The Bi Phase

This weekend, while humoring my partner and seeing, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” I was reminded of a “trend (?)” which incenses me. And that is, “The Bi-Phase”. For those of you who haven’t seen (or suffered) through the movie, the main female character tries to escape her past “ex’s”, which her none too bright, sorta boyfriend keeps referring to as her ex-boyfriends. Although she constantly corrects him by calling them her seven evil ex’s (we never learn why they are evil, despite how long the movie drags on, but that is besides the point), he never notices the corrections she makes. Nor does he make any connection to the female who accosts him, ninja style, in an alleyway.

Now, before you go all nerdy video-gangbusters on me here, I understand Scott Pilgrim was hardly a glowing example of anything other than “the nerdy guy beats every guy who ever beat up on him and still gets two hot chicks in the end” kind of movie, and that isn’t where my beef is (well, not in this blog anyway). What’s got ants in my pants, bees in my bonnet and whatever other trite expressions you can think of for being pissed off, is the whole concept of a “Bi-Phase.”
In this particular movie, you would have to be beyond a nerd or live in a darker cave than I do, to not realize that Ramona (female character with 7 evil ex’s) has had a relationship with a woman. That’s certainly cool with me and I speculate that it is probably cool with the nerdy 95% male dominate population in the movie theatre. What’s not cool with me; you know, me who identifies as bisexual, is that when it comes time for Ramona to ‘fess up about her relationship with her evil fem ex, she merely shrugs it off as, “I thought I was Bi. It was just a phase.” And, to kill the ending of the movie, much like “Chasing Amy,” Ramona decides that she’d rather be with a man. How convenient.

How sad.

How fucking much it pisses me off that in the few movies I’ve seen, bisexuality is still being presented as a phase, a joke, a temporary, desperate period of exploration until a man is found.
How oddly, eerily biblical-as if finding a man is the true answer to what every woman is really looking for, and yet, if she can’t find one, she might be able to get away with being edgy enough to be “bi,” but only if it is a passing phase. And of course, that discounts all the bisexual men in the world!

Clearly for me, this is a deeply personal issue. For most of my life I was torn, often to the brink of suicidal ideation, over my sexuality. My very first crush, as I’ve already blogged about, was on a boy my age that lived across the street. However, in hindsight as an adult, I often wonder if he would have been my first crush if I hadn’t had heterosexuality rammed down my throat and bashed into my head at least since the time my first, and only, male cousin was born- a mere six months after I was. We were constantly referred to as “kissing cousins” (whatever that means…By the way, it turns out he’s gay and I’m bi, so that whole forcing heterosexuality thing upon us didn’t turn out so well!) And ever since I can remember I was asked if I had a boyfriend-I mean from the time I was THREE or so on!

Come ON! Talk about inappropriate questions for kids! We don’t even give children a chance to develop their own sexuality in our American society. We form their sexuality for them: based on religion, based on fear, based on tradition and our own expectations of weddings and what have-you and we start bombarding them, at the earliest ages possible, that they are to be heterosexual and that is that. It is almost a carefully re-written version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, except here children aren’t being taught to hate, they are being taught whom it is permissible to love and when and how.

Once my first crush moved away, my attention turned to a girl who lived on the next block from me. I was smitten with her in a way I’d never felt before, in a way part of me already knew I shouldn’t be, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. Yet on the rare times when we would walk to Sunday School together, the longing inside me to reach out and hold her hand was so intense I was certain it was worth any price that awaited me in hell. In our younger years I could get away with doing so under the guise of skipping to school to make it there faster, but all I really cared about was being closer to her. My crush on her lasted ages, or at least from second or third grade through fifth or sixth grade, when she turned to the ‘80’s Brat Pack and whatever boys Teen magazine told her where hot and I lost her forever. Two decades later though, I can still squirm in my seat as I think about my early childhood orgasms I’d have with her as we became too old for holding hands and skipping to school but not to self-conscious to avoid wrestling each other alone in my basement; our legs brushing, crushing each other’s clitoris’s, our barely developed breasts rubbing against each other’s breasts, hot, sweaty faces gasping for air, lips poised inches apart from lips, in a kiss we never dared.