Look, I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed. When I heard Ora was coming out with what has been called a “bisexual bop” I had high hopes. Ora collaborating with Cardi B, Charli XCX and Bebe Rexha to sing about the joys of snogging women? What was there not to like?
As it turns out, a lot. While Ora’s latest single, Girls, released last Friday, is catchy, it has also taken a lot of flak for perpetuating problematic bisexual stereotypes. Such was the backlash to Girls that Ora apologised on Twitter for the song’s content. She clarified that she has “had romantic relationships with women and men … [and] would never intentionally cause harm to other LGBTQ+ people”.
But what harm did she cause, exactly? Well, as the singer Hayley Kiyoko (also known as “lesbian Jesus”) wrote in a viral tweet, the song’s lyrics “fuel the male gaze while marginalising the idea of women loving women”. These lyrics include lines such as: “Yeah, we got with the dude / I saw him he was lookin’ at you,” and “Red wine, I just wanna kiss girls, girls, girls.” The song panders to the straight-male fantasy that female bisexuality consists of straight girls getting drunk and making out for a guy’s attention; it furthers the misconception that bisexuality is just about sex, not love. As Kiyoko wrote: “This type of message is dangerous because it … invalidates the very pure feelings of an entire community.”
I hate to wheel out the sanctimonious phrase “as a”, but as a “bisexual”, I agree with Kiyoko. I put bisexual in inverted commas because, despite having dated men and women, I’ve always been loth to describe myself as bisexual. The word has terrible connotations. It’s rarely taken seriously, for one thing, with both lesbians and straight men assuming bisexual is synonymous with “fickle and promiscuous”.
At least, that has historically been the case. While bisexual erasure – the active process of questioning the legitimacy of bisexuality – is still a problem, the conversation around bisexuality has significantly progressed in the 16 years since I came out as queer. In a 2015 YouGov poll, 49% of 19- to 24-year-old Britons identified themselves as something other than 100% heterosexual. And an increasing number of celebrities are being outspoken about their own sexual fluidity. In an interview with the Guardian last year, for example, Kristen Stewart said: “You’re not confused if you’re bisexual. It’s not confusing at all. For me, it’s quite the opposite.”
Last year also saw the song Bad at Love, by the bisexual singer Halsey, hit No 5 on the Billboard hot 100 chart. The song recounts various failed relationships with men and women. It treats relationships with both sexes with equal weight. It doesn’t reduce loving a woman to a drunken romp conducted for a man’s pleasure, like Ora’s Girls does.
I can’t remember when I first heard Bad at Love, but I do remember that hearing it moved me to tears. Listening to a woman singing about loving another woman in a way that was heartfelt and personal (and on Spotify’s top-hits list) felt like progress. If songs like that had been in the charts when I was a teenager struggling to come to terms with an identity I didn’t see reflected in the mainstream, it would have made my life a lot easier.
Pop culture is important; it helps us define our identities. It makes us feel as if we belong. It shifts cultural norms. So, as Kiyoko, wrote in her viral tweet, it is important for artists to use their platforms “to move the cultural needle forward, not backwards”.
Are short men more aggressive?
Size doesn’t matter, we are always told. Science, however, would beg to differ. A study, by researchers at Vrije University in Amsterdam, suggests that the “Napoleon complex” is real; short men are measurably meaner than their taller peers. The researchers came to this conclusion after gathering a collection of males of varying heights and observing their performance in a money-sharing experiment called the “dictator game”. Smaller men, the academics observed, were more inclined to act aggressively in the game when there was no threat of repercussion. “It’s probably smart for short men to be like this because they have fewer opportunities to get resources,” the lead researcher, Jill Knapen, told New Scientist.
If you’re a man feeling personally threatened by this study, worry not, I also bring good news. Research has shown that short people live longer than their lankier friends. Further, while numerous studies would seem to suggest tall men have an inherent advantage in life, there is also plenty of evidence that in today’s technology-driven economy, short men face very few barriers to success. They’re amply represented in magazine rich lists, anyway. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are both a relatively modest 5ft 7in (170cm), and both are among the 10 wealthiest men in the world.
There have also been studies rebutting the idea that short men are more likely to be temperamental than tall men. Indeed, in 2007, research by the University of Central Lancashire found that taller guys were more belligerent than their shorter counterparts. All of which is to say that headline-friendly “scientific studies” about size probably don’t matter that much.
How the 1% are prepping for doomsday
The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece on “the upmarket way to prepare for doomsday”. After all, when the (ever-more-imminent) apocalypse finally arrives, one ought to greet it stylishly. Forget bulk-buying baked beans, says the Wealthy Person’s Journal, Armageddon should be upmarket. Rather than panic-buying pulses, the members of the richest 1% the Journal has interviewed seem to be buying things like the Tesla Model X car (cost: at least £72,000), which features a climate-control setting called “bioweapon defense mode”. They are also kitting themselves out in pricey End of Worlds jeans, which are advertised as being “slash-resistant and virtually impossible to rip by hand”. The jeans are not flameproof, however. So, if it’s death by lava for us all, I’m afraid, even the dearest designer denim can’t save you.