Verified by 
Key points
- Some polyamorous couples seek bisexual or heteroflexible women, known as "unicorns," for encounters.
- There are more couples seeking women than unicorns, and some women have found encounters unsatisfying.
- Women may be turned off by couples that treat them as secondary partners or prioritize the male's pleasure.
In the United States, many people are fascinated with sexual threesomes, which makes the fantasy of the ménage a trois incredibly popular. Among swing and polyamorous communities, it is common for female-male couples to seek a bisexual, bicurious, or heteroflexible woman for a sexual encounter and/or dating. In their fantasies, heteroflexible couples often idealize the women they want to date and sometimes develop very high expectations for the partners they hope to find. In reality, bi women who want to hook up with a couple are so hard to find that people in communities that practice consensual non-monogamy (CNM) call them unicorns, rare enough that they are almost mythical.
From a purely sex-positive perspective, there nothing wrong with wanting to have sexual adventures, and a menage a trois is one of the most popular adventurous fantasies — especially heterosexual men. From a relationship perspective, however, dating as a heteroflexible couple can be very problematic — especially in polyamorous context. In some forms of CNM like swinging or fleeting interactions in sex clubs, it is fine to assume that sexual interaction is a momentary adventure for everyone. In others, especially polyamorous spaces where the emphasis is on relationships, viewing someone as an experience is rude and unethical. Couples who want to date as a unit have earned a terrible reputation in polyamorous communities as unicorn hunters who pollute poly scenes with heterocentrism and couple's privilege. This first post in a series of two explores the foibles of unicorn hunting, and the second post explains how heteroflexible couples who want to date women can improve their chances of finding a woman to date, and how to treat her right once they find her.
Heteroflexible Unicorn Hunters
While not all heteroflexible couples who want to date women are unicorn hunters, those couples who fit the stereotype share some common characteristics. Not only are they female-male couples who want to date a bi woman, but they also want her to be exclusive with them and have no other partners besides the couple. They generally have a long list of what they want from their “hot bi babe,” often including dating both of them simultaneously (no solo relationships with either member of the couple), being emotionally and sexually available to the couple when they want her but also willing to go away when they are done with her for the evening, and be between 18 and 35 and height-weight proportionate, please send a photo. For a masterful depiction of the worst stereotypes of unicorns see Rachel Lark’s hilarious performance of The Unicorn Song on YouTube.
A special brand of unicorn hunters is looking for a sister-wife who will love them both equally, help raise their kids, clean the house, be willing to disappear for a while when it would be in inconvenient to explain who she is, and eager to move to their farm in North Dakota to milk goats. These couples are more likely to come looking for their “special woman to complete us” in polyamorous communities and are met far more often with disdain than welcoming arms and open legs.
A Hard-to-Fulfill Fantasy
With threesomes being such a popular fantasy, why is it so difficult to fulfill? For one thing, there are far more couples looking for women to hook up with than there are women looking for couples; the ratio is skewed from the beginning. Also, unicorn hunters have a terrible reputation, some people avoid them. Even when couples find the rare woman who wants to hook up with them, the reality of the interaction does not always live up to the fantasy.
Few unattached women. Many of the women in CNM scenes already have at least one partner, so there are not that many truly unattached women available for dating. Even fewer of these single women want to deal with dating two people who are already a couple. Don’t get me wrong, there are women who really enjoy dating couples, and the next post explains how to connect with them. These women are, however, few and far between so they can be difficult to find.
Hunters can be obnoxious. Some unicorn hunting couples have a one penis policy in which they only want to have sex with other women but are not interested in having another man join them. This preference can come across as obnoxious because it seems both homophobic against men and fetishizing of women’s sexuality as performative for men’s enjoyment. It also casts women as less threatening than it would be to bring in another man because women are a sexual novelty, not a "real" relationship partner.
Another reason that few women want to date couples is that some couples have a bad reputation for mistreating their dates. On the upside, only rarely is this mistreatment physically violent. On the downside, this maltreatment can be incredibly manipulative and emotionally damaging for the people on the receiving end. Some couples in CNM environments deploy what polyamorists call couples privilege, the attitude that the couple is the truly important element of the relationship, and should be protected at all costs.
Couple’s privilege expresses in a variety of ways, from assuming that the people the couple dates will be bound by the rules the couple has established even though the dates have had no input into making the rules, to treating a date like a sex toy so that one or both members of the couple has orgasms and then dismiss the date as soon as the couple is done. The underlying assumption that guides the couple’s privilege is that the other partners should be willing to sacrifice their comfort, desires, emotions, and well-being because they are secondary in importance to the primacy of the couple.
Other forms of CNM have less difficulty with the couple’s privilege because the couple is the essential unit of the interaction. Swingers often assume that the couple is the main event and other relationships will be semi-anonymous, fleeting, and/or barred from establishing an emotional connection. It is also difficult to find a single woman at swing events because most people attend as a couple. Monogamish relationships often emphasize the centrality of the couple and allow sexual and/or emotional connections only within negotiated boundaries that prioritize the couple over their outside partners. Emphasizing the couple is not always problematic, but it can easily become couple’s privilege when the established pair expects their secondary partner(s) to sacrifice their needs in order to support the couple’s relationship.
Disappointing threesomes. Some couples who have found a woman who wants to have sex with them end up realizing that the experience was not as exciting, satisfying, and magical as their fantasies about it. Sex with three people at the same time can be weird or awkward, especially for people who are new to group sex and unsure of how to go about it. In such cases, one person often ends up on the margins while the other two are deeply engaged. Unless they have a strong voyeuristic tendency, women who are not really that attracted to each other might not be interested in waiting around while the dude focuses on the other woman. When women are very attracted to each other, the man might be left on the margins feeling ignored. Being shunted to the side has happened to so many of the men in my research sample that they often described sex with two women as “not all that.”
This post has introduced couples looking for a threesome with a woman and explained why unicorn hunting is mostly unsuccessful. The next post in this series explains how couples who want to date a woman can be more attractive to her and treat her in a way that she wants to see them again.
Facebook image: goodluz/Shutterstock
References
Sheff, Elisabeth. "Polyamorous women, sexual subjectivity and power." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34, no. 3 (2005): 251-283.
