This week pitching season on Twitter began, and I was horrified.
Let me back up. A few weeks ago we had a panel on LGBTQ representation, how to write these kinds of characters. The bottom line was start by writing characters are people, then build out their motivations and how they move through the world based on their sexual preferences. Not just slap a sexual preference as an identifier on a character without thinking about how that person will be informed, what they will notice about the gender(s) which cause sexual attraction.
For me, I have written a lot in the last year about noticing that publishing tends to steer heavily in the adult fiction market toward sapphic story lines with too many tropes about a love triangle with a man. My discussion point to the panel was "can we move past this PLEASE?" Their point was that there need to be more options in publishing of plot lines OTHER than this particular trope.
One of the first pitching sessions on Twitter this week involved one designed specifically for the LGBQ community and the TNB community authors. I put a lot of requests out there to editors and agents to put emphasis on these OTHER options regarding sapphic stories.
A friend had a story with bi representation that avoided bisexual women as a slut trope.
THEN there were the stories that COMBINED bisexual women with a love triangle with a man, and some of those really not only made me cringe, but actually made me feel icky and fetishised. Because that is how I have felt in my personal life as a bisexual woman, and they were normalising all of that fetishisation in these pitches. That is why I am writing this article, and why this is important for publishing to pay attention.
The CDC said bisexual women are the most common demographic to experience relationship violence and stalking. I have had three major prolonged exposure to stalking experiences, all three of whom were male. Clearly I am not an anomoly.
Let me use my real life examples of what I saw normalised in some of these pitches. I want to be very loud and clear about what being a bisexual woman means and doesn't mean.
As a bisexual woman, it is not a competition for me about whether I date a man or a woman. My dating and romantic life is NOT a contest about which gender I will date.
I remember when I finally moved to a city with a healthy population of single women who dated women, and started having more opportunities to date both genders. I was at a party talking to some men who were not interesting to me. I recall trying to explain to them that I was attracted to some, but not all men, and I was attracted to some but not all women. I was NOT attracted to one gender like because I met a member of that gender I was going to jump into bed with them, just because they were a certain gender. I even tried explaining that I found jerks who I found unattractive in populations of both genders.
Their lewd question was "Just tell us do you prefer dick or pussy."
THAT is how people continue to view bisexuality. That is how these plots continue to define a character that is supposed to represent a bisexual woman as a fetish, not as a character who is a person moving through the world being motivated by that sexuality in her attraction, emotional connections, and dating choices.
If you want to write fictional stories about bisexual women, show that journey. Show a self-aware woman navigating relationships based on her attraction and emotional experiences with each gender based on her involvement with individual members of those genders.
Write about the insight a bisexual woman gains into how members of each gender operate differently in relationships. Stop focusing on the question "will she chose a man or a woman" or in more lewd terms "Just tell us do you prefer dick or pussy?"
PLEASE to the publishing industry, stop publishing stories that fetishise bisexual women in these ways.
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