My 15 Year-Old Daughter Just Told Me She's BiSexual -HELP!

Don’t come here for advice, Colette.

If you’re a Catholic - trust me! instead of getting sympathetic advice here, many of the other posters here will reach out and pull your lower lip pulled up over your head as if it were a leaf of lettuce.

Why not approach your pastor, instead, or some of your more devout friends whose parenting skills you admire?

The Dope message board - or anyplace on the internet, really - is the last place any caring, sensitive person should be putting their problems out there. As Tom Petty sang:

“There’s people running around loose in the world
Who ain’t got nothing better to do
Than make a meal of some bright-eyed kid.”

A good summation of what happens to sincere, devout people who come here.

And after they’re done having you for lunch, they gather the crumbs into an oak barrel, add water, let everything ferment, and call it ale.

Stay away, Colette. Stay away.

I’m a Catholic, and I’m sure I won’t be here much longer. I just hate to be driven away from a public board by bad characters. It seems unfair.

Er… have you read any of the rest of the thread, or just the OP? It’s actually been pretty supportive.

Not to mention that we have plenty of Catholic posters here – and some of them posted in this very thread.

Apparently we are having an issue with our definitions. Maybe I’m using the wrong words.

To me, “had to” and “were expected to” are two completely different things. Students in my primary school were expected to go to college but about 5% of my class chose trade HS or an apprenticeship instead of college-track and only one of them got any pushback (his parents had been hellbent on him being the first person in the family to go to college, to become a lawyer*; his mother cried; his father yelled; his grandmother didn’t talk to him for a whole two days and sniffled at him for months). Me, I had to go to college: attempts at exploring professions which would have meant trade school were met with “why would you even think of trade school?! With your brain!” It was as unacceptable for me to not go to college as to pull down my panties and take a shit in the middle of the town square. That’s had to.

And as for discuss, there was no discussion of “girls like boys” until it happened; there was a vague knowledge that it happened to most girls, but it was just a piece of background information, which moved to the foreground in different ways and at different ages. It wasn’t discussed by my definition of “discuss” unless “my, it’s hot out today!” “yeah, it’s called summer! :p” counts as a discussion.

  • For some reason, a lot of people who haven’t gone to college or even considered it for themselves have two defaults when they think of sending their own kids to college: doctor and lawyer. They never seem to say “I want my kid to be an engineer” or “I want my kid to be a museum curator”. It’s either doctor or lawyer.

I gotta hand it to you Colette, you’re good.

Collette, you are likely to get support here, not only from people generally sympathetic to your situation, but from those who have actually experienced similar things. Don’t let naysayers drive you off.

For the record, I have never, and would never, pull someone’s lower lip pulled up over their head as if it were a leaf of lettuce. It’s redundant and impractical, as lettuce— even hydroponically grown Tom Thumb and Bibb varietals— lacks the requisite elasticity. The once ubiquitous iceberg is, it goes without saying, positively brittle. As Tom Petty sang:

“Don’t come around here no more
Don’t come around here no more
Whatever you’re looking for
Hey! don’t come around here no more.”

A good summation - believe you me! of advice for alcoholic crumbs.

The first time our persecution forced you to say farewell, you were back within 45 minutes.

Right. Because being driven away from a public forum seemed unfair.

nm

Cool.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

You are not entitled to use this thread to lob gratuitous insults at the board members and air your grievances. Start a Pit thread if you need to vent your frustrations, but don’t do it in other people’s threads.

No warning issued, and stay out of this thread if you can’t contribute productively.

Everyone else- I can certainly understand your frustrations, but let’s not make this thread about Euphrosyne.
Start a Pit thread if you must.

No warning issued, but let’s move on.

I’m assuming that your question is not ‘How do I raise my child?’ but rather what is the impact of her current environment on her development?

Unfortunately for you, it is huge. As people, we like to pretend that we have more agency than we actually do. We like to picture ourselves as true arbiters of our destiny. We think that our beliefs are the result of long, drawn out philosophical wrestling and cold hard logic. These are largely lies that we tell ourselves to justify our beliefs. Largely, they come from social scripting and from social advantage. Not exclusively, I’m no determinist, but largely. In you daughter’s case, she believes herself to be bisexual. Why? Most likely, it began do to other people identifying themselves as such. She began playing with the identity and was socially reinforced by her peers. There is social gain with such an identification and she subconsciously weighs that gain with the social losses she may take. Similarly, her Catholic beliefs are likely bringing her a degree of social shame in an environment where upside-down crosses are apparently common place, so she experiments with distancing herself from them. It wouldn’t surprise me if at school, she is openly non-Catholic while at home she still says she is. Ultimately, it will be more than a shift in self-described identity and become a shift in belief. It’s fairly normal for us as a social species. The bottom line is that right now, she’s playing with her identity and while she may not be ‘naturally’ bisexual (whatever that means) it is likely that as she continually receives social reinforcement, her belief in who she is will change and she will believe herself to be bisexual which is really the exact same thing as being bisexual.

Of course, I will take a lot of flack for saying that because we have a predominant argument that sexual attraction is innate. I think though that we know for a fact that sexual attractiveness is extremely cultural. What we find sexually attractive maybe has some basic biological guidelines, but is heavily, heavily influenced by the culture around us. For instance, look up a painting of Philip the Handsome of Castile. I don’t want to be too much of a jerk about it, but he was rough, but at the time he was considered so handsome that they actually gave him the nickname ‘Handsome’. Similarly, we can look at artistic impressions of men and women throughout history that were famed for their beauty and frequently it makes us scratch our heads. It even happens within our own lifetime. Look at pictures of models from the 70s or 80s and at the time they were considered these ungodly paragons of beauty and now they just don’t have that same quality. Even looking at our own pictures from when we were younger, what we considered handsome or attractive we look at now and sometimes scratch our heads as to what we were thinking.

Anyway, we know that sexual attractiveness is largely cultural, but we like to draw lines at sexual orientation and I think that that line is arbitrary. We know that for instance it was considered normal during certain periods in ancient Greece for men to take on younger men as lovers. Does this mean that ancient Greeks were somehow latent homosexuals in incredibly huge numbers? I think that’s a reach. More likely, there was a social script that encouraged this particular sexual behavior and so it was simply normalized (We see a similar thing with the ‘child groupies’ on the west coast in the late 70s. Sex with barely pubescent girls became a normalized behavior within a subculture. This doesn’t mean that rock stars in the 70s were all somehow pedophiles or that young girls at the time were all sexually precocious, it was just socially scripted and they didn’t even consider why they were doing it.)

Anyway, to get back to my main point, beliefs are social. Whether you are Christian or atheist, whether you are a Trumpian or never-Trump, whether you are a vegan or a carnivore, an environmentalist or a drill, baby drill-er, and I would even go so far as to say many aspects of your sexuality (I wouldn’t go so far as to say your complete sexuality, biology is not destiny, but it’s certainly another part of the equation.) These beliefs are heavily, heavily influenced and perhaps even controlled by your social network. These beliefs can and do change throughout your life based on the social network you have (It’s why in college many people radically change their beliefs. It has nothing to do with education or maturation and everything to do with the fact that they have severed many ties to their old social networks and have developed completely new ones which forces a shifting of belief.) So to sum up, it wouldn’t surprise me if she believes herself to be bisexual because the people she is hanging out with say being bisexual is cool.

There’s the opening of a discussion, I look forward to being challenged on the specifics.

Really? I was under the impression that that was the only tool they had to increase their numbers…

Everything else about your post aside (which is why I didn’t copy it to here), what connotations do you consider to be carried by the the word “public” in public board (iyho*)?

*just in case you happen to have any opinions that can legitimately be labeled as “humble.” Or possibly, “your[s].”

(Asking as someone whose admiration for your posts is largely informed by the things you’ve shared about your experiences as an engineer):

In light of how your career path DID turn out, would you say that trade school would have offered you any plausible entry to that path?

I HAVE to know: Was engineer even on the table in those discussions in your home?

Thank you, Ivory TowerDenizen, for your even-handedness.

Not going there. Please see Ivory Tower’s (above).

A mod note telling the poster to step away from the thread, ANOTHER mod note instructing other posters to drop the issue with that poster, and then you deliver this:

You’re responsible for reading the Moderator instructions in the thread. Don’t let this happen again.