So my twitter feed yesterday had some tweets about BiVisibilityDay, which I gather is something relatively new and a reaction to bisexual people getting annoyed at people saying "no, you're just gay (or straight) in denial. You can't be trusted".
It feels like the intensity of interest in labelling of sexualities (and now, genders) is never going to level out. I think the reason people can legitimately find it irritating is because it seems to be (for want of a better way of putting it) a passive aggressive way to be narcissistic. "Call me by the gender I know I am"; "I'm pansexual, and that's subtly different from bisexual" etc. And in all cases "this is really important to me. This is who I am."
So the problem I have with the bisexual pride lobby is that (it seems to me) the disrespect issues arise from an excessive social interest in labelling this one aspect of life, but they try to solve it by creating another type of label. Why not, instead, attack the way people think about the importance of labelling desire?
As I have written before, it seems (if you can trust some modern historians) that older societies had a more pragmatic, and less narcissistic, attitude: one in which sex (and to a degree, relationships) was/were something people did, rather than being thought of as the key to who they are.
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