Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics. Paula C Rust
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be expressed through behavior. A few lesbians think of bisexuality as a positive sexual preference or choice and, conversely, a few think of it as a lack of preference or a failure to choose. Even among lesbians who use the same criterion to define bisexuality, there is considerable variation in the way they apply this criterion to distinguish bisexuality from homosexuality and heterosexuality. But whether defined in terms of behavior, feelings, preferences, or choices, bisexuality is usually defined in terms of gender; for example, as sexual behavior with both women and men, or as a choice between women and men. A very small handful of lesbians define bisexuality as the ability to love or be attracted to people regardless of their gender.
Lesbians who use different definitions of bisexuality tend to have different attitudes toward it. For example, lesbians who define bisexuality in terms of behavior tend to be skeptical about its existence and reluctant to become too closely involved with bisexual women, whereas lesbians who define bisexuality in terms of feelings are more tolerant and concerned about the difficulties they think bisexuals must face. It is not surprising that lesbians who define bisexuality differently have different opinions; after all, they are talking about entirely different things.
WHAT ARE BISEXUALS LIKE?
The question “How do lesbians picture bisexual women?” bears a disquieting resemblance to questions like “How do whites picture blacks?” and “What is the male ideal of womanhood?” In the past few decades, we as a society have become increasingly sensitive to the dynamics of stereotypy and oppression. One after the other, oppressed groups among us have begun to resist the economic, social, and political structures that cause their disadvantage, fighting to change not only these structures but also the prejudicial attitudes of the powerful members of society who benefit from the same structures. As a result, those of us who are oppressed ourselves or who are sincere in our hatred of oppression have become sensitized not only to sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism, and age-ism in particular, but also to the form of prejudicial thinking in general. We are suspicious of any statement that sounds like a generalization or that refers to people as members of groups instead of individuals.
Making generalizations about the objects in our environments, including other people, is a natural and necessary human skill. Generalization involves overlooking individual differences in the effort to find similarities. Without this skill, we would be unable to learn from our experiences, unable to plan future activity, largely unable to communicate with each other, and unable to empathize with the experiences of other people. So when does this natural and necessary capacity for generalization become objectionable? It becomes problematic when the objects we generalize are other human beings, and when our capacity to perceive similarities impedes our ability to perceive individual differences as well. At that point, we begin to see other people as no more than group representatives and we begin to treat them as members of categories instead of individuals. We then look at Black people and see nothing but black; we look at White people and see nothing but white. Instead of facilitating social interaction, our ability to generalize becomes an obstacle to social interaction that robs others of their individuality by replacing it with stereotypes.
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