BiCrushing
Take two maligned, misunderstood, yet somehow mutually-exclusive seeming social categories, mould them together and you have the bisexual virgin. In many circles, being bi and sexually inexperienced ā if itās even acknowledged as possible – is considered a no-brainer: the equivalent, if you like, of those lottery winners who declare theyāre going to give it all to Battersea Dogs Home and stay living in their council bungalow. Iām probably not alone in finding these kind of analogies annoying as they imply that being attracted to both genders is a choice based around promiscuity, rather than a state of being youāre lumbered with even if your accomplishments in love resemble George Bushās in literacy. I was, until recently, one of that special bi-virgin demographic. Technically, I still am. Well, as the teen-mag clichĆ© runs, it depends on what you mean by sex. As a Sociology student due to graduate this summer, I could write you a lovely essay on the subject of the bad, bad, bad phallocentric culture that places the penis ā and penis substitutes – at the centre of the sexual experience, and sprinkle it with words that would make your genitalia shrivel, but Iām not going to do that. For one thing, equating sexual experience with being lucky in love places you on dodgy ground – or at least, suggests you havenāt paid a visit to a pub on a Saturday night recently.
The reasons for my circumstances are somewhat simple. In her autobiography, 60s rock siren Grace Slick (former lead singer of Jefferson Airplane) writes, of her alleged pickiness around relationships: āItās never been a moral decision, itās just that Iām an eighteen-wheeler and it takes more mechanisms to get me in gear.ā Iād say the same is true of myself, except in my case Iām not entirely sure how to quantify what those āmechanismsā might be. Seemingly, I become somebodyās good friend, and, having established that theyāre wildly unattainable, I develop a fixation that gradually crosses the line from friendship to love. (There may or may not be an interlude during which I spend months or years at a cost to my mental health trying to convince myself that Iām not actually in love with them, even though itās blindingly obvious to anyone with functioning eyes and ears and in view of the facts).
The nearest I can get to a formula runs like this: If youāre a man, youāve got to like good music and be dark and scruffily handsome. If youāre a woman, youāve got to like good wine, be blonde and resemble Mariella Frostrup. Either way, thereās got to be a plethora of reasons why you and I couldnāt possibly happen on any level. Thereās nothing particularly exceptional wrong with me, I have no major bodily hang-ups, Iām just hopeless at crushes that are, you know, sensible. Let us qualify: in my case, sensible equals: single, childless, the right age, sexual orientation and geographical locationā¦ forget all the nitty-gritty extras like a mutual love for the Stone Roses. I had one or two vaguely sensible crushes at university, alas both rapidly destroyed any notion that this was the way forward One, in my fresher year involved a gorgeous but conversationally-sparse third year Engineering student who I spent a year eyeing up across crowded rooms before I allowed myself to understand his aloofness as disinterest. The second was my editor on the student newspaper who spent the drunken evening of our first ever meeting showing me frivolous websites, and, despite my being on the editorial team for most of this year, has barely spoken to me again except to ātalk shopā. Yes, it seems aloofness just does it for me every time.
Of course, thatās not quite the whole story. Like many people who donāt fit neatly into societyās homo/het binary, I spent a long time coming to terms with who I am: on one memorable occasion, as a 17 year-old Saturday jobber phoning for a lift home, I ran out of mobile phone credit and walked for half an hour to a payphone because I was too scared to use the one in the gay pub next to the office. The fact that I didnāt need to make self-acceptance into this arduous process is beside the point ā I did, and I have to live with the consequences, most notably the fact that it was a major barrier in my way of forming relationships for many years. Weathering the storm has recently led me to the door of my universityās LGBTa, where I have found the screamingly camp gay men are generally more approachable than the women, whom they outnumber by about 10:1. So, while this foray into the scene has done good things for my general welfare, a tonic for my love life it isnāt. Amid this, I have endured a three-week fling with a man who, when he wasnāt fumbling around and taking an unreasonable amount of the credit for āmaking stuff happenā down there, was asking me annoying questions (The next gawky student in glasses and a Red Hot Chilli Peppers T-shirt who asks āWould you fancy me if I was a girl?ā will receive the swift reply: āNo – howās that going to make a difference to your blandness?ā)
That rather dignity-starved attempt at a make-do relationship taught me that my life henceforth will take one of three paths: that a close friendship of mine will eventually actually manage to develop into an equally close relationship, that I will eventually manage to drag one of my hopeless crush-figures down to my own insensible levelā¦or that I will spend most weeks til my menopause writing columns like this. One way or the other all these scenarios are likely to bring me a certain amount of hardship, but, on a positive note, only the third will ever contribute anything to my gas bill. Surely thatās got to be worth a shotā¦
December 5, 2010
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Tags: BiCrushing Ā· Posted in: BCN 79: Jun 2006
