‘It Paints My Sexuality as a Phase’: Why I’ve Always Found ‘Barsexuality’ Troubling as a Bisexual Woman
By Kalli Dockrill
‘Barsexuality’ is a term that should have stayed on 2010 Tumblr, but I’ve been carrying it around like a cursed object since I was fifteen. Drunk on a Nalgene full of vodka, I’d confessed my love for the female drummer in my high school band. I had expected my ‘out’ friend Melanie to catch the secret and protect it fiercely, but there was apparently no secret to keep. I was barsexual not bisexual. I was Madison and Louise in Gilmore Girls, kissing each other so men would buy them drinks.
I have no interest in dissecting the minutia of how ‘barsexuality’ paints bisexuality as a phase. A Google search for ‘barsexuality’ will reveal Tumblr blogs cleverly dissecting that argument. And besides, it is not in queer bars that ‘barsexuality’ most haunts me. Rather, I find it lurking in pub bathrooms and club dance floors. It appears like a spectre over two girls sharing a changing room stall or dancing pressed close under flashing lights.
Perhaps it is because I was raised to value female friendships that I find ‘barsexuality’ so troubling. The complaint that two straight girls kissing is an appropriation of bisexuality assumes that physical affection between women can only ever be sexual. And if that is true, am I a pervert for participating?
In November 2022, I was dressed in a white button-down and bald cap. I was surrounded by women dressed as Pitbull, racing between college bars, completing challenges and uploading photographic proof to Facebook to earn points.
At Tesco we stopped for a speed eating challenge. A long string of American jerky was selected, and it was decided that two of us would scoff it down Lady and the Tramp style, kissing at the end for dramatic flair. I was volunteered, vouched for by my roommate who argued I was the fastest eater she knew. I was drunk. I thought it would be funny. I agreed.
I was out to a few people at the time. The girl on the other end of the jerky, however, had no clue I was bi. This fact meant nothing to me until I was one bite and half a second away from kissing her. Then I was hit by a concrete wave of anxiety. What if they had been joking about kissing at the end and she didn’t want to? What were the requirements for a platonic kiss? How did you peck someone with jerky in your mouth? If I didn’t kiss her would I look like a buttoned-up chicken who had no command over her sexuality? Would she still consent if she knew I wasn’t straight? I pecked her quickly. We broke apart laughing, jerky spittle flying from our mouths. I don’t know why I felt guilty.
In Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde describes the erotic as the deepest well of emotion, pulled up in brimming buckets through women’s fierce and collective love for themselves, for their work and for each other. For Lorde, the erotic is more than a way to sell perfume bottles. It is rich and variable: the love we feel as we watch our mother’s face age, the softness of a friend’s cheek as we brush eyeliner across her eyelid. In our hetero-capitalist world, we are encouraged to see ourselves as isolated competitors. It is only when we are in heterosexual relationships that we are allowed for a moment to be a – weaker – part of a whole. The erotic empowers us to find fulfilment and connection outside that heterosexual unit, and in doing so we become monsters, capable of destroying societal order itself.
In my earliest recollections of kisses between women who liked men, any hint of monstrosity is neutralised by a sexualising male gaze. At thirteen, watching Friends, I craved a friendship as enduring as Monica’s and Rachel’s. Yet, when they kissed to get their apartment back, their affection was trivialised by Joey and Chandler’s gleeful lust. The camera still cut away before their lips could touch, laughter offsetting a threat too dangerous to see. So then, who am I when that bisexual yearning is rooted so deep in my body? A monster or a joke?
As I have gotten older, the moments I have felt most monstrous have not been the most sexual. A year ago, I was living in a ski resort town in Western Canada. Six girls in a three-bedroom apartment left no privacy and little desire for it. I was working in hospitality, where the right smile at the right man meant a fifty-dollar tip, and our apartment was a haven of girlhood. One of us used the bathroom while the other showered. We fell asleep curled around each other on the couch watching Vampire Diaries. The love I felt for them was as vivid as any erotic fullness Lorde described.
On a night out we crowded ourselves into a bathroom stall. I turned to face the wall and they laughed and told me to turn around. I wondered if they would really mean it if they knew. Trans Youtuber and internet critic Natalie Wynn perhaps put it best: ‘Most women know how it feels to be pursued in a creepy way. So there’s this severe reluctance to express any kind of overt attraction to women for fear of being a creep.’ Wynn points to dating apps as a common-sense tool to ensure the other party is interested. But with friendship, there’s no app. Like queer women have been doing for decades, I find myself wondering when to speak up.
Yet in my bisexuality, I have a privilege not every queer woman has. When I was invited into that cubicle I had a boyfriend. Combined with my whiteness, my thinness, and my blondeness, I am a non-threat. I appear like I need desire coaxed out of me and so I get invited into intimate spaces without a second thought. What does it mean to acknowledge that power? Do I shout, ‘I’m bi!’ before I’m pulled through the door?
It has taken time for ‘barsexual’ to enrage me. To realise that I am not stealing, but that something is being stolen from me. Lorde writes that the erotic is a bed where we might lay down to rest and wake up empowered. What I am realising is that the bed comes mail-order, ‘ready-to-assemble’. Inevitably, the instructions are shit and pieces are missing. But that knowledge makes clear what needs to be done.
If I can pass as straight in a way that protects me from harm, then it’s up to me to figure out the instructions and send away for missing pieces. To hold hands on the tube and share stalls in the changeroom. To put the bed together, so that everyone I know might rest in it.