by
Jane Ward
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[...] 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.
Straight men have already made it loud and clear that many of them are in it for the sex and free labor, so their work is not to acknowledge this but to recognize it as an utterly incomplete mode of desiring women—a feeble version of what heterosexuality could be. For straight women and men, accountability means piercing through the fantasy we’re all sold about the natural ease and happiness of heterosexuality and instead learning to recognize the structural and cultural conditions that have produced, but also stunted, their heterosexuality.
What she had read had evidently made her impatient of the prime discrepancy between man as he might be, and as he was. She would impose her crude belief that there could be heroism, excellence on herself and others, until they, or she, gave in. Exceptions could arise, rare and implausible, to suggest she might be right. To those exceptions she would give her whole devotion. It was apparently for them she was reserving her humility.
When Sefton Thrale said the word "global" you felt the earth to be round as a smooth ball, or white and bland as an egg. And had to remind yourself of the healthy and dreadful shafts and outcroppings of this world. You had to think of the Alps, or the ocean, or a live volcano to set your mind at rest.
lol
He used outworn idiom: "Lombard Street to a china orange," "All round China to get to Charing Cross"; "The Old Lady"even"of Threadneedle Street": phrases outdated before his time, which he cultivated and kept going if not alive. Still spoke of Turkey as "the sick man of Europe," though the entire Continent was a casualty ward long since. His sympathies were with the manageable distances of the past rather than the extravagant reach of the future. The future had been something to talk about, one foot safely on the fender.
It was easy for youth to scent this out and condemn. Less easy to feel for what was human in it, let alone pitiful.
god
The girls heard it said that Dora was raising them. Yet it was more like sinking, and always trying to rise. In these children a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end. An aversion to emotion was engendered, and the belief which in Caro was to last her lifetime that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress.
It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction. He was used to thinking of his life--I have done this, how could I have done that--like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. There was Father, loudly angered; Mother, all untidy woe. Then there was his aptitude: a teacher coming round after school, "The boy has unusual aptitude." The boy, out of all the others. His name had been printed on a list, and the award covered everything, even the books except, that is, for a coat; and the university was near the North Sea.
Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important. This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.
neil