The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Straight culture was also marked by men’s fragility and irritation, their pervasive sense of burden, loss, and entrapment.

many straight women find themselves dating or married to men who feel to them like tyrants or children, and many straight men find themselves with women they don’t actually want to talk to; both parties learn to fake interest in the name of relationship success.

In mundane everyday life, however, the misogyny paradox takes the subtler form of straight men claiming to love women and yet speaking over them, explaining things to them with no regard for women’s knowledge or expertise, and training their sons to reproduce this lack of respect for women’s humanity.

According to the documentary filmmaker Sut Jhally, this theme—men want women and also hate women—appears across musical genres and reproduces itself anew in each generation.

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.

Being queer hardly means we are saved from sexual abuse, intimate-partner violence, unhealthy relationships, or traumatic breakups.

Straight culture encourages panic at the idea that someone of “the wrong sex” might be using the women’s restroom and thereby threatening women’s sexual safety, while a queer approach to safety broadens our analysis to include gender policing and gendered violence of all kinds—including violence against trans and nonbinary queers who just need to pee and face no end of harassment in public bathrooms.

queer people also increasingly agree that these gender expressions are not determined by people’s body parts or sex assignment at birth, nor are they linked to sexual desire in any predictable way (femmes are often attracted to femmes, queers of all stripes can find nonbinary folks desirable, and so forth).

In other words, the tragedy of heterosexuality is about men’s control of women, but it is also about straight women’s and men’s shared romantic and erotic attachments to an unequal gender binary, or to the heteroerotic fantasy of binary, biologically determined, and naturally hierarchical gender oppositeness.

Heterosexuality (or the investment in a normative sexuality organized around the attraction of opposite bodies) is not an outgrowth of preexisting binary gender differences but a force that requires and produces binary gender difference.