this is too real
Note this doesn’t work for bi girls!!
Mara Wilson is a bisexual woman
Boy bands are almost overwhelmingly cultivated around the easiest way to sell shit to young girls, which very heavily leans into societally dominant heterosexual love story narratives, which in themselves tend to focus on specific attitudes towards gender roles, presentation, and styles of attraction.
Bi women are not straight so we do not conceptualize our gender and attraction the same way a straight woman would because we do not function under the same societal pressures and dynamics. Ergo, the marketing around and content within the songs by many boy bands can be incredibly alienating to a bi woman audience even if they still experience attraction to men because we often do not experience that attraction in a way palpable to or even considered by those cultivating the public image of these bands.
Accusing Mara Wilson, a bi woman, of bi erasure, for sharing an amusing anecdote on her own experience, is ridiculous. But it is also an incredible disservice to bi women like myself who are more than acutely aware that we are (and always have been) a far cry from this media’s target audience – and it is, in fact, a demonstration of the effects of bi erasure that people so stalwartly align us with heterosexuality that we’re accused of erasing ourselves when we talk about our alienation from mainstream m/f-focused media.
As another bi woman, I had to blink and think if I even know any boy bands.
I don’t.
Same. I spent a solid 10 minutes trying to remember any boy bands *ever* and drew a massive blank.
Bi as fuck over here.