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[...] He said that his boss forced him to sell diseased meat covered in yellow spots, which he’d had to remove. The employee wanted to leave, to get a job at the Cypress Processing Plant, since it had such a good reputation. He just wanted to do honest work so he could support his family. He couldn’t take the smell of bleach, the stench of rotting chicken made him vomit, he’d never felt so sick and miserable. And he couldn’t look the customers in the eye, the women who were trying to make ends meet and asked for whatever was cheapest to make breaded milanesas for their children. If his boss wasn’t there, he gave them whatever was freshest; otherwise he had to sell them the rotten meat, and afterward he couldn’t sleep because of the guilt. This job was consuming him little by little. The employee told him all this and he talked to his father, who decided to stop selling meat to the butcher shop and hire the man to come and work for him.
[...] It’s known that in public nursing homes, when the majority of seniors die, or are left to die, they’re sold on the black market. It’s the cheapest meat money can buy because it’s dry and diseased, full of pharmaceuticals. It’s meat with a first and last name. In some cases, seniors’ own family members authorize a private or state-owned nursing home to sell their bodies and use the proceeds to pay off any debt. There are no longer funerals. It’s very difficult to ensure that a body isn’t disinterred and eaten. That’s why many of the cemeteries were sold and others abandoned. Some still remain as relics of a time when the dead could rest in peace.
[...] He thinks it’ll be cause for concern when the man stops looking at him this way, when the hatred doesn’t keep him going any longer. Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything. He wishes he could hate someone for the death of his son. But who can he blame for a sudden death? He tried to hate God, but he doesn’t believe in God. He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral, but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one. [...]
Esteban is his sister’s husband. Whenever he thinks of his brother-in-law, he sees a man hunched over, with a face full of contradictions and a half smile that’s an attempt at hiding them. He believes Esteban is a man trapped by his circumstances, by a wife who’s a monument to stupidity, and by a life he regrets having chosen.
She takes him to a room on another floor where the specimens, all males, are sitting on seats similar to those found in cars. They’ve been immobilized and their heads are inside what look like square helmets made of metal bars. An assistant pushes a button and the helmet-like structure moves very fast, striking the specimen’s head against a board that senses and registers the quantity, velocity, and impact of the strikes. Some of the specimens appear to be dead because they don’t react when the assistants try to revive them. Others look around disoriented, and have pained expressions on their faces. Valka says, “We simulate automobile accidents and collect data so that safer cars can be built. That’s why we need more male specimens, strong ones, so that they can withstand several trials.”
When he reaches the kitchen, it’s as if he’s been struck by a smell that’s rancid, if fleeting. He walks toward the door to the cold room. He looks through the glass and sees a head without an arm. So she got herself a female, that skank, he thinks. Domestic head are a status symbol in the city; they give a household prestige. He looks at the head more closely, and when he makes out a few sets of initials he realizes she’s an FGP. Off to the side on the countertop, he sees a book. His sister doesn’t have books. The title is Domestic Head: Your Guide to Death by a Thousand Cuts. There are red and brown stains in the book. He feels he might vomit. Of course, he thinks, she’s going to carve the head up slowly, serving pieces every time she hosts an event. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts thing must be some sort of trend, if all her guests are talking about it. An activity for the whole family, cutting up the living being in the fridge, based on a thousand-year-old form of Chinese torture. The domestic head looks at him sadly. He tries to open the door, but it’s locked.
As for the normalized sexism inside straight culture, lesbian feminists wrote volumes. With righteous rage, they detailed the ways that straight men desired women’s services—emotional, sexual, reproductive, domestic—rather than actual women, and they exposed the toll this took on women’s mental health. The Radicalesbians declared, “by virtue of being brought up in a male society, we have internalized the male culture’s definition of ourselves . . . as relative beings who exist not for ourselves, but for the servicing, maintenance, and comfort of men.”7 They described recoiling from men’s misogyny (“I began to avoid him, . . . to sleep with him to shut him up, to be silent out of exhaustion, to take tranquilizers . . .”).8 Audre Lorde described sex with men as “dismal and frightening and a little demeaning.”9 Gloria Anzaldúa recounted the misogyny inside straight Mexican culture, wherein “woman is the stranger, the other, . . . man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of fear,” and consequently, Anzaldúa explains, “I made the choice to be queer.”10 Kate Millet put forward a theory of patriarchy as a heterosexual political system maintained through men’s sexual power over women, in families as well as in the public sphere, that had naturalized rape and other forms of men’s sexual coercion and control of women.11 Cherríe Moraga concurred that the “control of women begins through the institution of heterosexuality,” adding that a man wants “to be able to determine how, when, and with whom his women—mother, wife, and daughter—are sexual. For without male-imposed social and legal control of our reproductive function . . . Chicanas might freely ‘choose’ otherwise, including being sexually independent from and/or with men.”12
ugh
[...] The professional and university-educated young women whom Fincher interviewed described their boyfriends as selfish, jealous, insensitive, boring, arrogant, and generally unappealing, and yet they also described a high likelihood that they would marry these men because they did not believe better men were available and they feared being lonely.61 This tragic arrangement on which heterosexuality was founded—“I don’t really like you, but I am going to get (or stay) married to you out of fear or practicality”—remains alive and well, giving rise to an enormously profitable self-help and relationship-coaching industry designed to smooth over heterosexual antagonisms and disappointments.
[...] In particular, the tension between the expectation of heterosexual love and men’s unapologetic disinterest in conversation with their wives produced a demand among women readers for advice on how to cultivate their husbands’ affection. For instance, Dr. Edward Podolsky’s 1947 book Sex Today in Wedded Life: A Doctors Confidential Advice includes a list of “10 Commandments for Wives”:
- Don’t bother your husband with petty troubles and complaints when he comes home from work.
- Be a good listener. Let him tell you his troubles; yours will seem trivial in comparison.
- Remember your most important job is to build up and maintain his ego (which gets bruised plenty in business). Morale is a woman’s business.
- Let him relax before dinner, and discuss family problems after the “inner man” has been satisfied.
- Always remember he’s a male and marital relations promote harmony. Have sane views about sex.
- No man likes a wife who is always tired out. Conserve your energy so you can give him the companionship he craves.
- Never hold up your husband to ridicule in the presence of others. If you must criticize, do so privately and without anger.
- Remember a man is only a grown-up boy. He needs mothering and enjoys it if not piled on too thick.
- Don’t live beyond your means, or add to your husband’s financial burdens.
- Don’t try to boss him around. Let him think he wears the pants.
lol
In sum, midcentury representations of marriage doubled down on earlier themes of opposite-sex disinterest and resentment by suggesting to women that not only their bodies but also their personalities needed to be carefully managed in order to produce happy heterosexuality. As experts elaborated their expectations of the good wife, women’s submission and self-sacrifice became central ingredients of straight culture, with women warned about what they must give up in order to “keep their men” (the list of sacrifices included their jobs and interests, their desire for adult conversation, their selfhood). Straight culture was also marked by men’s fragility and irritation, their pervasive sense of burden, loss, and entrapment. Men were encouraged to fantasize about freedom from emotional intimacy with women or to dream of a life characterized by diminished heterosexual demands (i.e., bachelorhood) and expanded homosocial bonds (the company of men). Of particular significance to my analysis of the heterosexual-repair industry is the fact that midcentury advertisers learned to capitalize on the tragedy of heterosexuality by creating ads that played on men’s desire for freedom and power over women and women’s desire to be attractive and interesting to their husbands.54 Marketers recognized that women had to work to achieve and sustain men’s transitory satisfaction with heterosexual marriage or face the threat of abandonment and economic insecurity. Women’s subordination and precarity within heterosexual relationships gave marketers a phenomenally effective “hook” for reaching straight women consumers, a hook that would continue to animate the heterosexual-repair industry into the next several decades.55