The Bisexual Woman Pop Culture Keeps Getting Wrong
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with scrolling through yet another listicle or watching another show where the bisexual woman exists only as a punchline or a plot device. For decades, mainstream storytelling has leaned on two stock characters: the greedy woman who "can't choose," and the confused woman who will eventually settle down. Both scripts flatten real people into cardboard cut-outs designed to titillate, shock, or reassure straight audiences that bisexuality is a phase, a marketing tactic, or a transitional state on the road to a more acceptable identity.
This piece looks at where these portrayals come from, how they shape what Australian viewers and readers see in local media, and why they take such a heavy toll on the mental health of bisexual women who are simply trying to live honestly in a culture that keeps editing their story.
The Roots of a Lazy Trope
The "greedy bisexual" stereotype did not emerge from nowhere. It grew out of a long history of treating women who step outside heterosexuality as either performing for male attention or experimenting before committing to a heterosexual life. Early cinema used bisexual-coded femme fatales to signal danger and moral corruption, while pulp fiction and talk shows treated female bisexuality as a scandal to be uncovered. The through-line was rarely about bisexual women themselves. It was about the anxieties of the audiences consuming the story.
That framing has proved remarkably persistent. Modern streaming dramas, prestige films, and pop music videos still recycle the same beats: a kiss at a party, a heavily edited magazine cover, a hashtag campaign, then a public relationship with a man that gets treated as the "real" identity finally revealed. Bi erasure in mainstream culture is not new. What changes is the platform, from cable television to TikTok, and the speed with which a tired stereotype can be amplified into a global meme before nuance has a chance to breathe.
Television's Token Lesbian-for-a-Season Problem
Television has long offered bisexual women a familiar deal: visibility in exchange for vulnerability. A show introduces a queer-coded woman, builds an audience around her relationship, then quietly pairs her off with a male lead so the storyline returns to safer ground. The arc plays out across genres, from teen dramas to long-running soaps, and the message is consistent. The most interesting version of the character is the one that disappears.
Australian screen culture has had its own version of this. Long-running serials like Neighbours and Home and Away have shipped queer storylines, but rarely let bisexual women exist in long-term, settled relationships without their sexuality being framed as a complication. Melbourne-produced shows like Please Like Me and newer streaming commissions have tried to do better, yet for a generation of viewers the dominant memory remains the brief queer arc followed by a return to a heterosexual pairing.
This pattern reinforces the idea that bisexuality is a destination on the way to a more permanent identity, rather than a complete one in its own right. It also feeds a broader cultural anxiety that bisexual women cannot be trusted to commit to relationships, friendships, or even a stable sense of self.
Music, Magazines, and the Myth of the Attention-Seeker
If television treats bisexuality as a phase, pop music treats it as a publicity move. Female pop and indie artists who come out as bisexual, pansexual, or queer often find their personal lives reframed as savvy brand management. The coverage reads less like journalism and more like a recurring headline template: "Is she really bi, or is it just good marketing?" Even when an artist has spoken openly about their identity for years, the press cycle tends to reset that conversation with each new release.
Australian acts like Cub Sport's Zoe Davis and performers on the Brisbane Bigsound indie circuit have all navigated this minefield. Magazines, podcasts, and morning television segments in cities like Sydney and Perth have treated their identities as either a curiosity or a marketing story, rather than a normal part of their public life. The framing assumes bisexuality is a tactic rather than a truth, which contributes to the wider invisibility of bisexual women in pop culture.
| Medium |
Stock Trope |
Real-Life Cost |
| Television |
Lesbian for a season, then paired with a man |
Audiences see bisexuality as a phase |
| Film |
Hyper-sexualised bisexuality for the male gaze |
Real women internalise objectification |
| Pop Music |
"Bi for attention" or album-cycle publicity |
Artists retreat from honest storytelling |
| Print and online media |
Confused, experimenting, going through a phase |
Bi readers feel invisible in their own community |
This comparison captures the recycling of the same lazy tropes across formats, and how each format punishes the women caught in its frame.
What Australian Audiences See at Home
Australia's media landscape carries its own complications. The Marriage Act was amended in 2017 to legalise same-sex marriage, and most states now recognise non-binary gender markers on identity documents. Sydney Mardi Gras remains a touchstone event on the queer cultural calendar, with Brisbane Pride Festival and Melbourne's Midsumma offering alternative hubs across the country. On paper, the visibility is there.
On screen, the picture is more uneven. Bluey has been quietly celebrated by Australian parents for including same-sex parents in recurring storylines without making it the joke. Heartbreak High on Netflix has woven queer and bisexual characters into its ensemble in ways that feel integrated rather than tokenised. Even so, Australian streaming catalogues still lean heavily on imported American and British programming, meaning that local bisexual viewers are often seeing their lives reflected through scripts written in Los Angeles or London.
The everyday Southbank brunch, the flat white on Lygon Street, the share house in Newtown, these are the real textures that Australian bisexual women navigate, but they rarely make it into the scripted dramas that claim to represent their lives. The gap between lived experience and on-screen representation is one of the reasons community-led storytelling, podcasts, and independent zines have grown in suburbs from Fitzroy to Parramatta.
The Mental Load of Being Misrepresented
Living under a constant fog of stereotypes takes a measurable toll. Bisexual women report higher rates of anxiety, depression, and substance use than their lesbian or straight peers, a pattern that researchers link to minority stress, erasure, and the exhausting work of explaining one's identity over and over again. When pop culture keeps insisting that bisexuality is a phase or a performance, that stress compounds rather than fades.
It shows up in subtle behaviours: softening language on dating profiles, deflecting questions at work, or laughing off jokes at family barbecues. Many bisexual women describe a low-level tension that never quite switches off, especially when navigating spaces that assume everyone is straight until proven otherwise. Australian support services, including QLife and Minus18, have expanded their resources to meet this need, though access remains uneven across regional and rural communities.
The ongoing anxiety of being misread is something many bisexual women will recognise. For readers who want a longer reflection on the everyday weight of anxiety, what I want people to know about living with anxiety offers a candid personal account. The piece resonates with anyone whose identity has been treated as something to be explained rather than simply lived.
Real Stories Break the Script
The script is shifting, and not only in Hollywood. Audiences, writers, and performers are actively rewriting the story, and a handful of patterns are worth paying attention to.
- Bisexual characters written by bisexual writers, rather than filtered through producers who treat orientation as decoration
- Storylines that let queer women stay queer across seasons, in long-term relationships and friendships, without the obligatory heterosexual landing
- Coverage in Australian press that treats bisexuality as an identity rather than a headline, in outlets from the ABC to community newspapers in Adelaide and Hobart
- Streaming platforms releasing data on bisexual representation, so creators and audiences can track real progress
- Festivals like Sydney Mardi Gras, Midsumma, and Feast Festival giving bisexual women their own dedicated programming rather than folding them into broader queer line-ups
- Mental health resources tailored to bisexual adults, including why I stopped treating my anxiety as an enemy
The shift is uneven, and it is fragile. Backlash to queer representation, both online and in funding decisions, means the gains of the last decade are not guaranteed. Still, the direction of travel is being shaped by women who refuse to let their identities be reduced to a season arc or a tabloid headline, and that matters.
Bisexual women have always been here, in Sydney share houses, Melbourne art scenes, Perth laneway bars, and Brisbane activist circles. What changes when pop culture catches up is not their existence, but the loneliness attached to it. The story worth telling is not whether bisexual women are greedy or confused. It is the much richer, stranger, and more honest one they have been living all along, and that audiences are only now learning to read on its own terms.
