The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

My 31 highlights

• Lesbian feminists and gay-liberation activists challenged this logic by arguing that their eroticism was actually forged through identification; when women had sex with women or men had sex with men, they discovered what was desirable about themselves through the mirror of their partners’ bodies and desires. As in Audre Lorde’s description of the erotic meeting of joyful equals, lesbian feminists argued that lesbian sex represented a kind of feminist praxis wherein lust and identification were not mutually exclusive but radically interconnected. Harry Hay, the early gay-liberation activist, called this praxis “subject-to-subject consciousness” and believed it was impossible within straight culture, wherein sexual partners were perceived as “other.”

• Seduction trainees were taught that the best mind-set for seducing women is not to be attached to any particular woman but to approach enough beautiful women to get rejected dozens of times, until men move into a relaxed, abundance-oriented, nothing-to-lose frame of mind. This “fail harder” ethos comes directly from corporate, sales-driven motivational frameworks, which, as the sociologist Rachel O’Neill argues in her outstanding study of London-based seduction bootcamps, makes seduction less of a game than it is a form of work, in which men become sexual entrepreneurs who approach sex in terms of long-term investment and increased returns.9

• Gray confirmed for millions of readers that men and women do not naturally like or respect each other, and therefore they would need to learn to “fake it” for the sake of their relationships. While this may seem depressing, Gray reassured readers that heterosexual alienation is perfectly natural and nothing to worry about.

• 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 there is also another, far less discussed facet to this story about queer people keeping their distance from straight people—an element that has less to do with queer vulnerability or oppression in the face of straight privilege and more to do with queer power, freedom, abundance or relief in the face of heterosexual misery and myopia. It is a story about queer people sometimes finding straight culture and relationships too sad or enraging to witness, too boring or traumatic to endure. It is about queers often wishing to look away from the train wreck, by which I mean the seemingly inextricable place of sexual coercion and gender injustice within straight culture, or what the feminist writer JoAnn Wypijewski described in 2013—as she reflected on the ubiquity of sexual assault among teenagers—as heterosexuality’s relentlessly “primitive” attachment to lies, manipulation, and violence as the formative route to sex.2

• Robbins’s seminars are a stunning example of the cyclical nature of the tragedy of heterosexuality; the very gender binarism and misogyny that produce heterosexual misery are also the interventions proffered to consumers to remedy it. Robbins’s personal coaching also exemplifies the self-improvement focus of twenty-first-century heterosexual repair, in that it reframes men’s power over women not only as a winning relationship strategy but also as an act of spiritual wholeness that brings out the best in men and women, aligning them with their “path.”

• Living under the weight of heteronormativity means that a lot of people have come to understand heterosexuality as the most instinctive and fulfilling form of sexual relating.

• The discourse surrounding queer suffering and the ease of heterosexuality reflects a certain kind of reality, but it also obscures another. It masks the gendered suffering produced by straight culture, as well as queer sensations of freedom that result from having escaped not homophobia but heterosexual misery.

• 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

• book’s gender essentialism provided a reassuring counterpoint to the mounting feminist evidence that gender roles are socially constructed and therefore mutable, and it provided readers an alternative to the slow and difficult work of feminist social change.

• It is my belief that gay men’s persistent ownership of the meaning and origins of queerness, along with many gay men’s lack of concern about the lives of women, has made it difficult to shift our attention away from what is sad about being gay to what is even sadder about being straight.

• “If you are the bad guy, brilliant. He gives women a purpose, a challenge. He shows the world that he’s a big, bad, nasty guy but he shows the woman his good sides. He has a picture of his mother by his bedside table. He has cried in front of her. She wants to save him and melt his icy heart.” As I watched men take notes on this most nauseatingly heteronormative of monologues, I struggled not to roll my eyes with queer repulsion.

• In the late twentieth century, readers consumed the idea that the job duties associated with being a successful wife still included a significant amount of performativity and husband-centered emotional labor, a kind of “intensive wifing” that mirrored the intensive mothering and child-centeredness popular during the same period.68

• First, queer feminists have argued that straight life is characterized by the inescapable influence of sexism and toxic masculinity, both of which are either praised or passively tolerated in straight spaces. Second, queer observers of straight life have pointed to straight women’s endless and ineffective efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight women’s optimism and disappointment

• Here, modern marriage is characterized by the recognition of a wife’s personhood, just as one recognizes the personhood of a child. As with the child, this discursive recognition of personhood had no effect on the long-standing structural conditions that assigned greater value and freedom to one person over the other—whether adult-child or husband-wife. Instead, 1950s marriage-education films offered straight women a mechanism to imagine that their conformity and submission had nothing to do with the patriarchal foundation of heterosexual marriage itself but were instead individual acts of self-expression. Representing what would become a persistent theme in the American heterosexual-repair industry, such films obscured the coercive pipeline that tracked women into heterosexual marriage, motherhood, and free labor by situating the figure of the wife within a seemingly feminist discourse about women’s “freedom to choose.

• In the 2002 book Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women, the Australian journalist Susan Maushart offered a hard-hitting critique of precisely this “relentless routine of husband maintenance,” wherein a heterosexually married man “does fewer chores, is happier, healthier and generally more satisfied,” while a heterosexually married woman, “by contrast, will perform two to three times more unpaid physical, emotional, and organizational labor than her husband—and for a fraction of the rewards.”69

• When men extend empathy and subjectivity to women out of self-interest, to grease the wheels of sexual access or to continue receiving women’s emotional labor, this makes no intervention into men’s profound sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and women’s love, nor does it pose any challenge to men’s unrelenting attachment to their own masculinity as the core of their identity, the foundation of their goodness, the basis on which they connect with other men, and the primary contribution they think they’re making to the world.

• Queer people act out and hurt each other in numerous ways, including violence, addiction, lying, and so forth. But the key difference between straight culture and queer culture in this regard is that the latter does not attribute these destructive behaviors to a romantic story about a natural and inescapable gender binary. Lesbians, for instance, do not find ourselves attracted to a gender category that is principally defined by its inability to understand or identify with our own. We are not mansplained by the people who claim to love us. We are not expected by our partners to shoulder the most devalued household and parenting labor because we are women.

• queer people yearn for one another, and they yearn for a break from witnessing straight life.

• Late-1990s television shows like the phenomenally popular HBO series Sex and the City (based on Candace Bushnell’s 1997 book by the same name) linked “girl power” to straight women’s access to wealth and consumer objects, desirability and casual sex.

• of the core dysfunctions of straight culture—and a centerpiece of my analysis—is the misogyny paradox, wherein boys’ and men’s desire for girls and women is expressed within a broader culture that encourages them to also hate girls and women.

• The notion that the erotic depends on distance and unfamiliarity, or “keeping the mystery alive,” is one of the conceptual anchors of the heterosexual-repair industry, probably due to its resonance with the gender binary (for instance, a peddler of heterosexual repair might say, “It’s a good thing that men and women are from two different planets. . . . It may lead to some miscommunication and resentment, but it keeps things hot!”)

• 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

• From a queer perspective, this is one of the more discouraging elements of the heterosexual tragedy: when straight men move toward feminism, they almost always do so in ways that prop up the gender binary that causes their problems in the first place! Straight men’s feminism—when anchored in gender-essentialist ideas about “real manhood”—also relies on the emotional labor of straight women who are compelled to celebrate and reward men for putting their “masculine energy” or “male strength” to a nonviolent use.

• straight people’s attachments to mainstream culture and the status quo are sometimes accompanied by apathy about social justice projects, and this is what makes heterosexuals the worst people to get stuck next to at a dinner party.

• Heteronormativity nonetheless erases the need for straight people to justify or explain their sexuality, to others and to themselves: What does being straight do for them? What do they like about it? When did they first know they were straight?

• 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.”

• One of the foundational principles of lesbian feminism is that each person’s sexual desire is their own responsibility, if not something they can choose, then at least something they can choose to examine and take ownership of. Two decades before the emergence of what we now call queer theory, lesbian feminists argued for a vision of sexuality as a site of choice and political resistance. A far cry from today’s “born this way” approach to sexual orientation, which has been most widely embraced by gay men, lesbian feminists claimed their love of women as a cultivated political stance, an act of opposition to heteropatriarchy.

• One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expression of heterosexual misery, a kind of subconscious jealous rage against the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and disappointments of straight culture. Added to this anger is also an unspoken sadness—a chilling cloud of resignation—that is a palpable and sometimes repellent ingredient of the affect of straight culture. Straight people have few opportunities to grieve the disappointments of straight culture (the bad and coercive sex, the normalized inequities of daily life, straight men’s fragility and egomania, straight women’s growing disillusionment with men’s fragility and egomania, the failed marriages, the coparenting that is really solo parenting . . .) because how does one speak about the failure of the very system that defines people’s success?

• Women’s sexual disinterest triggers not only anger in men but also a kind of heteropatriarchal melancholy: a sexual loss that is difficult for straight men to mourn because it is perceived to be unnatural and shameful, a denial of men’s very birthright as men.

• While straight men’s desire for women’s bodies is often portrayed as an incredibly powerful force, many men’s notorious confusion about what produces female orgasm, their disinterest in providing oral sex to women, and their dramatically narrow ideas about what constitutes a female body worth desiring (waxed, shaved, scented, dieted, young, etc.) suggests that heteromasculinity is characterized by a much weaker and far more conditional desire for women’s bodies than is often claimed. To lesbians, men’s countless missed opportunities to actually like women are baffling.