Baumgartner is a journalist who worked for Ms. in the early 90s and has covered bisexuality in her writing across her career. This book is partially history/analysis and partially memoir from her own experiences talking to people, going to events, and working in feminist and queer spaces.
Lots of good reflections/personal experiences relating to the things I’m interested in— fashion and sexual identity, conversational sign posts and bisexual identity, etc. It’s also a little more recent than books like Vice Versa (about 10 years later), so while Ms. and Ani DiFranco were still The Big Thing before “my time” (I do listen to Ani DiFranco though), the cultural references feel a bit closer to me, or I can at least point to memories in my own childhood and recognize how 3rd wave feminism, which I was unaware of, impacted me. Like “girl power" as a slogan to aspire to.
I think it’s an interesting place to be, say, in middle school or in high school, and so to be aware of a cultural phenomenon but not REALLY be able to participate in it, since you’re still too young to do a lot of things by yourself and have no money. That doesn’t directly apply to me in this respect, since I was too young even for that, but I am reflecting on the things that I DID feel that youth-induced FOMO and angst and longing about, and simultaneously thinking about how young teens have felt the same way forever. It makes me think about everyone who was too young in the 60s/70s to participate in all of the activism going on (or at least participate in the ways they may have wanted to), but old enough to know about it and want to be a part of it. I also wonder how this phenomenon works differently for people like me, who needed to ask their parents to drive them to any given thing, vs. people growing up in cities where you’re able to go places without your parents from a much younger age via public transit.
Passages I’ve Marked
p.5- story about how news reported that a study that found bi men don’t exist, but the actual study found that the real results were basically the opposite— almost all the men in the study sexually responded to both men and women in some way, just the extent of the arousal varied (and was small in many participants)
p.26- “AC/DC” as slang for bi, feminist atmosphere of Ms. creating the necessary conditions for JB to experiment with women, song “I Kissed a Girl” by Jill Sobule
p.50 - paragraph on the problems with the word “bisexual” and problems with its alternatives. “As a label, bisexual sounds pathological, academic, and a little embarrassed —- like the identities ‘stay at home mom’ and ‘runner up.’” “Or, as writer Jenny Weiss put it in Girlfriends magazine, “Of all the words for bisexual, the worst is probably bisexual.” This is a big mood.
p.51- “The word bisexual makes me cringe at times, but saying I’m heterosexual or a lesbian feels inaccurate- regardless of who I am in a relationship with. So, cringing all the while, I use the label. Because of my relationship with the word feminist, I have learned that cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business: the label bi sounds bad because, at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible, and disparaged social group.”
p.52- references Garber’s section on Tiresias, notes that the importance of this story is that it shows that the WHOLE STORY/whole picture is what makes a bisexual, not any snapshot in time.
p.78- “The fact is, second-wave women thought about looking both ways a lot, even though they rarely described their lives or insights as bisexual. Instead, they were woman-identified women or political lesbians (gay in the streets if not in the sheets, to paraphrase rock critic Ann Powers)”
p.100 - description of the outfits of Ani DiFranco fans as emblematic of third wave feminism and bisexuality
p.105- Baumgartner and Gloria Steinem both date “when it was okay for women to be bi” as starting in the early 90s
p.108- extended quote reflecting on Liza Featherstone’s own sense of fashion and gender/sexuality presentation as a bisexual
p.123-126- different examples of bi women talking about the loss/exclusion they felt when they got into long term relationships with men
p.141- some thoughts about how dating women changes how women approach dating men and expectations for being in a relationship
p.156-157- some thoughts about bisexuality and the objectification of women and the male gaze, coming to see yourself as a sexual agent instead of perpetually as a sexual object, and how dating women changed Baumgartner’s relationship with porn
p.170- more about p.141, but also pointing out that just because dating a woman may help you clarify what you want when dating a man, sexism/internalized sexism means you might still not be good at actually COMMUNICATING those things to/with men
p.175— “stereotype threat”- the presence of someone from a dominant group diminishes the performance of a non-dominant group, subconsciously. Can make people from non-dominant groups feel less confident, less smart, like they have less agency, and so act that way.
p.189- describes the “feeling out if someone is gay and implicitly communicating to them that you are also gay” as “embroidery” and notes that her own go-to embroidery is finding ways to work in the phrase, “my ex-girlfriend”
p.194— same as above, mentions the difficulties of having “to constantly crowd every conversation with sign posts (“ex-girlfriend,” “ex-boyfriend,” “baby’s father”) to indicate the whole person I am”
p.220- more about the relationship between sexuality and gender presentation for bi women (shift in it becoming more okay in 3rd wave feminism to be lipstick/femme than it was in the 2nd wave)