From “Orientation” – originally written 1/30/2011:
Having transitioned from a monogamous marriage almost 2 years ago into a polyamorous one, I’ve been close to a lot more self-identifying bisexual women than I ever had before (really, most of the women I’ve had sex with up until recently considered themselves straight) and had many more female friends who identify as bisexual. One theme I notice is women involved with and committed to men who have primarily fantasized about being with other women usually through exposure to girl on girl porn and with the encouragement of their male partners, who find these latent desires profoundly arousing. When they speak of their bisexuality, they are lighthearted and optimistic, and I don’t detect the weight of experience, the sum of years, the reality of the fact (in my opinion) that all interaction is work, all meaning has some sort of cost… I envy them to a certain extent. Female bisexuality has been fetishized extensively as of late, and it’s now standard for straight girls to make out to attract males, an act unthinkable in the years of my early and late adolescence.
It’s 2016, and this trend continues. As a polyamorous woman, I meet a large number of women seeking women who have curiosity and theoretical attraction to other women but little to no physical experience to speak of.
It is the dreaded bicurious phase. And it is awkward.
If I’m really being honest with myself, I can acknowledge that I went through similar uncertainty in early adolescence and that the only reason my curiosity dissipated so precipitously was the rampant experimentation taking place among my female friend group. I was actually a bit disappointed the first time that I French kissed a boy at 14 that it was so similar to kissing girls (a practice that I had formerly considered as being “practice” for “the real thing”). It was nice and felt very good, but I expected it to eclipse my same-sex experiences. And it didn’t.
But to the point, circumstances – an atmosphere of adventure and boldness – well, they carried me right over that threshold. When I finally identified as anything other than straight (in college), I had been carrying on with women for 6 years.
It would seem far others did not have these opportunities.
Many of my experienced lesbian and bisexual friends refuse to be anyone’s “first,” and I get it. I’ve had a lot of sex with straight and/or bicurious girls and some of it has been truly terrible. Sometimes they don’t know what to do and become so nervous and scattered that they can’t accept input or direction. Sometimes they find they are physically repulsed in reality by something that aroused them so profoundly in theory (when that happens, I have to not take it personally, which is difficult). And so many passive pillow queens who lie there as if they’re expecting missionary sex. They are largely interested in receiving oral, which works well for me as my natural orientation is toward giving pleasure instead of receiving it (especially not with new lovers). They like to kiss, and some are enthusiastic about fingering. I’m yet to meet a new recruit (so to speak) who was dying to eat me out. They are hesitant to play with my breasts.
As with anything, there are individual variations, but overall they behave rather uniformly as a group.
Going into such encounters, my expectation is to thoroughly enjoy and experience an exquisite body, the sensual memory of which I can masturbate to later. If I hope for more than that, I’m invariably disappointed.
Anyway, I still haven’t written the newbies off. It’s an awkward job, but someone’s gotta do it.