How to portray bi women is an area of romance and erotica writing where you can often tell whether the writer has actually spent any time with or talking to women who are not entirely heterosexual.
The classic cliché of bi women (as seen in porn and bad erotica) is extremely good-looking women who seem equally interested in both sexes, and who are magically always around when there is an orgy or a threesome or moresome. A great time is then had by all (wink wink).
Having had the privilege of getting to know a number of women across the sexual spectrum over the last 15 or so years, I know a lot more than that. Although still not enough. You can never know enough, which is one reason I get pissed off about the human lifespan being finite. But enough of the barstool philosophy.
Not only are women not sortable into buckets (Straight, Bi, Gay), their sexuality is fluid over time. Some women go through episodes of being bi-curious, and may act on those inclinations, sometimes to the extent of co-habiting with other women. Some women lose interest in men, then regain it. Some women are never sexually or romantically interested in women, although they are capable of admiring a woman, sometimes from a distance, sometimes from close-up. Sexuality is not only fluid across the entire population of humans, it is sometimes fluid in a person’s lifetime.
The bi woman who is 50:50 for men and women is actually a rare occurrence, in my experience. In the lifestyle (that is swinging to the outsiders), many women, when I asked them about their orientation, would define themselves as “bi-curious”. However I soon discovered that this was a “safe” answer, adopted because it had the largest possibility of interesting questioners. A lot of women in the lifestyle are not really bi or even bi-curious, but they claim that they are in order to avoid deterring suitors. Interestingly, with men it is the reverse. Many bi men in the lifestyle self-identify as straight, because they are scared that if they self-ID as bi or bi-curious, that will scare off straight men in a couple.
Most of the women that I met in the lifestyle would describe themselves as bi-curious. Most commonly they were smart enough to know that if they labelled themselves as such, and played with other women in a group situation, such as playing with other women’s bodies and kissing, that would be enough to step the sexual intensity up a notch. As for actually going down on another woman, they would not do that. A bridge too far.
The truly bi women were either bi leaning towards men, or, in some cases, bi, leaning towards other women. On more than one occasion, I heard the bi women leaning towards other women referred to semi-jokingly as “married lesbians”. I actually watched two such women at a party one evening, as they played for a long time with each other and several other women. Whenever a hopeful man approached, they swiftly made it clear that they were not in the slightest bit interested. A more experienced man than I (at the time) said to me “they barely tolerate their own husbands in the bedroom, they’re not going to play with another man at these events”.
A lady who I had the privilege of meeting after my last divorce was bi, by her own admission, although she was delightful and naughty in the bedroom with me. She lived with a man for 5+ years, but he refused to let her indulge her bi side, so she left him, and after a while, she met and moved in with another woman, and they are happily co-habiting. Another couple we know lived as a poly trio for 5 years with a woman until the woman underwent an epiphany and started dating men, at which point the poly trio was amicably dissolved, and the woman married her latest man and went off to more superficially conventional married life.
The threesome FFM porn myth is seldom realized in reality, because the chances of both women being 50:50 bi are quite low. More likely both women are at best bi-curious, in which case the man is going to end up doing a lot of the work, and the women will be disengaged from each other. This is not to say that this is not still an exciting and fun thing. It is just that you need to enter an FFM (initially) without the expectation that both of the women are closeted bi and will proceed to entwine each other and you. (it also works in reverse, in an MMF, most of the time the men are not bi, and the woman is busy).
So, when I come to write stories and novels involving more than conventional 1:1 sex, I do not fall into the trap of assuming that “Bi” means, as one cynic said to me “anything that moves”. It is more subtle, varied and varying than that.