Heterosexuality Quotes

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.”
― Dorothy Parker

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“Whether it's men, women—it doesn't really matter. The human race is filled with passion and lust. And to coin terms like heterosexuality, homosexuality or even bisexuality makes no sense to me. You are human. You love who you love. You fuck who you fuck. That should be enough—no labels. No stigmas. Nothing. Just be to be.
But life isn't that kind. People will always find things to hate.”
― Krista Ritchie, Kiss the Sky

“How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?”
― Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

“You're into what you're into, I'm into what I'm into. We don't have to be into the same shit, and if you're safe, sane, and happy, then go on and get you some.”
― Matt Fraction, Sex Criminals, Vol. 3: Three the Hard Way

“Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in, affairs of the heart from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other.”
― Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women

“If you think being straight means you're being discriminated against, you're probably misreading your privilege.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: 'try on' a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the 'fit' and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies' dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. 'Mariam,' he said as if by way of explanation, 'has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.' On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“A woman writer, except in rare instances, has no protection such as enjoyed by men who use their wives and mistresses as a marline to save themselves from the wear and tear of interruption.”
― Miles Franklin

“The line between straight men having sex with men and "actual" homosexuality is under constant scrutiny, and for straight men, violence is a key element that imbues homosexuality with heterosexual meaning, or untangles hetero-erotic forms of homosexuality from the affective, political, and romantic associations with gay and lesbian life. Sometimes this violence takes the form of humiliation or physical force enacted by one straight man as he makes sexual contact with another; in other cases, it may take the form of two men fantasizing about sexual violence against women. In many cases, violence is a central part of the work of reframing homosexual sex as an act that men do to build one another's strength, or to build what I call "anal resilience," thereby inoculating one another against what they imagine are the sincere expressions of gay selfhood.”
― Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

“Sexual intercourse is the only purely reproductive sexual practice and if it is engaged in by women only when they wish to procreate then reproduction is under women's control. Once sexual intercourse is established as compulsory then women have recourse only to artificial contraception, abortion, and infanticide, to control reproduction and childbearing.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Saying it's hard being straight is like complaining to the poor that it's difficult being wealthy.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Explanations of straight men's homosexual behavior take the awkwardness, shame, and ambivalence attached to these encounters as evidence of discordance between self and behavior, forgetting that these affectations characterize the terrain of sexuality more broadly. For example, among the many costs of sexism is that sex is often utterly scripted and unsatisfying for straight women, and yet straight women's sexual dissatisfaction is rarely taken as evidence that they are acting out of accordance with their heterosexual orientation.”
― Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

“Some men became fathers mainly to show that they are not gay. Some, only to hide the fact that they are.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Estos anuncios dolían a Yuichi. Sin poder evitarlo, le obligaban a pensar que la sociedad se basaba en la heterosexualidad, ese principio, enojoso hasta la exasperación, establecido por la mayoría.”
― Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors

“Will patrols his heterosexuality like a prison guard who has recently lost faith in the penal system. Or maybe one who favours reform of the penile system (thanks and sorry . . .).”
― Robert Webb, How Not To Be a Boy

“The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not.”
― Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind: And Other Essays

“If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts: A Memoir

“Heterosexuality is not merely a sexual orientation that happens to be the orientation of most people. Heterosexuality is a political institution that is taught and conditioned and reinforced.”
― Angela Chen

“...the work of sexologists and the development of sex therapy are all instances of how men’s power over women was to be supported and managed through the regulation of marital sex. Sex, in this scheme of things, was not a natural and spontaneous seeking after pleasure by men and women, but a regulatory mechanism designed and constructed to enforce male dominance and female submission.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Women's anxiety is not just some unnecessary vestige of a past morality but a realistic response to most, if not all the practices and ideas about sex in this book. The Joy of Sex shows women to be rather unregenerately 'Victorian' in attitude to sex, never quite catching up to what is modern. Women's backwardness was the problem in all sexual-revolution advice literature.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“He will lift up the limp bodies of the rabbits and show me how he caught them square between the eyes, and the bright bodies of male and female pheasants with shot in the breast and their necks hanging broken and their eyes half open in the voluptuous death he loves. He will be a knife leaning above me as he kisses me.”
― Meridel Le Sueur, Harvest

“And so part of the declaring of love means you are working to a commission, now. You are not the sole architect of the person you are building. Someone else is looking over your blueprints--nodding, enthusiastically,over this turret--so you build the turret bigger! and remaining tactfully silent over an ostentatious fountain, which you immediately and silently scrap. You have entered a new world--in which there are two opinions on what will make the very best you.

And if your partner is wise, and kind, and has the same taste as you, you will make amazing things together.

And if your partner is broken, or impatient, or has darker needs--is unknowingly trying to build you in the shape of another woman he once knew, and lost; is trying to lean into your foundations to make his own stronger--you will make something with rotten walls, and impossible angles, which will, one day in the future, collapse.

But that is all part of becoming an adult. That is the difference between girls and women. That they are finally ready to hear the secret of what makes them them,. That they are strong enough--for good, or for ill--to ask someone what is, unexpectedly,the most terrifying, relevatory question, on Earth; one you have to be brave, and ready, to hear: "Why do you love me?”
― Caitlin Moran, How to be Famous

“Have you ever thought what it means to have free will in terms of religion? Imagine that God created you with a gay brain, and then expects you to be a heterosexual, but not homosexual, because you have free will to choose the 'right way'.”
― Elmar Hussein

“homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense, but is merely a preference, orientation, or propensity, on par with and not different in mind from, heterosexuality.”
― Matthew Riemer, We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride In The History of Queer Liberation

“Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions ... but homsexuality is workers' control of production, not the end of work.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“The narrower their lives, the wider their hips. Those with husbands had folded themselves into starched coffins, their sides bursting with other people’s skinned dreams and bony regrets. Those without men were like sour-tipped needles featuring one constant empty eye. Those with men had had the sweetness sucked from their breath by ovens and steam kettles. Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh. They had looked at the world and back at their children, back at the world and back again at their children, and Sula knew that one clear young eye was all that kept the knife away from the throat’s curve”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“it is most useful to think about these questions not in terms of the individual rights of transsexuals, but in terms of how these issues link with those of other marginalized populations, or with the functioning of the state in general.”
― Viviane Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism

“Feminists want to free all women from the threat of harassment in the street through the reconstruction of male sexuality. [...] men would have to abandon objectifying exploitative sex and redefine altogether what they saw as sexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution