Playboy Magazine and Fluidity

This morning on twitter, I saw a tweet from a blog I like to follow, @afterellen (news and media by/about lesbian and bi women) that read ‘The only “Playboy" playmate to ever come out as gay is reportedly engaged to a man’. The subsequent article describes how this particular model came out in 2004 as a lesbian, and began to publish, speak, and do activist work around LGBT issues. The article cites the New York posts description of her recent engagement to a man. Stephanie Adams states that she will “retire from being a public persona so that we can settle down and have children ... Life is good ... I have no regrets for anything.”

Maybe this is the sexuality studies student in me, or the fact that I have friends that identify in fluid and plural ways, but, what’s the big deal? I wanted to write about this post after I read Gabe’s blog describing the comment section from an AOL story about a 77 year old trans woman, also a veteran, that finally got the gender confirmation surgery she had been wanting. Both of these articles deal with the story at hand well-enough for online news sources (which is to say slightly painfully), but what I wanted to talk about was the comment section of this story, rife with biphobia and general internet idiocy.

Let’s start with this gem: “I think she realized she's not going to be young and hot forever.  The guy is probably an 80-year-old billionaire.” Sexist and reductionist much?

Or how about: “…this means she was never a lesbian.  She was bi (or bicurious) or straight. Everyone has the right to change their mind but this sucks for lesbian visibility. And all these people screaming "biphobia, biphobia"...what I have to say is fuck that. Lesbians (who ONLY sleep with other women) can have whatever opinions we want about anything we want.  Its not biphobia to get irritated when shit like this happens.”

Yes, of course you can have your opinions, but that doesn’t make it impervious to critique when people call you out.

I’d like to use this article to talk about the ways that these concepts of fluidity and sexuality for example, have consequences outside of academic discussions. For Stephanie, she can have a relationship with a man, something that brings her joy, and that same action to others, results in anger and resentment. When we have these conversations in class, I think it’s easy to abstract the idea to a point where we forget that labels, or a lack thereof of, hold significant meaning to people and are not just points of intellectual debate.  Thinking about one’s sexual trajectory and how that might change over time also has consequences for sexuality education in the sense that it needs to incorporate these realities into and honest and messy conversation about sexual identities that are not always occurring.