The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

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”).