Feel Your Feelings: Bisexual Attraction Anxiety

By Hannah Winspear-Schillings (she/her)

I read a book recently that (metaphorically) blew me away: Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are. Aimed at unravelling misinformation around sex and sexual wellbeing, the part that stood out to me the most was a chapter on ‘meta-emotions’.

Put (somewhat) simply, meta-emotions is a term for how you feel about how you’re feeling, e.g. feeling frustrated about feeling tired. Nagoski describes negative meta-emotions as one of the most common barriers to sex positivity. Reading this triggered a thought-tangent of mine about how it could apply to bisexuality.

Bisexuals’ anxiety about their degree of attraction to different genders appears to have intensified in recent years. Every week I seem to run into a new minimalist infographic on Instagram to the effect of: “if you’re 30% attracted to men and 70% attracted to women, that’s fine”. Well, Instagram might think it’s fine, but I don’t. This sentiment always seems to me to water down and delegitimise bisexuality as its own identity. It also completely disregards the emotional aspect of attraction.

And here’s where meta-emotions come in. All attraction is contextdependent, and context can be influenced by a range of internal and external factors. Hypothetically, if a bisexual woman feels less at ease around men, naturally that would lead her to perceive her attraction to women as “greater”. But that in itself isn’t the attraction, it’s the meta-emotion. It’s how Example Bisexual Woman #1 feels about her feelings.

In her book, Nagoski stresses that how you feel about your sexuality is more important than your sexuality itself. Many bisexual women I know, including myself, downplay their attraction to men in an attempt to compensate for their perceived “deficit in queerness”. There seems to be a pervasive idea that, as a bisexual woman, dating or being attracted to men makes you inherently inferior, less empowered, less liberated, less queer.

Using this framework, we can see how biphobia, misogyny, and traumatic past experiences can all contribute to anxiety around degrees of attraction to different genders. But it’s not quite so simple to say “I feel more/less attracted to a certain gender” as a bisexual person. Interpreting it as such does a disservice to the emotional nuances of attraction, and erodes bisexuality as a standalone identity.