Bisexual, would rather be a lesbian.

[winterstream]

Hi, this is a maybe an odd sort of question, but I’m gonna go ahead and ask.

Up until recently I’ve avoided examining my sexuality too much- I just knew I was attracted to women and left it at that. I'm 22, not, and have never been sexually active, have never been in a romantic relationship. I’m fairly certain now that I’m bisexual (but still primarily into girls- I’m female, by the way). The problem is that I wish I was just interested in women. For some reason the part of me that maybe/kind-of likes guys dredges up cringey, unpleasant feelings related to negative stereotypes about women and female sexuality that I don’t even believe in. I feel like if I actually do like guys and were to act on it then I’d no longer get a “free pass” from antiquated notions about the idea of being a ‘slut’, women pandering to men, gender roles, women being less capable/submissive/weak../[insert derogatory term here]. I’d feel like I was one of those girls.
I know that all these things are untrue and misogynistic, and that the ‘I’m not like other girls’ stuff is rubbish- this isn’t a rational judgement, it’s a feeling. I'm not religious, or from a conservative background, so I don't quite know why I'm having this reaction.

How do I stop feeling this way?

[Sunshine]

Wow - how does one stop ones self from feeling something? I have no idea. Looking forward to other insights on this!

Speaking as a woman who is interested in both women and men (or rather, for whom gender is not the most important issue where relationships and sex are concerned) and who is with a man, I would just like to point out to you some advantages of being bi:

Both men and women can be absolutely lovely. The female body is beautiful, and so is the male. If you can appreciate both, why miss out on half your potential joy?
The pool of people I would want to be with is small for a variety of reasons - if I had excluded men from it, my chances of happiness would have been even smaller and I would never have gotten to experience the wonderful relationship I have now.
It reduces negative feeling. When I see a romantic movie, for example, I feel neither animosity towards the guy (because he gets to be with the girl I find attractive) or the girl (because she gets to be with the guy I find attractive), but I get to enjoy the interaction of two attractive beings.

I am not saying I think everyone should be bi- or pansexual God forbid, what would happen to diversity? I'm just trying to say that if you find you have the potential for bisexuality, the benefits of accepting that and making the most of it might be worth the effort to come to terms with it.

[Heather]

You know, I grew up one of "those girls" -- if I'm getting what you're alluding to -- and I assure you, we're not any less valuable because people make assumptions based on foolish, half-baked stereotypes. And when we know how foolish those are, and have our own sense of self, it's also pretty easy, IME, to not let that stuff even phase you and to shrug it off.

It sounds to me like some of what you're assuming here, or getting on board with, is that sexual orientation determines gender identity. In other words, that women only attracted to women are stronger or more capable, for instance, or dominant versus submissive, and that women attracted to men (be they straight or bisexual), are weaker or less capable, submissive rather than dominant.

Not only does sexual orientation not determine any of that -- there are certainly submissive lesbians, or lesbians that are highly feminine, or that people consider sluts -- I hope you can see that thinking that way also reduces people to really tiny boxes, where there only seem to be a couple choices, rather than representing people as the highly diverse group of billions that we are.

Again, you make pretty clear you see the folly in a lot of this, but you're just having trouble letting it really land and resonate with you. It also may be that like a whole lot of people, you've got some biphobia and sexism locked into your head: given how biphobic and sexist so much of our world and what messages we get from it is, that's not a big shocker. A lot of people struggle with this, especially when we're younger and haven't had some real time to unpack it all and learn how to toss it off.

Just FYI, you get to date or have intimate relationships only with who you want to. So, for any reason, if you feel best only dating women, you get to do that. Being bisexual doesn't make it so we <i>have</i> to date people of more than one gender, it just means that we feel attraction to people of more than one gender. What we do with those feelings is totally up to us.

It sounds to me like you're already doing the work of thinking some of this through, and it might just be something that you need to be patient with yourself about, giving yourself more time and life experience to process and work out. It's okay to have internal conflicts, and to struggle with frameworks that we know are problematic, but are also so pervasive that they have become part of the way we think. It's not having any awareness of that stuff that's super problematic, and clearly, that's not an issue for you.

Do you think you can perhaps cut yourself a little slack here, and try to just accept that yep, you've clearly internalized some crap stuff, but yep, you know it and are going to give yourself time to just work it out?