Status Updates From La contrainte à l’hétérosex...

"Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality."

"While women may, indeed must, be one another’s allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other’s company and attraction to each other’s minds and character, which attend a recognition of each other’s strengths."

"Another layer of the lie is the frequently encountered implication that women turn to women out of hatred for men. Profound scepticism, caution, and righteous paranoia about men may indeed be part of any healthy woman’s response to the misogyny of male-dominated culture. Lesbian existence is also represented as mere refuge from male abuses, rather than as an electric and empowering charge between women."

"It is asserted that primary love between the sexes is “normal”; that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; and that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women."

"The lie is many-layered. One layer asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men."

"The lie keeps women psychologically trapped, trying to fit mind, spirit, and sexuality into a prescribed script because they cannot look beyond the parameters of the acceptable. The women imprisoned in prescriptive ideas of the “normal” share the pain of blocked options, broken connections, and lost access to self-definition freely and powerfully assumed."

"The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today afflicts not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers."

"I suspect that the problem of the married woman who would prefer emotional–physical relationships with other women is a statistic surely no one will ever really have. How could we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to believe was their “natural” destiny?"

"Women have married because it was necessary, in order to do what was expected of women, because coming out of “abnormal” childhoods they wanted to feel “normal,” and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment."

"Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on
women."

"Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life."

"It has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic, partly because to acknowledge that for women heterosexuality may not be a “preference” at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and “innately” heterosexual."

"The original deep adult bonding is that of woman for woman. One form of false consciousness which serves compulsory heterosexuality is the maintenance of a mother–son relationship between women and men, including the demand that women provide maternal solace, nonjudgmental nurturing, and compassion for their harassers, rapists, and batterers (as well as for men who passively vampirize them)."

"What should be cause for alarm is instead accepted as normal sexual intercourse."

"The adolescent male sex drive, which, as both young women and men are taught, once triggered cannot take responsibility for itself or take no for an answer, becomes, according to Barry, the norm and rationale for adult male sexual behavior: a condition of arrested sexual development. Women learn to accept as natural the inevitability of this “drive” because they receive it as dogma. Hence, marital rape."

"As a young girl becomes aware of her own increasing sexual feelings … she turns away from her heretofore primary relationships with girlfriends. As they become secondary to her and recede in importance in her life, her own identity also assumes a secondary role and she grows into male identification."

"As sexual power is learned by adolescent boys through the social experience of their sex drive, so do girls learn that the locus of sexual power is male. Given the importance placed on the male sex drive in the socialization of girls as well as boys, early adolescence is probably the first significant phase of male identification in a girl’s life and development."

"The ideology of heterosexual romance, beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales, television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool ready to the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use."

"Sexual abuse and terrorism of women by men has been rendered almost invisible by treating it as natural and inevitable."

“Female sexual slavery is present in ALL situations where women or girls cannot change the conditions of their existence; where regardless of how they got into those conditions, e.g., social pressure, economic hardship, misplaced trust or the longing for affection, they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual violence and exploitation.”

"Men really fear not that they will have women’s sexual appetites forced on them or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether."

MacKinnon argues that placing rape only in the realm of “the violent” allows opposition to it without questioning how heterosexuality has normalized force as part of “the preliminaries.” Under conditions of male supremacy, she asks whether the notion of “consent” can have any real meaning at all.

MacKinnon raises radical questions about the qualitative differences between sexual harassment, rape, and “ordinary” heterosexual intercourse. One accused rapist even claimed he used “no more force than is usual for males during the preliminaries.” She criticizes the idea that “rape is violence, intercourse is sexuality,” which removes rape from the sexual sphere altogether.

"Enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually “normal,” while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is “queer,” “sick”."

"Women have been convinced that marriage and sexual orientation toward men are inevitable—even if unsatisfying or oppressive—components of their lives."