The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

If we want to know why many queer people prefer their own company to the company of straights, certainly one answer to this question is about protection and mutual care—we hold each other up in a world that pushes us down.

To return to my “queer kids sitting together in the classroom” metaphor, we might also consider that sometimes queer kids huddle together because they know, or at least imagine, that the other kids, the straight kids, have little or nothing to offer them.

Noah Michelson explains it this way: “From where I’m standing, it seems that straight people haven’t done so hot when it comes to love, sex, marriage, the family or gender roles, among other things. So why would I want to buy into that dysfunctional system?”10

Things that bore us are not just uninteresting but often also often tedious, repetitive, unoriginal, mechanical, and sometimes mind numbing.

Everyone more or less follows the same predictable scripts that signal gender success in a given time and place.

Yes! I think that’s the trouble! Sexuality irrelevant! Homos can’t really do the having kids part unless they really want to. And the marriage part only recently became possible as a script

The list—a queer take-off of the hit blog “Stuff White People Like”—included promise rings, gender-reveal parties, boat shoes, “Live, Laugh, Love” art, sip and paint events, Chinese-symbol tattoos, talking about the cut of engagement rings, gendering everything, cruises, voting for white supremacists,19 royal weddings, drag queens but not drag kings, Law and Order: SVU, and parties for every single life event, among many other uninspired cultural preferences.

Baby shower is so cringy I’m never going to another

The obsessive gendering, empty expressions of solidarity, mansplaining husbands and boyfriends, addiction to mainstream media and mass-marketed tchotchkes, and self-improvement programs run on delusions and/or self-loathing (especially those offered by the heterosexual-repair industry)—these are things that queers “just don’t understand,” according to Troisi and Werder.

Yes!!!!

Maturity and respectability are measured by what one has given up in order to keep the family system going, an ethos that is challenged by the presence of a queer child, for instance, who insists on “being who they are.” Queerness—to the extent that it emphasizes authenticity in one’s sexual relationships and fulfillment of personal desires—is an affront to the celebration of heteroromantic hardship.

Yes!!!Yes!!!Yes!!!!!!!!

Straight culture, unlike queer culture, naturalizes and often glorifies men’s failures and women’s suffering, hailing girls and women into heterofemininity through a collective performance of resilience.

I still think it’s patriarchal society, not straight culture

Male redemption narratives have rarely required of their leading figures any meaningful restoration or atonement. The simple act of apologizing is enough to warrant a second act.

Basically, straightness shapes everything, precisely by narrowing the field of what is conceivable or limiting the imagination.

Yes keep distance w men (other women’s bf). Like not that I love to hang w them so much but it’s hard for ppl in male dom places

Straight Rituals

Yes!

Being a queer person compelled to participate in straight rituals can be an alienating and cringe-worthy experience.

T_T

A dyke can be chubby, silver-haired, wizened, and sloppily dressed and still have a lot of game.

Yux likes silver haired prof type yes lol. Reflecting on what I’m attracted to, maybe too much overlap with hetero culture, I want pretty faces and game. =_=||

“discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”45

Pregnancy discussion

“Most annoying of all might be the belief that all bisexual women are interested in having threesomes with heterosexual couples—I

I only know too we’ll. And the media representation is also fueling that imagination

“I find it strange how someone can not like someone based on their genitals. Being pansexual, the concept of someone being ruled out of partner status because of what their genitals are just is absurd to my mind.” (gender fluid, Hispanic Latino)

I’ll certainly think twice when one genital has the potential to knock someone up

Straight men have caused women unthinkable suffering, and yet I share with them, presumably, something that has been fundamental and significant in my life—a desire to partner with women.

Lol I feel that way too

The privileges associated with heterosexuality are amplified for women of color and poor and working-class women, for whom other sources of power are unavailable.

if it is true that desire for sex with men is powerful enough for some women that it makes heterosexuality more desirable than queerness or asexuality, then this is itself an amazing fact—one that intervenes in the oft-cited notion that women care more about emotional connection than they do about sex. For straight feminist women, even this assertion—“I am in it for the dick,” as one straight friend told me—is an important first step toward deromanticizing women’s gendered suffering and exposing the cost-benefit analysis that is part of any heterosexual encounter under patriarchy.

A basic premise of straight culture is the idea that gendered bodies, especially women’s bodies, require purification and modification to be desirable—shaving, perfuming, toning, refining, shrinking, enlarging, and antiaging. But in queer spaces, it is often precisely the hairy, sweaty, dirty, smelly, or unkempt gendered body that is most beloved.

For gay men I imagine yes but not me!

Let’s not over generalize here. I like slim gender neutral bodies ><

This means that something very powerful is possible in queer life that I rarely see in straight culture: a merging of objectifying desire, on the one hand, and a feminist, subjectifying respect for those who are desired, on the other.

being “woman identified” was a core element of lesbian feminist practice, and while it often referred to women’s self-identification, or learning to love the self through intimacy with other women, it also referred to the practice of investing in women’s collective freedom and self-determination.

For the Radicalesbians, to desire women meant that one’s “energies flowed toward women,” that one desired to “relate more completely to women.”17 It meant disinvesting in “male identification,” or in the practice of supporting, benefiting from, justifying, and being complicit with patriarchal interests.

It meant recognizing that while straight men claimed to love women, in fact their energies flowed toward men—toward admiring men, seeking men’s approval, forging bonds with men, and so on. Heterosexuality, lesbian feminists recognized, was an oppressively homosocial—and often homoerotic—institution that romanticized men and women’s alienation from each other.

when women had sex with women or men had sex with men, they discovered what was desirable about themselves through the mirror of their partners’ bodies and desires.