The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

Erotically uninspired or coercive, given shape by the most predictable and punishing gender roles, emotionally scripted by decades of inane media and self-help projects, and outright illogical as a set of intimate relations anchored in a complaint-ridden swirl of desire and misogyny, straight culture for many queers is perplexing at best and repulsive at worst.

The late lesbian feminist poet and theorist Adrienne Rich contended that while being straight was largely beneficial for men, the same was not always true for women, for whom the institution of heterosexuality had been a site of violence, control, diminishment, and disappointment.

When lesbian feminist ideas are sidelined, we keep our focus on queer misery, and we fail to name the contradictions and miseries of straight culture—the entrapment, the disappointment, the antagonism, the boredom, the unwanted sex, the toxic masculinity, and the countless daily injustices endured by straight women.

But this book argues that it is more appropriate to worry about heterosexuals, to feel empathy, to “call them in” rather than call them out, and ideally, to be in solidarity with them as they work to liberate heterosexuality from misogyny.

First, queer feminists have argued that straight life is characterized by the inescapable influence of sexism and toxic masculinity, both of which are either praised or passively tolerated in straight spaces. Second, queer observers of straight life have pointed to straight women’s endless and ineffective efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight women’s optimism and disappointment.

As for the normalized sexism inside straight culture, lesbian feminists wrote volumes. With righteous rage, they detailed the ways that straight men desired women’s services—emotional, sexual, reproductive, domestic—rather than actual women, and they exposed the toll this took on women’s mental health.

“by virtue of being brought up in a male society, we have internalized the male culture’s definition of ourselves . . . as relative beings who exist not for ourselves, but for the servicing, maintenance, and comfort of men.”

Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.”

Lesbian feminists were also alarmed by the amount of time and energy straight women were investing in trying to gain men’s respect, with either painfully slow or nonexistent results. In 1972, the women’s caucus of the Gay Revolution Party issued a statement in which they expressed serious concern that straight women “seem to believe that through their attempts to create ‘new men’ they will liberate themselves. Enormous amounts of female energy are expended in this process, with little effect; sexism remains the overwhelming problem in the most ‘liberated,’ ‘loving’ heterosexual situations.”

Multiple states are enacting abortion bans with the aim of overturning Roe v. Wade at the federal level. Currently, the president of the United States and many men in Congress are shamelessly displaying their misogyny with regularity and great entitlement. This is all happening on the political stage, and it’s also happening in girls’ and women’s daily lives, in their relationships with boys and men.

straight culture seems to rely on a blind acceptance that women and men do not need to hold the other gender in high esteem as much as they need to need each other and to learn how to compromise and suppress their disappointment in the service of this need.

I agree but this is not just seen in straight culture, or how would you define a queer relationship culture?

Many straight women spend dozens of hours planning each detail of their weddings or baby showers or baby gender-reveal parties, while straight men keep their distance from the very rituals that are intended to mark important moments in their lives. In no way do I intend to imply that couples should spend every minute together, but if we held straight couples to basic standards of good friendship—mutual respect and affection and a sense of comfort and bondedness based on shared experience—many straight relationships would fail the test.

Yeah went to a baby shower only lady’s female friends are there so bizarre. Only male is the husband, not even his dad. And this is a “good dude”

Speaking as if directly to this decent but self-centered male sex partner, the representative of “anyman, everyman,” she explains, You’re a decent guy. . . . I do not feel like you are going to rape me. . . . The sex wasn’t particularly bad, either. . . . It was normal sex. Normal, boring, vaguely dehumanizing hetero sex. Which is precisely the point: The normalcy. . . . Because there was something in the choreography of the whole thing that just struck me as, I don’t know—unsatisfying in a way only feminism can remedy. . . . Here, supposedly, is what you consider sex: We make out, you play with my boobs, I blow you, you do not go down on me even though I ask [*insert some bullshit on how “I only go down on women I’m in love with. Now put it in your mouth.”]. Penis goes in vagina, penis moves in and out of vagina, . . . penis ejaculates. . . . Sex is now over because you have decided it is over. You have decided sex is over because you are a man, and because this choreography that favors men with penises—man becomes erect, man penetrates woman, man ejaculates—is what we have been told sex is.50

dramatically narrow ideas about what constitutes a female body worth desiring (waxed, shaved, scented, dieted, young, etc.) suggests that heteromasculinity is characterized by a much weaker and far more conditional desire for women’s bodies than is often claimed.

I also have relatively high conditioned desires for any sex

“emotional gold digger” to describe straight men’s reliance on women partners to “play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secretary, emotional cheerleader, mom.”

Lol

While I view Cooper’s suggestion that women should “become less invested in straightness” as an important option, later I will argue that another way forward is to redefine heterosexuality itself, to expand its basic ingredients to include more, and not less, attachment and identification between women and men.

Huh

is quite possible, for example, that children who are attuned to the tragedy of heterosexuality, or who are keen observers of the misery wrought by heteropatriarchy in the lives of their parents or other significant adults, are oriented otherwise by a desire to avoid such suffering.

lol that explains a lot of things

Heterosexuality (or the investment in a normative sexuality organized around the attraction of opposite bodies) is not an outgrowth of preexisting binary gender differences but a force that requires and produces binary gender difference.

straight culture’s version of gender equity often looks like men taking on “women’s work” (housecleaning, child care) but needing a ton of gender affirmation in the process or using their strength and privilege to lovingly protect the girls and women in their lives.

Lmao

The professional and university-educated young women whom Fincher interviewed described their boyfriends as selfish, jealous, insensitive, boring, arrogant, and generally unappealing, and yet they also described a high likelihood that they would marry these men because they did not believe better men were available and they feared being lonely.

Lol

and even though many of these straight people are kind and good and feminist, the point is that queer people yearn for one another, and they yearn for a break from witnessing straight life.

Yes!!!

All of this said, my intention is not to romanticize queer life. Being queer hardly means we are saved from sexual abuse, intimate-partner violence, unhealthy relationships, or traumatic breakups. Queer people act out and hurt each other in numerous ways, including violence, addiction, lying, and so forth. But the key difference between straight culture and queer culture in this regard is that the latter does not attribute these destructive behaviors to a romantic story about a natural and inescapable gender binary. Lesbians, for instance, do not find ourselves attracted to a gender category that is principally defined by its inability to understand or identify with our own. We are not mansplained by the people who claim to love us. We are not expected by our partners to shoulder the most devalued household and parenting labor because we are women. On the whole, misogyny has not cast a shadow of fear over our flirtations. Our relationships, unlike straight relationships, aren’t presumed to be subject to gender-based antagonisms or in structural conflict from the start.

But the key difference between straight culture and queer culture in this regard is that the latter does not attribute these destructive behaviors to a romantic story ...

Men love women’s bodies, we are told, but only after women spend an inordinate amount of time whipping their bodies into a lovable shape—by dieting, shaving, waxing, dying, perfuming, covering with makeup, douching, and starving them. Young men, we are encouraged to believe, have a lot of desire for women, but they dare not talk to each other about sex in ways that center girls’ and women’s pleasure, power, or subjectivity because, paradoxically, this kind of talk feels gay.

Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.”75

It is possible for straight men to like women so much, so deeply, that they actually really like women. Straight men could be so unstoppably heterosexual that they crave hearing women’s voices, thirst for women’s leadership, ache to know women’s full humanity, and thrill at women’s freedom. This is how lesbian feminists lust for women. I do not despair about the tragedy of heterosexuality, because another way is possible.

on T-shirts and elsewhere, of men’s simultaneous desire for and hatred of women—all wrapped together into one dysfunctional sexual orientation.

“falling in love was what a man did with other men . . . [and] falling in love with women more often than not was unmanly,” but modern heterosexuality compelled men to engage in precisely this unmanly act.6

So fking twisted

British sexologist and eugenicist Havelock Ellis described men’s “latent cruelty in courtship” and women’s receptivity to pain and domination as core heterosexual impulses:

tragic state of heterosexual marriage for many women, including new brides shocked and repelled by the revelation of their husbands’ naked bodies or “driven to suicide and insanity” by “the horror of the first night of marriage.”

Women frustrated with this state of affairs could turn to marriage-advice books written by authoritative men, such as Podolsky and Tyrer, but most of these texts would simply affirm the gendered lopsidedness of heterosexual love: women are to appreciate men’s humanity—their ideas, triumphs, and vulnerabilities—though they should hardly expect men to offer the same in return.

But the ads also capitalized on men’s still tenuous and largely transactional attachment to women. If wives were not careful about their appearance and caretaking responsibilities, they were in danger of losing their husbands or suffering their wrath.

I also have this problem =_=||

inaugurating what would become a long television tradition of braiding together marital misogyny, or men’s aversion to their wives, with heterosexual love.

Playboy offered men sexual images of women they could eroticize without any expectation of love or friendship, but it also created a virtual community of men—a space where real love and friendship, the kind experienced among men, could at least be approximated on the page, between a sympathetic male columnist and his male reader.

Drawing heavily from twelve-step, addiction-focused approaches to codependency, Norwood argued that women needed to learn to validate themselves and stop trying to change men to meet their needs.

lol

the book’s gender essentialism provided a reassuring counterpoint to the mounting feminist evidence that gender roles are socially constructed and therefore mutable, and it provided readers an alternative to the slow and difficult work of feminist social change.

Venus Martian book

In the late twentieth century, readers consumed the idea that the job duties associated with being a successful wife still included a significant amount of performativity and husband-centered emotional labor, a kind of “intensive wifing” that mirrored the intensive mothering and child-centeredness popular during the same period.

Lol

Pickup Artists

A very very absurd chapter.

One of the trainers quickly affirmed that this is a common theme for men: “Men want to be able to choose, not settle for the low-hanging fruit. We’re going to make that happen.” My sympathy for some of these men—men heartbroken by the low-hanging fruit—started to wane.

white-supremacist hierarchies of beauty ensured that the figure of the skinny blonde still held sway over these men.

Yeah I remember Elon Misk wanted his 1st wife to due platinum blonde as well

On the one hand, gender labor smooths out the contradictions, but on the other hand, the very act of doing this labor exposes heterosexuality as a high-maintenance, nonautomatic project.

Coaches encouraged them to make self-deprecating jokes, to bond with women about how creepy other men are,

Saw that on snl lol

“My mom sent me here to lose my virginity. Do you think I have a shot?” [The coach explains that “anything about being a virgin, having a small penis, being gay, being dropped off by your mom—ironically, these all get a laugh and really make women comfortable.”]

Wtf… that’s nothing but creepy

They offered several examples of these differences: men know right away if they are attracted to women, but women’s desire builds in response to social cues;22 men just want to be happy all the time and live in the “high,” but women want a fuller range of emotions and a compelling journey; men are “hunters” who measure success by external accomplishment, whereas women measure experiences by their emotional depth; men want to solve problems and be heroes, but women want to be heard and to share intimate experiences.

The fuck I’m very manly by this standard

certainly agreed with this critique of the heteropatriarchal notion that straight women are sexual gatekeepers by nature or hardwired to trade sex for emotional connection or “keepers of virtue” who, over the course of their lives, bestow sex—as a gift—on a select and fortunate group of lust-filled men.

Ewwww! Gross!!!! Gross!!!!!

one of the most misogynistic corners of the internet, young men who had come together to improve their “game” were standing up for #metoo, thinking beyond consent to consider the quality of women’s sexual experiences, and using spot-on metaphors to help each other conceptualize good, humanizing sex.

Humanizing sex lmao.

“ancient, sacred” energy of masculinity, which complements, rather than harms, women.

😮‍💨 what kinda bs is this

Straight men’s feminism—when anchored in gender-essentialist ideas about “real manhood”—also relies on the emotional labor of straight women who are compelled to celebrate and reward men for putting their “masculine energy” or “male strength” to a nonviolent use.

Yes

“I hope he bangs this chick tonight because she’s smoking hot. That would be really good for him, and if he could do it, that would just make me so happy.” And I wasn’t just saying this. I actually felt it. . . . At that moment . . . my love for him was bigger than any form of jealousy I could have. In Nawaz’s narrative, as in many of the stories that men tell about their personal transformations in the seduction community, the romance lies not in the relationships men have with women—which are described in more transactional terms (the win/win)—but in the relationships they have with one another.35

That’s so bizarre, I don’t think I can ever say that to a hetero female

Once you’re on this track, you’re pretty much a lesbian and you think like a lesbian and you live with lesbians and your community is lesbians, and the heterosexual world is foreign. —Gloria Anzaldúa

Lmao damn true