If I’m bi, why don’t I write about my relationships with women?

Because men are gross about it, honestly

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I sat under the stars with a guy I was dating and he asked me if there was anyone I still thought about. The truth came flooding out, and with it, rage, anger, and pain. My ex girlfriend had hit me hard across the face, while drunk, and I’d never been able to forgive her. I still loved her, but the betrayal and violence was a deep wound. “Mhm,” he said, aroused. “So you sleep with women? Can you get in touch with her?”

I wish I could say this was isolated. Men, overwhelmingly, deeply eroticise my sexuality. Where I see fraught breakups, core memories, deep love, heartbreak, limerence, and longing, they see threesomes. They get sexually excited when I mention a female friend is bi. They imagine me giving head and moaning loudly in a performative way for a secret male voyeur. Even deeply painful memories; being kept a secret, being unable to come out to people we knew at school, and being lied to about a “fake” boyfriend, became sexy. Images of me giggling in my school uniform as a girlfriend nailed me in her gym kit. That stuff. Porn. Sex. Nothing else. I had become erotica.