Still, it’s important to note that some breakthroughs have taken place in the past few years, however small they may appear. The quantity isn’t there, to be sure. But the quality of bisexual television characters is, on the whole, improving.

Revenge, for instance, created the character of Nolan Ross, one of the few representations of bisexual men in the media. Ross, a wealthy software inventor and lead character Emily’s confidante in her quest for revenge, has been in serious relationships with both men and women, and has had more casual relationships with men than with women. The show didn’t acknowledge or discuss his sexuality, however, until an episode in the first season which Ross sleeps with a man named Tyler. In response to Tyler’s confession that he sometimes sleeps with men, Ross simply states, “I get it. I’m about a three on the Kinsey scale myself.”

To its credit, Revenge reveals Ross’s sexuality in a way that doesn’t capitalize on the supposed shock value of two men having sex. True Blood’s steamy scenes between men—like the ones featuring male vampires Eric and Talbot, and one male character’s dream sequence in which another male character invites him to take a shower—often give off an aura of “You never thought this would happen, did you?” But Ross tosses out the information casually, like any other fact about himself, suggesting to the audience that this knowledge isn’t a great revelation—not because Ross is the most dapper man in the Hamptons, but because bisexuality is not a big deal.

That kind of message is especially necessary right now, because despite some improvements in quantity and quality of bisexual male characters on TV, it still seems far more shocking for a man to be bisexual than for a man to be gay.

Why? In 2013, a straight male audience is more likely to understand that gay men don't choose to be gay, but still can't seem to grapple with why a bisexual man would choose to sleep with another man rather than a woman. Perhaps that’s because a straight male audience or an audience informed by the straight male perspective tends to believe the female body is innately more appealing than the male body. Seeing the world from this point of view, it’s easier to understand why a woman would stray from the acceptable heterosexual path, lured by the female form’s beauty. Thus, the bisexual woman’s preferences are more socially acceptable and are often seen as more natural than the bisexual man’s. A 2002 paper in the Journal of Sex Research titled “Heterosexuals’ attitudes toward bisexual men and women in the United States” reflects this: It showed that heterosexual men rated male homosexuals and bisexuals less favorably than female homosexuals and bisexuals. (And as Slate's Willa Paskin rightly notes, passionate scenes between two women are far more prevalent than passionate scenes between men.)