End Intolerance! These Stereotypes Belong in the Past

Not a question of either or, bisexual people still stand in a somewhat diffuse light in the general perception. The public vacillates between total acceptance and total rejection. The LQBTQ movement of the last few years has been able to do some valuable educational work. However, many contemporaries are still not completely comfortable with the fact that men and women can be equally attractive to someone.

This natural inclination is not at all rare. After all, 3% of the population in Germany admitted to being attracted to both sexes in the course of a survey conducted in 2020. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, maintained that every human being has a predisposition to feel love and lust for both men and women.

Both areas are also wide open territory in the case of bisexual love. In our enlightened and endeavored politically correct time it is the goal above all to accept people as what they are and how they feel, see and present themselves. Some views are old chestnuts that need to be tidied up as soon as possible. In this article, we present seven such antiquated stereotypes that are clearly outdated in the 21st century.

1. Bisexuality doesn't exist

The LGBTQ community has a 2005 study to thank for this assertion. The questions at the time were geared in such a way, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that the result led researchers to conclude that everyone ultimately preferred one gender, even if they had had relationships with both along the way. As a result, the rumor persisted for years that bisexuals were either straight, homosexual, or outright liars.

However, it is correct that sooner or later bisexuals also find a partner for life or at least for a certain period of life. Just because this is then a woman or a man, the person has not finally decided on a preferred gender and committed to it forever. If you are open to a new perspective and cannot see your own sexuality as set in stone, you will come to the conclusion that Sigmund Freud was perhaps right after all:

Women always find other women attractive without immediately leaving their partner or husband for them. Men can have best buddies with whom they have more in common than just sports or the weekly bar crawl. Denying the game of bisexuality is nonsense from a probability standpoint alone.

2. No one is safe from the advances of bisexual people

Like anything foreign, the idea of bisexuality scares off intolerant contemporaries. Too many myths circulate and too unimaginable is the image that is conjured up in people's minds. Those who find men and women sexually interesting and erotic, are thought to help themselves like they’re living in an all-you-can-eat buffet. Supposedly no human being escapes this lasciviousness from people who, because they can choose, don’t let anyone get away from their clutches.

Here bisexuality is confused with promiscuity, and even this comparison is still sorely lacking. The fact is that bisexual women and men carry the same high demand for love and partnership in themselves as hetero or homosexuals. They are also looking for a hot flirt, a lasting partnership and of course for the great love. For them there’s just no exclusion of male or female gender.

3. This is just a phase

The discovery of one's own sexuality takes place in several stages of life. From the first childhood realizations that girls and boys are different, but nonetheless somehow interesting, to the picture-book family, several phases of reorientation can occur. The most pronounced is that people deal with their own sexuality, certainly during puberty and then later again between their late 30s and mid-40s.

What is often mistakenly dismissed as a midlife crisis actually heralds the phase of individuation according to Carl Gustav Jung, a student and later professional colleague of Sigmund Freud. It is neither a crisis nor a form of rebellion, but the realization of who we actually are and have always wanted to be. Recognizing sexuality as part of one's own personality is therefore not a temporary phenomenon, but part of growing up, which can sometimes take longer in sexual terms.

4. Bisexuals prefer open relationships

Just because you have more relationship options than other people doesn't necessarily mean you want to have it all at the same time. Even among bisexual people, there are those who strive for a very traditional two-way relationship, so those who are open to both sexes do not necessarily prefer open relationships.

5. Ménage à trois just happens now and then

Those hip misconceptions that are responsible for the stereotype from the previous point also like to insinuate bisexually inclined people to have triangular relationships or purely relate to the sexual aspect, making a more or less quick threesome, whenever possible, a reality. The fact that this is a type of play that does not exclude any sexual orientation per se and conversely is desired by hetero and homosexual women and men alike remains completely unspoken.

By the way, the reverse conclusion is also too simple and simply wrong. A heterosexual man who wants his wife to have a tingling erotic threesome with a man does not necessarily have to feel same-sex inclinations. So the following applies: between adults, everything is permitted that pleases everyone involved. Drawing conclusions about sexual orientation from a specific adventure or experiment is short-sighted and far too simplistic.

6. People with bisexual inclinations are in the minority

Here the crux lies somewhat buried in the fact that surveys rely on people telling the truth, glossing over the common phenomenon they don't actually know any better. The majority of people will certainly still classify themselves as heterosexual, followed by the strongest minority of homosexuals.

Other hues of the rainbow are a little more difficult to capture. In addition, the question arises as to how meaningful it is to pass numbers and statistics back and forth in connection with sexuality at all, since in the final analysis it is always people, none of whom should be more important or less important than another.

7. Bisexually inclined partners* are unfaithful.

Again, promiscuity and nymphomania are confused with sexual orientation. Fidelity or infidelity is not a question of preferred sexual contact. Bisexual people live and maintain their relationships no differently than hetero or homosexuals.

Today’s Conclusion: Men, women, and the lived diversity.

It will take many more rainbow parades to garner the LGBTQ movement the respect everyone deserves. Discrimination based on one's sexual orientation should have been a thing of the past long ago and should not even be an issue anymore. But here, too, we are still too strongly attached to the role models that have shaped our society since time immemorial.

Social control, inherited behavior and views are not least the social environment in which we grow up, and this mainly determines how tolerant we are towards our fellow human beings. That's it for today.