New York magazine proclaimed 2024 the year of the bisexual. (And also the year of the knitfluencer, whatever the hell those are - a new type of martini?). Anyway, you mean I was on trend all year and didn't know it? What do I do now it's 2025 and I'm so last year? I wish I'd known it was my year before the year was over; when you're a middle aged schlub whose primary concerns in clothing choice are comfort and it covering my problem areas (which is all of my areas), opportunities to be part of the Zeitgeist are fleeting and must be seized.
New York magazine certainly thinks bisexuals are all the rage, with a rash of stories such as "A Film Lover’s Guide to the MMF Threesome", "Why Do I Feel Weird Calling Myself Bisexual?" and "Why Are There So Many Bisexuals on TV All of a Sudden?" I couldn't bear to read any of them. I don't know, and to be honest don't super care, what privileged writers attempting to appeal to hip young wealthy milennials and Gen Z has to say about something I struggled to articulate or admit for years. It wasn't so much that I was ashamed to say I was bisexual as that I didn't even know what it was.
Actually I was literally ashamed to say I was bisexual - I have a tongue tie that makes it hard for me to enunciate the word, causing snorts of derision when I do. Maybe it's for the best my moment has passed. New York also panders to readers a little closer to my age group, if not to my tastes and income. I see an article titled I’m 60 and My Retinol-Based Routine Stopped Working. What Do I Do? and my only response is "Admit that you've exhausted your treatment options and it's time to consider voluntary assisted dying?" This is why it's best I write about world events and not fashion trends.
A new year means we get the annual
release of government cabinet papers from 20 years past. 2004 was a bleak year politically - John Howard and the Coalition won a fourth term in office, followed by George W. Bush winning a second term as US President. Everything was awful, although awful by normal human parameters given whatever is happening now. It's still not a time one much wants to be reminded of, but I took a look anyway, even though the really juicy stuff relating to national affairs remains censored. Records of the human finger bones found in Helen Coonan's filing cabinet or Saddamn Hussein's call to Howard saying "help me break out of here, I'll totally make it worth your while" will remain locked in the national archives.
The striking thing is that both Howard and Bush were re-elected even though by 2004 we were well aware that the justification for invading Iraq was a total load of bovine excretions. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, as most people guessed in early 2003 and was finally officially admitted to in January 2004. John Howard came out today defending Australia's involvement in the Iraq invasion, saying "I knew from earlier examinations there had been a failure to find stockpiles, in other words, the physical weapons, although there was plenty of capacity through programs to develop them very rapidly".
I love this justification. I go over to Ray Martin's house, break in, and drag him outside to perform a citizen's arrest. The police are summoned and demand to know what's going on. "I had to take action," I insist. "I'm not saying Ray Martin is secretly murdering people, but the man has knives in his house. The situation could escalate at any moment!" Just think of all the aggressive action one could take against people, organisations, entire nations, on the basis that whilst you haven't seen proof of their nefarious deeds, they could possibly do bad things at any time. "We don't know that the Faroe Islands pose a threat to Australia's national security, but the situation could change at any moment. We should invade." (No one tell Peter Dutton about this. He'd be foaming at the mouth to try, although at least nuclear power plants on the Faroe Islands would put them 18,000km from where Dutton wants them now).
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