Plenty of millennials are familiar with slang terms like "woke," and "bae," and "on fleek," but there's a whole subset of slang words that most of us probably aren't that familiar with — words used to describe the bisexual community.
So, to break them down and give us all a little more understanding of what it's like to be bisexual, Amanda Montell of "The Dirty Word" — a sex positive word nerd's dream YouTube show — asked three of her bisexual friends to quiz her on bi slang.
The women go over words like "a unicorn" — a bisexual girl who has sex with a straight couple, but does not form emotional attachments — and "gay after three" — the idea that someone is gay after three drinks.
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As it turns out, even Montell wasn't too familiar with this type of slang, which the women in the video explain may connect to a bigger problem of bisexual erasure, Hello Giggles reports.
Bisexual erasure, as GLAAD explains, is "a pervasive problem in which the existence or legitimacy of bisexuality is questioned or denied outright."
"There's gay and lesbian visibility and conversations and then bisexual is kind of like this afterthought," one woman explains. Which is backed up by Montell's confession of "cheating" at the beginning of the video, when she says that she looked for linguist studies on bisexual slang but could only find research on gay and lesbian slang.
As Montell recalls, it's a problem only furthered by problematic portrayals of bisexuality in media. She remembers a Sex In The City episode in which Carrie dates a bisexual man and says, "I'm not even sure bisexuality exists. I think it's just a layover on the way to gay town." That moment shaped Montell's views about bisexuality for a long time, because if Carrie said it it must be true.
Tackling the problem of bisexuality as it shows up in language, and studies of language, understandably made this video much more serious than a similar one Montell posted last year talking about lesbian slang. But, really, it makes sense that it would be.
As one of the women said, "We just want to be heard."
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