by
Jane Ward
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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
Another number-one New York Times best seller from this era, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, by the psychologist Susan Forward and published in 1986, took a different and more feminist approach by naming misogyny, rather than codependency or lack of self-love, as the main dysfunction of the tragedy of heterosexuality. The book boldly demonstrated that misogyny was a widespread problem, characterized by men who controlled, devalued, yelled at, threatened, blamed, and frightened the women they claimed to love. These men flew into rages and acted like “hungry, demanding infants” who expected women to be “a never-ending source of total, all-giving love, adoration, concern, approval and nurturing.”60 In a particularly striking passage that echoes William Robinson’s account of heterosexual marriages seventy years prior, Forward acknowledged that readers may wonder about her use of the word “hatred” to describe many heterosexual relationships: “I realize that my use of the word hatred in the context of an intimate relationship is both explosive and controversial. . . . But it is the only word that sufficiently describes the combination of hostility, aggression, contempt, and cruelty that the misogynist exhibits in his behavior toward his partner.” [...]
Exemplifying this kind of broad generalizing about straight women, Kezia Noble announced during her bootcamp, in a salty and mocking tone, “Oh, he was so nice, I just had to have sex with him. . . . No woman has ever said that!” She went on to sing the praises of the bad-boy archetype: “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. It was not that I believed her to be wrong across the board; I knew many straight women, and queer women too, who were attracted to this kind of edgy masculinity. But it was the context of heteronormativity—wherein utterly mediocre straight men, including self-destructive, emotionally deficient tough guys, had the power to absorb straight women’s attention, to make women labor to save them, to impress women with the most basic displays of human feeling—that depressed me. Here was evidence of the power and resilience of narratives that repackage men’s deficiencies as enticing challenges for women.
[...] But the thing about heterosexual misery that makes it irreducible to basic human foible is that straight relationships are rigged from the start. Straight culture, unlike queer culture, naturalizes and often glorifies men’s failures and women’s suffering, hailing girls and women into heterofemininity through a collective performance of resilience. For instance, straight women’s suffering, and men’s redemption, played itself out on the national stage in 2016 with the release of Beyoncé’s opus Lemonade, which chronicled Jay-Z’s lying and infidelity and Beyoncé’s rage and ultimate forgiveness. Here again, popular discourse seized on the opportunity to position a Black woman as an exemplar of heteroromantic survival. The Ethiopian American writer Hannah Giorgis, writing for the Atlantic, explains that very little was required of Jay-Z for him to be forgiven:
These issues aside, the above comments from my respondents point to the fact that straight rituals are oppressive on a far greater order of magnitude, because of not only their disturbing content (e.g., throwing a party to announce the shape of an unborn baby’s genitals) but also their compulsory force. 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 [...]
The queer feminist scholar Angela Jones begins her essay “#DemandBetterStraightSex!” with an experience that a straight woman friend once shared with her. Her friend described sex with her boyfriend, but she was also describing what is now a familiar story about straight sex: he thrusts, he’s into it, he cums, she’s barely present and is thinking about doing the laundry, he gets up, and it’s over. Angela’s friend seems confused: “Sometimes it just feels like he’s raping me. I know he loves me, but why does he have to have sex with me when he knows I don’t want to?”48 Feminist research indicates that unwanted sex inside heterosexual relationships is so common and normalized that it a core part of the scaffolding of rape culture; there’s a thin line between unwanted sex (the kind that many women have with husbands and boyfriends all the time) and sexual assault. [...]
These are promising approaches, and there is no doubt that the gravity of the tragedy of heterosexuality requires a wide array of tactics. And yet my years of teaching and writing about heterosexuality have led me to rethink whether offering queerness to straight people, where queerness is defined as practices of gender and sexual nonnormativity, is the most practical or empathic way of attending to the daily injustices of straight women’s lives or to the material and cultural realities of heterosexual desire. Some straight women I know are structurally bound up in relationships with men that produce resentment but also security and comfort, disadvantage but also privilege. The privileges associated with heterosexuality are amplified for women of color and poor and working-class women, for whom other sources of power are unavailable. Moreover, “straightness” as an embodied desire for the opposite sex is, for many straight people, inseparable from a desire for gender and/or sexual respectability and cultural legibility.5 Straight people can be very attached to being straight, both erotically and culturally.