If Heterosexuality Weren't Everywhere, I'm Not Sure It Would Ever Be Invented
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how appropriate it is to open an article about heterosexuality with a mention of Deleuze and Guattari. Maybe they were just bros, but they seemed awful close, at least to hear Edgar’s assessment.
The question of desire is a primary one in a lot of critical theory. The Frankfurt School took it up, from Freud, it was primary to the Deleuzoguattarian project, and Lyotard’s reaction to it, and came up again in the work of Mark Fisher just before he died. But desire is often put forward as an abstract thing, regardless of the two nodal points in the relationship. Thinking about this, after finishing Postcapitalist Desire, I am struck by an inescapable thought. There is a weirdness at the heart of heterosexual desire that isn’t ever discussed, despite the fact that this desire is still the one constantly referenced in the media.
Please note, I’m not writing a piece about the sex act, or describing the nuts-and-bolts functioning of sexual desire with reference to sexualized bodies (though I feel there is productive discussion there to be had, I’m not going to be the one to pick up that particular line of inquiry.) I mean, simply, that within the abstracted dynamics of our society, heterosexual desire stands out as at odds with most of the rest of what’s going on.
This isn’t to say that heterosexuality is subversive, or that heterosexuals are somehow the real queer people. Simply that, given the way our society deals with relations of difference between people, Otherness is generally the source of antagonism: see the history of racial discrimination, colonialism, class warfare, religious persecution, what have you. Difference is punished unless it can be exploited.
Adam and Eve, as painted by Peter Paul Rubens. The man had a type.
It’s possible that this last is the explanation: heterosexuality is the default because it is understood that only that variety of copulation is able to produce new human beings, and this requires some kind of alliance between the two parties. While homosexual encounters are pure reproductive expenditure (in Bataille’s understanding of “expenditure”) without production. But this also describes the majority of male-female pairings: there’s an expenditure of effort, but no reproduction happens. It’s done for enjoyment.
The idea that like attracts like isn’t really borne out 100% by nature. The north pole of a magnet attracts the south pole of another and repels other north poles. Of course, magnets aren’t people, and arguments about what is and is not natural generally don’t mean all that much.
Given that our society – which for me is American society, but I also see this in the nations of western Europe and in a few other places – generally does not accept difference, this whole situation comes across as very different from other forms of affiliation. In friendships, and in workplaces, the situation tends to be homophilic: people tend to associate with people like themselves. Ideally this similarity goes beyond racial or social positioning and is more about similarity of values or the such, but that seems to be somewhat rare.
Before I continue, I feel I should make an autobiographical note, laying out the various markers attached to me, so that this can be understood (or rejected) in the context that is appropriate. I’m a cisgender white man, who identified as heterosexual through my whole life, who is married to my (pseudonymous) writing partner, Edgar, who is transmasculine and doesn’t identify as heterosexual in the least. For what it matters, I was raised middle class, went to graduate school, and worked a series of shit jobs after that: if class-centric neologisms are things that you pay attention to, I would probably be defined as something like the “upper precariat class” being an adjunct professor (people think teaching college comes with prestige, so I get a bit of respect, but I’m making adjunct wages, and if you know, then you know. I don’t want this found by my employer and then have to have a conversation about it.)
So, here’s my principle question: why is it that alterity, usually a point of contention, becomes a point of attraction in the sexual arena, especially for those to whom alterity usually matters the most? And to whom it provokes hostility in all other areas.
Straight vs. Heterosexual
You might notice that, up until now, I haven’t used the word “straight”, which is an unusual choice, I admit. Straight is faster and more to-the-point. More colloquial. It has one-sixth the number of syllables, and is thus faster. I would say, however, that “straight” and “heterosexual” are different things.
Another caveat: outside of binary trans people who identify as such, there is no “queer heterosexuality” or “queer straight” identity. However, I would differentiate that there are non-straight heterosexual people, primarily because of how I’m going to define “straight” through the rest of this piece. This move is driven primarily by the long-running Tumblr joke “are the straights okay?” (Which is possibly the oldest meme I know of without a Know Your Meme page.) Usually this difference is marked by setting what I’m calling “heterosexual” as “straight”, while what I’m calling “straight” as “Straight™”, and I don’t have the patience for that.
What I’m saying is, essentially, that you can separate heterosexual desire from the experience and practice of “Straightness”, and while I intuit that one could potentially separate Straightness from heterosexuality, in the way that Patrick Wyman’s piece on bro culture and chivalry suggests a kind of “multi-gendered masculinity” and recent discourse have attempted to bring up “multiracial whiteness” as an explanation for the phenomenon of non-white supporters of the former president (which has problems and is beyond the purview of this piece, see here, here, and here for more information on the discourse around this term), given my own identity (noted above,) it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to explore this. In discourses of sexuality – which necessarily include discussion of family dynamics, because family dynamics emerge out of sexuality – Straightness is specifically the hegemonic position, what I call the “unmarked default.” It is what everyone is assumed to be.
I ask, why is it necessary that we know what genitals an unborn fetus has? Why is this a widespread enough question that we have it color coded? And why do people care enough to make explosives to announce it? This whole situation is, in the words of a number of commentators “aggressively straight”.
Straightness is a cultural construct – an ideology, or possibly an imaginary (I’m unclear on the actual definition of “imaginary” personally, because I can’t bring myself to read Lacan). It isn’t simply desire for a member of another binary sex, but also includes (at the more “benign” end of things) asking small children if they have a boyfriend or girlfriend. At the less benign end of things, it involves conversion therapy, “corrective” sexual assault, and explosives-centered gender reveal parties that spark wildfires. It is an interest in the sexual activities of other people and a desire that they experience the same variety of sexual desire and reproduce in the culturally acceptable fashion.
It is, in short, a desire to produce more straight-identified people, through either reproduction, persuasion, or coercion. Straightness is, in short, evangelical heterosexuality. So this harms not only non-straight people, but also straight people who are unable to participate in the action of reproduction (primarily female-assigned people who are either unwilling or unable to bear children.) I’m struck by the fact that the second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, positioned the central trauma of the Scarlett Johansson character, Black Widow, as being unable to bear children. This is certainly fine on the face of it, but it struck both Edgar and I as a horrible misstep that she uses this to label herself a monster.
The message of this sort of thing is clear: the “straight world” is an interior space, centered around the heterosexual sex act, the resulting reproduction, and emergent family dynamics. Everything that does not fall under that heading – queer people, the intentionally child-free, the people who for whatever reason cannot have children – is considered suspect, alien, or tragically monstrous.
This trend is irritating, because it makes me agree with a Bloomberg piece. Also, it’s just capitalism trying to extend the pink tax to things other than hygiene products.
It goes beyond this, though. While the identity of Straightness is encrusted around the idea and practice of an evangelical heterosexuality, it protects itself like any ideology does through things like cisnormativity – see deodorant for men, or pens for women, or frankly any piece of children’s clothing. See also, what happens when you give a supposedly male dog a name like “tulip” – set a timer and see how long it takes someone to point out that that’s a “girl’s name” as if it is self-evident that an animal that rolls around in fecal matter has the same conception of gender roles as you. It’s the whole existence of Buffalo Wild Wings. The evangelical heterosexuality that makes up straightness demands the production of new people to carry it out, and also demands that these people behave in the right way.
The Beating Heart of Anxiety
Of course, this leaves aside the alterity that straightness swallows whole – the purported fundamental difference between men and women. The whole “men are like this, women are like that” that we’re all raised with – men are numbers, women are language; men are reason, women are emotion; men are providers, women are caretakers; that whole thing. Of course, we can’t say that anything is “human nature” unless we find it in all societies, and these assumed gender roles are largely not repeated.
A wedding cake topper that depicts the bride dragging the groom, I think. Otherwise, it’s some kind of weird sex thing. I don’t know why this exists, honestly.
But cisgender men and women look different. There’s an apparent dissimilarity there. And for Straightness to even work, you have to accept that to one degree or another. Patriarchy exists, I would say, because of this dissimilarity and the dependence that men have (or perceive themselves to have) on women. It’s a learned combination of attraction and repulsion that form the positive and negative polarity that drives the motor of patriarchy and straightness.
This lives right on the surface with straight men, because they tend to be really bad at hiding it. The most common jokes told about marriage are that the man wants to escape it. This neglects the fact that, traditionally speaking, the man is supposed to ask the woman: he asks, and then his life goes to shit and he wants out, but he’s apparently such a catch that the woman won’t let him and somehow has the power to make him stay. It’s an incoherent idea, even if you accept all of the premises that the Straight world brings to the table.
Because it’s an ineffective disavowal of the reality: that, generally speaking, the marriage is desired by both parties. Generally speaking, the man loves the woman and wants her to stay; generally the woman does, too, though it’s been noted in most marriages the woman gets the short end of the stick. Note, though, that if you ask the man why he’s marrying someone he obviously doesn’t like, he drops the joke and admits that he loves his fiance and wants to go through with it.
He’s just expected to disavow it.
It’s a disavowal of a vulnerability that no conventional man seems to want to confront: a desire for something other than ourselves. It’s impossible, I would say, to love a person and not be changed by them in one way or another. I think this is intuitively clear to most people. Traditional masculinity can’t accept a desire for the other because of how it’s constructed, because inviting the other in is seen as an invasion, a loss of some kind of integrity. But everyone does it, and the people who object to it are always painted as immature.
It’s something that you’re expected to do and expected to disavow, and if you refuse either step, then you’re some kind of mutant.
Which is really weird when you think about it.
This isn’t a “man cave”, this is a playroom. And I’ve been in enough dive bars that look exactly like this that I can’t help but imagine the smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke.
Of course, for this traditional man the disavowal takes the form of continually over-performing masculinity, which pushes the whole thing along further. It leads to them setting aside rooms as “man-caves” or “studies” and drinking beer alone in the garage or while doing yard work – because torturing a plot of land into a grass monoculture is peak traditional masculinity (trad-masc? I might be forbidden from new coinages).
The Implications
In the framework of Dis-Identity Politics that I’m trying to develop, I suspect that the male/female split is the first one. Because some people can play the reproductive role of inseminator, they are positioned as men; because some people can play the reproductive role of carrying a child to term, they are positioned as women. Outside of reproduction, it makes no sense to divide people up like this. Some “men” are going to be more physically and psychologically suited to traditional “women’s” work and vice versa.
For example, even before Edgar came out as nonbinary, they made more money than I and I handled the lion’s share of the cooking and cleaning. I had the patience and my job required I wait around the apartment for a call most of the day, meaning that I was in our home more often and didn’t want to get sucked into something I couldn’t drop at a moment’s notice. I jokingly called myself the “housewife” but it never went past a joke, because we were just getting started and only an idiot cares about propriety when necessity is a much more pressing matter.
This is getting off into the weeds; let’s circle back. From the dyadic division of inseminator/inseminated, you then had those who wanted to participate and those who didn’t, making a Queer/Straight division (or however it’s positioned in the societies in question). By this process, all of the binaries and spectra that divide us up are produced: it’s a matter of relation between people, not anything interior to them. The social world is created by establishing and negotiating these relations, and is constantly recreated by our actions in regard to these relationships.
As a side note, anyone you see presenting this “super straight” flag is either a Nazi or has been taken in by Nazi talking points. Two of the giveaways is the fact that it came out of 4chan and has the initials “SS”. For more on fascism, see here.
Some of them – white, male, straight, wealthy, and so on – are made dominant within their relations, but this power relation is constructed by those who possess these identities either seizing or being invested with that power. There is nothing natural about this.
Always-Already Weird
If it seems like I’m re-weirding heterosexuality, then good. It means I’m doing what I set out to do. If heterosexuality wasn’t already common, I’m not sure we would invent it. That isn’t a judgment of those who experience heterosexual desire, that’s an indictment of our treatment of difference.
I mean that, because look at how we respond to difference in our society to people who don’t fit into the unmarked defaults that we put forward: they are implicitly and explicitly punished for living their lives as they see fit. We despise difference, as a society. We shouldn’t, but we do. However, if “men” and “women” are truly as different as When Harry Met Sally paints them – to the point where they cannot be friends – then how does any of this work?
We’re taught that people stick with those who resemble them. Similarity of ethnicity, of outlook, or ideology, or anything, is treated as foundational.
Both that and the “naturalness” of heterosexuality cannot be true.
I choose to believe that neither is true.
Because some of my favorite people could not have led lives more different from my own. And because some of those people simply don’t experience heterosexual desire. I’m not about to tell them that they clocked their own experience wrong. That would be absurd.
I have a confession: though I think of myself as introverted, I love crowds, and somewhat miss being able to be among them. Some of this is probably due to the quality of heterophily that I hold up as a virtue.
I think that this is all important to note, because the existence of heterosexuality as a mode of desire – and specifically of loving and respectful heterosexual relationships – indicates that hostility towards the other is not necessarily a default mode for human relations. I do not believe that these relations are necessarily some kind of exception to the rule, nor do I believe that they indicate that there is some kind of suppressed love for the other that an alien order has been imposed on us to eliminate.
It suggests something much more freeing: that there is no rule. That it is possible, with work, to establish affinity and solidarity between those who do not, in the least, resemble one another.