Everything Is Content - Bisexuality in pop culture - a deep dive

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

In celebration of Pride Month - this week on Everything Is Content, we’re doing a deep dive into a topic that is very close to our hearts -  bisexuality in pop culture. Who are our bi and queer icons from the world of showbiz? (and bizarrely, the animal kingdom…), what are the new frontiers for bi representation in the media? and what does the queer pop boom mean for us? If you’d like to hear us deep dive on a topic - send us a message on Instagram @everythingiscontentpodAnd while we have you - we’d like to remind our UK listeners to vote in the general election on Thursday 4th July. —ROLLING STONE: Billie Eilish Would Like to Reintroduce HerselfDAZED: Why were the SATC girls so weird about bisexuality? GLAAD: Representation of Bisexual+ Characters THEM: Reneé Rapp Is Rewriting the Rules of Lesbian Pop StardomTV SHOWS MENTIONED: Sex And The CityAlly McbealThe OCI Kissed A GirlBroad City Killing Eve Euphoria Coronation Street A Shot at Love with Tila TequilaToo Hot To HandleLove IslandAre You The One ARTISTS MENTIONED: Frank Ocean Miley CyrusBillie EilishRenne Rapp Muna Chappell Roan Jojo Siwa—Follow us on Instagram:@everythingiscontentpod @beth_mccoll @ruchira_sharma@oenone ---Everything Is Content is produced by Faye Lawrence for We Are GrapeExec Producer: James Norman-FyfeMusic: James RichardsonPhotography: Rebecca Need-Meenar Artwork: Joe Gardner  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

and only he's having sushi as we're having this conversation and she's just waving these chopsticks around being like no no one's a hundred percent straight she's like conducting our gayness yeah up up up up up and away i'm beth i'm richara and i'm anoni you are listening to everything is content every week on this podcast we get together to share our opinions about the biggest pop culture stories of the moment. From films to literature, runways to ticky-tockies, we love to unpack it all. This week, we're doing another deep dive. This time, in celebration of Pride Month, we're going to get stuck into a topic that's very important to all of us here.

Bisexuality and pop culture. Who are some of our bi icons? How far have we come with bi representation since the 90s? And what does the queer pop boom mean for us? Make sure you're subscribed so you don't ever miss an episode. And let us know on Instagram at everything is content pod if there's a topic you really want to hear us cover. And before we start, this is our last episode before the UK general election which is on Thursday the 4th of July. We want to remind you to go out and vote. Okay let's get on with the deep dive.

We usually start the podcast by sharing what we've been loving this week but every time we do a deep dive we like to tweak it slightly. So today I'd like each of you to tell me your bisexual or queer icon. By the way in this episode we'll be using the term bisexual to encompass several different identities including bisexual, pansexual and sexually fluid. So girlies who are your bi cons? The two I wanted to go for are Frank Ocean and then also Rene Rapp I remember when Frank Ocean put out this statement um on his tumblr about falling in love with a man when he was 19 this was back in 2012 and there was this massive moment of a lot of people visibly saying that they just wouldn't support his music anymore which was obviously fucking grim and then there was like

a few people I think Beyonce was one of them I think Jay-Z was one of them I can't remember who else who like put public statements out and they would just basically said like love is love um and supported him because he was going through a really rough time when he came out it was really it was really really bad also Renee Rapp I really love how open she's been about her sexuality she's been on loads of podcasts and spoken about um previously identifying as bisexual and now coming out as a lesbian and yeah it's really nice to have somebody just be really vocal about that and just talk about their sexuality and also be really proud of it what about you bethany so i've got three because i suppose i love bi people more than Richard. My first one is

someone pretty hip-hop happening as Rene Rapp. It's Marlon Brando. R.I.P. Marlon Brando is fine! For Christmas, I think I was about 15, I asked for his autobiography, which my parents procured for me from eBay and I can see Producer Faye typing

furiously to find out if this is true. Bisexual icon icon kind of in the way that he was like I'm an actor of course I've shagged men many rumors about who he'd been with uh Richard Pryor James Baldwin like just his rumored shag list is like the toast of the town of Hollywood like all of the coolest people so he's my number one I read that at a very formative age i was like oh my god okay cardi b her tweet when someone accused her of queerbaiting and she said i ate bitches out before you was born sorry i don't have the razor phone pics to prove it to you which i think is just the most fantastic millennial clapback to anyone saying like you're queerbaiting or just anything i'm sorry i don't have the razor pics to prove it and then to drop it off susan sarandon oh oh my god love do you know i have to say my

favorite genre and i annoyingly i can't think of the men that have done this but i've watched a few interviews or listened to something with often like marlon brano-esque men and i love it when they say something like that like just like really casually drop in that they've slept with men but it's really inconsequential because I don't think we see that or hear that as much from male celebrities whereas I think women might allude to through music or their work that you know they've slept with women or they've done something and if men do it it often actually becomes the brunt of like more homophobia than with women because people tend to sexualize it so i love that marlon brando was a little queer and only who is your number one number two number three if you've got four okay i didn't know we were allowed to do two plus it's a competition i've only got two i'm

sorry my first one's quite obvious it's miley cyrus um she came out as pansexual in 2016 i've loved miley forever actually do you know i will do I'll throw in a couple more because I think for me these women showed me that it wasn't like shameful and that sexuality can come from a cool place so like Cara Delevingne when she was first coming up I'm sorry that lion tattoo on her finger and like she was that girl and so when she came out when Miley came out there was like a whole generation even um Amber Heard there was just kind of like a cohort of female celebrities very casually if maybe it felt casual to me i probably wasn't reading as much media as i do now but i remember it just feeling suddenly that there was this conversation and it was completely fine and it was just like yeah i'm a woman and i have boyfriends and

girlfriends so those three ladies and then a special mention for Pam St Clement who plays Pat Butcher in EastEnders because I didn't know this until like a few months ago but she's actually one of the founders of Stonewall yeah I know isn't that amazing I had no idea so yeah I love that I don't think she I haven't I used to watch EastEnders but I didn't watch it like religiously I don't know if she ever had a queer storyline but that would have been iconic what an icon lover when i was researching for this episode i googled bisexual animals just to see like who in the animal kingdom is gorgeous by icon and i was like oh my god the list is extensive is it um it was like earthworms flamingos whales dolphins only to find out in animal biology bisexual actually just means to have multiple

so they're actually not bi icons they're just animals with different stuff the best gay icons is it the bonobos that only have sex with other female bonobos like for pleasure like they're all just it's a massive matriarchy and they're all lesbians but they have to have sex with men to have babies but other when they're not having babies also someone like fact check this to your own you know in your free time because it could be slightly wrong but from what i remember they're basically a lesbian matriarchy who only allow men in when they have to procreate and otherwise they're all just getting with each other i don't know that sounds like my kind of biology i'm not going to fact check imagine we get sued by bonobos big bonobos coming

should we get stuck into some buy discourse two yeses from me it's a bi yes from me delicious it's a hello to bi discourse so this is a topic that i think we've got a lot to say on and it's one that pops up regularly you could set your watch to it in the online discourse cycle and it is the straight boyfriends of bisexual women i saw a post on X recently that read, this has nothing to do with anyone being bisexual. I don't want your cishet boyfriend in a queer space. Like leave him at home. Don't bring him to Pride.

Don't bring him to Chappell Rhone. Chappell Rhone? Why would a man be there? End tweet. I said none of that. That was all someone else's tweet. We've seen this take many times on our feeds, but this time felt particularly spicy.

I don't know whether we're all fed up of seeing it for the nth time, but people had a lot to say. The person who posted that turned off replies, but, and I haven't checked this today, they might have deleted it, had 10,000 quotes on that post last time I looked. Oh, nightmare. So, I know. checked this today they might have deleted it had 10 000 quotes on that post last time i looked oh nightmare so i know let's wade into the mark why do we think bisexuality is always in the firing line in these very predictable ways and just to explain on that quote cis her boyfriend

would refer to a cisgender straight heterosexual man who was in a relationship with a queer bisexual woman. And cisgender to mean not transgender and identifies with the gender that they were assigned at birth. It is just like that really old cliche that people have around bisexuality, which is you're one foot in you're one foot out and there is a lot of biphobia when it comes to kind of accepting that people aren't categorized in this really simple way of being you know gay or straight biphobia sits in a different place where you have to take nuance in and I think you know having the nuance of a discussion that somebody can be bisexual and have you know the queer experience but then also at present be in a heterosexual relationship and they've just brought their partner along that requires nuance and sometimes bisexuality doesn't really get that

level of nuance it's still kind of like a pervasive a pervasive kind of like stigma against it I guess I think this tweet why it's it's complicated is because the issue that has happened more recently is that there has been this growing and amazing push to create more gender fluid and queer friendly spaces for people who feel like the world is not set up for them. And so it's really useful to have these queer nights or spaces. And because we do have this sort of archetypal stereotypical idea of what especially like the fabled cishet white man is these some queer people in queer spaces are worried about them you know coming into their space but I would argue that if a cishet man is dating a queer woman you would hope and believe that they are not going to be an aggressor or someone that's going to be

like worrying to have in the space so again I do think that's the difficulty where bisexual people are kind of being blamed for bringing inverted commas unwelcome people into the space but it's not this is where sometimes this conversation around gender identity and sexuality gets a bit clunky and messy because in a push to create a more inclusive world sometimes that puts up barriers that actually creates more division yeah yeah yeah this is kind of a tangential point but I've had it a few times when going to queer nights or queer clubs where I've very clearly just been like had you know like a read over by the bouncer and the bouncer just is like giving me a hard time it

almost makes me feel like i have to just like go through my dating history or like who i've had sex with or like kissed whatever and just be like well there's this this this and this to prove that i am like part of that space and some part of me can acknowledge it comes from a place of wanting to protect and keep this safe space going for people who you know are marginalized in society but also doesn't feel great when you are just like on the outskirts of that and then somebody does something like that to you and makes you feel like you can't be part of the space because you don't look or you're not intrinsically part of it so I can empathize with people not wanting you know heterosexual cis men there personally i probably wouldn't bring my

boyfriend to a queer night i would just go with my queer friends but i don't know there's just so much nuance in this topic but i also feel like gatekeeping isn't the point of these spaces but also we're not in a world where it is safe for marginalized people to exist as well so there's just so much going on here and in the tweet it's it's a chapel rone and i know i'm saying that differently and wrong every single time concert and pride which those aren't intimate kind of club nights with a very tailored audience that is pride it's a big event there are big events and the other is a concert so it did just feel very petty another point people have been making is that you can't tell from scanning. So they're kind of, I'm assuming, on the hunt at these events for someone who looks like they don't, quote unquote, belong, like the straight boyfriend.

And you can't tell who is the cishet man just from glancing at them. Like there is no little pride banner. There is no like rainbow tattoo. There is just no way to know. So I think it's just like a moot point. Who are you telling like don't bring? Like what's going to happen if you do bring either your straight boyfriend who, as Anoni said, you would hope would be very respectful. Or your queer partner who might present in a way that makes him look like a cishet boyfriend.

Like it just seems like a very posturing point. Because where do you go with that you don't know we don't want to encourage people to feel like they visibly have to present as anything because I've always been like very femme and you know I don't face the same discrimination as other people who aren't femme or who present in a much more obviously queer way I don't know there are like so many things going on with all of this because I don't experience discrimination in the same way. I will never understand that.

But it's also just like, I don't think gatekeeping or like making people feel as if they're not looking the right way for being themselves is also the answer. I think actually we might be on the turning point of something positive. And I always say this, like the pendulum has to swing really far the other way in order for it to come back and sit somewhere in the middle and I think it's interesting we've gone from anyone that falls outside of this very specific paradigm of

inverted commas normalcy is ousted from society they then go and create their own groups their own spaces and that's happening so well that they're actually going actually now we don't want you who we perceive to not be our version of whatever we want you to be welcome and I wonder if that means that we're on the cusp of everyone kind of going actually we're all more similar than we thought is there more common ground and I do think that's and I know we're going to come on to this but I think that is the future hopefully of the younger people coming through it's like we've had to fight and the generations before us have had to fight for representation and the ability to express ourselves and actually it's kind of going the other way and it's like god why do you care stop asking me like who i'm having sex with and what

my genitals are can i not just come to the club like ala billy eilish who said that she like felt that she was pushed to come out because a reporter who i think in hindsight probably was well intentioned was trying to connect with her over being bisexual but it just came off all wrong and it kind of felt like billy was getting baited into saying that she was bisexual and she did and then later felt really frustrated with it it feels like and we'll come on to this later it feels like labels aren't really what a lot of young people care about they just are who they are they like will sing about it if they want to sing about it and that's it i also think with bisexuality people have maybe veered away from putting a label on it because it can be really exhausting to talk about it to identify as such and deal with the biphobia the bi erasure so it can be easier to kind of be absorbed into

a broader label uh i'm queer or I'm, you know, something else. I think when it's explicitly about bisexuals, people really come with the daggers on the internet and in the discourse that maybe someone like Billie Eilish or anyone who hasn't said or has no interest in a formal coming out will maybe be a little bit hesitant to attach that word to it even if that word is a perfectly like perfect description of their identity I think it can be very pointed in a completely different way like you know I'm not going to do oppression olympics

but I think it can have its own set of problems to use that word i think because it still goes back to that idea of like people think you know bi is like a phase on the way to being more gay or it's someone being greedy or it's like it's always just been kind of taking the piss out of like no one really takes it seriously it was i would say more and more what we're seeing with younger people which i think is going to happen more and more by the way if we carry on like socializing children in a way that means that like you can fancy who you fancy and like gender isn't important that more and more people are just going to be like actually yeah I do fancy this person and today the person I fancy is a boy but like tomorrow the person I have a crush on could be a girl and actually I wonder how much these sort of like labels will matter but we've got a long way to

come before we get there I personally don't believe that anyone's fully straight but that's my own battle to fight so I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I've been obsessed with I Kissed a Girl, which is a show on BBC, which is the first British dating show to feature exclusively lesbian and bisexual women and non-binary people. And it got me thinking about how bisexuality is portrayed in pop culture and how that's changed over the last few years. Dazed published a piece in 2016 titled Why were the sex in the city girls so weird about bisexuality in it there were multiple moments which were highlighted which throughout sex in the city the girls were super biphobic and this kind of comes on to what you were talking about and only carrie bradshaw fucking how she called bisexuality uh quote layover to gay town and

miranda called it greedy so yeah you know great stuff the 90s and noughties were the early days of mainstream LGBT representation and I guess at the time it probably felt quite new and super clunky I mean that that is a very kind way of putting it I'll say we'll get on to how representation has become more nuanced but for now I wanted to ask do you think that was typical of bi representation in the 90s and noughties do you think it was you know ideas of it being quote unquote a layover to gay town do you know what I think is really interesting about bisexuality as well is that men so often are viewed and correct me if you disagree viewed more harshly in terms of sometimes if a woman finds

out a man is bisexual, that might engender some homophobia within her or start to feel insecure about the fact that this man is also attracted to men. I feel like it maybe carries more weight than a woman saying to a guy that she's bisexual. I wonder if it's something to do with threat or just is that like traditional homophobia, but the episode where Carrie finds out the guy she's dating is bisexual, she is just immediately kind of repulsed and i can't date him anymore and i don't think that happens even today as much if a woman comes out as bisexual so i do think that that as much as it was like it's quite shocking now i do think there's still a thread of that that exists within society now as well. I agree completely.

I was thinking back on all of my favourite shows, shows I still love, and it was Sex and the City. Ally McBeal has a very similar storyline where I don't know if you've watched Ally McBeal. Excellent show, very problematic. And in one of the episodes, Ally McBeal, who's basically searching for love the entire time, meets a great guy, finds out he's bisexual

and completely discards him for all of the reasons. And this is the heroine of the show, basically searching for love the entire time meets a great guy finds out he's bisexual and completely discards him for all of the reasons and this is the heroine of the show says i'm you know it makes me worried you'll have diseases it makes me worried just like the late 90s early 2000s came out it makes me you know worried you'll take our kids to the ball game and you'll be checking out the mums and the dads so like very many problematic things there biphobic wise like hypersexuality and that they're kind of dishonest classic homophobia all of that and I just think it was so hard to get away from and it's it's maybe it's because we were watching shows about women because we were younger girls and we were teenagers but it is that storyline and I saw this on tumblr about

a thousand years ago so it's probably really reductive but it was a post that said when bisexual men exist men just assume that they're or we assume that they're secretly gay with bisexual women we assume that they're actually secretly straight all of them it just like tends them towards the the default it's just attraction to men or it's like faking and it's just like a very I mean maybe it's really simplistic but it really awoke me to the idea of like that's all we do we hear that someone's bisexual we go you don't know you're actually just attracted to men and you know one of my favorite biphobic things that you just brought up is this idea that like if you're bi you're going to be attracted to everyone but it's like if you're straight sorry you don't go

into a room and if every person that room is the opposite gender as you you don't fancy them all it's like it doesn't fancy both genders doesn't suddenly mean you fancy everyone that's ever existed which seems to be the common fear no it's so stupid part of the issue with the representation is just like really badly written narratives around bisexual people so I'm thinking of the OC when Marissa gets into a relationship with Olivia Wilde who is you know I think she's the manager of a bar or something and it's very much seen as like a diversion from her real track of dating Ryan you know the muscly guy who she's meant to be with so I think it doesn't help people understand bisexuality as being

legitimate when you see like this character being portrayed as having a quote-unquote blip from the narrative of the route she's meant to be which is in a straight relationship it doesn't make bisexuality seem legitimate or you know like a real sexual identity when so little time is given to her being in this like really i don't know new kind of relationship and this being a core part of her identity that she's exploring it's just a blip in the the storyline do you know something I always think about is the words heterosexual homosexual and bisexual are way too reductive for bigoted brains to conceive because when someone hears someone's like bisexual or homosexual it is always the sex that people are thinking about and whenever you have a bi character on tv

they're always hyper sex they're always someone that is kind of like dragging you into the dark side they're like the hedonist and it's like there's never really any stories just about the fact that it's queer love any sort of like queer person is not given the same wealth of feeling, emotion and romance as a straight relationship would be given. And I think that's because everyone's brains conversely are trained to just imagine gay sex as soon as they hear that someone has got any kind of sexuality that diverts from straightness. And that's a real like hindrance because it's like you're forgetting everything else. All anyone can think about is, oh, my God, god you're gonna have sex with someone who's got the same genitals as you and that's like kind of where the buck stops they are just um plot devices then in these and we're in the then now we're talking about how you know before this modern era how

bisexual people were portrayed and they were actually sexy plot devices they were not i'm trying to think back i didn't watch the oc to this point so i don't know whether oliver wilde's character gets like a proper arc or if she's just in and out but everyone i can think of is like a one episode job that's meant as like a learning curve the main character bisexual people were not like recurring characters whereas gay characters that did that did happen in the 90s that did take off no that's very much the vibe of the oc she's like there to kind of mess up the romance of marissa and ryan and then very much just like fucks off at some point that's so infuriating was it in the new york times it comes up quite a lot but there was a cover and it was like the new sexuality by and then it was like

what paper was that in was it the news week that was it news week the new sexuality by and then it was like male what paper was that in was it the news week that was it news week the title was bisexuality not gay not straight a new sexual identity emerges do you know what it is it's just oh my god the old secret third thing it's it's the secret third thing and also just genuine laziness like there is a podcast i listen to where one person who's part of the podcast is bi but she's just married a woman and so other people just keep referring to her as lesbian and it really irritates me because it's like no I think people have this idea that once you pick a partner the fullness of your sexuality is diminished into whatever partner you're with at that moment in time and I think that's what's

so hard often for bisexual people is when you're in a straight relationship people are like oh right so you're straight because it's just easier for them also like just on that kind of horrendous newsweek article bisexuality just hasn't just emerged once the clock struck 12 and it was the year 2000 like bisexuality has like a rich history do you not think that like people are fucking each other like left right and center in like ancient greece and they probably weren't putting a label to it but they were a thousand percent all kinds of sexualities. They were scissoring in the Egyptian pyramids. Hell yeah. Everyone's kind of resisting and tussling with this cultural ideology,

which is so much more recent than humanity is, but so pervasive and so all-consuming that it literally creates wars and makes people die. And sorry, I've gotten really deep. And podcasts episodes. And podcast episodes it's just such a weird thing to be cross about and to misunderstand because our understanding of sexuality as we believe to be true now is so young in comparison to like how long vaginas and penises

and people have existed it's frustrating because i think people so badly often do you want to understand but it just goes to something really reductive so I think people think of like okay there's three sexualities they're straight that's zero gay there's bisexuality that's 50 gay and then gay which is 100 gay have I done it right and obviously it's very well meaning but then to say no that's not right you almost feel like a little bit mean you go it's not right it's a it's a much richer more varied you know and I actually am happy with people not totally understanding or you know cleaning the slate and just listening and just going you you know this better than me how can i not step in and i definitely step in all the time i think i i've got tons of not internalized biphobia but

probably like some bi erasure probably some like very silly ideas about how other people's, because my sexuality is not a copy and paste of Richaer's or anyone and none of my friends. It's not, it's its own distinct thing. We're all muddling around trying to understand it. Maybe we need a bit more grace with each other, but we definitely do need the conversations because it's not a zero gay, 50 gay, a thousand gay. I mean, some people are a zero gay, 50 gay, 1,000 gay. I mean, some people are 1,000 gay, but...

LGBTQ plus media charity glad reported that the 2023-24 tv season has the lowest number of bisexual characters since 2020 they also reported that a recurring problem that is still seen today is bi erasure where a character does not label themselves as bi, queer or any word to self-describe. Is the new frontier of bisexuality to present it on screen without comment? An example of this is in Broad City the characters sleep with women and men and it's never explained or labelled or in Killing Eve neither Villanelle or Eve openly say they are bisexual although their characters can certainly and are often read that way. So let's discuss this a little bit, because I do think we are in a kind of not golden era for the bisexual, God, I wish, but in a far better place, especially setting it against what we just talked about,

how hideous it was 20, 30 years ago. I feel like when I've been watching these shows where people don't necessarily identify but they are just like sleeping with men women whoever or just like yeah acting in a way that could be perceived as bisexual or whatever pansexual I've really loved that and I felt like not having a label has felt really empowering watching that and it's felt like oh no this is the norm we don't need to be bogged down with, you know, having a moment of coming out or having that kind of discussion. It makes me feel like I'm a norm in a way by not having this be like a big part of the storyline. It's just acceptable.

Like I remember watching Rue fall in love with Jules on Euphoria and they never had a conversation. They never made it a thing. And I felt so moved by that and it felt so much like a relief because it was just a fucking love story it was just a love story I couldn't agree with you more and I also think it means that it's not a hack plot device and that they're not ticking boxes by labeling things all the fear that people have around their sexuality

and having to come out like that is the scariness it's like how people are going to judge me it's kind of lovely to live in a world where it's never questioned it's like no questions are asked and no answers have to be given it's just happening but then it's interesting if this charity is saying that that's bi erasure because maybe it is linguistically but personally I agree with that I think it's better. I think we need both because I think I just, in my life, really just rely on the assumption of bisexuality

because my big age, like I'm not doing a, you know, it's no necessity for me to do any sort of coming out. So it rings very true to watch something like Broad City where she is going home with a gun no one blinks an eye if we need a full spectrum of representation which will include the people struggling with bisexuality the people with internalized biphobia the people who need to come out and a kind of a roadmap for adults and young people to come out as bisexual to navigate

bisexuality and we need people that it's like baked in don't worry about it like i'm just fucking a woman there's a man there's somebody else that is what we need and I think that's the problem it's not that we need to kind of encourage writers of these shows to write a really hammy really like overwrought scene where an adult woman is like I'm really grappling with this because maybe she's not and it's just as true for that not to be the case so I'm just like you know pushing for more representation across yeah the board would you say we've had that though with slightly younger programs like sex education and heart stopper and those shows which are kind of on the nose and sort of like educational at the same time as being but then again I think the other issue maybe with that is programs like sex education and heart stopper are so on the

nose about gay relationships are so in your face about being liberal that maybe there is a demographic of people that won't even watch them and maybe the by representation with labels that we need is on shows which has got like a very large populace watching them which is why sometimes you hear about there's on coronation street they had a trans character for years that literally no one spoke about wasn't a big deal hayley lover i never really i was always an eastenders girly sorry i was both i was bisexual i was by you were by soap you were by soap opera by soap soul so i think that like maybe that's the issue it's like i find see and find and engage with lots of content and media and things that do have those things in them but maybe it's like I mean this might sound dumb but have we ever had a politician coming out as bi

not that I know of at least in the UK this just in from our producer but Carla Dania who is the co-leader of the Green Party is bisexual so I don't want to sway your vote but yeah very sorry for the bi erasure you know what has been actually quite instrumental for me which sounds quite cringe for me to say but seeing in loads of the like really trashy netflix reality shows where a lot of the contestants just act act out their sexuality in the ways they want and they often just like go for men go for women and it's just like completely normalized. That's probably some of the best representation I've seen on TV compared to like dramas

or anything else like that. Because it is just like people living their life. As a reality TV lover, I think you're on the nose because we did like 20 years ago or 15 years ago, there was a kind of a shot of love with Teal'r Tequila, which was the first time I had seen. And it was it was a car crash show. And like, I think really like everything you shouldn't do with a reality show. But it was Tila Tequila who comes out as bisexual at the beginning, says, I'm into men, I'm into women.

And she had 10 men or I don't know, a certain amount of men, a certain amount of women to fall in love with. And that was a little bit dicey. Whereas in recent years, we saw someone on, I think, the second or first series of Love Island just partner with a woman. Wasn't in the rules. Sophie, who sadly passed away a few years ago, just partnered up with Katie, which I was like, wow, amazing. And now I think people have seen that there is a hunger for that and they're making dedicated shows. But it's so interesting when you leave people room on a show like that to be themselves and to follow their heart. Often it won't follow a heteronormative script. Yeah, I'm just thinking of like Francesca Fargo.

I believe that's her name on Too Hot to Handle from a few years ago. Her and like Megan Barton Hanson were like the first women who I saw who were super femme, who were just like, it just was never a thing. They were just like, I'm going to couple up with a woman. Maybe I'll couple up with this guy. It just, it was so, it was so like nothing. There was a American show called Are You The One, which had a full, lovely, lovely, lost cast. And, you know, I think they had a trans contestant which I think had been had just not been done they were not kind of

over explaining it for anyone they were like anyone could really like end up with like you're never going to know basically it's not like the other one where it's like men and women versus each other the women are all infighting which I thought was a really good idea and it comes with its own set of challenges and Love Island every year is like no we can't have

yada yada yada and which is why it's fantastic that these shows are being made separately and blowing up so some might say that we are living in a golden age of queer pop. Some others may say that pop and queerness are synonymous. And that would be me. But anyway, we have artists like Chapel Roan, Chappelle Roan, Chappelle Roan, Chappelle Roan, because I don't know which one, Moona, and dare I say, Jojo Siwawa and they are all providing us with sapphic anthems renee rap who um richira brought up earlier recently told them magazine

about the self-doubt she had while deciding to come out as a lesbian when she was hosting snl after having been out as bisexual since she was a teenager and she said when you're bisexual you almost want to prove yourself but it came to be that no I actually just am gay like that so in that same interview with them magazine now I only saw this one clip so I don't have it in the context but they were doing like a quick fire round and they said to her strapping or yapping and you could read this two ways you either think she's laughing being coquettish and coy and finding it really funny or I kind of read it like whoa that's quite a lot to put out in the world and she replies and she's kind of loads of people took it as her being really funny but she was like oh well you know you can strap and you can yap I'm not saying I do either but they're

both great and she's kind of like dancing around it I don't know if that's for comedic effect or because actually there's one thing to acknowledge someone's sexuality but it's kind of another thing to insinuate or ask it's like it would be like doing a quick fire round with a straight person who like a straight woman and going condoms or the pull-out method I mean it's just such an invasive question just because you're straight like having straight or gay sex I just thought it's quite a lot to ask a young woman if she straps yeah for all the not the dads listening to podcast sorry i just know that like some of my older relatives have listened to this do we do an explainer on what strapping and yapping is even yapping i think because i

just don't want them to have to google it on their own dime i would prefer they google oh really okay so yeah i mean i assume that was the yapping is like because the internet has decided that yapping just means going on a bit and strapping the art of using a strap see it's a really personal question isn't it I just didn't want anyone to to find themselves uh opening google on a busy train yeah so it's just it's the art of wearing a strap on which couples of any gender can do it's called pegging when a woman wears a strap on and penetrates a man and if women do it together then it can be called strapping it's a really common thing like for lesbian women or like anyone who engages in it it just felt quite a extreme thing

like i imagine she has quite young fans and it's not that young people shouldn't be aware of it I just thought we do have this tendency and it's kind of what I was talking about earlier with this like the idea of like sexuality being at the forefront of the concept rather than like the two people involved where it's like the minute you mention who you're attracted to if it's not straight people it's like great how do you have sex we've spoken about it before but just like red carpet interviews and interviews in general have crossed the threshold into just like kind of being harassment of celebrities and just kind of like you know like pushing them into these like really uncomfortable situations where they're like forced to talk about sex or sexualize their like essential colleagues like i'm thinking of

you know like io edabiri being like shown j shown Jeremy Allen White's like new Calvin Klein advert where he was like completely topless and like barely wearing anything and then the interviewer was just like so what do you think about this what do you think about this it it feels like that with this situation as well and what I do think is because she's spoken about her sexuality openly that in some interviewers minds gives them the green light to also probe into her sex life which is not at all fair also i kind of want you guys to watch the video because there were lots of people who may be bigger fans of hers that read it better and maybe it's like just me feeling a bit like motherly because she is younger than us and i felt a bit like oh i wouldn't be happy if someone asked that to my like younger friend i do that. She might genuinely have found it really funny.

Like she is very open and she's very like cavalier and humorous. So maybe she didn't feel uncomfortable and it could have just been me projecting onto her. As someone who does interview famous people, there is often like a lot of back and forth about what you can ask. Don't know if that's the case here. But more than that, it's sometimes like we kind of train viewers how to talk to people i mean it's not exactly the same thing but when you watch how people do talk to like a young queer person and you ask a really invasive question like that wouldn't be okay to ask in another setting so i do

wonder at that as kind of a precedent to like dive in and talk about someone's like sexual proclivities because really that's rarely okay i feel like there's a sliding scale here because on the one hand are we saying that in in order to kind of posit society is celebrating gay icons and celebrating gay culture and celebrating artists that are being open we're kind of like pushing the button a bit too far and actually being really invasive yes there are so many people all over the world trying to because of their own fears and their own probably complicated relationships with their own sexuality are trying to hide people's like sparkle and their sexuality and then on the other hand it's like if you do talk about it someone is going to ask you like do you take it up the bum which isn't what strapping that wasn't what they were talking about with renee but just someone will ask someone will ask people need to chill if they just chilled

none of this would happen there's no like vomit button where i need to ask somebody a question like that there's just we could have a conversation without that on a scale of one to a hundred how gay are you guys feeling after this conversation according to you 100 everyone's 100 gay no no no not everyone's 100 gay it's just no one's 100 straight you can be 100 gay you just can't be no one's here okay got it i feel more gay not certainly not less gay i never feel less gay oh oh sorry i don't know whether that was like i liked it or it was like affirming for you no i feel i feel good i mean it is annoying and is depressing hearing about like how interviews are like just making this whole situation just 10 times worse but we set the conversation off in a really good way by starting with a real low which was sex in the city so everything feels better than that to be fair yeah but then look what they did they brought in

che che che i've not watched it's so bad this is what i mean this is kind of what we're going back to about that they're not showing it's like che diaz is what someone who's just been born and has been told about a rainbow flag and wokeness would design as a character and it's like i don't need that yeah well happy pride month we hope that you are celebrating in style we hope you're wearing and eating the rainbow and we hope that as in like eating all your vegetables and all of the genders i think i'm eating Skittles. That was not assumed. I was like, what are you on about? No, like wearing the rainbow for pride,

eating the rainbow for health and could mean the rainbow of genders that we have. Send us your favorite bi icons, but also the best media representation you got that reinforce your sexuality, even if you are a straight. Send it to us on instagram at everything is content pod thank you so much for listening to this episode of everything is

content leave us a review if you love the podcast it means so much to us when you do and also tell your boyfriends tell your girlfriends about the podcast if you love it. And we'll be back on Friday next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Sexual. Everything Is Content is a Grape original podcast, and we are part of the ACAST Creator Network.

This podcast was created, devised, and presented by us, Beth McColl, Ruchira Sharma and Anoni. The producer is Faye Lawrence and the executive producer is James Norman Fyfe.