Bisexuality

I

Introduction

Bisexuality, sexual attraction to both sexes. Bisexual people are able to fantasize about and enjoy both homosexual and heterosexual acts of lovemaking, although some bisexual people prefer one gender of partner to the other. Bisexuality should not be confused with transvestism, which is wearing the clothes and adopting the appearance of a person of the opposite sex, or with transsexualism, which is identification with the gender role of the person’s opposite sex. However, transsexuals or transvestites may also be bisexual. Bisexual people generally are content with the gender they were born to.

II

Background

Historically, bisexuality was condoned and approved of in ancient Greece, specifically with regard to relationships occurring between older, often married, men and youths as a form of friendship or as an initiatory and teaching relationship. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems attributed to Homer, Greek heroes are sexually active with partners of both genders. Among some Polynesian societies this is still the case.

Research and anecdotal evidence suggest that bisexuality is far more prevalent than exclusive homosexuality. It is a sexual identity shared by millions of people worldwide. In the 1940s, in a major social research program, the American biologist Alfred Charles Kinsey examined patterns of sexual behavior and found that 37 percent of men in the United States had experienced homosexual orgasms. About 25 percent of men had had incidental homosexual encounters, compared with 13 percent for women. However, as only 5 to 10 percent of men considered themselves homosexual, it is clear that same-gender sex is neither unusual nor exclusive to homosexuals. Kinsey found that some people had no preference as to their partner’s gender; in others, sexual identity had not become fixed, or they had a sexual identity that included both.

III

Theories of Bisexuality

The Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud suggested that sexual life included the child’s capacity to gain pleasure from many different body zones. He described infants and children as “polymorphously perverse”—that is, they could gain sexual pleasure from almost anything. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung linked bisexuality to the presence in the unconscious of a person’s opposite gender. This he called the “anima” (the woman in the man) and “animus” (the man in the woman), which he said exist as “potentials.”

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Despite the widespread inclination of men and women to reproduce, there is no hard evidence that humans have an inborn instinct toward gender-specific sexual behavior—that is, being attracted to one gender only throughout life. If this were not so, attachment to parents of the same gender would be difficult, as would close intimacy with same-gender siblings or friends. Adolescents often develop strong attractions (“crushes”) for same-gender friends as part of normal sexual maturation. Hence, in psychoanalytic theories, bisexuality is a normal part of childhood experience. Its presence in adulthood may be nondifferentiation from this state, or the fulfillment of more than one potential.

Problems arise for bisexual people as most societies have particular taboos that make multiple or varied sexual choices difficult. This can lead to bisexual people feeling that they have to make a forced choice to enter into either exclusive heterosexual or homosexual relationships, which may cause emotional distress to them and their partners. Guilt can arise from the difference between who they really are and how they want to live, and what they believe society expects of them.

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