I’m Fucking Tired of Writing About Abuse and Sexual Violence Against Bi Women Like Evan Rachel Wood

CONTENT NOTE FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE, INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE, BIPHOBIA

I feel like I write this article every year.

In 2016, when I authored the Invisible Majority report.

In 2017, when #MeToo tore through the entertainment industry.

In 2018, when Queerty ran a piece titled “Why does bisexuality make us so uncomfortable?”

In 2019, when I answered the questions of bi+ women wondering if they’re “bi enough” to call themselves bisexual.

And now, in 2021, when Evan Rachel Wood confirmed the open secret that Brian Warner (aka Marilyn Manson) was the person to whom Wood had alluded for years — the person who raped her. The person who subjected her to constant sexual and physical violence.

I’m fucking tired of writing this article. And I know I’m not the only one. Here’s Lo Shearing in The Independent. Here’s Reina Gattuso in Teen Vogue. Here’s Zachary Zane for Bi.Org. Here’s Nicole Johnson and MaryBeth Grove in the Journal of Bisexuality. Here’s Sarah Head in the new book Intimate Partner Violence and the LGBT+ Community. Here’s Lynn Addington, a Professor in the Department of Justice, Law & Criminology at American University, writing for the University of Minnesota’s Gender Policy Report.

Same stats, over and over. I know them by heart.

From the Centers on Disease Control and Prevention, 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation:

  • Forty-four percent of lesbian women, 61% of bisexual women, and 35% of heterosexual women experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
  • Twenty-six percent of gay men, 37% of bisexual men, and 29% of heterosexual men experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.
  • Approximately 1 in 8 lesbian women (13%), nearly half of bisexual women (46%), and 1 in 6 heterosexual women (17%) have been raped in their lifetime. This translates to an estimated 214,000 lesbian women, 1.5 million bisexual women, and 19 million heterosexual women.
  • Four in 10 gay men (40%), nearly half of bisexual men (47%), and 1 in 5 heterosexual men (21%) have experienced SV other than rape in their lifetime. This translates into nearly 1.1 million gay men, 903,000 bisexual men, and 21.6 million heterosexual men.
  • Of those women who have been raped, almost half of bisexual women (48%) and more than a quarter of heterosexual women (28%) experienced their first completed rape between the ages of 11 and 17 years.
  • Approximately one-fifth of self-identified lesbian and heterosexual women (20% and 22%, respectively) and one-half of bisexual women (48%) reported they were concerned for their safety and/or reported at least one post-traumatic stress disorder symptom (20%, 46%, and 22%, respectively).
  • Nearly 1 in 3 bisexual women (37%) and 1 in 7 heterosexual women (16%) were injured as a result of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner.

Sixty-one percent of bisexual women experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Nearly half of bisexual women (46%) have been raped in their lifetime.

Sixty-one percent.

Nearly half.

WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS INFORMATION??

How do I hold this information in my body? The body that has also experienced sexual violence. The body that has, in the past, held my friend’s bodies, their hands, their trauma as they told me stories of their own assaults — whispered stories, shouted stories, secret stories, “was this enough” stories, “was I really raped” stories, “but I was drunk” stories, “but he told me I deserved it” stories.

Sometimes I feel like the data makes it worse; the data confirms what we suspected all along.

Violet* reached out to me on Twitter. In November, Violet was able to leave her abusive relationship, her first same-gender relationship with a woman who ended up gaslighting Violet and weaponizing her sexual orientation. I asked her how her story made her feel about her bisexuality. “I am now hesitant to pursue relationships with other people because I feel even more fragile and unsure about being bi+ than I was before coming out. My situation didn’t “look” like the abuse that I had seen on TV or in movies, so it took reading an article my mom sent me about coercive control for me to allow myself to accept the reality of what was going on, and start taking steps to leave.”

I’m sharing Violet’s story because she shared it with me, but I must also provide the context that Violet’s story is very rare. The vast majority (95% in one study) of perpetrators of intimate partner violence against women are male. I often hear from survivors whose perpetrators were female and I think it may be a call for validity. “Am I a survivor if my perpetrator was female?” Of course. You are. You are a survivor.

Male violence in the United States is an epidemic that ties Marilyn Manson directly to the insurrection on January 6th, a connection built on the living bodies of bisexual people, with a quick stop by AOC’s recent video connecting her own experience of sexual violence with the terror she felt during the insurgence.

Alex DiBranco is executive director of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. She’s written extensively about the connections between misogyny, male supremacy, and intimate partner violence. In her piece Mobilizing Misogyny, DiBranco details how anti-feminism infects Men’s Rights Movements with rhetoric openly advocating for violence against women.

The virulent misogyny promoted by male supremacists, often couched as anti-feminism and accompanied by racism and nativism, has serious repercussions that play out on a global stage. In 1989, Marc Lépine killed 14 women at an engineering school in Montreal under the guise of “fighting feminism.” In 2009, George Sodini killed three women and then himself at a fitness class in Pennsylvania, leaving behind a website that complained about being rejected by women (and leading PUAs to coin the term “going Sodini”). Anders Breivik murdered 77 adults and children in Norway in 2011, leaving behind a manifesto attacking “the radical feminist agenda,” Islam, political correctness, and “Cultural Marxism” (see David Neiwart’s article in this issue). And in May 2014, Elliot Rodger set out to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde slut” at the “hottest” sorority at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writing, “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you for it.” He ultimately killed six people and himself, though he failed to make it inside the sorority.

Violence against bisexual women fits perfectly into this narrative: a group that is over-sexualized by mainstream media and isolated from community support. The ideal target for male supremacist anger and violence. Sarah Head explores the particular vulnerability of bisexual people to intimate partner violence in her new book chapter. “For instance, an abused person will experience a sense of dissonance when their experience and their beliefs about what a relationship should be conflict with each other. So, when a partner, for example, threatens to “out” a bisexual person to their children’s school to undermine how their parenting is viewed, this behavior conflicts with an abused person’s belief that their partner acts in their family’s best interest. Such an abusive tactic will evoke a degree of discomfort (or dissonance) for the abused person.”

Nicole Johnson and MaryBeth Grove offer a comprehensive theory of the outsized vulnerability that bisexual women face. (With the caveat from me that while substance use and alcohol use may be correlative to an increased vulnerability to intimate partner violence, that does not mean that if bisexual women were to decrease their substance use or alcohol use, that this would reduce their vulnerability to violence.)

The limited research to date points to several vulnerability factors, including: a cultural milieu prone to hypersexualization, objectification, and dehumanization of bisexual women; stereotypical understandings of bisexuality in women that may engender negative appraisals and resulting aggression toward this group; and an increased risk of problematic substance use, or negative consequences associated with one’s use of alcohol and/or other substances, in this population, possibly as a result of the aforementioned risk factors.

Evan Rachel Wood has talked openly about her vulnerability to Brian Warner’s abusive tactics. Wood and other accusers have come out publicly about Warner’s torture and manipulation, and his insistence on total control and sexual availability.

Wood’s bravery cannot be understated.

Violet, like me, is incredibly proud to call Evan Rachel Wood family. This is because Evan Rachel Wood saved Violet’s life. “The only reason that I am out of my abusive relationship now is because of Evan Rachel Wood. My mom went to a talk hosted by a legislative advocate that is working with ERW to extent the statute of limitations for domestic violence, at which the concept of coercive control was discussed. I had discussed some of my issues with my mom, and she had concerns of her own, so when she heard the talk a lightbulb went off and she sent me an article about it.”

*Violet’s name has been changed.

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Heron

Heron Greenesmith is an attorney, analyst, advocate, and author. Follow Heron on Twitter.

Heron has written 1 article for us.

27 Comments

  1. Thank you. There have been many times in my life when I have reached out to people for help only for them to use my sexuality against me at the first possible opportunity.

    People that I trusted as friends that outed me to abusers over petty arguments. Supposed friends that put me in real danger because of their over eagerness to share my ‘scandalous secret’ with the slightest excuse. This has happened on more than one occasion (with different people that weren’t connected to each other). I don’t trust straight people at all anymore. Or very few others at all.

    • I’m so sorry to hear this, Al. And thank you for sharing. You are not alone AND you’re not alone in feeling alone. There simply aren’t enough resources for us or training / education about us.

  2. Thank you for writing this. This information is important, and your anger is valid.

    I wish that those of us in the wider queer community had a better grasp of the dynamics here, that bi people being more isolated from community support leaves them more vulnerable to abuse and trauma, as reflected in these statistics. You deserve space to feel safe and fully accepted. Biphobic microagressions are damaging just like any other unexamined biases, yet I see them go unchallenged all the time.

  3. I am so grateful to you, my teacher and friend, for the clarity of your voice and the commitment of your hands. Thank you for all the ways you lift up bi+ people’s stories so that one day we will be able to tell new ones <3

  4. As a bi woman and survivor of sexual violence I never know how to react to these stories. So I mostly go with numbness.

    When I first heard the stats, I was like, well that’s interesting but I don’t see how the two are related in my case. And I’m still not sure they are – I was so young (11 and 12) when I was abused that no one, including me, knew I was bi. And my abuser’s other victims aren’t bi, afaik.

    But I do relate to the problem of finding support and community while being authentically myself, both as a survivor and as a bi+ person. It’s exhausting to feel like I have to hide part of myself or forcefully assert part of myself instead of just being.

    I was so nervous the first time I sought out help through the queer community. I was looking for free support groups for trauma survivors and found one at my local lgbt+ center. At the first session, I was most anxious about disclosing that I’m bi and married to a man. No one in the group blinked and it ended up being an incredibly helpful group.

    • Oh Cleo, thank you so much.

      You’re not alone. From the CDC analysis: “Of those women who have been raped, almost half of bisexual women (48%) and more than a quarter of heterosexual women (28%) experienced their first completed rape between the ages of 11 and 17 years.”

      What this tells me is that bisexuality and misogyny interact in complicated ways that we might not even be fully aware of.

  5. 💔❤️

    Thank you for continuing to write this horrible story and thank you for sharing your anger about it, which I found incredibly helpful to see. Like some of the other commenters I don’t really know how to connect to the statistics other than be numbly disappointed, but I know how to connect to your anger ❤️

      • I still find it hard to be angry at the people who have abused me, I mostly feel hurt still, and ashamed, but I can be angry that it happens and angry on behalf of all the other victims ❤️

        • I bookmarked this days ago, opened it several times and finally just read it. I’m glad I did. And it’s helpful to know I’m not alone, even in my reluctance.💕
          I related to all of this and the comments. But this last comment, biensurmacherie, is packed with so much powerful feelings. And I’m grateful you shared it. I’m with you.
          And while you are angry on behalf of the rest of us, we are angry for you.❤

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