You probably read the title of this and just thought that I must be some hater. But that’s not the case. Here’s what I mean by this: In the world of television, bisexuality is often used as a convenient thing for some select characters. I’m not entirely sure that the writers quite understand the concept of just what it means to be bisexual. Of course, I’m not sure if I do either. And I know that I might have said some bad things here and there about the LGBT community, even though I should know better.
But I think that the true problem with bisexuality as it is portrayed in TV at times is that it just seems to appear when writers need it to. What can make it worse is that we are supposed to just accept that they’ve either always been bisexual and it never came up before or that they come to terms with it very quickly without even knowing themselves that they were this way before.
Now I forget if bisexual is the same as pansexual. You never hear about the pansexual, although I’m pretty sure that it is different. Still, the fact is that it seems like both are used interchangeably when I think that what is often meant as pansexual is portrayed instead of bisexual.
What are issues that I’ve had with this? Well, Clarke in The 100 was portrayed as straight for the first two seasons. But then in the third season premiere, she’s just randomly hooking up with some woman with no hints that she was ever bisexual before. This was a problem in my mind. They can’t just expect us to be okay with what seems like a change like this with nothing indicting that she was into women in any of the past two seasons.
Another time this was an issue was in Jane the Virgin. Petra was randomly into her lawyer, another woman. This was despite no hints ever in the series that she’s into women at all. And, of course, it is a huge problem for a client and their lawyer to be together. JR, this woman that Petra was now dating, did believe that Petra hadn’t ever been with a woman before. But there was never a moment seen on screen where Petra came to terms with her being bisexual like there should have been.
Does there have to be a come to terms with their sexual orientation moment? Well, yes. The only way that it is okay without it is if we already knew this about them. That’s why in Supergirl when Alex was coming to terms with being a lesbian, it was portrayed on screen like it should have been. And it was needed since an earlier episode showed her on a date with a man.
It seems like the other problem with it is that the bisexuals on television as just shown as dating the gender that the writers want them to at any moment in time. Maybe at one point they are into men. Then they are into women whenever the script requires it. I’m not sure if this is how bisexuality even works in the end. Of course, I don’t know much about it myself.
I have no idea what else there is to say about this topic. I hope that you read through it and that is makes sense to you. I also hope that you aren’t a hater and don’t think that I’m one either. Do you think that my views make sense at all? I hope that they do.
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