Bi-sexulaity currently taking a kicking over at the Guardigan

And yet here we are - middle aged and not all ‘special and unique’. Aw diddums, they have it all coming - and won’t it be a shock when they get to the age when they just want to come home from work, get into comfy clothes and sit with the cat and watch Masterchef whilst balancing a bowl of chips on their belly.

ComputerSaysMo

As a 16 year old who knew everything I had a chastening takedown from my Granddad exactly along the lines of young people think they invented sex, but yet here you are... I guess they will just have to work it out for themselves. It's interesting the way that so many people want to be seen to be interesting and different yet choose such tribal identities.
As my teen self may have said 'I want to be like everyone else. Different!'

I recently read a post on Facebook by someone very proud of their gender-non-conforming family. They themselves were pansexual, and had a trans child and a pansexual one. They received congratulations in the comments on their extremely "evolved" family.... and there's the crunch. Among young people, and even not so young, as this person must be in their late thirties at least to have older kids, it's considered the height of enlightenment to be as non-conforming as possible. It's something to aspire to.

People like me, well, we're just boring old vanilla! (I'm a 67 year old heterosexual widow, mother, grandmother, who is not sexually active and has no plans to be such.)

Datun is right - it used to be an accepted thing that different people had different levels of sex drive. Advice columns were full of letters from couples who loved each other but who felt “mismatched” sexually.

I think the change was that, back then, sexism reigned so it was considered unremarkable for a woman to have a low sex drive and a man to have a high one. This was very much the driver for the “lie back and think of England” school of relationships. Every once and a while you’d see an advice column letter from a woman whose sex drive was higher than her husband’s and the general air was that there was something wrong with him - as in “how can a man be not entirely dick-lead?”

Somehow, when we got around to acknowledging that women can like sex and be visually stimulated too, and that LGB were people too, a whole porn-soaked swathe of society decided that men and women alike are all indiscriminate horndogs up for anything porn teaches them all the time, OR they’re one of dozens of “gender identities” that help them say no.

So basically, I think the change is we considered ourselves to be saying no until we said yes. The youngsters now consider themselves to be saying yes* unless they’ve got cast iron but still acceptably “inclusive” way to say no.

*This is because, like all 20-somethings since the dawn of time, they believe they’ve invented sex.

One of the guys in the comments says he is “pan” because he likes tall people, both male and female “full stop”. If someone likes tall males, and short females, then that person would be bi. Bonkers.

Whilst surely bisexual for naive people like myself means nobody Is ruled out as a potential partner on the basis of sex I understand pansexual is supposedly more inclusive of trans sexuals. Bi sexual people might not be woke enough. They might just fancy ‘men’ and ‘women’ but not lady boys for example. So bisexuality may mean you’re a a king of TERF or Trans Exclusionary Bisexual so TEB basically

Ok so how is bi different from pan exactly? You sleep with men and or women. Or no one. That’s it isn’t it?

Why does every chuffing kiddie wink need their own special word for what they do in bed? We dont care! We just don’t care who you have sex with as long as it’s not illegal or with an animal (possibly illegal but I’m not Googling it to check).

Italiangreyhound Yes, totally agree, I’ve also heard it described in an “I’m soooooo non-discriminatory” way.
And as a bi woman, my response that I’ll shag either men or women but I like to know which in advance somehow didn’t measure up.

I actually appreciate ReallyBoring's perspective. Sex is so personal and people are so reluctant to speak honestly that we kind of assume that it's a fairly universal experience - everyone wants it, everyone who has access to it has it 3 times a week and enjoys it - so it's good to understand the ways in which people vary from this perceived norm.

For a while there, about 20 years ago, it was kind of out that 'media sex' didn't exist. And that everyone, or at least most people, were just bumbling along. The boaster at school was nothing more than that, and your five times a night bloke was a liar.

And then it appeared to all get eclipsed by image/social media.

In the world of Tinder, where a date is decided by nothing more than a touched up image, it's little wonder that people want to put any strong preferences into labels, as both a useful shorthand and a means of deflecting tossers.

It's very lowering to think that you have to actually give yourself a label that means you only want to shag people you are emotionally attached to, as a means of differentiating yourself from what you think is everyone else shagging themselves senseless with people they don't know or like!

I don't mind which term people use but I find the implication that some sexual orientations are better than others a bit galling.

My friend described it as liking the person not the gender! It seems to imply heterosexual (or homosexual) people are hung up on the sex but pan sexual people care about something deeper.

But heterosexual and homosexual still choose the person because they like/love the person! I didn't marry dh just because he was a man!

Arghhh. That should be Google.

Surely the pan bit of pansexual comes from the prefix meaning 'all/every' rather than from the god Pan?
That's what I always thought - "I'm pansexual, I shag absolutely anything. BTW, that dog of yours looks rather cute...." But oogle tells me that it merely means "I shag anything that's human, adult, consenting and alive".
In which case, all I'll do is shrug and say "So bloody what?"

I actually appreciate ReallyBoring's perspective. Sex is so personal and people are so reluctant to speak honestly that we kind of assume that it's a fairly universal experience - everyone wants it, everyone who has access to it has it 3 times a week and enjoys it - so it's good to understand the ways in which people vary from this perceived norm. And if having a label helps people quietly understand their own sexuality and feel positive about it, then that's the upside of the new sexual tribalism.

I am looking forward to being old and seeing this generation morph into their parents and what their own kids have up their sleeves to vex them.

Devil's advocate. Demi is actually a very smart, survival tactic for the majority of people who don't want to perpetually (or ever) shag about. Ditto asexuals. You're not a bigot if you have your own bona fide label shield.

Thirty years ago youth aligned itself into precise and finely delineated tribes by music and associated clothes. To the outsider, much of the music sounded the same and most of the clothes were distinguished by insignificant details.

Now it’s similiarly minor concerns over who does what with their genitals and why. Otherwise not much has changed: to da yoof it is all terribly important, but to the outsider it seems all rather Jesuitical.

I agree Calvinsman I was thinking along the same lines, it implies that everyone else is keen to hook up with people where there's no emotional attachment.

It's creating a "veh special" label for something that is a very ordinary experience for most people (see also, "Non-binary").

It’s co-opting therapy speak across the board, isn’t it? The way all the youngsters these days say they’re “triggered” when really they are just reacting negatively.

If you read the comments, one of the people featured in the article is there “happy to answer any questions”, but when people don’t agree with what he’s saying he calls it “oppressive” .

reflectant

Jazz Bass. Much sexier and curvier (rubs thighs)

The demi label is the weirdest of all.

Mum, dad, sit down. I've got something to tell you. I'm not like the other girls. I only want to have sex with people I really like.

Do you still love me?

All this business of labels, creating identity groups, arranging the groups + labels to define in-people and out-people, and all the rest, is as old as the hills. As such there's nothing wrong with it.

The problem comes when it leads to certain groups being able to control the behaviour of others, to force them to do things they otherwise would not choose to do, to compel speech, and to effectively create an outlaw* when someone disagrees with an ideology. And then, astonishingly have elements of this put into statute law of the UK.

• original sense of the word, where someone who is out-with the law who can be acted on with impunity and cannot expect protection by agents of the law

Whoops sorry, obviously I meant Demi label and not demo label.

I actually think the need to have a demo label at all is sad. (Not that you are sad but that it’s needed in the first place).
It implies that the norm is to want to have sex with people who you are not emotionally connected with and I just don’t think that’s true.
We live in a very pornified culture idea that everyone is up for it all the time is rammed down our throats, when actually I think it’s really frightening that ‘wants to feel an emotional connection to their sexual partner’ is considered an orientation.
I am so glad I’m not a young woman now, I really feel their boundaries are being eroded by stealth.

If DH does most of the cooking and wears pink shirts, and I'm a bolshy feminist who wears black all the time and earns more, are we in a queer relationship?

You know what? Under the current regime, I think you probably are!

It’s co-opting therapy speak across the board, isn’t it? The way all the youngsters these days say they’re “triggered” when really they are just reacting negatively.