a blight for sore eyes

The onus of the blame for heteronormativity in contemporary publishing and media often falls upon bisexual women. I'm thinking of that God awful YouTube video by that Lavender Menace person who started speaking of how sapphic literature these days is so normative (I personally agree) before veering way™ off course to spew vitriol about how this was because every popular sapphic book nowadays is bisexual and not performing the acceptable model of lesbianism or sapphic desire.

When films like Bound get talked about in terms of being a lesbian classic, nobody mentions the fact that Corky, the butch from the film demonstrates biphobic (and by extension lesbiphobic) feelings towards Violet, the femme, and considers her to be "lying" for the male gaze and performing queerness. The film ends positively, with Corky overcoming her biases and acknowledging that Violet is just as queer as she is. It's irrelevant if Violet is bisexual or a closeted lesbian (I lean towards the latter with reference to her character), what's relevant is the policing of certain kinds of identities as being "less" queer and the refusal to accept or show empathy towards bisexual women, as we are considered beings incapable of authentic self presentation or autonomous desire. Instead, we are all just a gaslit hivemind of people operating under comp het.

Bisexual women cannot have peace when it comes to representation; people took that one sentence about Poison Ivy wildly out of context, retconned decades of her representation as a bisexual icon in popular culture in love with another bisexual woman and then gaslit bisexual folks for being "annoying" about it on social media. When Love Lies Bleeding released, on Twitter, bisexual women were told to stfu because this is a film about "REAL butch4butch dykes" (and then you see the film made by a bisexual director and the muscle mommy you love to gatekeep is a) not a butch and b) an open and proud bisexual).

Villanelle, who was openly bisexual in the Killing Eve books, was retconned by fandom into a man hating lesbian and that apparently made her more authentically queer than Eve, who remained bisexual in both TV and source material. Of course, it is easier to see the more "visibly queer" Villanelle as a lesbian, while Eve, whose relationships centre men more, and who has to have her eyes opened by the sexy assassin hunting her down, can be bisexual.

I find this a really weird pattern. The whole subgenre of "bisexual woman having a reckoning and leaving her husband for a lesbian" is corny at best and poorly equates bisexuality with heteronormativity at worst, especially because the same formula is almost never applied to show a bi woman leaving her husband for another bi woman, or a lesbian leaving behind a comp het marriage or having a mid-life awakening in popular sapphic tradpub literature; the closest to this I can find is the novel Cash Delgado is Living the Dream (2024) by Taylor Kay Mejia.

It's silly, and vapid and frankly very condescending to assume that every bisexual women in popular media is actually a lesbian facing comphet. You need to unshackle your points from separatist biphobic rhetoric on social media, even if it is dressed in shallow feminist terminology. It's literally okay to let a film or book be bisexual, and I can promise you it doesn't make the narrative less queer or feminist or subversive.

I know some nasty people will be rbing this post and talking about how bisexuals are the privileged white people of the lgbtq community etc etc, and honestly I don't know how to articulate about this issue without coming off bitter, so here is an essay by Carmen Maria Machado, whose writing on bisexuality, queerness in horror/dark fiction and on sapphic literature & culture in general I highly recommend:

queer films:

"when you're observing me, who do you think I'm observing?"

Dorothy Harrell, acrobatic All-Star shortstop for the Rockford Peaches, 1948.

One of the top players in AAGPBL history, who served as an inspiration for the 1992 film A League of Their Own.