You know, what’s really ironic about this bisexual erasure is that for much of human history, it appears that attraction on a spectrum was taken rather for granted. From obvious examples like the Greco-Roman world to less obvious ones like Edo-period Japan, it looks like people often viewed strictly polarized sexual attraction as rather rare.

I’m reading a dystopian novel right now titled Hadrian, set in a not too distant future after global warming has spiraled out of control and caused mass famine and population crashes.

Hadrian is the name of a small country in the north of what used to be Canada, in which people have decided to make homosexuality the norm in order to keep the population down to manageable (non-starving) levels. This is interesting because it sort of mirrors what some scholars believe the archaic-period Greeks did on purpose with respect to homosexuality starting about 600 BC. Although that experiment was limited only to the elite ruling class, which was running out of room to expand.

It looks like the author of Hadrian thought about that ancient Greek experience as she was dreaming up a future society that decides to leverage humanity’s innate propensity to bisexuality. Then she lets things go to an authoritarian extreme in her imagination.

And therein lies the crux: however it is that we humans experience sexuality, we seem determined so often to force our own personal experience on others.

I’ll probably be reviewing the novel before too long, by the way. But it’s available as a very reasonably priced Kindle book now if anyone’s interested.