But it's quite clear that a lot of guys on this thread hate the concept of someone being bisexual and want to complete destroy of the idea - that is massive erasure.
I almost think you're addressing two different crowds as if they're one, honestly. The people espousing that view like cgymike dropped one liners in here, didn't elaborate, and then ran.
They are not understood and suffer from erasure, to the point where we are saying that you have to organise your relationships into a neat little order to still claim to be bi.
It's difficult to see how anyone feels this pressure unless they are overwhelmingly dating one gender and then frequently experiencing mistaken perceptions, or skepticism, about their sexuality over it. We aren't talking about people who date both men and women and someone sitting off to the side keeping a tally sheet. I've been talking about people who never date anything but men and then get profoundly defensive about their bisexuality. Those are the bisexual people I have offline experience with. There's a lot of them.
Their relationship status has nothing to do with it, they are gaining nothing by still saying they are bi when they are with a partner other than being honest about their desires.
I agree any one particular relationship status has little/nothing to do with it. However I suspect there are any number of things that people are "getting" out of a false labelling, whether those benefits are real or imagined, and whether they are social or only internal and psychological, when they identify as something
other than the big G (and all of its tropes, stigmas, stereotypes, connotations and pigeonholes) while they otherwise pursue only the same gender... whether their ID is "I'm straight" or "I'm bi." Surely we don't pretend there's "no reason" that gay men who self-label as straight are doing it for "no reason", do we?
Let's face it. People don't grow up hearing daily ranting about how evil and gross and effeminate and unmanly and uncool bisexuals are. They grow up hearing that about homos. There's a very obvious possible motivation for a bi label to be more comfortable for people who are not comfortable with homosexuality or with being associated with its identity. I don't really know why we're all trying to kid ourselves that there's "no" motivation for someone to falsely label or being asked to pretend that's the case.
The first day in any demographics course would rather neatly tie up the problems with unquestioned self-labels: people routinely lie or fib or grab onto vagueness to make up "cool" identities and avoid "uncool" ones about ethnicity like crazy. In short? People do lie about labels, every day, even on anonymous surveys, in big numbers. That wouldn't be in any way controversial to say in academia because it's a known problem with self-ID's. But it produces a wig-out here.
Yeah but this means we have to discredit honest people, ones who are happy and confident in their sexuality, because some people lied. We don't do the same to gay people, when we lie about our sexuality around the world, yet we do doubt all bisexual people. Is it just we doubt all people that are not the same as us? It is starting to feel like that.
Why is it when you talk about any subset or percentage or minority or slice of bisexual people, even subsets that bisexual people acknowledge are out there, the whole of the identity is invoked as being under attack and threat of eradication? I don't understand why it's that delicate, that fragile, that sensitive and that defensive. The "bi people get shit/misunderstanding from other groups" explanation doesn't do very much to establish this special fragility when I'm sitting here as a gay minority. Does a discussion of bisexual people who really can only be observed pursuing one gender actually cover a much broader swath of the bi population than bi people are comfortable acknowledging? Do they fear that acknowledging that subset threatens the identity?
