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Shocking rise of sexually bi-curious youth

Features

bicurious

During one of the most talked-about tournaments this year, the Pulse photographer caught two girls getting cuddly in the open. They were unperturbed by the camera as it clicked away, even taking a break from their smooching to give a blank stare at the lens.

They were clearly inebriated and in a moment of spontaneity. Later, one of the girls - let us call her Carol - would plead that her partner was just a ‘sister’ and she was just ‘showing some love’.

Katy Perry’s song, I Kissed A Girl, perhaps best describes this trend, as the controversial lyrics tell of a girl in a steady relationship who gets cosy with another girl. And likes it.

Welcome to the world of the bi-curious.

This is not a sexual orientation, but is mostly an experimental phase especially among young people.

Grace offered her account, saying that her curiosity began while she was in a top provincial school in Nairobi, which slowly progressed into a serious phase as she sat through her final years of college.

“It started in school where I got fascinated by the female body and just felt some strange attraction. I am very open-minded and so we would oil each other sometimes after a bath and before I knew it I appreciated female attention,” she says.

The defining distinction, of it being experimentation as opposed to orientation, means that these people maintain normal relations and generally outgrow the phase. At times, their partners know about it.

“My chick is at the bi-curious stage in her life so our thing is to hit clubs and parties where we vibe chicks together and go home for a wild night. Definitely alcohol plays a role and sometimes weed,” Kev, a recent graduate shares.

According to James Mbugua, a counselling psychologist at the Nazarene university, for some this can be a passing stage.

“From the assessments we do, for some it’s a passing stage at adolescence but also, as they progress it can become permanent. As the hormones spike during adolescence, young people are introduced to these things in their peer interactions especially in Form One. For those who were abused, it can contribute to such behaviour,” he says.

The closed, same-sex boarding school environment has in some quarters been associated with contributing to this phenomenon.

“I wouldn’t say they are the cause but they are an enabling factor. The closed environment and exposure to the same sex leads to experimentation.

There’s the tendency to be together in dark areas at night, share beds and sometimes abuse drugs. Monitoring students is hard because most schools focus on exams and performance,” Mbugua opines.

When Jess broke up with her long-time boyfriend, she sought solace in her best friend as would be expected of any heartbroken girl. She spent nights at her place in Kilimani being nursed through her heartbreak.

Before long, their friendship started having other ‘benefits’.

“I would look forward to spending the evenings with Kimberly, and she would always be there,’ Jess says of her friend.

“Each morning I would wake up thinking, ‘why can’t men take care of me as well as she does?’ I mean she makes me feel every good thing and then some; physically, emotionally, sexually, especially sexually. I shall save you the gory details ...whenever she was with me, she would show me off to her friends; everything I would want my man to do for me,” she reminisces of her friend, with whom she has long stopped being intimate.

Some are of the school of thought that in as much as everyone is not bisexual, sexuality is fluid and as such people become bisexual at different stages in their lives; a phenomenon we now refer to as bi-curious.

Olivia has been bi-curious her entire high school life.

“As a high school student in an all-girls school, it was so much fun fooling around, plus it was the cool thing to do. If you wanted to be in the cool clique, that was the fastest route in,” she recalls.

Inasmuch as she enjoyed her fellow female company, she barely even thought of it when on holiday. The same trend recurred in university, but beyond the varsity borders she is as heterosexual as it gets.

“I cannot explain it. It just happens and to be honest I never feel the urge for some female loving whenever I am away from school,” she says of the inconsistency in her sexuality.

“In fact, I have a boyfriend now whom I love to bits. I do not know what I would do without him,’ she adds matter-of-factly.

“You see I am your typical kind of tomboy. I do not necessarily dress like a guy but I prefer to leave the makeup and jewellery to the divas. More often than not you will find me in the company of guys and as such understand how they reason,’ Jollene rationalises.

“I settled for the notion that since I was the benchmark of how men should treat their ladies, why not go all the way and it was totally worth it,” she says satisfactorily.

All that changed when she got married.

“I think I was waiting for that man who was more man than I was,” she wrings out an explanation amidst a hearty laugh adding that while she waited for Mr Right, experimenting looked like a good option.

While she once contemplated having a sex change due to the unending pressure to be bit more lady-like, she realised that all she needed was a guy who would sweep her of her feet.

Jess on the other hand ended her relationship due to guilt.

“At the back of my mind, I knew it was wrong, but I kept asking myself, ‘how can an experience so wrong feel so right?’” she recalls

According to Mbutu Kariuki, an expert in developmental psychology, sexual orientation is a very complex  and has been marred by a lot of inconclusive evidence.

He reckons that many reasons have been given for bi-curiosity including age, social status and hormonal changes. But there has been no proof to show when one’s sexual orientation is determined. While some argue that it happens at conception, others are of the opinion that it is at birth and others still, argue that it happens as one grows, experiments and then makes a final decision.

Kariuki argues that it is not uncommon to find teens and people in their early twenties experimenting. In addition, he believes that we have allowed people who know nothing about sexual orientation to teach our kids about it and as such have passed on numerous myths.

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