Research shows that bi men face a number of biases in dating. For example, many straight women worry that they could never be “enough” for bi men, who, in turn, would cheat on them. Others assume that bi men are really just gay. In 2019, a study published in the Journal of Bisexuality showed women’s dating profiles of men labeled with their sexual orientation. They found that “heterosexual women rated bisexual men as less sexually and romantically attractive, less desirable to date and have sex with, and less masculine compared to straight men”.
Needless to say, these attitudes are negative generalizations that prejudge bi men based on perceptions of statistical averages in ways we would all find pretty bigoted if it were about race or ethnicity rather than sexual orientation. What’s interesting is that these attitudes about bi men are actually directed toward bisexuality as a concept, not bi men as individuals. In fact, researchers have found that without knowing their sexual orientation beforehand, people find bi men the most masculine.
In a 2023 study published in The Journal of Sex Research titled “BIDAR: Can Listeners Detect if a Man Is Bisexual from His Voice Alone?”, James Morandini and his colleagues set out to study how people evaluated male voices and if they could tell a man’s sexuality by his voice without being told. They recruited 70 participants (42 women, 28 men) to listen to the voice recordings of 60 men (20 straight, 20 bi, 20 gay). What they found surprised them. The listeners were able to accurately pick out the straight and gay men at a much higher rate than random chance. But the bi male voices tripped them up, and their guesses “did not differ from what we expected due to chance”. When asked to rate the masculinity of the speakers, the listeners rated the bi men’s voices as the most masculine of the three: “bisexual voices were judged significantly more masculine than straight voices”.
People have various associations and preconceptions about bisexuality that they superimpose over bi men, instead of treating them as individuals. But when they have nothing else to go on other than treating them as individuals, these assumptions fall away. This is how we can be reasonably confident that the negative attitudes bi men face in dating are not purely romantic and sexual preferences, but actually prejudices grounded in false beliefs. It’s one reason why only 20% of bi people are out to all the people in their lives.
Morandini speculated that one reason for his study’s results could be that bi men go out of their way to negate negative stereotypes: “bisexual men may be under pressure to prove their legitimacy […]. This may lead bi men to over-swing [their masculine] presentations in some instances, to assure partners and others in their lives that they aren’t gay”.
The point here is not to confront anyone over their dating preferences, much less try to police them. It is simply to point out that scientific evidence shows at least some of the attitudes people hold about bi men are simply prejudgements that don’t show up in situations where folks are forced to judge bi guys as individuals. If someone finds bi men less masculine, that’s their right. But if they actually find bi men more masculine than straight guys only until discovering they’re bi, that’s a pretty strong indicator that something else is going on.