Reviews - Bi. Storia, scienza e cultura della bisessualità

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Bi. Storia, scienza e cultura della bisessualità

2.5 - like this isn't the worst book out there, maybe my expectations were just too high - I think at best this just reads as a little self-indulgent for the author to hype herself up and at worst feels a bit confused and accidentally keeps leaning into the stereotypes its trying to disprove. I think if you just want to know a lot of fun facts about bisexual research this is probably a good book to pick up, however it does get quite depressing since a lot of the facts aren't actually that fun.

I will say one thing I really liked at the start of this book was that I loved how seen it made me feel and how it had a lot of interesting history about Bisexuality and research into that identity. I also enjoyed that while this references a lot of academic texts the tone of this book always stayed quite conversational, like chatting with a friend or a buzzfeed article. I liked the way the author comibined all three topics, although sometimes it did just feel like she was throwing all the facts she could find on a topic at you and sometimes it felt a bit like she was framing the research in a way to support her argument when the research in reality didn't support her argument at all.

Unfortunately this quickly vanished as the author keeps inserting herself and how amazing she thinks her own idenity is, she also projects a lot of her self onto the reader and while this isn't the worst thing inherently it just irked me so much. I'm just dissapoined because as I sadi before at the start of this book I just felt really seen, but by the end I just felt less connected to the bi-community than I have before, I had several moments in this book where I thought that maybe I wasn't bi at all becuase the author kept making these statements about her bi experience like they should be everyone's experiences when a lot of them were just unrelatable to me. It just made me feel bad about myself and I kind of resent the book for that, especially since it started out making me feel so welcomed.

classic_monolith's review against another edition

3.0

informative medium-paced

vae's review against another edition

3.0

informative medium-paced

Fascinating in a lot of ways, but "history" jumps from the ancient greeks to the nineteenth century with no mention of anything in between. It's a very Western view of bisexuality and of history. Asexuality isn't mentioned at all, which is a glaring oversight for a book that emphasises bisexuality as different to monosexuality. Very little discussion of any differentiation between sexual attraction and romantic attraction. Section 28 got mentioned briefly, with no acknowlegement of how it imacted a generation (and we can see the impact today in a generation of straight politicians who grew up never needing to consider that people of other sexualities might exist and not be a threat to society)The last chapter felt like the author was comparing identifying as bisexual as similar to the stages of grief, which seems out of character with the rest of the book exhorting people to find joy and pride in their identity as bisexual.

Content Warnings

sailor_marmar's review against another edition

4.75

funny informative reflective fast-paced

petra3's review against another edition

4.25

informative reflective fast-paced

I think it's a book that should be read by everyone, ESPECIALLY people who are not bisexual (plurisexual). It's incredibly important to give space to bi people, and the author does a really good job navigating the many different topics and aspects. As someone who knows a lot, and has done research related to bisexuality at university, a lot of this was known to me, and wish we'd go deeper, but still, I enjoyed it a great deal. As a bisexual woman myself, it just made me happy that a book like this exists!