Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much

by Jen Winston

In hindsight, all my love stories with men had only been performances—one-woman shows furthering the True Love agenda, perpetuating the harmful idea that a woman’s sole purpose is to provide sex and free therapy to her husband until one of them dies. Sure, a feminist can still “fall in love,” but she should do it only if it’s what she wants. But where’s the line? There’s things we want, and then there’s things the world tells us to want. But how can we determine where one ends and the other begins? If I’d “fallen in love” with a cis man, I’d probably still be out there squashing myself. This book’s ending would consist of sugarcoated essays that spoke to his strengths, concluding with a chapter called “Actually, Not All Men! Who Knew?” A close reading would indicate severe gaslighting on both the guy’s part and the patriarchy’s, but since I’d failed to “hold myself accountable” and call this out, Empowerment Instagram would deplatform me immediately (rightfully so). This isn’t to say that healthy relationships with cis men cannot exist—just that it seems like they cannot exist for me. Thanks to heaps of internalized misogyny, I tend to make myself smaller—I abide by traditional gender roles until a hip queer person on the internet tells me it’s time to stop.