Phoebe Maltz Bovi is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
In March, a Gallup poll of 12,000 Americans revealed the startling finding that “more than one in five Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ+.” According to Gallup, “if current trends continue, within the next 30 years, the proportion of U.S. adults who identify as LGBTQ+ is likely to exceed 10 percent.”
It's easy to look at these numbers and imagine that a major shift in human behavior has occurred. If you don't follow these topics closely — if you interpret “LGBTQ+” as the 2024 version of “this is about gay people” — you might get the impression that everyone is gay now, or that within five minutes everyone will be gay.
Now, you might be confused: how do we reconcile this with the fact that male-female couples are everywhere (yes, even in 2024)?
Bisexual. Despite the culture war fervor surrounding this T and Q category (i.e. transgender and non-binary people, and the burgeoning subcategory of “queer”), the number amounts to about three people, in the grand scheme of things. Canada has similar results. Instead, it's young bisexual women who are driving the rise in LGBTQ+ numbers. In a Gallup poll, 20.7% of Gen Z women checked “bisexual,” compared with just 9% of millennial women and 2.8% of their predecessors, Gen X (the Silent Generation's 0.1% bisexual women is a disappointment). Gen Z men are far more bisexual than their older counterparts, but only 6.9% identify as such. So this is about young bisexual women. According to the Pew Research Center, they are typically partnered with men.
Are we witnessing the inevitable outcome of a more open society, one in which more people can be their true selves? Or are these just a bunch of straight women who fancy themselves more interesting, or more politically enlightened, than the uptight suburbanites that the term “straight woman” evokes?
Some argue it's the latter. Posts In an interview with X, following survey results on bisexuality among Gen Z women, Dee said: “It's a meaningless distinction unless it's reflected in their behavior, not just their identity habits. Ask me how many of my bisexual friends have never seen a woman naked, let alone had sex. Spread the word.” Dee writes about how some young people are beginning to see sexual orientation labels as assertions of closeness and belonging, rather than actually relating to who they're with and what they're doing: “It's more internet-based and therefore insubstantial.”
Others were outspoken in their skepticism. I told a joke“'Bisexual' just means Democrat.”
It's impossible to accurately gauge the ranks of people who are functionally heterosexual but identify as queer (not just appear straight…straight). There's no test for bisexuality, not like when someone claims to be indigenous and others can confirm or disprove it. The fact that most bisexuals end up in straight-appearing relationships speaks to the relative ease of finding opposite-sex partners, and is not, in and of itself, an indication that there are a ton of straight women who simply claim to be bisexual.
I don't doubt that bisexuality is real — some of my best friends are bisexual — and I'm aware of the Kinsey Scale and the broader theory that sexual orientation is a spectrum. But I do challenge the idea that everyone is bisexual, or that everyone could be if they could just let their guard down. I can see where the doubt comes from, seeing as the number of bisexual women has grown far beyond the numbers found in lesbian relationships.
Besides sexual interest in both women and men, there are several other reasons that motivate women to claim to be bisexual. For lesbians, the motivation is obvious: society is homophobic and the term “bisexual” is less definitive. But why do straight women do it? Do they just want to seem funny?
Some may find their identity rooted in a post-#MeToo sense that it's inappropriate for a woman to need a man. But in my opinion, it's more an internalization of the decades-old scientific assertion that women are inherently bisexual. The dogma that all women are bisexual has always felt a bit too convenient. Even when couched in the language of queer liberation, the theory that all women are a little bit bisexual tends to slip back into business as usual. (Not least because it suggests that lesbians secretly welcome companionship with men.)
Take for example the 2022 Men's Journal headline “Are all women turned on by women? Study finds women are turned on by sexual stimuli involving both men and women.” The cited study (i.e., straight women's pupils dilate more than expected to women) does not prove that straight women want to have sex with women. As with other similar studies, women's physiological responses to sexual stimuli are not a proxy for underlying sexual orientation. It may indicate that women react physically to unwanted sexual situations as a defense mechanism (i.e., anticipating assault) or that women are so accustomed to seeing sexy images of women that they associate them with sexiness.
Moreover, much of the documented sexual fluidity in women (i.e. women dating men for a while, then dating women, then dating men again, etc.) can be explained by the fact that society is relatively tolerant of women doing so compared to the outrage it would cause if a man did the same. Homophobia, biphobia, or a mixture of both, prevent “straight” men from acting on their same-sex urges or labeling such behavior as LGBTQ+ related.
A woman who only dates men being open to gay dating is not a threat to sexual adventurism; for many straight men, it's a plus; and in any case, it's probably not as damaging to a straight dating prospect as a man telling her the same thing. No matter how much Harry Styles fan fiction she reads, if a straight woman heard her husband say “I'm bisexual,” she would probably assume, unfairly, that the underlying truth was that he was going to run off with his business partner, Steve.
Another factor here is the demise of the “straight ally.” Remember? Sometimes being an ally came in embarrassing forms, like the so-called straight ally showing up on Pride Day holding his girlfriend's hand to avoid any misunderstanding about his position. The concept of allyship, in the bad old days, gave plausible deniability to the kid who joined his school's gay-straight alliance. (I remember telling myself my high school crush was just a dedicated ally, but oh well.)
Today, you can't effectively be an ally to straight people. Consider Taylor Swift, a public figure who has only dated men (at least publicly) and who has conveyed pro-choice messages in her work and public statements. The New York Times has a lengthy essay about how Swift is sending secret, coded messages that she's not straight. What other reason could a woman have to wish happiness on her queer friends?
If you, like many straight women, are drawn to environments that are less rigid about gender roles, it's understandable that you want to avoid being accused of appropriation for being there in the first place. If you're a straight woman and you're in a gay bar, you're invading a queer space, but if you're a bisexual woman, you're a member of the community.
In 2024, saying “I'm straight” can come across as a potentially offensive statement in some circles, as if you're expressing not just your sexual preference but a principled opposition to other ways of life. That is, bisexuality itself may have shifted from being a code for people who actually feel sexual attraction to men, women, and perhaps non-binary people, to a category that includes people who don't object to such attractions in principle.
Paradoxically, my skepticism of the assumption that all women are bisexual comes from reading the testimonies of women who felt that female-female sex was something they should enjoy, tried it, and then realized it wasn't for them.
I'm thinking of the polyamorous memoir “More,” in which author Molly Roden Winter tries a threesome with another woman, realizes women aren't for her… then a few years later, she tries it again with two women, with the same results. “An FFM threesome might be a safe way to explore the depths of my bisexuality,” Winter writes of her thought process, but those depths are like a puddle in a draft.
Nona Willis-Aronowitz set out to break away from her heterosexual peers for a completely different reason: her political opposition to heterosexuality, and in her book Bad Sex, she concluded that cisgender men were the people who could do that for her. Neither Winter nor Willis-Aronowitz have concluded, according to the book, that they are in fact bisexual. But have they ever been surveyed in this ongoing college-application journey? Who knows?
What interests me is not how these writers responded specifically, but rather what these stories suggest about women who identify as bisexual as a whole. Some who check that box may be indicating something other than desire for women. And that may be fine! But it may not seem like a step toward acknowledging women's sexual autonomy.
