I actually don’t have anything particularly gay to talk about today, except for mentioning that I watched Kissing Jessica Stein last night. If you’ve never seen it, the rundown is pretty simple. Girl journalist has awful luck with men, and gets called out on being ‘too picky’ by her ex/boss. There’s a personals ad that her friend comes across in the paper with a quote that miss journalist had just read…only…it’s in the WFW section. On a crazy, bicurious whim she answers it. The women awkwardly traipse through a lesbian relationship; complete with the journalist covering up their relationship by saying her girl is her “friend”, etc… The pair go through the relationship, the relationship dies of lesbian bed death, and they remain friends afterwards. The journalist is kind of left ambiguous, because they set her up with her ex /boss again, and her girlfriend is seen with another woman.
Now that’s all very gay, but the driving point of this movie has a lot more to do with how we view ourselves when it comes to human relationships. The delightfully bisexual characters in this movie really were pretty spot on when it comes to figuring out that you’re bi.
Watching this pretty much got me thinking about my own dynamic in relationships, my types, and all that. Everybody has their preferences, and bisexual people are no exception. There are a lot of jokes out there that we’ll pretty much boink anything human that moves, but that’s never ever been true for me. Obviously, like any responsible person of ANY orientation I steer way clear of any kind of disease I can catch, and I’m a real stickler for getting all parties involved screened for HIV before anything remotely physical happens. The phrase “herpes is forever” should be mentioned here, too.
All that being said, I think there’s a difference between “picky” and “careful”. Everybody has their preferred type, sure. That’s normal. For me, if the in question potential partner is a guy, he’s always older than I am (usually by enough to be noticeable) and always has dark hair. Most of the time, they’re either Italians or Nikki Sixx wannabes. For girls, I cannot get into butch chicks. Being bisexual, I don’t see the point. It’s not my thing. The other weird thing is that I don’t usually like white women. Normally we look like birds and it’s just not attractive to me. Usually.
Having a type is not what I’d consider picky. Picky would be having this ideal person who’s absolutely perfect in every single way in your eyes and expecting every single date you go on to be “that” person. Picky would be those people who go on and on like Jack Black’s character in Shallow Hal. I think picky is also a front for self esteem issues a lot of times too. There seems to be this very real issue for people in deciphering what they admire and want for themselves, and what they want in another person. For example, Girl A thinks that she wants to be ‘with’ Girl B because Girl B has an outgoing, shiny personality. The girls would date for a while, and then the traits that Girl A thought she liked about Girl B get annoying. They split, and Girl A blames the entire scenario on Girl B not being “enough”. What really happened there was that Girl A saw things in another person that she wanted to be/have for herself, and was not aware that the problem was really with herself and her self-image, not with her “crappy” partners. I’ve had mad girl crushes like that, especially when I was 17 or so years old. It was easy to confuse what I “wanted” with” what I wanted for myself”.
That was pretty much the realization that miss journalist was given in Kissing Jessica Stein. It was pretty thought provoking because when you apply thoughts like that to all of your failed relationships, you sometimes look back and see that it really WAS you, not them.
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