The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

Some years ago, I was chatting about parenting with a lesbian couple with a child close in age to my own. We arrived at the topic of children’s sexuality, and one of the lesbian moms made a comment I have heard before, a comment that lesbian and gay people are perhaps more likely to share openly than lefty straight parents: “If I am to be totally honest, I would prefer, for our child’s sake, that he isn’t gay. We don’t want him to have to deal with the challenges that come with being gay.” Despite the stark reality of homophobic bullying, this logic didn’t ring true to me, and I was struck by how normalized it had become to say something about queerness (“No one would choose to be gay” or “I don’t want my child to be gay like me”) that most people I know would be quite unlikely to say about almost any other form of difference subject to violence and oppression. I then asked these lesbian moms, “Do you really feel that way? Do you feel like your own life has been so terrible that you wish your parents could have saved you from it? Do you feel that being straight would have been better for you?” These women both smiled, looked at each other, laughed, and said, “No. I see your point.” I didn’t probe further, but what I imagined those sly smiles were reflecting was their instantaneous flashback to all that was pleasurable and joyous about their lesbian lives. I have no idea what they were actually thinking, but the point here is that I suspect many queers love (the queer part ...

Concern about straight women’s well-being, and agreement that straight men would benefit considerably from some basic instruction on how to treat women, is something of a running joke in queer subculture—or, to be more accurate, in dyke subculture. For instance, the Instagram page @hets_explain_yourselves is a digital archive of #hetnonsense that includes in its bio the rhetorical question “Are Hets OK?” Followers of the page can scroll with befuddlement or horror through images of infant clothing proclaiming, “I heart boobs just like daddy,” a beer garden called “Husband Day Care Center,” numerous memes about how to keep a man, a diet book that promises women they can use nutrition to control the gender of their future babies, and so on. In a similar vein, the queer comedian DeAnne Smith has a comedy routine based on precisely this blend of queer shock and confusion about straight people’s lives. Speaking first to straight women and later to straight men, Smith proclaims during her routine, I don’t know how to speak to straight women but I do have something to tell you. . . . You have set the bar in your relationships too low. How would I know that? . . . The girl I am dating now, until now, has exclusively dated men. It is so easy to impress her! . . . It is ridiculous. I just show her basic human decency and she loses her mind. . . . Straight guys, it’s not that hard to impress women. Show minimal, minimal, minimal, minimal interest in things your lady is passionate abo...

the historian Hanne Blank offers a telling account of heterosexuality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and colonial America, citing the American preacher John Cotton’s concern that so many men “despise and decry [wives] and call them a necessary Evil” and noting that, for several centuries, men who loved women were perceived as “effeminate” or “cunt-struck.”10 The idea that men’s romantic or even sexual interest in women is threatening to patriarchy, or “unmanly,” may strike us as quite inconsistent with current understandings of heteromasculinity, yet there is ample evidence of the persistence of this view. Indeed, my own earlier research looked closely at the links between white heteromasculinity and expressions of disgust or resentment for the object of one’s sexual desire—especially in the US military, in US fraternities, and in other male-dominated institutions in the United States.11 In some of these institutions, girls and women are so degraded that for straight men to express enthusiastic interest in them, as desirable humans rather than as bitches, whores, and abject receptacles for penetration, is to subvert their own masculinity (now sometimes called being “henpecked” or “pussy-whipped”).

A distinctive and common feature of early twentieth-century marriage self-help texts is their concern with the problem of mutual physical repulsion by wives and husbands. Sexologists and physicians by their own accounts were very busy teaching women and men how to make their bodies, and heterosexual sex itself, less repellent. Stopes was worried about the “mental revolt and loathing” that wives may feel in reaction to their husbands’ sexual violence;18 Ellis warned of the “stage of apparent repulsion and passivity” that seemed to be a normal part of women’s experience of sex with their husbands (a stage he believed would eventually give way to “active participation”);19 William Robinson, another early twentieth-century sexologist and author whom I discuss in more detail shortly, hoped that his marriage-advice manuals would address the “disgust,” “deep hatred,” and “desire for injury and revenge” that heterosexual couples felt for each other.20 If heterosexual, reproductive, married intercourse was a core organizing principle of American life in the twentieth century, how could it also be so disgusting and rage inducing? On women’s end, the most obvious answer comes from sexologists’ own accounts: marriage was a site of repeated rape and dehumanization of women by their husbands, a situation that women struggled to endure and survive. But even beyond the well-documented patriarchal violence of marriage were other contributing factors. Intercourse between white American men ...

Heterosexual desire and mutual likability did not come naturally, they acknowledged, but could be cultivated with the proper tools. Last, they accepted the premise that women and men often found each other’s bodies undesirable and hence advocated for the consumption of beauty products that help stimulate opposite-sex desire. Laying the foundation for the midcentury explosion of beauty interventions targeted to women attempting to appear “fresh” and “lovely” for their husbands while laboring at home, eugenicist advocates for hygienic and modern marriage offered soaps, perfumes, makeup, douching, and other consumer goods as keys to happy heterosexuality. They made explicit that heterosexual marriage was no longer a labor contract in which both parties showed up “as is” but an ongoing affective project requiring access to precise tools and information that would build mutual affection. Each of these interventions set the stage for straight culture’s emergence as the romantic arm of misogyny, wherein the delicate coexistence of hate and love, the slap and the kiss, would come to represent the heteroerotic. But this era also initiated straight culture as a gendered mode of consumption in which the purchase of beauty products and relationship advice were vital to maintaining this delicate balance.

ass on public transport. . . . The grotesque and murderous aesthetics of necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach.”3 Sometimes straight culture is quite literally repulsive; we feel it in the gut. We have insufficient language to describe queer people’s experience of finding straight culture repellent and pitiable, given that heterosexuality has been presented to us as love’s gold standard. But even without a suitable name for this contradiction—the fact that the world’s most glorified relationship is often a miserable one—many queers have still spoken this truth. In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves: “The so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. . . . The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.”4 As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual.

The affect of straight culture is marked not only by repressed anger and sadness but by a kind of emotional flatness, an antiflamboyance. Here, straight culture and WASP culture overlap, highlighting the ways that straight people of color, Jews, Muslims, people with disabilities, sluts, fat people, and white queers—to name a few—depart from the norms associated with straightness and/or whiteness. For example, a common straight critique of gay affect in the mid- and late twentieth century was that it was too flamboyant—too spectacular, too loud, too sexual, too confident, too animated, too exposed, and overall just too much. If we reverse the gaze, focusing on queer people’s assessment of the look and feel of straight life, we can see how straight people—especially straight white people—might seem to queers too passive, boring, unimaginative, and generally uninspired. If queerness is too much, then straightness is too little, the relational manifestation of lack.

Queer conversations about the boredom of straight life take place with different languages and at multiple registers. In the academic realm of queer studies, the fact that straight culture feels tedious and repetitive is sometimes traced back to the way gender itself is a repetition, a never-ending process of attempting to achieve normative, or at least legible, femininity or masculinity.15 Everyone more or less follows the same predictable scripts that signal gender success in a given time and place. Sometimes queer scholars understand the mechanical and unoriginal quality of straight culture to be reflected in its obsession with reproduction, or the ways that straight adults so often pin their own value and happiness on their children’s future accomplishments—a literal reproduction of themselves.16 Numerous queer scholars have also argued, in different ways, that heterosexuality is intended to be boring, its very design aimed at control and predictability. Straight culture keeps people having babies, buying products, working hard in the paid labor force to support children, and fearing many of the potentially less boring sexual desires and/or subcultural practices that are inconvenient for capitalism, white supremacy, and the state.17

From a queer point of view, one of the defining features of straight culture is complaint. Straight women complain about men they date or marry with such gusto that queer people are left shaking our heads and thinking, “My god, why, why, why does this woman stay with someone she finds this pathetic?” In The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant demonstrates that complaint was cultivated in women through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to create a singular and normative “women’s culture” organized around the premise that heteroromantic love is what women want most and what they will seek at all costs, even when it fails them and causes them great pain.23 Products marketed to women—cosmetics, romantic films and literature, self-help programs—manufactured sentimental belonging in “shared womanness” by celebrating women’s ability to survive their disappointing and failed relationships, and this survival became a defining feature of women’s empowerment. For Berlant, the female complaint also keeps individual women tethered to their own somewhat-unique expressions of normative heterofemininity: “[Women’s culture] flourishes by circulating as an already felt need, a sense of emotional continuity among women who identify with the expectation that, as women, they will manage personal life and lubricate emotional worlds. This commodity world, and the ideology of normative, generic-but-unique femininity trains women to expect to be recognizable by other members of this int...

Heteronormativity is not a neutral cultural formation organized around a natural, freely occurring sexual preference but an obligatory system structuring many of the world’s societies, a system “that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized and maintained by force.”44 As one comrade explains above, straight rituals feel like they “require the participation of all [people] engaged around them,” including queer people. This is because heteronormative rituals—coming-of-age parties, engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelor/ette parties, weddings, gender-reveal parties, baby showers, elaborately gendered children’s birthday parties, Valentine’s Day, anniversary parties—are the accepted traditions offered to all of us to celebrate passage through life. Heteronormative rituals shape how we understand the difference between youth and adulthood, success and failure, loneliness and connectedness. In straight culture, if women don’t get married and have children and figure out how to stay attractive and keep their man, a cascade of tragic temporal consequences ensues: the clock is ticking, the window is closing, youthful beauty is fading, expensive interventions are needed. By contrast, while many of these heteronormative demands try to push their creepy tendrils into lesbian feminist culture, there remains considerable room for a feminist dyke to assert her disinterest in having children as a point of queer pride (“No breeders!”) and to experience deep love and c...

A secret about lesbian sex that I don’t think I have ever seen written about before is that lesbians appreciate different things about the vulva and vagina than do straight men. If popular culture and the rise of vaginal tightening and rejuvenation procedures are any indication, straight men value a “tight” vagina. But this is incomprehensible to me as a dyke. If I only had a nickel for every time I have heard queer people brag about being size queens with capacious vaginas and/or anuses that welcome fists and giant dildos, I’d be a rich woman! In queer space, what makes an orifice “good” is not how it feels to the person going inside it (for whom it might make sense for the emphasis to be on tightness) but how the orifice feels about itself: what it wants, what it can do, what it can enjoy. For many humans, the capacity to take something very large into one’s body is extremely pleasurable, and this is much more difficult when one has been told that the goal is to keep all orifices small and tight. It is fine, of course, if size is not one’s thing, but the point here is that it makes queer people—like my comrades quoted above—quite sad that in straight culture, a vagina is evaluated according to its capacity to please men and not its capacity to experience pleasure.53

ten years younger than me . . . sometimes. Sometimes I am eight and she is not born yet, but the ghost of her puts a hand on my throat, pinches my clit, bites my breast. . . . When I am fucking her, I am a thousand years old, a crone with teeth. . . . She is a suckling infant, soft in my hands, trusting me with her tender open places.”23 Highlighting the lesbian feminist disinvestment in female sexual innocence and modesty, Jeanne Cordova recalls that her status as a handsome butch lesbian and high-profile radical organizer “brought dozens of women” to her bed, one of whom, Bejo, Cordova describes as “the most accomplished femme lover” she’d ever met. “Old-school bar femmes were far better lovers than newly coined lesbian feminists.”24 Cherríe Moraga, too, desires a woman with age, accomplishment. Of Elena, the woman she lusts for, Moraga states, “I am ready for you now. I want age. Knowledge. Your body that still, after years, withholds and surrenders—keeps me there, waiting, wishing. . . . Willing. Willing to feel this time what disrupts in me. Girl. Woman. Child. Boy. Willing to embody what I will in the space of her arms.”25 Lesbian feminist desire, in these accounts, is defined not purely by two women’s sexual attraction to each other but by a quality of desiring women in which the objects of one’s lust are women’s complexities and accomplishments, both corporeal and otherwise. The best women lovers have the scars, the hunger, the weight, the teeth, and the political ...