“I am going to eat your soul… and Shit. It. Out.” Jennifer Check, teenage-girl-turned-succubus, slowly advances toward Needy, her ex-best friend, blood staining her glossy red lips and diaphanous white gown. “I thought you only murdered boys?” Fear dancing in Needy’s wide eyes, she backs away from Jennifer’s advance. With a four-word response, Jennifer makes bisexual history: “I go both ways.”
“Jennifer’s Body,” the cult-classic 2009 horror film, features a perfect example of a trope pervasive in both fictional media and modern youth culture. With it, the “Evil Bisexual” was born.
As with most zeitgeist-defining phenomena, the “Evil Bisexual” was not born from one movie or meme alone. This trope arose as a composite of many years of cultural moments, from the homewrecking, homoerotic duo in 2024’s “Challengers” to the Tumblr-era personality quizzes made popular on Buzzfeed in the early 2010s. The “Evil Bisexual” reflects a question of what lies at the crossroads of fluidity, power and desire. The answer? Danger.
Increasingly, Gen Zers are approaching this perceived danger with something between fascination, apprehension and full-blown identification. According to data from the General Social Survey (GSS), bisexuality is booming, with the 2008 statistic of two percent of US adults identifying as bisexual rising to four percent in 2018. As the number of people who identify as bisexual rises—from 1.9 percent of Gen X adults to 15.3 percent of Gen Z—so too does bisexual representation in media and popular culture; not all of it is good, however.
Historically, evil characters in fiction novels, embellished histories and early Hollywood films have been depicted as sexually ambiguous, often expressing depraved lust for victims of all genders. According to ScienceABC, “‘queer coding’ was used to depict queerness as immoral and socially unacceptable, using stereotypes to equate queerness with evil.” Think Frank-n-Furter from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” with his equal opportunity predation on the male and female leads of the show, or the eponymous villain of the 1897 gothic horror novel “Dracula,” whose bloodlust for both Jonathan and Mina is often interpreted as a metaphor for sexual impropriety and assault. Just as vampires or similar phantoms are neither dead nor alive, the fluid nature of bisexuality posed a problem for earlier audiences. Bisexual characters in these narratives are decadent, uncontrollable manifestations of impure and unbridled lust. The first “Evil Bisexuals” were not only emotionally dangerous, but posed a threat to the physical safety of individuals and cultures at large.
As time progressed and opinions concerning LGBTQ+ people improved, bisexual representation in film and television shifted away from this narrative—although morally bankrupt bisexuals like David in “Lost Boys” (1987) and Catherine Tramell in “Basic Instinct” (1992) continued to exist. Queer characters, to combat their past depictions as depraved antagonists, became sanitized. Bisexuality was either erased entirely or reduced to a “confused phase,” a prelude to a more respectable monosexuality. “I don’t even believe in bisexuality, isn’t it just a stop on the way to gaytown?” Carrie Bradshaw’s bi-anxiety in season 3, episode 4 of “Sex and the City,” released Jun. 25, 2000, is a prudent—though prejudiced—assessment of popular sentiments toward sexuality in both past and present media. Under this body of thought, bisexual people are momentarily caught between two worlds, two identities. One day, they must choose whether to be fully gay or straight; the gray area of bisexuality is only a waiting room for more rigid labels waiting to be imparted onto queer people from either side of the spectrum.
By the late 2000s, this skepticism reverted into something murkier, with new flair: bisexual characters who were not confused so much as corrupting. Coexisting with the rising trend of the palatable, ambivalent bisexuals, this novel iteration of the queer coded villain rose above the sunshine and rainbows like an angry, black storm cloud. From sexy comic-book seductresses to morally ambiguous teen-drama instigators, fluidity became shorthand for danger, unpredictability and a kind of glamorous amorality. Where the “gay best friend” was a punchline, the bisexual villain became a plot twist.
Jennifer Check, the don diva of dark bisexuality in the 2000s, garnered lasting influence in the cultural consciousness through her embodiment of this cyclical evolution. She is not the tearful, indecisive love interest torn between two partners, nor is she a reflection of the moral anxieties of the time she is a product of. Instead, Megan Fox’s character is a supernatural threat who—like Dracula or, perhaps more fittingly, Carmilla—refuses to dampen her appetite to gender, genre or moral alignment. Her hunger is made tangible, simultaneously metaphorical, literal and completely queer. In contrast to older depictions of either evil or muted, rainbow-washed and altruistic bisexual, Check, however, is lauded as a liberating character—especially for young viewers of the film keen on irony and self-mythologizing.
In 2025, as performative males prowl the streets of Bushwick armed to the teeth with matcha, wired headphones and Trader Joe’s totes, Check’s particular form of self-irony is all the more resonant. Part of the “Evil Bisexual” trope’s appeal is that it disrupts the 2000s demand that queer stories must be wholesome to be worthy. Who do teens and young adults—desperate to self-identify with some fictional character—turn to when they do not slot into the “Hearstopper,” Hallmark category of queerness? Are bisexuals not also allowed to be messy, trifling or emotionally unstable? Enter stage left: the revamped “Evil Bisexual.” While Nick Nelson from the 2022 Netflix adaptation of the graphic novel “Heartstopper” is momentarily confused, yet harmless—he takes an “Am I Gay?” Buzzfeed quiz, for Christ’s sake—Patrick from “Challengers” is a stinky, washed-up saboteur and side-piece. In the place of LGBTQ+ characters who justify their presence in narratives through uplifting audiences, Check and her contemporaries encourage bisexuals everywhere to give up on being perfect and allow themselves to be just a little… messy—sometimes problematically so.
On TikTok, “Evil Bisexual” is not a slur so much as a vibe: dramatic “alt” eyeliner, morally ambiguous song lyrics and jokes about seducing your friend’s situationship as an act of community service. It is self-aware villainy, performed with the implicit understanding that the joke is on the stereotype itself. These users declare their commitment to ghosting ex-lovers, starting controversy, cancelling plans and—most importantly—being bisexual.
Still, the line between reclaiming and reinforcing remains thin. To lean too fully into the trope runs the risk of buttressing the same fears it emerged from: the fear of sexual ambiguity, discomfort with fluidity and suspicion of any identities that cannot be easily categorized. In this way, queer youth humor is a balancing act of dispelling these notions of the untrustworthiness or insincerity of bisexuals while also making light of this perceived villainy to navigate and process desire and the muddy business of being seen.
The “Evil Bisexual” persists because it holds a mirror up to cultural anxieties while allowing queer people to see themselves as something more than just a moral lesson. The trope makes space for the monstrous, for the unglamorous and the unapologetically complex. And, in a media landscape still struggling with its portrayal of bisexuality at all, this dangerous complexity might just be the most radical move of all.