The discourse about dating bi men is going around again

How we date and who we date will never not be a hot topic on social media. Oversharing our dating lives is the foundation of the internet, but it’s also the source of some of the worst takes you’ll ever hear.

Because the internet is cyclical, certain ideas and expectations about sex and dating get repeated ad nauseam on TikTok and X. While a lot of it is centered on heterosexual dating norms about first dates and hookup culture, occasionally (re: annually), we’re dragged into discourse about dating bisexual men.

Discourse about bi men hits the internet (again)

In the past month, TikTok and X are embroiled in takes and reactions and reactions to takes about straight women not wanting to date bi men.

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Bisexual dating and labels are a conversation we have basically every year. Here’s a tweet about it from 2024. Here’s a tweet about it from 2020. I’ll even throw in a tweet from 2018 about the “bi-lesbian” label discourse. This time, however, it’s about bisexual men.

For Zachary Zane, author of Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto and sex expert for Velvet Brands, a sex toy manufacturer, the reason this conversation has an annual loop is its complexity. He’s also quick to push back on the instinct to label every rejection as biphobic.

“It’s a very similar argument every time,” Zane said to Mashbale over email. “I think it never resolves because it’s actually a more complicated question than it seems on the surface. I don’t think that if you don’t want to date a bi guy, you are automatically extremely biphobic. And I’m saying this as a bi man who’s had plenty of people not want to date me because of my (bi)sexuality.”

A 2023 meta-analysis in Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity pulled together 61 studies from 1999 to 2022, totaling over 32,000 participants, to figure out who actually holds the most anti-bisexual bias. Across the board, men reported more negative attitudes toward bisexuality than women did, and that gap widened specifically around male bisexuality, meaning straight men, more than straight women, tend to carry the biggest hang-up about bi guys. (Gay men and lesbians, for what it’s worth, had similar attitudes about bisexuality.)

So why does the online discourse keep circling back to women specifically?

A separate study on actual willingness to date bi people gets closer to an answer. Researchers surveyed over 1,800 people across sexual orientations and found that straight people and gay/lesbian people were both less willing to date bisexual people than bisexual people were willing to date them. However, the reluctance to date bisexual men specifically was unusually strong. Strong enough that even bisexual women reported hesitation about dating bi men.

Added together, these studies suggest varying conclusions: Men, straight men especially, apparently carry more measurable anti-bisexual bias overall. But when it comes to who bi men are actually trying to date, it’s resistance from women — bi and straight alike — that keeps showing up as the real sticking point.

Glamour and YouGov polls from the same general period found similar patterns: Most women surveyed said they either wouldn’t date a man with any male sexual history, bi or not, or weren’t comfortable with the idea of a bi partner at all.

For Zane, desire isn’t something anyone owes a justification for, but he does draw a hard line between someone simply not being interested and someone being cruel about why.

“There’s a difference between people, more specifically cis women, who don’t want to date a bi man because, ‘Ew, that’s gross, he sucks dick.’ That’s clearly homophobic and biphobic.”

So where does the fear come from, if the stereotypes don’t hold up?

Common stereotypes against bisexuality range from bi men who are “actually” gay and in denial, that they’re incapable of monogamy, and that they’re at a higher STI risk. These stereotypes seemingly persist because bi men are an easy target for stigma that would be socially unacceptable if aimed at almost any other group.

Zane doesn’t pick one so much as point out they’re all load-bearing for each other. “These stereotypes are all interconnected,” he says. “Being labeled ‘secretly gay’ fuels the stereotype that bi men pose a greater STI risk, just as the myth that bisexual people are incapable of monogamy reinforces those same STI concerns.” Killing one myth, in his telling, barely matters if the other two are still propping it up.

Much of the pushback in this discourse relies on a straw man argument that anyone raising the topic is trying to shame or guilt straight women into finding bi men attractive, as if attraction itself is up for debate.

“I think often, though not always, ‘discomfort’ is synonymous with insecurity,” says Zane. “But a person doesn’t want to admit that they’re insecure, so instead they use the word discomfort.”

Nobody’s arguing women should be forced to date bisexual men; the argument is about the reasons some women give for ruling them out categorically — the idea that they’re secretly gay, more likely to cheat, or riskier for STIs. It’s one thing to have a preference, but another to base that on unfounded assumptions. Plus, treating any pushback on those beliefs as an attempt to “shame” women into attraction lets people avoid actually defending the belief.

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Why the discourse cycle repeats

Honestly, part of why this conversation comes back every year has nothing to do with bisexuality specifically — it’s just how the internet works now. Writer Daysia Tolentino nailed it when she described online discourse as react-first-think-later, where the goal isn’t actually figuring anything out, it’s staying mad enough to keep scrolling.

Everything gets treated like the biggest deal ever, so annoyingly classist conversations about bonnets in classrooms and discourse about bi men’s dating lives end up hitting your feed with the exact same energy.

One tweet basically called the whole thing out, joking about having to do “the bisexual men and straight women conversation” again next year, and the year after that, forever. It’s not even really about bi men at this point — it’s just what happens when the internet finds a fight it can have on repeat.

The cost of this is that bi men are obviously the ones affected the most by this discourse. They’re still the least likely group in the LGBT community to be out to the people in their lives, by a lot. The Pew Research Center found that only a small fraction of bisexual men were out to most of the important people around them, compared to the large majority of gay men and lesbians who were.

Even Zane, someone who’s spent years publicly unpacking this exact discourse, doesn’t think the conversation is going anywhere soon. He compares it directly to the equally exhausting, equally cyclical “should straight people go to Pride” debate that resurfaces every June.

“The discourse is undoubtedly exhausting,” he admits. “But I think the only way we can move the needle forward is through discourse. It just takes time.”