Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw

13 reviews

takarakei's review against another edition

hopeful informative inspiring medium-paced

4.5

The difference, however, is that as a bisexual person you are constantly asked Why? Why do you want these things? Why do you have sex with the people you do? How can you know this is what you really want? Are you sure? How can you be sure? What if you change your mind? I dream of a world where people stop asking bisexual people these questions and instead ask themselves these questions.

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lizwizwiz's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

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billiema3's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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bryelle's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective fast-paced

4.5

This book is really good and talks about facts and statistics about being bisexual.

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ruthhelizabeth's review against another edition

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challenging dark hopeful informative medium-paced

4.5

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inkdrinkers's review against another edition

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funny hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

"Bisexual people need to regularly decide whether or not to come out, knowing that if they don't, they will probably be mislabeled as straight or gay."

Julia Shaw's Bi sets out to tackle the misunderstanding around the label that is tied to so many stigmas and negative connotations in our world. Bisexuality is the "invisible" sexuality, often lumped in with the rest of the LGBTQA+ umbrella, but never given spaces to breathe by itself.

I loved how this book chose to not only contextualize bisexuality, but discuss the wider issues with the world seeing sexuality as black and white or gay or straight. There are so many topics covered in this little book that made my heart happy, from discussion of open relationships as early as the 1800s to taking a real, difficult look at erasure of the bi community even though the mother of pride was bisexual.

Admittedly, my favorite section was by far and large the discussion about social identity and the way social media has changed the discussion around sexualities. I loved the small talk about parasocial relationships and how bisexual people who are visibly out are already changing the way culture views and speaks about bisexuality. This was just an overall fascinating read and I'm so glad I picked it up! I'm eagerly planning a trip to get a physical copy because I want to go through and highlight some of my favorite segments and quotes. Shaw had an incredible voice that not only conveyed serious topics but made me laugh out loud multiple times.

I would 100% recommend this read to anyone who is curious and wants to broaden their preconceived notions about sexuality! It's a wealth of information from historical impact to current discussion and I feel like is a wonderful starting point to understand viewpoints that might be different than your own.

Content Warnings: Biphobia/Homophobia/Lesbophobia (all discussed in detail, as it catalogues historical looks at the queer community), sexual violence/sexual assault/rape (mentions in regards to bisexual individuals being more likely/hate crimes), sexism (brief discussion about identities), racism (discussion about identities impacting social standing)

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dominic_t's review against another edition

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informative reflective medium-paced

2.75

I enjoyed reading this book, and I learned a few things. However, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone. If you know a lot about bisexuality like I do, it will retread a lot of ground. If you don't know much about bisexuality, you will come away from this book with a very skewed idea about bisexual culture and history.

The history chapter was just too short, and it was entirely focused on western Europe and the United States. It was very strange. An entire quarter of the chapter was about one dude who wrote a book that touched on bisexuality in the early 1900s. It was an interesting vignette, but it took up way too much of the chapter. In my opinion, it was not nearly as important as she made it out to be. I think she wrote more pages about this one guy than she wrote about Stonewall. The history chapter also abruptly stopped in the early 90s. She just wrote a wrap up paragraph that basically said that bisexual visibility has increased since then. Summing up 30 years of history in a paragraph or two is ridiculous. I did learn a few things from the chapter, but it mostly just filled in details about things I already knew. If you were new to LGBTQIA history, this would give you a really skewed, whitewashed vision of what happened. This chapter is the main reason I would not recommend this book to anyone.

I did really enjoy the chapter about whether or not queerness has a biological basis. It was interesting to hear about some of the discussions, research, and controversies around this question.

At one point, she discusses same sex sexual encounters in prison. She quotes men who had sex with other men in prison but still identified as heterosexual. She made a comment that she really thought these men should interrogate their sexuality more because they chose to engage in these sexual relationships; her reasoning was that they could have just masturbated alone if they weren't actually into sex with other men. She said it was their internalized homophobia that prevented them from identifying as bi. She was way out of line with this whole discussion. Everyone has the right to define their own sexuality. She doesn't know what it's like to be in prison for a long time. When someone describes their personal identity and experiences, believe them. "Actually, I think you're bi because you engaged in sex with other men while you were in prison, and I really think you should do some soul searching about that" is a really foul thing to say. These men opened up about their experiences and what those experiences meant to them, and she misappropriated their words to make a point that directly contradicts what they were saying. It was smug and gross.

She wrote a chapter about oppression of bisexual people around the world, and she discussed how bisexuals are explicitly denied political asylum on the basis of their sexuality. I thought that portion of the chapter was well done. My issue with this chapter is that it is the only chapter that featured bisexual people outside western Europe and the United States. In her book, bisexuals in Uganda and Poland don't contribute to bisexual history and culture; they only exist as oppressed people. She does try to counter the narrative of European/American superiority by pointing out that a lot of the violent homophobia in African countries is a legacy from European colonialism and by highlighting conversion therapy that happens in the United States and Europe, but the narrow focus of the rest of her book undermines that effort.

I think that the idea of this book is super important. There isn't a lot written explicitly about bisexuality; you have to unearth a lot of bisexual history from books that focus on the whole LGBTQIA movement. It can be tedious and difficult to create a unified narrative. I just wish she had done this in a more inclusive way. I get that she wanted to write a short book to provide a general introduction, but her brevity left the narrative incomplete.

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