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Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century

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Human sexual preferences have been deemed so important in the last four decades that they are now the subject not only of scientific investigation but also of human resource departments, military recruitment officers, and political campaign advisors. It is difficult to say just how and why the astronomical weighting assigned to sexual preferences got started, but at the present time many are careful to note whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, or some other designation. In this regard, some social commentators have complained of the "commodification" or "exploitation" of sex through pornography or prostitution. Whether or not pornography is really as rampant as claimed, it does not compare with the huge weighting placed on sexual orientation and its blatant "in-your-face" advertisement. In addition, sexual orientation it seems is now considered a branch of both philosophy and political science, with all the accompanying rhetoric, some of it sophisticated and some of it not, usually taking place in these areas.

This book, which is a collection of essays, could be read in this light. The rhetoric it contains, sometimes designated as "queer theory" in some of the articles, is blatant but not really to the point. A large amount of uncertainty is left in the reader's mind about its content and direction. One might wonder why the authors have chosen to write the articles in the book. In some of them it is apparent that academic pressures to publish, and its consequent parallel need for originality, have motivated some of these scribes of sexuality to put on paper what is sometimes screamed out in marches and rallies. And the articles written by these authors, along with all the others, would in fact be academic if it were not for the legal environment faced by people with alternative sexual persuasions (alternative meaning non-heterosexual). If all sexual behavior would be accepted and never be subjected to legal action, if even imprisonment, there would be no point, outside of scientific curiosity, for the current rhetoric of sexual preferences and for any need for asserting some vague notion of sexual identity. Bisexual women would no longer need to worry of invading "lesbian space." Husbands would no longer need to worry about any news that their wives are bisexual. There would be no need for "standpoint theorists" who are "located outside of dominant ways of being and knowing" and therefore imputed to be in a state of apodictic certainty and whose mental gyrations on gender preferences are taken to be axiomatic and beyond dispute. And most of all, there would be no need for the sophomoric shrill of sexual politics, and its capacity to bore if not dull the mental attention of those who are sympathetic with all individuals who experience suffering or political/legal persecution. But as today's headlines bear witness to, there is still much to be done to make sexual preferences beyond the prying eyes and gavels of government henchpeople. This book therefore is appropriate reactionary literature and an example of the out-of-equilibrium ethos of the twenty-first century.