[Content warning: this post describes bisexuality as a desirable state. Any sexuality is okay as long as it makes you happy; if reading this will make you feel uncomfortable because of your monosexuality or pressured into becoming bisexual, I encourage you to skip this one.]
Many of my monosexual friends have attempted to turn themselves bisexual. This is a post on the success rates.
Much of the information in this post is based on things I was told in confidence or that were posted on personal social media accounts; for this reason, I have chosen to be fairly vague in this post. I encourage people who have tried bihacking to bring up their specific situations in the comments.
There are obvious epistemological problems with talking about bihacking: specifically, it is very difficult to tell apart “self-modified into bisexuality” and “was bisexual the whole time but repressed it”. I have decided to respect people’s self-identification here: if they think that bihacking just allowed them to express attractions that were already there, then I’ll think they did that, but if they think that bihacking actually turned them bi, then I’ll say that. People who are remarkably skeptical about bihacking may conclude that the success cases were all people in the first category.
The most successful strategy for changing one’s sexual orientation seems to be having a sudden epiphany: I personally know of two or three cases of “epiphany bisexuality”. Gayle Madwin, who identifies as queer-by-choice, has a fairly typical experience:
It was a very sudden thing, a very particular moment in time, in the evening of April 8, 1992. I suppose it was like . . . imagine a sudden flash of light going off in your mind, a flash of insight, and suddenly this gigantic abyss opens up in front of you, and in that yawning abyss you see the all the twinkling lights of a city skyline at night, and the city is called The Gay Life. Now then, you’re not actually in the city, you’re just a little suburban kid in a little suburban house with your two parents and 1.5 siblings. But you’re looking into the abyss, and you can grasp the edges of it and feel that it’s real, and if you chose to climb into it then you could. So you’re sitting there in your pink or blue bedroom, and you’re like, “Oh my god what am I going to do about this abyss here, what if my parents come in, how am I going to explain this gigantic abyss suddenly opening up right in the middle of my room?” Because even though you’re not actually in the abyss, you know you’re not supposed to even see it. You don’t fit in anymore. In order to fit in as a straight person, you’re not supposed to know you have any alternative. And besides that, now that you know you have an alternative, how can you just ignore it without making the tiniest effort to find out what the alternative really is? You don’t know what it’s like to be gay. So how can you turn it down without wondering, for the rest of your life, what you’re missing out on just because you were too much of a coward to climb into the abyss and explore?
So I didn’t have a choice about seeing the abyss open up. I suppose it was an unconscious choice, but it wasn’t a conscious one. And once it opened up, I could not in good conscience have passed it by. But I was aware of making a choice, of grasping the edges of the abyss and climbing through. I don’t think I completely understood, in that instant of climbing through, exactly how permanent my decision was—but I do think I had some idea. I wasn’t totally counting on it being temporary. And the instant after I climbed through, when I let go of the edges and felt myself falling—well, it was a long way down. I knew before I hit the ground that I’d fallen too far to ever be able to climb out again. And it was scary, you know, because ever since that moment I’ve never been able to see my parents except as distant faces peering through the hole in the sky. It was very isolating for the first couple of years because I didn’t know anybody at all down here. But eventually I did get to know the inhabitants of the city, in fact I even bought a house here, and I’m very much at home. I’m satisfied that I got a better deal in this city than most people get in the world I came from.
Epiphany bisexuality seems to be the most effective method of turning people who were previously 100% heterosexual into Kinsey 3 bisexuals. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any method which causes such epiphanies to occur, leaving the hopeful proto-bisexual with no better strategy than wandering around hoping a bolt of lightning hits.
Attempting to become bisexual seems to have a much less successful track record. With one exception– whom I have unfortunately lost contact with and thus cannot ask about their current sexual behavior– every person I know who has attempted bihacking has stalled out around Kinsey 1 or Kinsey 5 (depending on their starting point)– that is, they are predominantly attracted to one gender, but have incidental attraction to another gender. They may be interested in kink play, kissing, or foreplay with their non-preferred gender, but dislike genital interaction; they may be attracted to a very small percentage of their non-preferred gender, often those that look most similar to their preferred gender.
Common bihacking tactics include the following:
- Deliberately noticing and cultivating the twinges of attraction you get to people of your non-preferred gender.
- Jerking off to porn containing people of your non-preferred gender.
- Kissing people of your non-preferred gender experimentally.
- Attempting to “bridge” through attraction to trans people: starting with Buck Angel or Bailey Jay, and then gradually expanding to people with fewer and fewer signifiers of your preferred gender.
An interesting question which I’m not aware of the answer to is whether someone has managed to hack biromanticism but not bisexuality. I think that would be really useful to explore– particularly given the gender imbalance in the rationalist community.
A hopeful note is that most people who have tried bihacking have managed to make themselves Kinsey 1s or 5s– very, very few people completely fail. This might be because those with more fluid sexualities are the ones attracted to bihacking in the first place, but regardless, if you’re a guy who’d like to be able to kiss men, it may be well within your power to be able to do so.
It would be remiss to conclude this blog post without talking about trans people. Compared to the somewhat dismal track record of bihacking, there are many, many cases of people who previously believed they were only interested in cis women or cis men who became interested in trans people. One way to model this is that you have separate switches for “is into male-presenting people”, “is into male-identified people”, “is into people with flat chests”, “is into people with penises”, and “is into people with testosterone-dominant hormone systems”. People who become attracted to trans people flip some of the switches, but not all of them. A person who develops an attraction to trans men might switch the genitals switch to “is into people with any genitals”; a person who develops an attraction to a nonbinary person, assigned male at birth, who hasn’t medically transitioned may switch the identity switch to “is into people of any identity”. That offers some hope: perhaps we could manage to switch all the switches.
However, I think the best explanation for this data is that very few people are only interested in male-presenting, male-identified people with flat chests, penises, and an testosterone-dominant hormone system. Most people are instead “only attracted to people with a testosterone-dominant hormone system”, or “only attracted to people who identify as men”, or “only attracted to people who have a testosterone-dominant hormone system and a penis”. However, because they only interact with cis people, they don’t realize that those things aren’t always bundled together. Furthermore, it is very common for heterosexual people in our culture to be frightened of being seen as “gay” and for people of all sexualities to not view trans people as real members of our genders. So once a woman who is only attracted to people who identify as men meets some trans people, overcomes her fear of being gay, and internalizes that trans men are men, she might end up becoming very attracted to someone who has breasts. That isn’t a change in her sexuality, however– that’s a change in her beliefs. The potential for attraction was always there.
In conclusion, given the common rationalist goal of becoming an immortal bisexual polyamorous superbeing, it may very well be that bisexuality is the hardest part.
David Chapman said:
Having spent 20+ years in all-male or almost-all-male schools, I can report that “situational bisexuality” was then common in school-age American males. Anecdotally, the same is true in the military, prisons, etc.
If this doesn’t work in the rationalist community, maybe it’s because y’all aren’t desperate enough, due to being too old (hormones down to a manageable level) and/or insufficiently segregated! 🙂
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MugaSofer said:
Is it really situational bisexuality if all the available partners are same-sex?
Seems like situational homosexuality, which is hardly better than heterosexuality from a bihacking point of view.
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David Chapman said:
I guess that depends on whether you define sexuality in terms of action or desire. Both can be useful, according to purposes.
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kevinbrowne said:
I am currently working on my own version of bihacking and felt kind of alone in that quest. Now you’ve given me a name for it and some ideas about it, so thank you! Can anyone point me to more material about this?
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callmebrotherg said:
This is about polyhacking rather than bihacking, but the process involved is described super in-depth, so there might be something there that you could use for bihacking (in which case, tell the rest of the community!).
http://lesswrong.com/lw/79x/polyhacking/
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Jay Feldman said:
Tried bihacking for a year, it failed, then I few months after I gave up I had the epiphany bisexuality moment.
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MugaSofer said:
>Kinsey 1 or Kinsey 5 (depending on their starting point)– that is, they are predominantly attracted to one gender, but have incidental attraction to another gender.
Isn’t this Kinsey 2/4?
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Machine Elf Paladin said:
Kinsey scale is 7 points from 0 to 6. 0/6 is “exclusive attraction to opposite/same sex”, 2/4 is “attracted to both genders but with a preference towards opposite/same sex”.
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Rangi said:
I might be biromantic but not bisexual (Kinsey 1 or 2 at most). I’m not interested in testosterone-dominant bodies, but can feel attraction towards some people with such bodies with the right personality. Unfortunately, I can’t describe a method for achieving this; it was just an epiphany, realizing suddenly that certain men I know would be just as fun to date as certain women.
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Dragon's meme trash said:
I accidentally reversed bihacked myself so to speak. Used to be a lot closer to a kinsy 3, now I’m a kinsey 5, probably because I kept using the term “gay” to refer to myself because it generally sounded more aesthetically pleasing. Also possibly taking hormones and other substances
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thebirdreader said:
On a related note, what do you think of the ones that are into people with such-and-such chromosomes, regardless of genitals or presented identity?
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ozymandias said:
Do they make them get 23&me before banging?
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thebirdreader said:
The attraction is more like ontological than epistemological 😉
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MugaSofer said:
I’d be very interested to see someone totally change their mind about sex after being informed the person has a rare genetic disorder.
I’m not even kidding, if that exists it sounds like it’d be fascinating.
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anon. said:
I’ve never been in that situation, but I expect that if I did, that would be my experience
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nancylebovitz said:
If they’ve got immortality, they might also be able to enable people to choose their sexual orientation.
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ResearchToBeDone said:
I’ve been trying this myself, but my primary strategy is less any of those, and more via interrogation of the arbitrariness of mental concepts of gender. Like, whether I’m bi or not, I know there are things about traits I associate with one binary gender or another that don’t make sense. Independent of bi-hacking, I’m already interested in changing my subconscious concepts of gender in that sense.
So the strategy has been mostly “think hard about how little sense gender makes as a concept until it falls apart, and expose yourself to people whose performance of their gender clashes with your conception of how gender works”. Not a lot of success yet, though. Although by the model I use to think about gender, I think it sort of makes sense that success is usually on a 1-2 point scale.
If we simplify the idea of gender to roughly “type of people that we associate with specific collections of traits”, and we assume that people tend to be attracted to particular traits, it would seem to follow that monosexual people are monosexual because most of the traits they’re attracted to tend to fall into one specific gender category. My working theory is that changing the traits someone is attracted to is difficult, but changing the degree to which one associates those traits with a particular gender might be easier. At least, it might be easier to the extent that there are people whose performance of gender may not entirely line up with the traits you associate with it and are attracted to.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I tried something like this. All that happened was that I was forced to conclude that my sexual orientation is less “heterosexual” and more “not people with male sexual characteristics.”
If I ever encountered some alien race where the males had human-female-like sexual characteristics and the females had human-male-like sexual characteristics* I’d probably be gay for them.
*(I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe the males have sperm reservoirs in their vagina that the females suck up with a penis-like ovipositior? And then the females lay eggs later with their ovipositor? And then the males nurse the babies when they hatch?)
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Histidine said:
They don’t particularly resemble humans (huge and have four arms, among other things), but the Mardukans in the Prince Roger / Empire of Man series by John Ringo and David Weber have something like this. The “males”* have a big penis-like ovipositor to deliver ova, and the “females”* have a sperm sec where fertilization takes place. After that, the quadruplets gestate in pregnancy blisters on the “female’s” back.
*The human characters in the story use those labels rather than what they consider the more technically correct categorization based on gamete type, due to closer parallels with humanity’s own sexual dimorphism and historical patriarchal cultures.
(This was your completely useless bit of mil-scifi trivia for the day)
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somervta said:
//An interesting question which I’m not aware of the answer to is whether someone has managed to hack biromanticism but not bisexuality. I think that would be really useful to explore– particularly given the gender imbalance in the rationalist community.//
I think this is me, or maybe bisensuality+biromanticism but only partial bisexuality. I’m not sure why you think it’d be useful to explore though.
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ozymandias said:
It seems to me like not having a romantic relationship is generally both more distressing and harder to fix than not having sex, and therefore exploring ways for people to have nonsexual romantic relationships might be useful.
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itsabeast said:
You mean like a romantic friendship? Those used to be very common.
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systemicinsanity said:
Is there a gender, hormone, or sex trend in successful bihacking, that you’ve seen? Pop culture keeps saying vague things about women having fluid sexualities or being latently bisexual or whatnot. Last I heard, surveys have about twice as many gay as bisexual men, and twice as many bisexual as lesbian women, by self-identification.
Alternately, is there a trend in the *object* of successful bihacking? Like, is a bihacker more likely to develop a new attraction towards men than they are towards women, or vice versa, regardless of the bihacker’s own gender?
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The Smoke said:
Something like ‘bihacking’ being an issue seems like a symptom of some unhealthy aspects of the community. Most probably, there is a remarkable pressure on people to conform to the ‘ideal’ sexuality, even if this is not perpetuated by anyone in
particular.
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ozymandias said:
You can think of no reason beyond social pressure that lots of people might like to be able to be attracted to more than one gender?
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queenshulamit said:
I have heard of a couple of trans women who were lesbians but HRT made them bi (Julia Serano said this, and a couple of women in my board game club and someone I follow on tumblr.) I mean I don’t think there’s anyone who wants to be bi badly enough that they would transition if they had no reasons to besides that, but it’s interesting. Do you know of studies into the thing? Seems like a thing you might know.
(Jesus would disapprove of bihacking b/c he is bad and mean and wants people to have zero fun)
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Somervta said:
Interesting. I’d also like to know if anyone has an idea of where to look for more on this,
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Gtri said:
I’ve successfully hacked my self from being completely turned off to gay porn, to enjoying masturbating to gay porn. Whether I will be attracted to it in real life is another matter, but I certainly have fantasies about it. Its much stronger when I am already aroused. When I am not aroused I find women appealing and don’t find men appealing. Not at all attracted to hairy men.
This was mostly a process of lots of being aware that bi-hacking was a thing + lots of hentai (futanari, traps) + erotic lit with similar themes + a mild dose of trans porn
This was over a process of maybe 4-5 years? It was only in the past month or so that I became aware I could also get off to gay porn.
I was never set out to do this, but it was always on the edge of mind.
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avbn said:
I’m a little late to comment since I’m going through a backlog of posts, but I figure another perspective couldn’t hurt. On the topic of bisexuality and biromanticism, it was through a process very similar to bihacking that I realized and accepted my aromanticism. If I like the V and the D ( and a great deal more of anatomy in general) but am not interested in long walks on the beach or candlelight dinners with anyone, why not embrace bisexuality? My only problem is whether to consider the result a success, if only because being emotionally disinterested isn’t exactly a huge turn-on (who knew?).
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BiFurious said:
I successfully shifted from 1 to 3 over the course of several years. Notably, I pulled it off in my early 20s.
Some of it was an epiphany about attractions I’d always had, conquering socially induced hangups about gay intimacy, and realizing things I’d noticed at an early age but forgot. That part is what I usually share with people. The part I can never share and will take to the grave is that I made a deliberate effort to shift using the techniques mentioned above. I could’ve kept going but wanted to stop there.
I think fetishes can be a powerful tool that can override/remap sexuality to some extent. Become highly dependent on a fetish, use fetish porn to cross the gap, then wean down the fetish.
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