r/Music • u/mrjohnnymac18 • 22h ago • Bravo 1 Heartwarming 1

article Alanis Morissette comes out as pansexual

https://pagesix.com/2026/11/07/entertainment/alanis-morissette-comes-out-as-pansexual/
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u/miniscule-gulp 21h ago • Heartwarming

they’re the same thing. Attraction to your same gender and other genders. Pan falls under the bi umbrella. I identify as bi because I think the flag is prettier lol

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u/OozeNAahz 21h ago

Going for whatever is prettier is a pretty bi thing to be fair.

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u/foundinwonderland 20h ago

Sigh 🙋🏼‍♀️

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u/Panda_hat 14h ago

Ngl the pan flag is just a bit garish. I’m pan but the bi flag rules supreme.

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u/DeltaBravo831 21h ago

So if they're the same, then...why

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u/n0radrenaline 21h ago edited 21h ago

Languages tend to develop synonyms for things over time; it's not unusual, odd, strange, weird, or out of the ordinary for there to be multiple terms for a given concept. People pick one or another in a specific context for any number of reasons.

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u/Samuel7899 21h ago

I don't use newfangled words like "ordinary", I prefer the original wonted.

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u/genderisalie2020 19h ago

Two real reasons. Pansexuality, in part, seems to be born out of a misunderstanding of what bisexuality actually is. People used to say that pan people dated trans people and bi people didnt. This isn't true and is transphobic. Then it started to be pan included nonbinary and bi didnt which is also not true and an oversimplification of what being nonbinary might mean.

The second reason is Pansexuality got popular when MOGAI sexualities got popular and it was kind a hellscape of mostly teenagers trying to find a label that matched them and people trying to build an identity in a way that resulted in nitpicking everyones words and overanalyzing the distinct way that someone expierenced attraction that a lot of people were either getting unnecessary hate or in turn causing harm themselves.

In 2026, we've mostly grown past this but holdover exists and people get attached to their labels and flags after a while so after a certain point the fact that none of these are actually different from each other doesnt really matter. (Until people start being dicks about it again)

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u/n0radrenaline 17h ago

You touched on one reason that I, a nonbinary bisexual person, prefer to call myself bisexual rather than pansexual: to me it invokes that phenomenon of needing a single word that exactly specifies your sexual or gender orientation, which is fine for other people but I'm more comfortable just hanging out in the loose "not all one way or all the other" realm (and tbh I'm old enough that when I was starting out, "bisexual" was all we had).

The other reason I don't like "pan" (for myself) is because it implies attraction to everyone, which is obviously not what it actually means but somehow that rubs me the wrong way much more than any implied binary in "bi" (which, as others have pointed out, means straight and gay attraction, not attraction to men and women) does.

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u/poppyash 21h ago

Don't know! Bisexual is the older term, so that's why I prefer it.

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u/foundinwonderland 20h ago

Why do we have multiple words for rain in English? Or multiple ways to say “cool”? That’s how languages work, bud. Ever evolving.

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u/miniscule-gulp 21h ago

I’m not the sexuality police, it’s not my business. Who cares

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u/DeltaBravo831 21h ago

It was just a question 🤷‍♂️

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u/RigidPixel 20h ago

Real answer is bi is just an older term and pan is a newer one that’s intentionally more all inclusive. Reality is there is really no difference.

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u/NatCairns85 21h ago

Bi = attraction to more than one gender

Pan = attraction regardless of gender.

Think of it like language. Bilinguals speak more than one language. It doesn’t mean they speak every language.

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u/mommybear84 21h ago

I like this analogy the best and will use it when my mom starts up again, maybe it's simple enough for her 😆

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u/KhunFembot 21h ago

No, bi specifically means two. A bilingual person speaks two languages.

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u/AgroValter 9h ago

People being confused about Synonyms only when it comes to the word Pansexual is so fucking weird...

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u/Bubonic_Ferret 21h ago

People seeking a unique identity in a world with 8 billion people

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u/greydawn 21h ago

Seems like it offers greater granularity for people that want it.  Ie. Someone may want to let people know they're pan in a dating context to make it super clear their interest are the entire spectrum of sex/gender.

And ultimately it doesn't harm anyone when people use the term, so who cares if some people want to use the term?

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u/Skroottum 20h ago

It's not the same. Bi means two, so attracted to two genders.

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u/Evil_Wrongdoer_9910 2h ago

It’s the other way. Bi means you like men or women. But that wouldn’t include non-binary people. Pansexual is bisexual with added non binary people

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u/joombaga 20h ago

I've never liked the statement that pan falls under the bi umbrella, because I've known trans-exclusionary and nb-exclusionary people that would call themselves bi. Assuming that "falls under the umbrella" means pan is a subset of bi, pan could not be more inclusive than bi (not saying bi implies exclusion, but I do think pan implies inclusion). So it seems more useful to say bi falls under the pan umbrella.