I Feel Like If You Want To Have Solidarity With Bisexuals You Should Think About Which Experiences You

I got inspired by starpyrate sparkly frame and decided to make one for me! and if you want that extra sparkle on your bi pride, feel free to use it!

happy pride!

what does febfem mean?

@bai-xue-lives and @prismatic-bell both asked me the same question, so here goes nuffink

Febfem: On Bisexual Radfems, Facts Don’t Care About Feelings, and Lesbians Essentialism

Radical feminists describe ‘febfem’ as a bisexual female* who, by choice. exclusively dates females. It arose out of a specific subset of radfem tumblr, which holds some ideas about gender, sexuality, and identity to be self-evident. these facts include:

lesbian refers exclusively to homosexual females. words like bisexual and lesbian are not identities but statements of fact. any person who self-identifies as a lesbian must be a female homosexual. if you’re not a female homosexual for any reason (you’ve dated men in the past, you were assigned male at birth, you’re bisexual but only date women) then you cannot be a lesbian. you need other words.

females who are exclusively attracted to females are the most oppressed group. everybody else needs to protect them; their terminology, and their spaces. they are inviolate. an attack upon them is the greatest crime. bisexual women are their oppressors because bi women benefit from heterosexuality (what these benefits are is unclear)

lesbians are allowed to call bisexual women anything they want, including slurs like cockslut, bihet, handmaiden, etc. a lesbian referring to bi women using these slurs is venting about her trauma at the hands of her bisexual oppressors and is above question or reproach. bisexual women are not allowed to vent about their trauma at the hands of lesbians because they have privilege over lesbians and it would be lesbophobic.

bisexual women are untrustworthy rapists who want to invade lesbian only spaces and abuse lesbians. [please note that in this case, “bisexual women” also refers to trans-inclusive lesbians.] all bisexual women are untrustworthy, cheating cocksluts until proven otherwise.

Bisexual radfems who want to have access to spaces that keep them safe and people who don’t treat them like cocksluts who are only waiting to cheat on the nearest lesbian, must find some way to signal their virtuosity. “Look at us!” They say. “We’re good bisexuals, unlike these other bihet handmaidens. Please allow us into your safe spaces, and make room for us in your rhetoric. We promise to hate ourselves for being attracted to men, constantly apologise for oppressing lesbians, and allow lesbians to target and bully us whenever they like. Look, to make it easy for lesbian radfems to tell when a bisexual is one of the Good Ones, we’ll put this handy word that we just made up - Febfem - in our bios, so you know precisely how to find us.”

It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for them. If you go through the febfem tag on tumblr, a lot of posts talk about the importance of not talking over lesbians, not infringing on lesbian-only spaces, and not appropriating lesbian terminology, and reiterating constantly that lesbians don’t owe bi women anything (Just be grateful they didn’t call you an abusive slut today!). Of course, all this ground is won at the cost of bisexual women who aren’t female-exclusive, trans-inclusive lesbians, and trans lesbians. So I don’t really feel sorry for them. Except when I do, cause hyperempathy is a bitch that way.

also, they hate mogai tumblr even though they’re literally the radfem version of mogais

*Note: I use female when talking about AFABs (as radfems use female) and women when talking about people who identify as women regardless of AGAB.

Preserving Bi Women’s History

Bisexual activist and scholar Robyn Ochs just announced the successful conclusion of a project she has been working on for 7 ½ years in collaboration with Amy Benson of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.

Back issues of Bi Women (now the Bi Women Quarterly) (1983-2009) and of North Bi Northwest (a publication of the Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network) are now archived and available via Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library. They have been digitized, and are searchable and available to the public.

Here’s the press release from Harvard’s Schlesinger Library:

Boston is home to the longest-lived bisexual women’s periodical in the world. Bi Women Quarterly, a grassroots publication, began in September 1983 as a project of the newly-formed Boston Bisexual Women’s Network.

Staffed entirely by volunteers, and containing essays, poetry, artwork, and short fiction on a wide range of themes, Bi Women Quarterly provides a voice for women who identify as bisexual, pansexual, and other non-binary sexual identities.

Robyn Ochs, editor of Bi Women Quarterly since 2009, donated the only complete collection of this publication to Schlesinger Library several years ago with the agreement that it would be preserved, and digitized in a searchable format. The digitized collection at Schlesinger covers the years 1983 to 2010. We are delighted to announce that this project is complete, and this resource is now available to researchers and to the general public through Harvard’s catalog.

Making the voices of bi women accessible will hopefully provide researchers primary material with which to begin to fill this gap.

Issues of Bi Women Quarterly from 2009 to the present can be found online a BiWomenBoston.org. These more recent issues will be added to the Library’s collection in the near future. 

“Politicised bisexuals want to connect with lesbian/gay groups, not to overthrow them, and to strengthen, not dilute, lesbian/gay anger and power.”

- Amanda Udis-Kessler, Bisexual Horizons: Politics, Histories, Lives

happy pride month !

bisexual pride headers + moon symbol ☽☾

All these "just say you're bi lol i promise it is okay to be bi" posts are always written in bad faith. They act like bi people who id as something else do this out of malice rather than struggling with their identity in the society that hates bisexuals. These people dont care about bi people feeling comfortable with their bisexuality, they just want us to "stay in our lane". Not to mention these posts always make internalized biphobia something that is our own fault.

you're absolutely right, and i was only trying to be reasonable because i'm afraid of confrontation. i actually already had that blog blocked from my main so i have no doubt OP was a biphobe who portrays our every interaction with lesbianism as forced and malicious anyway. the tags were about mspec lesbians, which i don't talk about here, but nobody ever assumes innocent until proven guilty with bisexuals, and anyone who identified that way must be doing it to encourage corrective rape and conversion therapy rather than because they struggle with an internal identity or even just genuinely believe it's right for themselves, whether true or not.

10k likes is crazy … well someone call dykes on bikes and the dyke march and the dyke alliance and

as a bi person, the bisexual flag brings me infinite joy and always puts a smile on my face, however as a person who has a Passion for Graphic Design, that undersaturated shade of purple infuriates me when it's used digitally

like, on an actual flag - which was its original purpose - it looks great!

those look fine! lovely, even! with the semi-transparent fabric, the way it catches the sunlight, it looks beautiful!

but now look at how it looks digitally

the pink and blue are so vibrant compared to the sad, lonely lavender!

and let's look at this statement from Michael Page, the creator of the bi flag:

(sidenote: he created this flag in 1998, so if his takes on bisexuality is different from yours, it's okay to notice that! a lot has changed since the 90s when it comes to lived experiences and the way we describe them. but, it's also important to respect his thoughts about this and the way he presented them, even if today, we'd probably not say that bi people "blend unnoticeably into both the gay/lesbian and straight communities.")

so in pantone colors, the pink is 226 C, the blue is 286 C, and the purple of the flag is 258 C.

but...here's the deal

Michael talks here about how the key to understanding the symbolism is to know that the purple blends into both the pink and blue. and on a physical flag, I think you can see that!

but digitally, it absolutely does not blend. it clashes badly, and looks oddly separate from the other two colors.

which got me wondering...what purple do you get if you actually blend 226 C and 286 C?

oh! oh, my god.

look at that! look at how nicely it fits between those colors!

look at it next to the original color scheme! look at how much more vibrant the purple is!

and friends. this is just blending through rgb! you get even more purple variations when you use other color spaces!

let's compare all of them:

(top: original, lab. middle: lrgb, lch. bottom: rgb, hsl)

look at all of the different purple options you can get just by combining these two colors!

if you want almost too-vibrant saturation, you can go hsl, if you want something more relaxed that's closer to the original, you can go lab or lrgb. and if you want to split the difference, lch is bright and violet, while rgb is there with its saturated but darker purple.

anyway, I guess I don't really have a point here? this isn't so much an informational post as it is Me Getting Weird About Colors, but I think it is a useful lesson about how colors look very different on screens compared to how they look on objects in real life.

and sometimes, I think it's okay to compensate for that.

out of all of these, this is my favorite bi flag:

it's the one where the colors were blended in lab color space. for me, the lighter, softer purple is close enough to the original bi flag purple, while also feeling like a smoother blend of the blue and pink

but that's just me! and it might not even look the same to you, since every screen is different, because technology is a nightmare!

anyway, thank you for coming with me on this colorful journey! I will now retreat back to inkscape and make pained sounds about inkstitch gradients until something tangible pulls me back into reality

anyone who recognizes this video will probably know who i am just by virtue of me posting it, but i don't care. this is my favorite bi character edit of all time and it never gets old!!!

it was also posted just before my birthday lmao

EDIT: don't worry if the post gives you a "this media could not be played" error message. i'm pretty sure it's an API thing. the video is still there, just go directly to the page instead of watching it here

You can only choose one

Yaoi

Yuri