Gee, "more mature and evolved"--and you wonder why lesbian/gay people and bisexuals are often at odds? You suggest it is a matter of choosing to "cut off half the world"--how nice that you have finally, single-handedly solved the question of the origins of sexual/romantic attraction! Maybe the truth is we love whom we love for complicated reasons that are biological, cultural, psychological, and historical--I don't know that a person who moves between men and women is anymore "evolved" or "mature"--I'm sure such people can be just as selfish, narcissistic, closed-off (what about the bisexual who only desires and loves skinny people?), it just shows itself in different ways. The gay man who loves white men, black men, fat men, skinny men, men with disabilities, working class men, men who are lawyers, and so forth, may be just as "open" to love in his way. And who's to judge the woman who only seems to love other women who are under 5 feet tall? How is any of this an issue of morality or health?
After viewing the film, I'd say the men were, at fade out, primarily homosexual in their attractions, but had obviously felt deeply for and were sexually active with women (and one particular woman) at times in their lives. I find the word "bisexual" itself equally divisive--it suggests that the individual moves simply between two of the sexes in terms of romantic love/sexual attraction. Actually, some recent research by psychologsts suggests that, for many people, there can be a very strong division between sexual attraction and romantic love. That both Sam and Steve by the end of the film seem quite clear that they will only seek out same-sex partners is a fairly telling point--that of course it does not negate what they had with Samantha. What it may suggest is that queer theorist Eve Sedgwick is more correct than she knew when she talked about the history of men using women as a kind of intermediary in all kinds of ways--she wrote about this mainly in terms of the way heterosexual men have used women as currency to work out their rivalries and sometimes buried homosocial/homoerotic feelings--it seems that Sam and Steve may have done the same with Samantha. It seemed to me as if Sam simply had a deep need to be surrounded by affection--the more the better--perhaps because of his horrifying father, that Steve probably went along because he felt coerced by Sam or was just bored, and Samantha was flattered by the attention. That doesn't mean that it couldn't or didn't grow into something authentic, nor that its dissolution means that it was all a lie. But it may suggest that there was more than simply a utopian ideal of polyamory going on there--just as the polygamy in Big Love, however it presents its picture of sister wives, is also always about patriarchal control of women's lives and bodies. By the end, I was equally tired of all three--and wondered what the hell it would be like to be their kids.
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