User:Maivea/Discrimination against bisexual women

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Discrimination against bisexual women is a form of discrimination at the intersection of misogyny and biphobia. It is distinct from misogyny or biphobia alone, and homophobia and lesbophobia; bisexual women experience higher rates of several forms of discrimination than the general female population, bisexual men, or monosexual gay men and lesbians. Discrimination against bisexual women is the subject of a variety of reporting, research and theory.

A bisexual woman carrying a humorous sign at Pride in Lima in 2022.
A bisexual woman wearing a shirt with intersecting blue and pink triangles.

Forms[edit]

Main article: Victimization of bisexual women

Violence[edit]

Sexual violence[edit]

According to data from the Center for Disease Control, bisexual women experience higher rates of intimate partner violence (61%) than lesbians (44%), straight women (35%), bisexual men (37%), gay men (26%), or straight men (29%).[1][2] The findings also highlight that, at 46%, four times more bisexual women than lesbians (13%) or straight women (17%) to have been raped. Numbers for gay and bisexual men were too small to report, and less than one percent of straight men reported being raped. Nearly half of bisexual women who have been raped report that their first rape occurred between the ages of 11 and 17. Additionally, 75% of bisexual women experience forms of sexual violence other than rape, higher than the 46% of lesbians, 43% of straight women, 47% of bisexual men, 40% of gay men, and 21% of straight men who do.[1]

Violent crime[edit]

According to data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 151 out of 1,000 bisexual women are victims of violent crime (defined as "rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault"), a rate several times higher than any other sexual orientation. Bisexual people are less likely to report violent victimization to the police.[3][4]

Economic inequality[edit]

Data from the Williams Institute shows that bisexual women face higher rates of poverty than people of other sexual orientations, and at comparable rates to transgender people,[5][6] among whom bisexuals and pansexuals are also more likely to live in poverty than other orientations.[7] Although rates of poverty in the LGBT community decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, cisgender bisexual women and the transgender community still face similarly elevated rates of poverty.[8]

Health outcomes[edit]

A study led by Brighton and Sussex Medical School found that bisexual women are four times more likely to be living with a health condition than straight people and two times more likely than other sexual orientations, likely due to minority stress.[9][10] Bisexual women experience higher rates of eating disorders, substance abuse, and mood or anxiety disorders than other sexual orientations.

Within the LGBT community[edit]

A survey of LGBT Britons by YouGov for the charity Stonewall found that more bisexual women reported facing discrimination and mistreatment inside the LGBT community than other sexual orientations, at 27%, compared to 18% of bisexual men, 9% of lesbians, and 4% of gay men.[11]

Lesbians may accuse bisexual women of benefitting from straight privilege or facilitating sexual violence against lesbians by men because of bisexual women's perceived association with men.[12][13]

Bisexual men may treat bisexual women's relatively greater visibility as a privilege while devaluing their activism because of misogyny.[12]

Within feminism[edit]

Amber Ault recorded several feminist bisexual women's negative experiences within lesbian feminism, including harassment, exclusion, and being told that bisexuals don't exist. In interviews with lesbian feminists, Ault identified techniques of suppression, incorporation, marginalization, and delegitimation they used to neutralize bisexual women's presence, writing that "[the need to maintain] the integrity of the dominant subject depends upon its capacity to maintain the other as a deviant object", suggesting the exclusion of bisexual women needed by interviewees to form an identity as a lesbian feminist echoed the dominant culture.[14]

In bisexual theory[edit]

There are several theories to explain discrimination against bisexual women.

Terminology[edit]

There is no universally agreed-upon term for discrimination against bisexual women, but bi-misogyny or the unhyphenated bimisogyny are sometimes used in bisexual theory.

The origin of the word bi-misogyny is unclear,[15] but it was used in the Journal of Bisexuality as early as 2014[15][16] and formally defined as discrimination against bisexual women by Mary-Anne McAllum in 2015.[17] The bisexual activist and author Shiri Eisner characterizes bimisogyny as "the intersection of misogyny and biphobia" which affects perceptions of bisexual women and the bisexual community as a whole.[12] Bi-misogyny has also been used to refer to misogynistic attitudes among bisexual men.[15][18]

Bisexism, though it has the word sexism in it, does not refer to sexism against bisexual women. It refers to discrimination against all bisexuals, in a similar fashion to intersexism referring to discrimination against intersex people.

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation (PDF) (Report). 2010.
  2. ^ "Bisexual Women have Increased Risk of Intimate Partner Violence, New CDC Data Shows". The National LGBTQ Task Force. February 4, 2013. Retrieved August 22, 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  3. ^ Truman, Jennifer L.; Morgan, Rachel E. (June 2022). Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2017-2020 (PDF) (Report). Retrieved September 28, 2023.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. ^ Widra, Emily (July 11, 2022). "New data: LGBT people across all demographics are at heightened risk of violent victimization". Prison Policy Initiative. Retrieved 2023-09-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  5. ^ Badgett, M. V. Lee; Choi, Soon Kyu; Wilson, Bianca D.M. (October 2019). LGBT Poverty in the United States: A study of differences between sexual orientation and gender identity groups (PDF) (Report). Retrieved September 23, 2023.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. ^ Fitzsimons, Tim (October 29, 2019). "Almost 30 percent of bisexual women, trans people live in poverty, report finds". NBC News. Retrieved September 23, 2023.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. ^ A Closer Look: Bisexual Transgender People (PDF) (Report). September 2017. Retrieved September 23, 2023.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  8. ^ "LGBT poverty dropped to 17% during the COVID-19 pandemic". Williams Institute. Retrieved 2023-09-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ^ Cross, Harry; Bremner, Stephen; Meads, Catherine; Pollard, Alex; Llewellyn, Carrie (2023-07-24). "Bisexual People Experience Worse Health Outcomes in England: Evidence from a Cross-Sectional Survey in Primary Care". The Journal of Sex Research: 1–9. doi:10.1080/00224499.2023.2220680. ISSN 0022-4499.
  10. ^ Shewan Stevens, Hannah (September 9, 2023). "'Biphobia stress affects my physical health': Are bisexuals destined to be chronically ill?". PinkNews. Retrieved September 28, 2023.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  11. ^ LGBT in Britain: Home and Communities (PDF) (Report). 2018. p. 13.
  12. ^ a b c Eisner, Shiri (2021-09-23). "Bimisogyny and What it Means". Leeds LGBT+ Literature Festival. Retrieved 2023-08-21.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  13. ^ Worthen, Meredith G. F. (2022-07-03). "L v. B and Feminist Identity: Examining Lesbians' Bi-Negativity and Bisexuals' Lesbian Negativity Using Norm-Centered Stigma Theory". Journal of Bisexuality. 22 (3): 429–458. doi:10.1080/15299716.2022.2060891. ISSN 1529-9716.
  14. ^ Ault, Amber (1994). "Hegemonic Discourse in an Oppositional Community: Lesbian Feminists and Bisexuality". Critical Sociology. 20 (3): 107–122. doi:10.1177/089692059402000306. ISSN 0896-9205.
  15. ^ a b c Pallotta-Chiarolli, Maria (2014). "Erasure, Exclusion by Inclusion, and the Absence of Intersectionality: Introducing Bisexuality in Education". Journal of Bisexuality. 14 (1): 7–17. Mary-Anne [McAllum] and I use the term bi-misogyny in our work: Mary-Anne in referring to the discriminative behavior against bisexual young women, and myself in relation to patriarchal behaviors and attitudes that some bisexual men display toward their women partners (see Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2014). Neither of us can recall, nor find, the original use of this term.
  16. ^ McAllum, Mary-Anne (2014). ""Bisexuality Is Just Semantics…": Young Bisexual Women's Experiences in New Zealand Secondary Schools". Journal of Bisexuality. 14 (1): 75–93.
  17. ^ McAllum, Mary-Anne (2015). "Telling our stories, making it real." Young bisexual women’s experiences in New Zealand secondary schools (Doctor of Philosophy in Education thesis). University of Auckland.
  18. ^ Pallotta-Chiarolli, Maria (2015). ""The Problem is that he's a Man, Not that he's Bisexual"". Engaging Men in Building Gender Equality. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 9781443878951.


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