Bisexuals are often accused of not knowing what they really want. Then, let’s say, you are only turned on by Europeans. You know a friend who also likes Asians. Would you call him confused, and even unfaithful, because he does not mind the unusual ethnic identity of his potential partner? Well, there do exist conservative Korean men considering Korean women with foreign boyfriends as “loose.” What’s comprehensible in both cases is their insecurity, which may increase due to a larger category of potential competitors. Such fear may be irrational but is common in a closed society, especially where people lack confidence and are highly sensitive to an external threat. In the same vein, I sympathize with lesbians who don’t want bisexual partners, because they don’t want to risk having someone who got a better chance of conforming to the social norm, as they reach the age for marriage and the temptation of surrendering to social pressure in pursuit of stability becomes greater as in most people’s cases.
As much as I’d like to understand their sense of insecurity, it remains a personal problem that each individual has to deal with, not a reason for condemning bisexuals altogether as being unfaithful. In my defense, I’d argue that my pansexual tendencies rather make my odds of finding the right partner dimmer. I appreciate genuine joy and revelation of one’s sensuality, autonomous and not limited to dichotomous nuances of sex. Yet it’s quite rare to find truly attractive ones in this regard. Both sellers and purchasers of sexuality turn me off; men who boast about sex only to cover their insecurity; self-degrading women who search for attention by exposing their sexuality to the eyes of the public; certain lesbians who play the role of “femmes” or “butches” (traditional feminine and masculine roles analogous to a heterosexual relationship); none of them appeal to me. Sexuality is a boundless universe just like the person himself, which involves his heart and mind, thus cannot be reduced to a genital function.
After all, every individual has to learn a healthy way of dealing with their insecurity. I hope this issue of bisexuality serves to awaken them to the absurdity of jealousy in a relationship. Remember the old debate over “men and women cannot be friends”? Though I find the European society much more open as regards this matter, a majority of Koreans seem to take it as an unshakable truth. Such an attitude brings me to two points; first, if your partner is bisexual, should he or she be blocked from all social relations, except for professional reasons, because everyone possesses a gender of either a man or a woman?; second, this narrow perspective on people unfairly reduces them to purely sexual beings. Such obsession with sex is not only unhealthy because it damages the wholeness of human relations, but also even more prone to infidelity as well as perplexity, I find.
Whereas LGBT activists fight for their rights, I feel that bisexuals, or rather pansexuals to my preference for the term, lack their own voice in political debates. Not only do they fail to fully identify themselves with gays and lesbians, but also their relative ease of adjusting to a heterosexual world makes their political salience seem minor. Such is the paradox of every political issue that is not isolated enough and therefore ends up further alienated. I wish pansexuals spoke more for themselves. I will try my best.
