Bi-cycling around what bisexuality really is

So, he's gay, right?

Olivia Wilde plays a bisexual doctor in the show House M.D. who becomes the butt of House's typical cruel humor in regards to her "slutty" sexual orientation as a means of coping with her terminally degenerative disease.

Katy Perry's infamous single casually joked about kissing a girl while being in a heterosexual relationship, reinforcing the idea that bisexual women are the stuff of typical frat-boy sex fantasies. 

Ahh, Tumblr users. The cream of the crop on the Internet, second only to 4chan users.

This is the story of bisexuals, as told by popular media:

• According to straight people, you are just "going through a phase."
• According to gay people, you are just trying to jump on the "gay rights bandwagon" as an excuse for why you're such a special snowflake. Alternatively, as demonstrated in the above Tumblr ask, you're trying to have your cake and eat it too by fitting in with "the straights" as much as possible without acknowledging your "true" identity as a 100% lesbian or gay.
• If you're a woman, you exist only in pornography for straight men to get their release from.
• If you're a man, you're just a closeted gay.
• You're twice as likely to cheat on your significant other.
• Once you do settle down with a marital partner, you have officially "picked a side." If you identify as LDS and marry someone of the opposite gender, you have officially been "cured" of your "phase" (this "cure" apparently also happens with lesbian and gay members who marry someone of the opposite gender).

What do all of these conceptions boil down to, in a one-sentence summary? Bisexuals don't exist.

What a sentence, what an idea, what a perception like this does, is reduce an entire group of people to a single label. It defines real, complex human beings by a single personality trait, and then erases them in one stroke. Certainly, stereotypes exist for a reason: some bisexual-identifying individuals are only experimenting with their preferences for a short time as part of the adventure called adolescence. Some bisexual-identifying individuals can't commit to long-term relationships. (And frankly, are either of those exceptions really all that important?).

Of course, these qualifiers could just as easily apply to people of any other sexual orientation or preference (you may know a "man-child" who just can't seem to mature in any of his relationships). But none of that seems to be nearly as important as the novelty it becomes when painted as a beautiful, cultured, intelligent man or woman who also happens to be attracted to boys and girls, not even necessarily in equal proportions of fondness either, but is nonetheless fond of two genders. A bisexual becomes this mythical unicorn of sexual wonder in a world where the default assumption is that everyone is straight, and honest, non-innuendo-embedded discussion about sex is still far too taboo a subject, and of course you have the one token gay acquaintance from your high school years who you casually follow on Facebook to make you feel better about not judging "the gays."

In this line of cultural thinking, a bisexual becomes an object.

And we should all know by now that objectification of any person, as a rule, is definitely not okay.

So, not only are bisexuals not even real, but when they do appear ever so briefly, they are immediately consumed as jokes by popular media, and as forgettable mistakes of "nature and nurture" by well-meaning Christians who obsessively practice loving the sinner but not the sin.

Bisexual people want to be taken seriously by their potential romantic partners and not discounted as flighty freaks of nature. Bisexual Mormons who are committed to living the gospel are looking for genuine support from fellow ward members, not conditional terms of love and not polite reassurances that "you'll grow out of it." To the vast majority of these bi- individuals, LDS or not, their sexual orientation is a very crucial, positive, and healthy part of their identity, just as it is to the vast majority of gay and straight people alike.

There's a common double standard that publicly owning your sexual orientation is "unnecessary" and "over the top" and "sex crazed" if you identify as anything other than straight. The reality is that bi-identifying individuals care just as much about loyalty and trust in all their relationships, romantic and otherwise, as they do about getting up on time for work in the morning, about beating their friends in Mario Kart, about reading their scriptures, about standing up for their morals, about living a meaningful life. It is not anyone's place to erase and avoid the "bi" label assigned to a person, nor is it their place to define that person solely by that aspect of their lives.

Can't people just be people, without having to drag the tags of cultural baggage along as well?