Beware the trope of the media bisexual

By Ben Helme

Welcome to modern media, where bisexuals exist to titillate, traumatise, and terrify. Gather round, clutch your pearls, and ogle. 

Freddie Baxter is an ‘asshole’ and a ‘bisexual nympho’. Frank Underwood cheats on his wife and kills people. Polo Villada cheats on his girlfriend and kills someone.  Annalise Keating cheats on her husband and covers up murders. Rosa Diaz is violent, volatile, and unemotional. Oberyn Martell is an insatiable hedonist who grabs people’s genitals to express his interest. Captain Jack Harkness is a hypersexual uber-flirt. The bisexual and pansexual male leads in the Gossip Girl reboot are characterised as a cheater and a ‘headstrong flirt’ respectively. Catherine Tramell, the iconic Sharon Stone character from Basic Instinct, is a promiscuous femme fatale with a penchant for ice-pick murder. Villanelle is a psychopathic assassin. Fleabag hits on everyone and can’t support stable relationships. Pam Poovey is crude, aggressive and promiscuous. Clarke Griffin is responsible for hundreds of deaths. 

Jennifer(‘s Body) seduces and kills her victims after becoming a ‘succubus’. Almost all the vampires from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina take sabbaticals from group-murders to engage in gender-mixed proclivities. So do the vampires from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So does The Countess in American Horror Story. Before you ask; yes, she’s a vampire too. 

Last but not least – Lucifer. The devil himself is attracted to both men and women.

I’ve seen more portrayals of a bisexual killing someone during sex than being in a happy relationship.

There are very few bisexuals in popular culture, especially amongst male characters. The media often stops short of representation, with flickers of queerness usually played for laughs (any expression of sexuality between men) or to play into a reductive male fantasy (sexuality between women). They would never use such a scary term as ‘bisexual’ to explain these quirky dalliances. However, the scarcity of serious presentations isn’t even the main issue: the issue is the content of this representation. The examples in the opening paragraph haven’t been cherry-picked to fit my argument – I didn’t look up violent, or dangerous, or promiscuous characters. They’re just what comes up when you look up TV and film bisexuals. This isn’t a subsection of the presentation. It’s all we get. 

To be clear, most of them never explicitly refer to themselves as bisexual (again, why would a showrunner ever commit to such a terrifying prospect?), but they’re shown engaging in a romantic or sexual context with men and women. They’re bi-coded at the very least, and as such, they’re relevant in a discussion of the media bisexual.

The media bisexual is promiscuous, aggressive, and untrustworthy. Their bisexuality is sloppily mistranslated as hypersexuality – it’s not that they’re attracted to multiple genders, they’re attracted to everyone. But despite this prolificness, sex isn’t something they enjoy so much as wield. It is their secret weapon and they’re ready to use it to achieve their nefarious aims. After all, they’re far more aware of their sensuality than any complex emotion. 

In short, they are predatory. In sex, violence, and ambition, the media bisexual is a hunter figure. 

I am by no means criticising people for being monogamous, polygamous, promiscuous, or otherwise. This is far from some outdated call to ‘respectability politics’ or against the open expression of queer sexuality. I’m not saying that bisexuals should ‘act straight’. But restraint is not intrinsically straight, and amoral licentiousness is not, despite what the media would have you think, intrinsically bisexual. Some bisexual people might live like the media bisexual (hopefully with fewer murders). But there are others who don’t, and we don’t have a place in the public consciousness. This is because we don’t fulfil the preordained function of the media bisexual – to drive outlandish plot developments through a heady mix of sexual availability and overarching amorality. 

If there’s a hot vampire character, it’s easy to make them bisexual, because it’s been done before. It’s a trope. But more insidiously, the media bisexual presents an opportunity that straight or gay characters do not. They can be suddenly paired with men and women, to end up in group sex scenes, love triangles or polygamy storylines, as in Elite or The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Why include a bisexual character if they’re not going to be shown getting together with various men and women across the runtime? 

Moreover, the media bisexual kills two birds with one stone – they drive the wild plotlines with their flagrant disregard for social mores, and they bring showrunners praise for their ‘brave’ depictions. Take Rosa Diaz – When Brooklyn 99 decided to include a bisexual character, there was an outpour of praise from the queer community, grateful to finally receive some semblance of positive representation. Brooklyn 99 becomes relevant, queer-friendly, and woke. To be fair, the actress is herself bisexual, but that doesn’t change the fact that Rosa is emotionally repressed, violent, and stony – just like all the vampiric media bisexuals before her. That all gets glossed over. Rosa Diaz is a great character, but we can’t ignore how perfectly she fits the pedigree of the media bisexual. She might appear inoffensive when considered in isolation, but when placed in context, you realise that she is symbolic of the wider media canon. We’re supposed to be grateful for this faux progressive representation, even as it reinforces vicious stereotypes. There’s so little bisexual representation that archetypal, harmful stereotypes of characters get lauded as ‘bicons’. The shows gain prescience, the showrunners score points, the stereotypes solidify. 

Why does this matter? After all, it’s easy to scoff at media analysis, especially as we pass our time in a highly academic institution. Do film and TV really matter? To that I reply – how many people in this country do you think have a close relationship with a bisexual person? By extension, for how many people is the image of the bisexual defined by Frank Underwood, or Annalise Keating, or Rosa Diaz? According to Pew Research Center, only 19% of bisexuals are out to ‘all or most’ of the important people in their life. It doesn’t take a genius to draw a link between the absence of well-adjusted, likeable bisexual characters and the fear within the community that they won’t be accepted by those they come out to. 

Representation matters – we learn from the art we consume, and it’s taught us biphobia.  

This doesn’t just affect other’s perceptions of bisexuals, but gives young people a narrow, warped perception of how they’re expected to exist. How many young bisexuals only see their identities represented in the ruthless? Life imitates art – just as media bisexuals aren’t allowed to be human, we aren’t respected in the public consciousness. If you’re a young, bisexual monogamist who dreams of having a spouse and a house and a tomato plant, and not of drinking blood, then according to the media, you just don’t fit into bisexuality. The pervading licentiousness of the media bisexual has left bisexuality pigeon-holed into one archetype. This reduces the proportion of the community that sees themselves on screen. 

Whether you feel enfranchised into your own sexuality across your formative years gets dictated by a group of largely straight showrunners. The brazen stoniness and carnality of the media bisexual might seem like a bit of fun, but it leaves young bisexual people in a limbo of non-representation, with no one to guide them through adolescence. This is alienating and isolating. When you only exist in the public consciousness as a campy, devil-may-care stereotype that isn’t taken seriously, it’s hard to view your community as complex and whole, with humanity beyond sexuality.

We live in a world that deifies binaries, and bisexuals are often forced to carve out their own space. It’s about time that we make this easier, by providing diverse, complex role models to challenge the pervasive, biphobic narrative. 

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