One stressor that bi women face, as Johnson found, is harmful stereotypes about our sexuality. I’ve identified as bi since I was 14 or 15, but sometimes I still feel strange saying it out loud. My discomfort is contained in the word itself. Bi, as in split, dual. Sexual, as in, well, sexual. When I came out as bi, I didn’t just feel the fear associated with being a member of a marginalized community. I felt shame, as though my identity was vaguely scandalous, the emotional equivalent of showing a stranger my panties.

This awkwardness isn’t just in my head. It’s a reality faced by bisexual women in American culture, and it’s called hypersexualization. Because bi women are often depicted in popular media and pornography as objects of titillation for straight men, rather than as unique, autonomous people, we’re thought to be perpetually down for sex—whether we consent or not. This false belief increases the likelihood that dangerous folks will target bi women to sexually assault.

“People often mistake someone coming out as bisexual as a sexual invitation,” says Ochs. “When someone is simply sharing their identity, people think that they’re inviting them into the bedroom.”

Sexuality is a wonderful thing, and we should all have the right to embody and express our desire however we please. But in a patriarchal culture, where men are taught that they have the right to control women’s bodies, independent female sexuality threatens the status quo. By having the capacity for intimacy with more than one gender, bisexual women disrupt traditional binaries between male and female, straight and gay. “Bisexuality makes everybody uncomfortable,” says Johnson.

This, in turn, may lead to the stereotype that bi women are untrustworthy, and can’t be content with just one partner. Of course, some bi women do practice polyamory or other forms of non-monogamy, and that’s OK. But there’s a difference between choosing a consensually non-monogamous relationship, and being dubbed “prone to cheating” because of who we are. In the former case, we’re expressing our agency to have the relationship of our choice. In the latter case, partners may use our sexuality as an excuse to behave in an insecure, possessive, or even abusive way.

“I had one girlfriend leave me because she was afraid I was going to leave her [because of my orientation],” says Ochs. “I wasn’t confused about being bisexual. I was confused about not being trusted.”

My bisexuality, too, has sometimes been a tender spot partners press when threatened. I once dated someone who said that my sexuality made me especially interested in sex and thus untrustworthy. It felt like a joke until the physical abuse started. In retrospect, those words were a kind of justification, an assertion that my sexuality needed to be controlled and punished. That I needed to be controlled and punished.

These beliefs aren’t just passive prejudices. They contribute to society’s dehumanization of bisexuals. In one study, Johnson asked bisexual women to indicate where in the “ascent of man” scale—the stages of evolution from ape to human—they felt their friends and family would place bisexual women. More than 80% of study participants felt that their social circles viewed them as less than fully human. Women who reported greater dehumanization were more likely to have been sexual assaulted.

These findings are alarming, but they don’t get the airtime they deserve. That’s because bisexual identity is often erased from discussions of both women’s and queer issues. This is true in everyday dating experiences. “We’re seen to be straight in mixed gender relationships, and gay in same-gender relationships,” says Ochs.