Bisexuality, Desire, and the Stories Pop Culture Keeps Getting Wrong
Pop culture often treats bisexuality as a shorthand for sexual availability. A bisexual character enters the story, kisses more than one gender, and suddenly the script reaches for familiar accusations: greedy, indecisive, unfaithful, confused, or simply “up for anything”. These ideas may be presented as jokes, drama, or edgy realism, but they shape how real people are judged.
The problem is not that bisexual people can have adventurous sex, complicated relationships, or changing desires. People of every orientation can. The problem is turning those possibilities into a supposed definition of bisexuality. When television, music, film, and celebrity coverage repeatedly connect bisexual identity with promiscuity, they make prejudice look like common sense.
Bisexuality Is Not A Synonym For Promiscuity
Bisexuality describes the capacity for attraction to more than one gender. It does not prescribe a number of partners, a relationship structure, a fashion style, or a particular level of sexual experience. A bisexual person may be monogamous, celibate, married, newly dating, aromantic, deeply private, or very open about sex. None of these choices cancels their identity.
Pop culture tends to flatten that range because a stereotype is efficient. A character who flirts with everyone can be written quickly, while a fully realised bisexual person requires the same emotional detail given to straight or gay characters. The result is a narrow image in which bisexuality becomes an invitation rather than an orientation.
That framing also creates a cruel double bind. A bisexual person in a same-gender relationship may be told they are “really gay”, while someone in a different-gender relationship may be treated as straight. A person with several partners is used as evidence of promiscuity; a person with one partner is told their bisexuality is merely a phase. There is no performance that satisfies a stereotype built to disbelieve them.
The Camera Loves A Convenient Stereotype
Film and television have long used bisexuality as a source of suspense, danger, or titillation. The bisexual woman may be the seductive friend whose boundaries cannot be trusted. The bisexual man may be framed as secretly experimenting, emotionally unavailable, or waiting to choose a “real” identity. These characters are often desirable, but rarely allowed to be ordinary.
The same pattern appears in celebrity media. A kiss, a rumoured relationship, or an ambiguous lyric can become evidence for a public identity that the person has not claimed. Then the audience is encouraged to debate whether they are “actually” bisexual, as though private intimacy were a puzzle available for public scoring. This is especially harmful when queer celebrities are expected to provide a neat explanation for every part of their dating history.
A more honest approach would show bisexuality as one element of a person’s life rather than the entire plot engine. Personal essays can hold that complexity because they make room for contradiction, uncertainty, and self-definition without forcing every experience into a sensational storyline.
Desire Does Not Cancel Commitment
The myth of inevitable cheating often rests on a basic misunderstanding of attraction. Being capable of attraction to more than one gender does not mean wanting every person, nor does it make commitment impossible. Desire and agreements are different things. Fidelity is shaped by honesty, consent, communication, and the boundaries people choose—not by whether someone is bisexual.
A bisexual character who cheats may be written as proof that their orientation makes relationships unstable. A straight character who cheats is usually allowed a motive: insecurity, resentment, opportunity, grief, or poor judgement. Giving bisexual characters no interior life beyond their sexuality turns a personal action into a verdict on an entire community.
Relationship structures deserve the same care. Some bisexual people are non-monogamous, and some are not. Ethical non-monogamy is based on informed consent and negotiated boundaries; it is not the same as promiscuity, and it is not the inevitable outcome of bisexual attraction. Treating all bisexual people as sexually indiscriminate erases those who want long-term partnership while stigmatising those whose relationships look different.
Patterns Worth Questioning
When a storyline links bisexuality with promiscuity, it helps to notice exactly what the script is asking the audience to believe. Is the character being denied trust because of their identity? Is their sexuality used to make them more dangerous, more marketable, or more entertaining? Are they allowed to set boundaries and change their mind?
Common warning signs include:
- A bisexual character is introduced through flirtation rather than personality.
- Their relationships are treated as evidence in a courtroom.
- Other characters call them confused, greedy, or incapable of commitment.
- Their sexual history is used as a plot twist or punchline.
- The story offers no bisexual community, language, or ordinary belonging.
- The character disappears once the drama around their identity is resolved.
Representation does not need to be perfect to be valuable. A character can make mistakes, have casual sex, or behave selfishly. The issue is whether the story understands that behaviour as individual behaviour or presents it as an unavoidable consequence of bisexuality. That distinction is the difference between a messy human character and a stereotype wearing a personality.
Australian Screens And Social Spaces
Australian audiences encounter these messages through a mix of local television, streaming services, music coverage, reality dating shows, and social media. The market is shaped by broadcasters such as the ABC and SBS, commercial networks, subscription platforms including Stan, and international services competing for attention. A queer character may be visible in a glossy streaming series while bisexual people still struggle to find nuanced stories made for their own communities.
Local context matters. A storyline that lands differently in Sydney’s inner west, regional Queensland, Perth, or a Melbourne university setting can still circulate nationally through streaming. Australia’s “mate” culture can make casual biphobic jokes sound harmless, especially in workplaces, pubs, sporting spaces, and group chats where people are expected to laugh along. The pressure to be easy-going can make naming the harm feel like making a fuss.
Sydney’s Mardi Gras has also helped place LGBTQIA+ visibility in the national conversation, but a parade cannot represent every bisexual experience. Someone attending an event in Oxford Street may feel affirmed; someone in a smaller town may be weighing family safety, local gossip, or whether a health provider understands bisexuality. Visibility is meaningful, but it does not automatically create security or belonging.
Australian media can do better by resisting the assumption that a bisexual character must be either hypersexual or inspirational. Stories set in Australia can include bisexual people in ordinary contexts: studying at TAFE, caring for siblings, working a casual job, navigating a share house, or deciding whether to bring a partner home for Christmas. Those details make identity part of life rather than a spectacle.
Biphobia Has Material Consequences
Stereotypes do not stay on the screen. When bisexuality is repeatedly associated with promiscuity, people may face suspicion from partners, dismissal from doctors, harassment from strangers, or exclusion from queer spaces. Some are pressured to prove their identity through dating history, while others hide it because they expect to be seen as untrustworthy.
The mental-health impact can be cumulative. Being told that your orientation is a phase, a performance, or a threat can produce shame and isolation. Bisexual people may also encounter monosexism—the belief that everyone is fundamentally attracted to only one gender—from both straight and queer communities. That can make it harder to seek support, especially when services are designed around a gay-versus-straight framework.
This is why feminism resources matter alongside media criticism. Feminist analysis asks who gets believed, whose desire is policed, and why some people are granted complexity while others are reduced to a warning. It connects representation with power rather than treating television as harmless escapism.
What Better Representation Includes
Better stories do not need to turn bisexual characters into educational pamphlets. They need to let them be funny, boring, selfish, generous, romantic, anxious, ambitious, and wrong in ways unrelated to their sexuality. They also need to show that bisexuality can remain real across different relationships and different stages of life.
Useful signs of thoughtful representation include:
- The character names their identity without needing to defend it.
- Their attraction is distinct from their consent and relationship agreements.
- They have friendships and communities beyond romantic or sexual plots.
- A partner’s insecurity is challenged rather than validated as truth.
- Their history includes more than sensational encounters.
- The story allows bisexual joy, safety, and ordinariness.
Writers can also avoid making one bisexual character carry the burden of representing everyone. A bisexual teenager, a bi parent, a non-monogamous adult, and a person who came out later in life may have very different experiences. Variety prevents the audience from treating one storyline as a universal rule.
For viewers, a little critical distance can help. Notice when a script asks you to confuse visibility with availability, confidence with promiscuity, or ambiguity with dishonesty. Notice which characters receive forgiveness and which are permanently defined by one mistake. These questions do not ruin a story; they reveal the values hidden inside it.
Bisexual people deserve stories that recognise desire without reducing them to it. They deserve characters who can love, leave, commit, experiment, recover, and grow without their orientation being presented as the explanation for every decision. This week, watch one familiar bisexual storyline and write down whether the character is allowed a life beyond the stereotype.
