The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

We might also examine the patriarchal and white-supremacist anchors of heterosexual desire in the United States, where Asian American women and white men are consistently ranked “most desirable” in surveys, with the former valued for beauty and docility and the latter for power.

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.

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.

Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting for men who have no close friends and won’t go to therapy. Men are less likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, to seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern so common as to be termed “normative male alexithymia” by psychologists.51 For straight men in relationships, all of these needs get aimed at women partners. In 2016, the writer Erin Rodgers coined the term “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.”52 Elaborating on this dynamic and the emotional burnout it produces in straight women, Melanie Hamlett further explains that the concept of the emotional gold digger “has gained more traction recently as women, feeling increasingly burdened by unpaid emotional labor, have wised up to the toll of toxic masculinity, which keeps men isolated and incapable of leaning on each other. . . . While [women] read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.”