quotes a bisexual person saying, ‘It’s not us-versus-them anymore. There’s just more and more of us.’

What I find astonishing is that this article could have been written today, with the exact same misconceptions, uneasy feeling of change, and echoes of optimism. Particularly, this idea that there are just more and more bisexual people is still popular today. But is it true? Before I try to answer that, I need to define what bisexuality is. To do that we are going to head back in time to see where the term came from, and three men with similar sounding names who were fundamental in establishing bisexuality as an academic and popular concept: Krafft-Ebing, Kinsey, and Klein.

INVENTING BISEXUALITY

It may surprise you that the use of the term bisexual to refer to human sexuality is almost as old as the term heterosexual. In his book The Invention of Heterosexuality, gay history pioneer and activist Jonathan Ned Katz argues that ‘the idea of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating to the late nineteenth century’.³ The first recorded use of the term was in an anonymous pamphlet in 1869, of which it was later established that Karl-Maria Kertbeny was the author.⁴

Kertbeny lived a colourful life. He spent time in many major European cities, where he hung out with celebrities like George Sand and the Grimm brothers, hid from authorities by living in a botanic garden in Leipzig, was briefly a police spy, and was in and out of debtors’ prisons because of a series of failed attempts at being a journalist.⁵ In his letters, pamphlets, and books he wrote extensively about his view that sodomy laws violated human rights, and that such consensual sexual acts in private should not be subject to criminal law. While writing, Kertbeny, who was probably gay himself, found the need to label and define the sexual norm so that he could explain how same-sex desires and sexual behaviours contrasted with it. This is why he came up with the terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’. A gay rights activist coined the word heterosexual as a by-product of creating the word homosexual.

In the etymology of Kertbeny’s ‘heterosexual’, ‘hetero’ comes from the Greek heteros which means another, while homos means same, and both are melded with the Latin word sexus. Not long after this, bi, or two, started to be used to refer to people who had both homosexual and heterosexual desires. A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other.

Before being adopted to describe human sexuality, the term bisexual was typically used to refer to creatures and plants which are hermaphroditic, so have both male and female reproductive parts. Even today, in the worlds of botany, entomology, and zoology the term bisexual is often used in this way. Roses are an example of a popular bisexual plant.

The first use of the word bisexual in English, in the sense of being sexually attracted to people of multiple genders, was probably in 1892 when American neurologist Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated Psychopathia Sexualis, an influential book by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in which he detailed what he considered to be sexual disorders in male prisoners.⁶ The book was intended for clinical-forensic settings, and Krafft-Ebing wrote it in intentionally difficult language and with parts in Latin so that laypeople couldn’t read it. The book played an important and controversial role in the discussion among psychiatrists at the time who were trying to understand why people have homosexual desires.

Why didn’t these terms exist earlier? As sexuality historian Hanne Blank has argued, people in English-speaking countries didn’t really think about sexuality as an identity before this.⁷ They didn’t consider they should be ‘differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced’. There were words to describe the kinds of sexual behaviour people engaged in, but sex was mostly something that people did, not part of who they were.

Once sexuality became a hotly political part of identity, people wanted ways to define these new sexual labels. The problem quickly became that what one person meant when they used a label like bisexual was very different from what someone else meant, which is a problem that continues to pose a major obstacle for researchers today.

To overcome this kind of problem, researchers in fields like psychology often create ‘operational’ definitions. For example, if you are a researcher who thinks that the label bisexual is underutilised by people, you could create a questionnaire about people’s sexual attractions. Those participants who score over a certain cut-off score you would label bisexual for the purposes of your study, even if they wouldn’t label themselves that way. The main thing is that you make it transparent how you are objectively defining bisexuality, so that other researchers can see whether they agree with whom you called bi, and so that they can repeat your study with other samples. Importantly, not all operational definitions are created equal, and it turns out that many people who study queer people react allergically to the very concept that sexuality can be measured objectively at all.

The reason for this really became clear to me in 2020 when an article on bi men was published in a prestigious scientific journal.⁸ The researchers operationally defined bisexuality as penile arousal to ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ porn. To measure this, they monitored how hard men’s penises got by using something called the penile plethysmograph, a mechanical sleeve that is slid around a penis. The researchers monitored arousal while the men watched pornographic material chosen by the researchers. You can imagine how being in a research lab where you are shown porn that you didn’t get to choose while having this object strapped to your genitals might be a rather, shall we say, unnatural situation. The researchers were pleased, however, because they found that the men who said they were bisexual did in fact get hard to both ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ porn. This, the researchers wrote, finally proved that bi men exist. This article made a lot of people very, very angry. Including me.

Along with two other bisexuality researchers, Jacob Engelberg and Samuel Lawton, I published a scathing critique of this article in 2021.⁹ We argued that in most academic disciplines that study sexuality, bisexuality is treated as an identity that does not need any kind of physiological response. This is also how sexuality is enshrined in (anti-) discrimination law in countries including the UK, Canada, Germany, and the US. As such, no sexual identity can, or should, be measured physiologically.

Worse still, history has shown us that the situations in which people suppose there is a way to measure sexuality physiologically are often disastrous. There have been many attempts to find physiological ‘proof’ of ‘deviant’ sexual tendencies, most notably by oppressive regimes that are trying to stamp out or regulate homosexual behaviour. A study claiming that the penile plethysmograph works to identify bisexual men legitimises its use and is a recipe for abuse in the hands of those seeking to persecute queer men. With high error rates and major theoretical flaws, tools like this are likely to land both heterosexual and queer men in prison, or worse. In the decades following its development by sexologist Kurt Freund, the penile plethysmograph has been used to facilitate a number of acts of violence against men who were thought to have homosexual tendencies, leading to concerns over its connection with human rights abuses.¹⁰

Measuring people’s genitals as proof of their sexuality is such a superficial understanding of the concept that it beggars belief how this study got published. Luckily, it is also an unusual methodology. Most researchers accept that sexuality is driven by subjective factors, so they ask people questions about their sexual desires, behaviours, thoughts, and identity rather than putting invasive measurement tools on their genitals. To these questions we turn now.

BLUNT QUESTIONS

Have you ever taken a sexuality quiz online? If so, then you have probably used a digital version of a tool that was developed more than half a century ago: the Kinsey Scale.

In 2011 historian Donna Drucker examined 29 sexuality quizzes on forums, blogs, or other sites, including ones in English, French, German, Spanish, and Norwegian.¹¹ Drucker found that the quizzes were ‘a powerful tool for sexual understanding, self-reckoning, and nurturing compassion for sexual others’. Drucker also found that ‘selecting a place on the scale, even if only in the short-term, gives most quiz-takers and commenters some feeling of power and control over choosing a place in the sexual world’. And although some did not find their place on the scale, most did. The online scales helped people feel less alone as they navigated the complex world of their own behaviours, desires, and identity formation.

Perhaps the most popular sexuality scale to this day is the one invented by Alfred Kinsey. Indeed, all of the quizzes Drucker examined were online versions of the Kinsey Scale.

In the 1930s Alfred Kinsey was a biologist with a PhD from Harvard known for his work on insects, specifically on gall wasps.¹² Historian and sexologist Vern Bullough describes Kinsey’s move from asexual gall wasps to sexual humans as ‘serendipitous’. It was the result of a large amount of money being available for sex research at the time, combined with the fact that Kinsey had taken the lead on a course on marriage and family through which he had become interested in human sexuality because he found the lack of research on the topic incredibly frustrating. The stars aligned and he slid into the area of sex research that would make him world famous.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Kinsey is that throughout his work he was a taxonomist. Whether gall wasp or human, all he wanted was to classify and describe the world as a scientist. This also meant that he refused to see his studies in moral or political terms, and instead wrote extensively in his reports about the ‘mammalian background’ of humans and tied his ideas to biological concepts.¹³ This was radically different from some of his peers, who thought that Kinsey’s approach to sex was outrageous. And, in fairness to his sceptics, some of his early approaches to studying sex were . . . blunt.

For example, he was known for asking his students at what age they first had sex, how often they had sex, and how many partners they had. He was also, according to the gossip among his colleagues at the time, asking female students about the lengths of their clitorises, notably not in research settings. If a professor accosted me after a lecture to spontaneously ask me about the length of my clitoris I would also be taken aback, or possibly report him to the campus police. Luckily for Kinsey, he was friends with the president of the university so his unorthodox start in sexuality research didn’t lose him his job. Instead, he was given a lighter teaching load, and asked to stop asking lewd questions in polite company and instead to move such questions to a structured research setting. This is where he came to conduct the famous Kinsey studies.

Kinsey ended up completing interviews with over 8,000 participants himself, in addition to training his research assistants to interview 10,000 more. Because Kinsey ...

Table des matières

• Introduction: I want more
• 1. The Bi Option
• 2. Our History
• 3. Nothing but Mammals
• 4. The Bisexual Closet
• 5. Invisi-bi-lity
• 6. It’s Political
• 7. Free Love
• Conclusion: Bidentity
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index