JamesR said:
Why is this thread in the Ethics forum? What's the ethical issue supposed to be?
Strangely, the question never occurred to me.
Well, okay ... what's strange about it is that it's almost a natural ethical issue to me. During the Oregon gay fray of the 1990s, there developed the strangest, localized but recurring theme against bisexuals. What was strange about it? It came from gays.
The superficial explanation is that bisexuals were cowardly, running from their homosexual inclination. In the end, it's a little more complex than that.
Circa 1992, my girlfriend at the time was one of those "would-be" bisexuals. She "would be" a bisexual if she actually liked it. But a small city in Oregon turned out to be one of my first shocking lessons in why the PMRC and others had a point. Apparently, bisexuality actually became popular at her school in response to
Basic Instinct. (I still think about that idea and it's like ... you're kidding me, right?)
So what happened then is a mingling of accidents. The OCA hit in 1990 with an anti-gay agenda after getting its rocks knocked in on an anti-abortion platform. Scoring local wins in Corvallis and Springfield, Christian homophobes thrust gays squarely into the spotlight and immediately began complaining about how gays were always crying for attention.
In the public debate that followed, news media was also undergoing a transformation in the wake of 1991's Gulf War. Twenty-four hour news coverage ruled the day, and the human aspect was vital. The tradition of finding incompetent witnesses is accidental in history--all the smart, observant people cleared out if they had anything resembling a stake in avoiding official interaction. But in the 1990s idiots became the standard fare. And in Oregon you had a flock of hypocritical pseudo-bi girls saying really stupid things to reporters, and after a while, the gay community just had enough of it. I can't speak for anywhere else in the nation, but in the Oregon fight, there came a period when gays just had enough. They were thrown into the spotlight, argued over like bad meat, and then misrepresented by a bunch of insincere sorority (
expletive that rhymes with "spots").
And so a new argument was afoot. In the Bill "Waffle" Clinton phase, fence-sitting and issue-straddling was unacceptable. The role of the bisexual in a war of identity politics found new value.
Additionally, there's a longstanding ethical issue of sexual satisfaction in the culture. While there is question enough in some people's minds about homosexuality, there is a response about commitment, biology, psychology, and nature. It's slightly more difficult to construct that response for bisexuality, which looks to the superficial like mere hedonistic excess.
Additionally, "bisexuality" is a slightly-tainted term by proxy of a segment of its constituency. Namely, double-ending a chick. A friend used to have a joke about wanting to double-end a woman with me so we could high-five over her back at orgasm. Thankfully, he figured out before I had to say anything that what he was proposing was using an extraneous prop (e.g. the woman) to achieve communion 'twixt ourselves (simultaneous orgasm). When he realized that the "bisexual" allowance he would make rhetorically for the benefit of his pseudo-bi girlfriend was merely sublimated homosexuality, the desire to double-end a woman with me disappeared.
So part of the bisexual issue, because of a certain segment of the constituency, involves all sorts of messy psychological and ethical pitfalls.
One of the amusing things about such scenes in porn in this context is that by the time a woman is impaled on three separate phalluses, she's a mere stage prop in one of the gayest shows going. Why do men defer to the "disrespect" of such "exploitation"? Because it's easier than admitting that the focus of the scene is three other men getting off.
Bisexuality, strangely, seems absolutely loaded with ethical bemusement.