For my final paper for the Sociology of Human Sexuality, I stupidly decided to take up the topic of bisexuality and monogamy. That is not to say that the topic is stupid, but rather believing I could tackle it in 12-15 pages for an unreceptive audience was stupid on my part. I had intended to paraphrase my paper here. However, it didn’t turn out anything like I had wanted. The literature that I had hoped to find… simply didn’t exist. Instead, I found myself spending more pages than necessary having to define what “bisexuality” and “monogamy” are… apparently no one knows. I can’t help but laugh at that. Everyone knows instinctively what they are and what they mean; even if those self-created definitions are false.
In the end, due to time and page constraints, I didn’t have the opportunity to address the reason that I had written the paper in the first place. I’m not entirely proud of the end result. I feel like I had to compromise my opinions, beliefs, and what I felt relevant to the topic in order to address what the prof wold be receptive to so that I could get the grade in this class that I needed in order to graduate. I think that in and of itself is saying quite a lot.
Also, I didn’t realize how offended I would get reading through existing theories and research for this paper. It really was a painful process… and became difficult trying to examine the issue from as unbiased a perspective as I could.
Hahahaha I totally just realized that I never put a conclusion on my paper!
I enjoyed reading your paper! I’m currently working on my thesis on “The L Word” and sexual identity and you’re right, it’s hard to find good literature on bisexuality. So what would be the conclusion of your paper if you had to write one now?
Thank you :) I’m glad someone enjoyed it! Good luck on your own thesis. I highly recommend Paula C. Rodriguez Rust’s book. As for the conclusion were I to write it now; I honestly don’t know. Its such a complex topic. I think that bisexuals aren’t any more likely to be non-monogamous than anyone else. I think the primary problem in research is that their “bisexual” sample populations are heavily biased and that is due to this whole bisexual invisibility and an insufficient operational definition for bisexuality that more often than not doesn’t take into consideration emotional or cognitive factors beyond sexual behavior alone. I think that before proficient research can be conducted on the issues of bisexuality, we first need to acknowledge and confront the biases inherent in the work being done by hetero- and homo-sexual researchers. However, those prejudices are pervasive. Also, I believe it would be incredibly difficult to obtain any funding for such work. However, I believe that understanding bisexuality truly is imperative to understanding sexuality as a whole and to overlook it, as has primarily been the case, is to weaken what we “know” about hetero- and homo-sexuality. After all, if you think about it what is heterosexual and what is homosexual? Really those two definitions hinge on how one defines bisexuality, not the other way around!
It is a complex topic indeed. I think scientists and people in general limit themselves by viewing sexuality as a dichotomy. I call myself a “lesbian” because society only gives me three options to choose from (and many think that bisexuality is not even an authentic sexual identity, which narrows my options down to two). But I know that my true identity is much more complex than that when I think of how I can relate to other people emotionally, cognitively and sexually.
p.s. This is still “Pussyfoot” talking, I changed my nickname now though :)
[...] of the web, I found a few people who have been trying to grapple with the question. There was one young woman who attempted to answer the question in a college term paper, to no avail. Then there’s a fellow [...]