The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

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The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
The TRAGEDY of
HETEROSEXUALITY
Jane Ward
NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2020 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the au-
thor nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed
since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ward, Elizabeth Jane, author.
Title: The tragedy of heterosexuality / Jane Ward.
Description: New York : New York University Press, [2020] | Series: Sexual cultures |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004725 (print) | LCCN 2020004726 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781479851553 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479895069 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781479892792 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Heterosexuality. | Sexual minorities. | Feminist theory.
Classification: LCC HQ72.8 .W37 2020 (print) | LCC HQ72.8 (ebook) | DDC 306.76—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004725
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004726
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are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers
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Also available as an ebook
For straight women.
May you find a way to have
your sexual needs met
without suffering so much.
Contents
1 Let’s Call It What It Is: The Tragedy of Heterosexuality 1
2 He’s Just Not That into You: The Misogyny Paradox 33
3 Pickup Artists: Inside the Seduction Industry 75
4 A Sick and Boring Life: Queer People Diagnose the Tragedy 113
5 Deep Heterosexuality: Toward a Future in Which

Straight Men Like Women So Much That They
Actually Like Women 155
Acknowledgments 175
Notes 177
Index 199
About the Author 207

1
LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
I am worried about straight people. And I am not

the only one. Queer people have been concerned about straight culture
for decades, not only for our own sake—because we fear homophobic
violence or erasure of queer subculture—but also because straight cul-
ture’s impact on straight women often elicits our confusion and distress.
Erotically uninspired or coercive, given shape by the most predictable
and punishing gender roles, emotionally scripted by decades of inane
media and self-help projects, and outright illogical as a set of intimate
relations anchored in a complaint-ridden swirl of desire and misogyny,
straight culture for many queers is perplexing at best and repulsive at
worst. And yet queer people often leave the issue alone because no mat-
ter how worrisome straight culture may appear to us, we know all too
well the problems with denying people their erotic attachments or cri-
tiquing an entire population’s sexual orientation.
Am I am being hyperbolic when I say I am worried about straight
people? Granted, this is an unfamiliar way of thinking about heterosexu-
ality for most straight, and many gay, people. Living under the weight of
heteronormativity means that a lot of people have come to understand
heterosexuality as the most instinctive and fulfilling form of sexual re-
lating. We are subject, as children and adults, to an onslaught of institu-
tions and media images that link basic human happiness and nearly all
significant rites of passage to heterosexual desire and coupling. And,
as many queer people will attest, it can be very difficult—depressing,
shameful, lonely, frightening, vulnerable, violent, and traumatic—to be
lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Many queers have wished to be straight, and
2 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS
many have come to the conclusion that the undeniable easiness of het-
erosexuality relative to queerness is evidence of the idea that no one
“chooses” to be queer—what rational person would choose a life of anti-
gay oppression? Through the lens of queer suffering, it seems almost
ludicrous to feel concern for straight people, at least not on account of
their straightness. For straight people experiencing other violent and
dehumanizing forms of oppression—poverty, white supremacy, patri-
archy, ableism, religious discrimination—straightness offers a degree of
respectability and privilege. As the African American feminist and ac-
tivist Barbara Smith explained in 1979, “Heterosexual privilege is usually
the only privilege that Black women have. . . . Maintaining ‘straightness’
is our last resort.”1 Straightness is a means through which people can
access some (unearned) cultural and institutional rewards vis-à-vis the
marginalization of their queer counterparts. Straightness ameliorates
other forms of suffering and creates an easier life. So if being straight
makes life easier, why on earth would queer people spend any time feel-
ing worry or sympathy about the effects of straight culture on straight
people’s lives and relationships?
This book argues that the basic premise of this question—that het-
erosexuality is easier than queerness—requires renewed investigation.
For instance, if we were to take this premise to the contemporary les-
bian feminist Sara Ahmed, we would be encouraged to consider that
one of the ways heteronormativity sustains itself is by telling and retell-
ing a story about how heterosexuality makes people happy, while queer-
ness produces difficulty and suffering. This story about queer suffering
under the force of heteronormativity is true; but it is also only a sliver
of the story about queerness, and it is one that masks not only queer
joy and pleasure but also queer relief not to be straight. The story about
the benefits of heterosexuality is also one with wildly differing levels of
truthfulness, or explanatory power, once subjected to an intersectional
analysis. The late lesbian feminist poet and theorist Adrienne Rich con-
tended that while being straight was largely beneficial for men, the same
was not always true for women, for whom the institution of hetero-
LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 3
sexuality had been a site of violence, control, diminishment, and disap-

pointment. Similarly, straight Black feminists, from Michelle Wallace
to Brittney Cooper, have long raised questions about the gap between
the promises of heteronormativity and the realities of Black women’s
relationships with men. Straight Black men benefit considerably from
straight relationships, while, as Cooper explains, “the privileges of
straightness [have] eluded me and a whole generation of overachieving
Black women.”2 Perhaps most urgently, an important indicator of the
relatively negligible value of heterosexuality for many women is the fact
that their sexual relationships with men have been maintained by force,
both through cultural propaganda targeting girls and women and more
directly through sexual assault, incest, compulsory marriage, economic
dependence, control of children, and domestic violence. This book will
provide ample evidence of these dynamics. The question, then, is, Is het-
erosexuality optimal for women when it requires so much coercion?
Gay men, especially white gay men, are often the greatest defenders
of the narrative about queer suffering, probably because they have more
power and privilege to lose as a result of inhabiting a nonnormative
sexual orientation (and sometimes a nonnormative gender). Relatedly,
gay men are also more likely than lesbians to embrace biological theories
of sexual orientation and the corresponding claim that people are only
gay because they have no choice in the matter. These perspectives have
drowned out lesbian feminist discussions about erotic agency and the
appeal of queer joy, and they have prevented us from investigating the
various ways that a woman might respond when, to use Cooper’s phrase,
the privileges of straightness elude her. It is my belief that gay men’s per-
sistent ownership of the meaning and origins of queerness, along with
many gay men’s lack of concern about the lives of women, has made it
difficult to shift our attention away from what is sad about being gay to
what is even sadder about being straight. My aim is to show that when we
hold the relationship between misogyny and heterosexuality in full view,
we are able to see beyond the male-centric claim that queerness consti-
tutes a tragic and unwilled loss of power, a loss that no one would ever
choose (even as it brings sexual pleasure and fosters the “pride” of the
oppressed). Still today, misogyny is rarely ever meaningfully scrutinized
in mainstream gay-rights discourse, so the reasonable suggestion that
women stand to gain more than they lose by extracting themselves from
heterosexual culture and cultivating queerness has become nearly im-
possible to hear amid the born-this-way chorus. For all of these reasons,
I am of the mind that lesbian feminist critiques of heterosexuality, now
sometimes dismissed as outdated, have renewed relevance and urgency.
This book is about a critical but still largely overlooked consequence
of the drowning out of lesbian feminist ideas and experiences. When
lesbian feminist ideas are sidelined, we keep our focus on queer misery,
and we fail to name the contradictions and miseries of straight culture—
the entrapment, the disappointment, the antagonism, the boredom, the
unwanted sex, the toxic masculinity, and the countless daily injustices
endured by straight women. This book is about the failure to recognize
these not only as feminist problems but more specifically as straight prob-
lems that many queer women are wildly grateful to have escaped. While
conservatives have long promoted the belief that queer relationships are
unnatural, damaged, and fraught with various kinds of dysfunction, this
project examines what might be gained from raising similar questions
about the health and sustainability of heterosexual culture—a culture
arguably damaged by misogyny, even as it has been unwilling to address
the structural causes of this damage.
I will show that the narrative about the “tragedy of queerness”—the
seemingly gender-neutral claim that no one would ever wish queerness

upon themselves—does not reflect many queer women’s lived experi-
ences. And yet there is no denying that countless lesbians have adopted
this narrative. Is it possible that this story about the tragedy of queerness
is more a rhetorical habit, an idea we’ve internalized from gay men—
not to mention worried family members, bad television, or the church?
Some years ago, I was chatting about parenting with a lesbian couple
with a child close in age to my own. We arrived at the topic of children’s
sexuality, and one of the lesbian moms made a comment I have heard
before, a comment that lesbian and gay people are perhaps more likely
to share openly than lefty straight parents: “If I am to be totally honest,
I would prefer, for our child’s sake, that he isn’t gay. We don’t want him
to have to deal with the challenges that come with being gay.” Despite
the stark reality of homophobic bullying, this logic didn’t ring true to
me, and I was struck by how normalized it had become to say some-
thing about queerness (“No one would choose to be gay” or “I don’t
want my child to be gay like me”) that most people I know would be
quite unlikely to say about almost any other form of difference subject
to violence and oppression. I then asked these lesbian moms, “Do you
really feel that way? Do you feel like your own life has been so terrible
that you wish your parents could have saved you from it? Do you feel
that being straight would have been better for you?” These women both
smiled, looked at each other, laughed, and said, “No. I see your point.” I
didn’t probe further, but what I imagined those sly smiles were reflecting
was their instantaneous flashback to all that was pleasurable and joyous
about their lesbian lives. I have no idea what they were actually think-
ing, but the point here is that I suspect many queers love (the queer part
of) their lives, even when they have been trained to rehearse a narrative
about how hard and tragic it all is. This narrative bolsters heteronorma-
tivity not only by obscuring the profound forms of queer joy that accom-
pany and often compensate for queer suffering but also by implying that
heterosexual lives are free of gendered violence and suffering.
Let me be clear. Homophobic violence happens—to young people
and adults, to women, men, and trans people. It happens to straight

people when they are gender variant and/or are presumed to be queer.
And it happens most harshly to queer people of color and poor and
working-class queers. In all cases, it is tragic. The ideas behind the pop-
ular 2010 “It Gets Better” campaign—namely, that queer kids can ex-
pect to grow up, become autonomous, make money, and discover their
entitlement and civil rights—were critiqued, for good reason, for eliding
the persistent race, class, and gender disparities that shape the lives of
many queer people.3
But misogynistic and racist violence happens to straight people too,

and in many ways, gendered and sexualized and racist forms of violence
and suffering are much more unrelenting for straight women than for
anyone else. When I teach “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Stud-
ies” at UC Riverside, I show a series of documentary films about gen-
dered violence and suffering. These are films about the horrific violence
(sexual, physical, emotional) that women endure at the hands of men
and the state, about the incredible toll that masculinity takes on men’s
bodies and mental health (as well as women’s bodies and mental health),
and about the tedium and unequal division of labor that destroys, or
threatens to destroy, an astounding number of heterosexual relation-
ships. Even though I have seen these films a dozen times, I still cry when
I watch them, and I have always assumed that I am crying feminist tears.
I have assumed I am crying for women. But more recently, something
shifted. After watching the films, rereading the numerous articles about
gender oppression I had assigned, and listening to countless stories from
straight women students about their abusive or just plain not-feminist
male partners, I got in my car and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I am
queer. I went home and told my partner, “Thank god we are queer.” And
I realized that I was crying queer tears for straight people. It became
clear to me: Straight women’s lives are very, very hard. It’s not that it “gets
better” for queer people; it’s that heterosexuality is often worse.
Often anger is the dominant mode of relating to heterosexuality
among radical queers. But this book argues that it is more appropriate to
worry about heterosexuals, to feel empathy, to “call them in” rather than
call them out, and ideally, to be in solidarity with them as they work
to liberate heterosexuality from misogyny. Here I take inspiration, in
part, from the queer worry expressed by the dazzling figure of Aunt Ida
(played by Edith Massey) in John Waters’s 1974 cult film Female Trou-
ble. In an unforgettable scene in which Aunt Ida counsels her straight-
identified nephew Gator that she’d be so happy if he “turned nelly,” she
begs of him, “But you could change! Queers are just better. I’d be so
proud of you as a fag. . . . I’d never have to worry. [But now], I worry that
you’ll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries!

The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life.” Like Aunt Ida, I
reverse the direction of the “ally relationship,” such that queers become
concerned allies to the straights in our families and communities, es-
pecially the women who may be experiencing more gendered suffering
than we are, and without the hot sex, queer humor, and political solidar-
ity to which many of us queers have access.
There is no doubt that my own queerness, femmeness, whiteness,
able-bodiedness, and position as a scholar living in the United States
have shaped, and limited, my ways of thinking about straightness. To
understand the intersectional complexities of lesbian feminist critiques
of straightness, I have leaned heavily on the writings of queer feminists
of color and placed their insights at the forefront of my analysis. I could
not be more grateful to have access to their pathbreaking work, much of
which offers an extraordinary model of how to balance critique and love,
pain and solidarity. To the straight people reading this book, let me say
with all my love and solidarity, I am your ally.
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality: a Lesbian

Feminist Diagnosis
Let me quickly assure you that this book is not so much about straight
people themselves but about the straight culture in which they are
embedded and to which they are held accountable. As with the often
nebulous racial category of whiteness, one of the ways that we avoid

looking critically at straightness is to keep it indefinable, to imagine that
it is so vast and irreducible to any one way of being. A queer person
makes a critical statement about straightness to which a straight person
will object: “How can you say that? There are so many different kinds of
straight people. Many straight men, like my husband/boyfriend/brother,
are gentle and feminist. Many straight relationships are egalitarian, lov-
ing, and based on feminist principles.” We might even characterize these
claims as #notallstraightpeople. And of course these claims are true.
They also function, however, to invalidate queer critiques of straight cul-

ture, to silence or otherwise shut down queer witness testimony about
the straight world. As when white people protest that critiques of racism
should not tar all whites with one brush, the intention behind this kind
of request to avoid “overgeneralizations” is typically to focus on excep-
tions. Many people like to identify with the exceptions, which soften
the sting of critique and accountability. So let us acknowledge those
exceptions. Feminist straight men, and feminist men’s projects, do exist
(though I can count the ones I know personally on one hand, maybe
two). Men do more housework and parenting labor than they used to
(though not much more, recent evidence suggests).4 Some straight peo-
ple live queer-ish lives, engaging in polyamory, heteroflexibility, kink,
marriage refusal, and so forth, though it is unclear the extent to which
these practices challenge the real problems at the heart of straight cul-
ture. There are straight couples that are very happy. There are men who
love and respect women deeply. There are men who were raised by femi-
nists, lesbians, and lesbian feminists. There are men who are attracted to
aging women, hairy women, fat women, powerful women, and feminist
women. But none of these feminist modes of relating have made much
of a dent in straight culture, the subject of my analysis.
So what is “straight culture,” as seen through a queer, feminist lens? As
this book will explore in depth, queer/lesbian complaints about straight
culture have circulated around two overarching themes (with several
additional subthemes considered in the chapters to follow).5 First, queer
feminists have argued that straight life is characterized by the inescap-

able influence of sexism and toxic masculinity, both of which are either
praised or passively tolerated in straight spaces. Second, queer observers
of straight life have pointed to straight women’s endless and ineffective
efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight wom-
en’s optimism and disappointment. While some queers might now balk
at the idea of spending our precious time theorizing heterosexuality or
standing in solidarity with straight women, these were central projects
for lesbian feminists in the 1970s and ’80s.6 Lesbian feminists thoroughly
documented and theorized the tragedy of heterosexuality beginning in

the early 1970s, though they used different terms and came to different
conclusions than my own. Their archive is vast, and I offer only a very
quick a summary here.
As for the normalized sexism inside straight culture, lesbian femi-
nists wrote volumes. With righteous rage, they detailed the ways that
straight men desired women’s services—emotional, sexual, reproduc-
tive, 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 main-
tained 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 inde-
pendent from and/or with men.”12
Lesbian feminists noted that even men on the left, the seemingly good
men who promised to respect women, ultimately caused women tre-
mendous suffering. Andrea Dworkin, who is now often vilified for her
fervent opposition to porn, BDSM, and sex work, came to lesbian femi-
nism after experiencing severe physical and sexual abuse at the hands of
her anarchist activist husband (he hit, kicked, burned, and raped her)
and subsequently engaging in sex work for survival. Dworkin experi-
enced multiple other instances of misogynistic violence in her life, and
as she delved more deeply into feminist work, the astounding ubiquity
and normalization of misogyny and men’s violence against women be-
came clear to her: “I heard about rape after rape, . . . women who had
been raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by
one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed,
torn, women who had been sleeping, women who were with their chil-
dren . . .”13 In the mid-1970s, at the height of lesbian feminist writing,
marital rape was legal in every state in the United States, and hence, rape
was understood by lesbian feminists not only as an act of patriarchy but
also as a normalized expression of heterosexuality. Though not a lesbian
but arguably queer, the African American feminist scholar bell hooks,
too, described the frequency with which straight women fled abusive
relationships with ostensibly enlightened men: “Individual heterosex-
ual women came to the movement from relationships where men were
cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical think-
ers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on
behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice.
However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their
conservative cohorts.”14 As lesbian feminists witnessed radical straight
men remain in denial about patriarchy, many gave up on the feminist

possibilities for straight men and for straight relationships.
During the 1970s and ’80s, lesbian feminists also established that while
sexism was a foundational element of straight culture, how sexism mani-
fested itself in women’s lives was significantly variable (what would later
be termed “intersectional”). Race, culture, socioeconomic class, and re-
ligion produced specific forms of heteropatriarchy, and hence, straight
culture itself was never monolithic. In 1977, the Black feminist members
of the Combahee River Collective Statement, many of whom were queer,
theorized that the forces of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy often

overlapped, serving two functions at once (“[Black girls are] told in the
same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ‘ladylike’ and to make
us less objectionable in the eyes of white people”).15 Like white lesbian
feminists, Black and Chicana lesbians detailed men’s violence against
women partners and family members, but they also extended this analy-
sis to radical movements (the Black Nationalist movement, the Chicano
power movement), contexts in which women of color were expected to
provide service to men and to follow men’s leadership.16 Though not a
lesbian feminist text, Michelle Wallace’s 1978 feminist classic Black Macho
and the Myth of the Super Woman painted a powerful image of the self-
sacrifice expected of straight Black women vis-à-vis the racist oppression
of Black men: “Every time she starts to wonder about her own misery, to
think about reconstructing her own life, to shake off her devotion and
feeling of responsibility, to everyone but herself, the ghosts pounce. . . .
The ghosts talk to her. You crippled the Black man. You worked against
him. You betrayed him. You laughed at him. You scorned him. You and
the white man.”17 Wallace, echoing the Combahee River Collective, knew
that antiracist political solidarity with men was vital to the survival of
women of color but that true liberation must also center an analysis of
patriarchy. In similarly intersectional work, Chicana lesbian feminists,
including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Carla Trujillo, showed
that one-dimensional concerns about the effects of racism on men of
color (and not women) were exacerbated by religious and cultural be-
liefs about women as natural caretakers; both sets of beliefs intersected to

amplify women’s sense of emotional, sexual, and political duty to men.18
Similarly, lesbian feminist analyses of socioeconomic class, such as found
in the essays of the white, working-class lesbian writer Dorothy Allison,
illuminated the ways that white, working-class cultural values—self-
sacrifice, silence, survival, and tradition—reinforced men’s control over
women inside straight relationships.19
Lesbian feminists were also alarmed by the amount of time and energy
straight women were investing in trying to gain men’s respect, with either
painfully slow or nonexistent results. In 1972, the women’s caucus of the

Gay Revolution Party issued a statement in which they expressed serious
concern that straight women “seem to believe that through their attempts
to create ‘new men’ they will liberate themselves. Enormous amounts of
female energy are expended in this process, with little effect; sexism re-
mains the overwhelming problem in the most ‘liberated,’ ‘loving’ hetero-
sexual situations.”20 The white lesbian separatist Jill Johnston pronounced
that she was identifying as a “woman committed woman” rather than a
“feminist,” explaining, “so many feminists advocate a change in our situ-
ation in relation to the man rather than devotion of our energies to our
own kind.”21 Lesbian feminist writers also documented the ways that
girls and women were groomed by straight culture to desire relation-
ships with men despite the overwhelming evidence that heterosexual
relationships were unequal. The promise of love and happiness, accord-
ing to Adrienne Rich, was the lure that seduced girls and women into
a thinly veiled relationship of subjection. As Rich explains, “the ideol-
ogy of heterosexual romance, beamed at her childhood out of fairy tales,
television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool
ready to the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use.”22
Lesbian feminist writing made exceedingly clear the contradictions and
precariousness of heterosexuality as a system equally organized around
love and abuse, manifest in the story told to countless little girls: “He hit
you because he likes you.” Indeed, as feminist historians have argued, this
exchange of potential love and protection for servitude is, historically
speaking, heterosexual romance’s defining moment.23
a Mountain of Evidence
But let us get more specific and more current. Part of why it is important
to return to classic lesbian feminist texts, and why lesbian feminist ideas
have arguably been making a comeback of late, is because so much has
not changed or has been repeatedly subject to men’s antifeminist back-
lash. As I write, every major media outlet has attempted to make sense
of the ubiquity of straight men’s sexual harassment and sexual assaults of

women (what the media is calling “the wake of #metoo”). Multiple states
are enacting abortion bans with the aim of overturning Roe v. Wade at
the federal level. Currently, the president of the United States and many
men in Congress are shamelessly displaying their misogyny with regu-
larity and great entitlement. This is all happening on the political stage,
and it’s also happening in girls’ and women’s daily lives, in their relation-
ships with boys and men.
It is difficult even to know where to begin the project of catalogu-
ing the daily violence that men commit against girls and women in the
name of love and desire. We could start with childhood, wherein adult
men who work as writers for Disney/Pixar are still using the big screen
to communicate to little girls that finding a prince makes magic hap-
pen, changes the world, wins wars, beautifies everything, and brings
girls closer to the divine.24 We could look to high schools, where sex
education teachers are still training girls in how to relate to themselves
as (inevitably straight) sexual victims and gatekeepers and to boys as
sexual agents and predators.25 We could take notice of the fact that bla-
tant expressions of misogyny have become the commonplace language
of heterosexual sex itself (“fuck that bitch,” “murder that pussy,” “beat
that pussy up,” “grab her by the pussy,” “choke her out,” “dig her out,”
“nail her,” “pound her,” and so forth).26 We would also want to exam-
ine the ways that so many boys and men value other men’s approval
more than women’s humanity, continuing a now centuries-old tradition
of positioning bros before hoes and using control over women’s bodies
to earn male respect,27 to make money for men,28 and to reroute their
disavowed desire for one another through a more socially acceptable
object.29 We might choose to focus, as the Chinese feminist journalist
Leta Hong Fincher has done, on the role of the state in encouraging
women to embrace men’s mediocrity, to pretend to desire men they do
not want, and to roll back their own accomplishments for the good of
the nation.30 We could look closely at recent findings that the hopeful
story about the new, engaged father has been greatly exaggerated and
that straight women across race, class, and job status still do the major-
ity of the child-care work.31 We could steel ourselves for the sociologist
Gloria González-López’s brave and chilling study of father-daughter and
uncle-niece incest in Mexico, in which she demonstrates that the script
of heterosexual romance has helped to normalize incest by cultivating
men’s attraction to girls and young women in need of care or rescue, by
cultivating women’s attraction to men of higher status than themselves,
and by recirculating the idea that men have unstoppable sexual needs
that women are obligated to meet.32 We could also consider the grav-
ity of the sociologist Diana Scully’s argument, based on interviews with
seventy-nine convicted rapists in the United States, that rape happens as
frequently as it does because so few boys and men have been trained to
identify with girls and women, to empathize with their experience, and
to humanize them.33
The tragedy of heterosexuality is about all of this and more. There
are complex and multiple forms of heterosexual suffering that vary ac-
cording to women’s positions within hierarchies of race, socioeconomic
class, and immigration status. To understand this suffering, we could
also look, as the Black feminist criminologist Beth Richie does, at the
ways Black women in the criminal justice system have been seduced
and entrapped by the expectation that they will be made happy by, and
must remain loyal to, Black men—even as some of these men rape, beat,
and torture them and their children.34 We could turn to research by
indigenous feminists that shows, in brutal detail, the way that settler-
colonial violence has shaped indigenous heterosexuality and its miseries

(through the imposition of white colonial gender norms; through the
theft of land, resources, and culture that sustained community health
and cohesion).35 We could examine—as numerous feminist writers
have—the white-supremacist structures that sustain white boys’ and
men’s profound sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and attention
and their willingness to yell at, stalk, threaten, rape, shoot, and kill
women who dare to be unavailable or uninterested.36 We could notice,
as demonstrated by the South Asian American feminist scholar Sham-
ita Das Dasgupta, that immigrant women often hide their husbands’
violence because they are under pressure to present an “unblemished”
image of their families and communities in order to avoid racist dis-
crimination and state terror.37
We might also examine the patriarchal and white-supremacist an-
chors of heterosexual desire in the United States, where Asian Ameri-
can women and white men are consistently ranked “most desirable” in
surveys, with the former valued for beauty and docility and the latter
for power.38 We might decide to place a spotlight on the sad state of het-
erosexual sex itself—the coercion,39 the missing female orgasms,40 girls’
and women’s agreement to sex so as “to get it over with” or “be nice.”
And we could, and should, keep a watchful eye on the copious ways that
straight culture repackages itself to make all of these tragic injustices
appear inevitable, if not desirable: bioevolutionary theories about the
needs of cavemen, the tsunami-like force of testosterone, and the un-
avoidable nature of locker-room talk;41 biblical justifications for strong
male leadership and the return to a more harmonious prefeminist era;42
self-help books designed to help straight women rediscover their lost
femininity and turn over the reins to men (explored in chapter 2); and
the persistent maligning of feminist and queer strategies and interven-
tions that stand to address the root causes of these problems.43
When my last book was published,44 I heard from many gay male
critics that they disagreed with my argument that straightness can be
understood as a fetish for normalcy, and queerness as a desire for the
unexpected and counternormative. Several gay men wrote to me and

explained that this argument made no sense to them since “every gay
man wants to be normal” or has wished that he were straight.45 These
men, though speaking from their experience as gay men, seemed to have
generalized their aspirations for normalcy to queer people more broadly.
They seemed to believe that wishing for the ease and privileges of het-
erosexuality is part of every queer person’s lot in life. But as I hope my
brief review of the tragedy of straight culture has illuminated, this argu-
ment simply does not hold water when we pay even a modest amount of
attention to heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution, one that has long

benefited men and harmed women.
Furthermore, while the daily tedium of heterosexual culture, charac-
terized in part by a predictable and incessant wellspring of antagonisms
and unresolved complaints (often termed “the battle of the sexes” by
mainstream commentators), is less violent than many of the aforemen-
tioned examples, it is nonetheless distressing. One of the sadder features
of straight culture, as the lesbian feminists quoted earlier made clear, is
that straight people keep going back for more, even as men don’t seem
to like or respect women much at all and as feminist straight women
(at least in my experience) are quick to confess that they have little re-
spect for men. Often propelled by the essentialist and heteronormative
logic that male and female “energies” are incomplete without each other
or that “opposites attract” or that heterosexual desire is hardwired and
nonnegotiable, straight culture seems to rely on a blind acceptance that
women and men do not need to hold the other gender in high esteem as
much as they need to need each other and to learn how to compromise
and suppress their disappointment in the service of this need.
are Straight Women Okay?
These compromises take strange and varied forms that can easily pro-
duce shock and concern for feminist queers. In my now forty-five years
as an observer of the straight world, I have noted that it appears to
be perfectly acceptable for straight couples to share few interests, to

belittle or infantilize each other, or to willingly segregate themselves
during important moments in their relationships. Straight couples
experience significant rites of passage like weddings and baby show-
ers nearly separate from each other, even though these rituals, at least
theoretically, are intended to signify something about the evolution
of their partnerships. Many straight women spend dozens of hours
planning each detail of their weddings or baby showers or baby gender-
reveal parties, while straight men keep their distance from the very
rituals that are intended to mark important moments in their lives.

In no way do I intend to imply that couples should spend every min-
ute together, but if we held straight couples to basic standards of good
friendship—mutual respect and affection and a sense of comfort and
bondedness based on shared experience—many straight relationships
would fail the test. This is precisely the observation that led Erin Sul-
livan, a blogger for the popular lesbian website Autostraddle, to write
the essay “Are Straight Women Okay?”46 Though lighthearted in tone,
Sullivan’s review of products marketed to straight couples—husband
and wife “conversation starter” cards, his and her coffee mugs in which
the “his” mug is larger than its counterpart, and a novelty “sex check
book” that helps straight couples maintain a fair sexual balance of
giving and receiving—compels her to ask, “Are straight woman okay?
Like, not in a joking way— do they need assistance?” In a follow-up
essay, she extends her alliance to straight women, pondering how to
best reach them: “I’m not sure where we go from here. Do we put up
flyers? Wear a special pin? Maybe when you see [straight women] at a
Pride event this month crowding the very bar you’re trying get a drink
from, make sure to remind them that we are their allies in this fight
and then wait for instruction.”47
Concern about straight women’s well-being, and agreement that
straight men would benefit considerably from some basic instruction
on how to treat women, is something of a running joke in queer sub-
culture—or, to be more accurate, in dyke subculture. For instance, the
Instagram page @hets_explain_yourselves is a digital archive of #het-

nonsense that includes in its bio the rhetorical question “Are Hets OK?”
Followers of the page can scroll with befuddlement or horror through
images of infant clothing proclaiming, “I heart boobs just like daddy,” a
beer garden called “Husband Day Care Center,” numerous memes about
how to keep a man, a diet book that promises women they can use nutri-
tion to control the gender of their future babies, and so on. In a similar
vein, the queer comedian DeAnne Smith has a comedy routine based on
precisely this blend of queer shock and confusion about straight people’s
lives. Speaking first to straight women and later to straight men, Smith
proclaims during her routine,
I don’t know how to speak to straight women but I do have something to

tell you. . . . You have set the bar in your relationships too low. How would
I know that? . . . The girl I am dating now, until now, has exclusively dated
men. It is so easy to impress her! . . . It is ridiculous. I just show her basic
human decency and she loses her mind. . . . Straight guys, it’s not that
hard to impress women. Show minimal, minimal, minimal, minimal in-
terest in things your lady is passionate about. . . . Take care of your ladies.
I don’t have time for all of them.
Perhaps something like white audiences’ laughter at the work of Black

comedians whose humor hold ups a mirror to centuries of white vio-
lence and inhumanity, straight audiences laugh at Smith’s disarming
suggestion that basic human decency is missing from straight men’s
relationships with women. The joke is “funny” in part because pointing
to many straight men’s egomania and unbridled sense of entitlement
is simultaneously shocking (anyone who dares to seriously make this
claim is met immediately with the #notallmen brigade or worse), but it
is also familiar. It’s funny because it’s true.48
In addition to wondering about whether most straight men and
women have a foundation of mutual interest or respect, another ques-
tion that queers sometimes ponder about straight people is whether they
are actually sexually attracted to one another. Studies show that many
straight-identified women find penises “unattractive,” are “turned off ”
by images of nude men, and prefer to gaze at naked women when given
the option.49 We also know that girls and women consent to a tremen-
dous amount of sex with men that they don’t want to have and/or that is
not pleasurable and that straight women are frequently in relationships
with men for reasons other than attraction (financial security, obliga-
tion, to retain resources for children, etc.). For instance, in an essay titled
“What I Would Have Said to You Last Night Had You Not Cum and
Then Fallen Asleep,” the feminist blogger Reina Gattuso illuminates the
banality of straight women’s dissatisfying sexual experiences with men
as she reflects on her orgasmless recent sexual experience with a “decent
guy.” Speaking as if directly to this decent but self-centered male sex
partner, the representative of “anyman, everyman,” she explains,
You’re a decent guy. . . . I do not feel like you are going to rape me. . . .
The sex wasn’t particularly bad, either. . . . It was normal sex. Normal,
boring, vaguely dehumanizing hetero sex. Which is precisely the point:
The normalcy. . . . Because there was something in the choreography of
the whole thing that just struck me as, I don’t know—unsatisfying in a
way only feminism can remedy. . . . Here, supposedly, is what you con-
sider sex: We make out, you play with my boobs, I blow you, you do not
go down on me even though I ask [*insert some bullshit on how “I only
go down on women I’m in love with. Now put it in your mouth.”]. Penis
goes in vagina, penis moves in and out of vagina, . . . penis ejaculates. . . .
Sex is now over because you have decided it is over. You have decided
sex is over because you are a man, and because this choreography that
favors men with penises—man becomes erect, man penetrates woman,
man ejaculates—is what we have been told sex is.50
While straight men’s desire for women’s bodies is often portrayed as an

incredibly powerful force, many men’s notorious confusion about what
produces female orgasm, their disinterest in providing oral sex to women,
and their dramatically narrow ideas about what constitutes a female body
worth desiring (waxed, shaved, scented, dieted, young, etc.) suggests that
heteromasculinity is characterized by a much weaker and far more con-
ditional desire for women’s bodies than is often claimed. To lesbians,
men’s countless missed opportunities to actually like women are baffling.
Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by
straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting
for men who have no close friends and won’t go to therapy. Men are less
likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, to
seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern

so common as to be termed “normative male alexithymia” by psycholo-
gists.51 For straight men in relationships, all of these needs get aimed
at women partners. In 2016, the writer Erin Rodgers coined the term
“emotional gold digger” to describe straight men’s reliance on women
partners to “play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secre-
tary, emotional cheerleader, mom.”52 Elaborating on this dynamic and
the emotional burnout it produces in straight women, Melanie Ham-
lett further explains that the concept of the emotional gold digger “has
gained more traction recently as women, feeling increasingly burdened
by unpaid emotional labor, have wised up to the toll of toxic masculin-
ity, which keeps men isolated and incapable of leaning on each other. . . .
While [women] read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek
out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or
spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current
problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.”53 Similarly, in the
book Eloquent Rage, the feminist Brittney Cooper points to men’s strik-
ing absence as supportive figures in her life, a role that is filled by other
straight women friends. Cooper explains, “When my patriarchal nuclear
fantasy didn’t happen and the privileges of straightness eluded me and a
whole generation of overachieving Black women, it is my girls who have
celebrated my success, showered me with compliments, taken me out on
dates, traveled the world with me, supported me through big life deci-
sions, and showed up when disasters struck.” As other straight feminists
have concluded before her, Cooper wonders if “perhaps straight women

need to become less invested in the project of straightness altogether. . . .
Far too many women leave behind the freedom feminism offers because
they want to stay on patriarchy’s dick, which is to say they want to secure
their straightness and their options of getting chosen.”54
All of this evidence that women get a raw deal in relationships with
men does not suggest, however, that straight women are not “really
straight” and should just go ahead and become lesbians, or celibate, al-
ready. While many lesbian feminists actually made this argument in the
1970s, my analysis of the tragedy of heterosexuality has brought me to a

very different conclusion. While I view Cooper’s suggestion that women
should “become less invested in straightness” as an important option,
later I will argue that another way forward is to redefine heterosexuality
itself, to expand its basic ingredients to include more, and not less, at-
tachment and identification between women and men.
While a detailed analysis of the origins of sexual orientation is beyond
the scope of this book, which is concerned with straight culture, it is im-
portant to note that sexual desires are developed by a complex of forces
that are not always conscious to us, or under our control. For instance,
from a Freudian perspective, human infants have an expansive capacity
to experience pleasurable sensations in response to humans of all kinds,
one’s own bodily functions, and even objects and animals that are soft or
interesting to the touch. This expansive desire gets disciplined to conform
to social norms, with heterosexual desire being the primary imperative
communicated to most children. As I have summarized elsewhere, the
cultural theorist Sara Ahmed offers a powerful account of the way het-
erosexual desire is reproduced, passed on by parents, as both an obliga-
tion and a “gift,” to their children: “[For Ahmed] . . . the child’s entire
social world is oriented toward heterosexuality while other object orien-
tations are cleared away. Heterosexuality, as the intimately close, familiar,
normalized, and celebrated couple formation, is the space in which the
child lives and becomes the space in which the child feels ‘at home.’ The
child’s body itself, like bodies desiring familiar foods, gets shaped by its
cultural context and begins to tend toward the familiar.”55 Queerness, too,
is shaped in part by forces beyond our control, but I am not a believer
that these forces are hormonal or neurological. It is quite possible, for
example, that children who are attuned to the tragedy of heterosexuality,
or who are keen observers of the misery wrought by heteropatriarchy in
the lives of their parents or other significant adults, are oriented other-
wise by a desire to avoid such suffering. This may well have been my own
story, no matter how much my queerness now feels animated by the raw
hotness of butch dykes and other queer objects of my lust.
Where Patriarchy and Heteronormativity Intersect
Some readers might wonder whether the problems that this book
describes are best understood under the umbrella of patriarchy, rather
than heterosexuality. Why focus on straightness at all? There is no doubt
that the problems that plague straight culture are the problems of patriar-
chy, or men holding power over women, and this means that the tragedy
of heterosexuality requires feminist intervention. But patriarchy is also
too blunt a conceptual instrument to capture the nuances of heterosex-
ual dysfunction, in part because, as the gender theorist Judith Butler
has argued, the relationship between patriarchy and heterosexuality is
more mutually constitutive than unidirectional.56 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 dif-
ference. 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. This last feature, straight culture’s
eroticization of men’s power over women, is often presented as a kind
of benign playfulness—a joke shared among straight women about how
husbands always get away without doing their fair share, let’s say. But the
heteroerotic appetite for situations in which straight men can display
power over women also fuels sexual violence, infusing straight culture
with endless eroticized representations of men hurting women and with
romantic tales of the redemption of violent, aggressive, entitled, and self-
obsessed straight men.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t eroticize gender differences. Gen-
der differences are hot! Queer subculture delights in celebrating what
is sexy about a whole array of ever-evolving gender expressions (non-
binary genders, gender fluidity, femme, butch, and the broad spectrum
of gender expressions that go by the name trans); but 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 sex-
ual desire in any predictable way (femmes are often attracted to femmes,
queers of all stripes can find nonbinary folks desirable, and so forth).
There is no doubt about it, straight culture’s obsession with genital-based
gender and sexual identity (i.e., only women can be feminine and only
people with vaginas can be women) is one of its defining features, one
that influences how straight people understand not only what is sexy
but also what is safe and equitable. 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. Similarly, straight culture’s version of gender equity
often looks like men taking on “women’s work” (housecleaning, child
care) but needing a ton of gender affirmation in the process or using
their strength and privilege to lovingly protect the girls and women in
their lives.57 These changes make a certain kind of progress, but they rely
on and sustain well-worn, binary notions about the roles of men and
women that make many queer people cringe.
Typically, when there is a general consensus that something is terri-
bly disappointing or dysfunctional, like a new restaurant or a workplace
policy, let’s say, that disappointing thing is shut down, protested against,
revised in some form—unless that thing is heterosexuality, for which

there is an uncanny attachment to returning, after no end of complaint
or disappointment, right back to its original form. Adrienne Rich ad-
dressed this problem by highlighting that while numerous feminist writ-
ers have made it their life’s work to document the expansive list of ways
that heterosexuality fails women, these same writers have all too often
authorized this failure by being unable to imagine an alternative or by
treating heterosexuality as an inevitable biological inclination that “does
not need to be explained.” Rich goes on to say that despite lesbianism
being an arguably more logical and fulfilling arrangement for women, it

is “lesbian sexuality which . . . is seen as requiring explanation.”58
Pop feminist texts, such as Hanna Rosin’s buzz-worthy 2012 book
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, are notorious for producing
heterofeminist complaints that ultimately go nowhere except back to
blaming women for being too dominant and successful or for setting
their romantic standards too high.59 Queer critiques of Rosin’s book
point not only to the failures of this kind of pop-feminist project and its
conclusions but more generally to the tragedy of heterosexuality, itself
“the sinking ship.” Of Rosin’s book, the queer scholar Jack Halberstam
explains, “Like a romantic comedy that throws up every objection to
the coupling of the male and female leads only to manufacture some
farcical event that brings them back together again and makes them see
the error of their ways, Rosin shows men and women moving in radi-
cally different directions and then concludes that maybe we need to opt
again for traditional gender roles to right the sinking ship of marriage,
family, and the social world built on the bedrock of heterosexuality.”60
For straight women like Rosin, who are intimately bound to men, the
need to tend to male feelings and preserve male entitlements is the cost
of making a degree of feminist progress (i.e., as Rosin details, women
are now equitably represented in the workforce and in universities and
are performing well in those spheres, for instance). The feminist writer
Leta Hong Fincher documents a similar bind for upwardly mobile Chi-
nese women in her book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender
Inequality in China. The professional and university-educated young

women whom Fincher interviewed described their boyfriends as self-
ish, 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 hetero-
sexuality 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.
My aim in the following chapters is to describe the tragedy of het-
erosexuality in sufficient detail that we might be able to make some sus-
tainable queer feminist interventions into straight suffering, while also
laying to rest once and for all the idea that queer women have any reason
to envy straight culture or to mourn its loss in our lives. In fact, queer
women have a long history of attempting to forge places away from the
influence of straight culture (communal households, lesbian land, etc.),
not simply to get away from straight cisgender men but to take respite
from witnessing the tragedy of heterosexuality more generally.
My partner and I take this respite every summer when we visit a
genderqueer feminist friend who lives in Hawaii, a woman we initially
heard about through mutual friends but had never met. She used to live
happily among a sea of queers in Berkeley, California, but after needing
to move to a remote part of Hawaii for family and health reasons, she
found herself without much of a queer community. So she put out a
call through the queer feminist grapevine for queers to come visit. She
missed queer people so much that she opened her home to us (and oth-
ers) without having ever met us. Now she is family to us, and we bring
new queers with us when we go. But it is also a no-straights-allowed
kind of arrangement, which makes some of our straight friends look at
us askance. And yet I understand perfectly that our friend has plenty
of straight people in her social circle already; and even though many of
these straight people are kind and good and feminist, the point is that
queer people yearn for one another, and they yearn for a break from
witnessing straight life.
All of this said, my intention is not to romanticize queer life. Being
queer hardly means we are saved from sexual abuse, intimate-partner
violence, unhealthy relationships, or traumatic breakups. Queer people
act out and hurt each other in numerous ways, including violence, ad-
diction, lying, and so forth. But the key difference between straight cul-
ture and queer culture in this regard is that the latter does not attribute
these destructive behaviors to a romantic story about a natural and in-

escapable gender binary. Lesbians, for instance, do not find ourselves
attracted to a gender category that is principally defined by its inability
to understand or identify with our own. We are not mansplained by the
people who claim to love us. We are not expected by our partners to
shoulder the most devalued household and parenting labor because we
are women. On the whole, misogyny has not cast a shadow of fear over
our flirtations. Our relationships, unlike straight relationships, aren’t
presumed to be subject to gender-based antagonisms or in structural
conflict from the start. We are not always already set up in such a way
that someone risks being a nagging wife or feeling trapped or need-
ing to buy self-help best sellers like He’s Just Not That into You or Men
Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them or How to Date Men
When You Hate Men or worrying about how to catch a man and keep
him or resenting that our gender means we will do most of the parenting
and housework or needing to convince our dating pool that we aren’t
bitches, whores, stupid, weak, or available to be grabbed by the pussy.
Quantitative data on quality-of-life comparisons between straight
and queer women are not easy to come by, and within this limited body
of research, one study often conflicts with another. There is evidence
that lesbians have significantly more orgasms than straight women do,62
engage in a more equal distribution of household labor than hetero-
sexual couples do,63 have higher earnings than straight women do,64
have better-adjusted children than heterosexual couples do,65 and, in
some countries, report higher relationship happiness than heterosexual

women do.66 Other studies suggest that lesbians get divorced at rates
equivalent to heterosexual women, though the meaning of this finding
is unclear given that same-sex marriage is a recent phenomenon.67 Some
studies report similar rates of intimate-partner violence among lesbian
couples and heterosexual couples, but questions remain about whether
lesbians are more likely to report violence than heterosexual women are
and/or are more likely to have their relationships misperceived by po-
lice.68 I approach all of this data with caution, as so much of the quan-
titative research on LGBT life tends to be motivated by a conservative

or neoliberal agenda (e.g., antigay research finds that queer people are
miserable and die young; progay research finds that queers are normal
citizens, happily monogamous, and excellent parents).69 Suffice it to say
that the kind of quantitative data that would be most useful to the queer
feminist investigation at hand are, by their very nature, limited. The field
of critical heterosexuality studies is still in its infancy, and “straight cul-
ture,” so hegemonic as to be unnamable outside of queer space, is a rela-
tively new object of inquiry.
The Paradox
One of the core dysfunctions of straight culture—and a centerpiece of

my analysis—is the misogyny paradox, wherein boys’ and men’s desire
for girls and women is expressed within a broader culture that encour-
ages them to also hate girls and women. If you have experienced life
as a girl or woman, you know the misogyny paradox all too well. Men
shout “compliments” about girls’ and women’s bodies on public streets
(“You are looking mighty fine today!” or “You’re a beautiful woman.
Why don’t you smile?”) and then, a moment later, when they are not
met with a response, hurl violent and misogynistic threats (“Fuck you
bitch!”).70 Young boys cannot wait to have sex with girls, and once they
do, many describe girls’ bodies in the most abject terms possible, seem-
ingly disgusted by their very objects of desire.71 Men love women’s
bodies, we are told, but only after women spend an inordinate amount
of time whipping their bodies into a lovable shape—by dieting, shav-
ing, waxing, dying, perfuming, covering with makeup, douching, and
starving them. Young men, we are encouraged to believe, have a lot of
desire for women, but they dare not talk to each other about sex in ways
that center girls’ and women’s pleasure, power, or subjectivity because,
paradoxically, this kind of talk feels gay. Such was the paradox that Jason
Schultz, a feminist writer, was faced with when he wanted to have a non-
sexist bachelor party and suggested to his male friends that they actually
talk about sex and desire together (“What makes us feel sexy?”) rather
than hire a stripper.72 When my students read about Schultz’s alternative
bachelor party, they are struck by how “gay” it seems, even as Schultz’s
request was for straight men to share stories, sans sexism, about their
experiences of having pleasurable sex with women.
Sometimes, the misogyny paradox takes a dramatic and violent form,
such as when men rape and/or murder women they purport to have
desired or even loved. For instance, by twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rod-
ger’s own account, he shot and killed six college students in Isla Vista,
California, in 2014 because he desired the girls he saw on campus but
could not bear that his desire wasn’t returned (as he said in his suicide
video, “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will pun-
ish you all for it”). Violent expressions of the misogyny paradox appear
frequently in popular culture, taking the form of men’s “animal attrac-
tion” to women they simultaneously desire and loathe for talking too
much, saying no to sex, being vain or disloyal, and so on. 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.73 Perhaps no one has been a more bra-
zen and high-profile exemplar of the misogyny paradox than President
Donald Trump himself, a man who has bragged publicly that “no one
loves women more” than he does and also bragged about sexually as-
saulting women. 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 repro-
duce this lack of respect for women’s humanity. As explored in the chap-
ters to follow, what is paradoxical here is not only that straight men say
they love women and then turn around and express their misogyny but
also that this love/hate relationship is successfully marketed to straight
people as a source of happiness despite overwhelming evidence that it is
a primary contributor to straight people’s misery. As we will see, 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 some ways, this paradox bears resemblance to the one examined
by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 2016 book Strangers
in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochs-
child traveled to rural Louisiana—where waterways are among the most
polluted in the nation—to ask how it is that poor southern whites whose
land, water, and bodies have been devastated by industrial toxicity con-
tinue to vote for probusiness conservatives committed to deregulation
and, hence, environmental destruction.74 In other words, why do poor
southern whites undermine their own best interests? Hochschild finds
the answer in a complex mix of rural whites’ gratitude for their industrial
jobs, their Christian belief that God will ultimately restore any human
damage done to the Earth and to their own bodies, and their belief that
the government cannot be trusted to help them. Similarly, in attempt-
ing to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so
many women are investing in straight relationships, when these rela-
tionships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Ber-
lant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the
condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic
object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached
to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their insta-
bility [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments,
Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it

means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.”75
Cruel optimism strikes me as an apt lens through which to think
about straight people’s attachments to heteropatriarchy. The promises of
heteropatriarchy are central to most ideas about what it means to live a
good life: children are tracked toward heterosexual romance in their ear-
liest years; boys and men achieve legible/successful masculinity largely
through sexual access to women and their labor; and girls and women
achieve value—and “happiness”—through access to male desire and ap-
proval. But when confronted with insurmountable evidence that heter-

opatriarchal arrangements are not all they have been promised to be,
then what? It is this moment of disillusionment, or the discovery of the
cruelty of the heteroromantic fantasy, which sets the stage for this book.
What’s ahead
I hope to have sufficiently introduced the idea of the tragedy of hetero-

sexuality and pointed to the work of several other queer/lesbian writers
who have attempted to document, theorize, and dismantle it. Next I will
move back in time, tracing the emergence of companionate marriage
as a difficult but worthwhile heterosexual ideal, as well as the evolution
of self-help texts and “relationship science” offered to straight couples
to help them understand why women and men do not naturally like
each other and how they might learn to cultivate, or at least present
the appearance of, mutual affection. We begin with an examination of
eugenicist “marital hygiene” texts of the early twentieth century, move
on to a survey of midcentury advertising campaigns and educational
films, and conclude with the late-century explosion of a self-help indus-
try built on biopsychological claims about gender difference.
I will lay the historical groundwork for understanding how both mi-
sogyny, in the form of husbands’ violent aversion to their wives, and
white supremacy, in the form of eugenicist campaigns for white marital
harmony, shaped American heterosexuality through the twentieth cen-
tury and into the current period. The lens is focused on the particular
ways that white Americans labored to produce heterosexual empathy
and mutuality and Black Americans labored to produce heterosexual
recognition and respectability, from the moment the term “heterosexu-
ality” was invented and imported from Europe.
Narrowing our view of the heterosexual-repair industry, chapter 3 de-
scribes my ethnographic study of the international industry of “pickup
artists” and “seduction coaches” for straight men. Here we will take a
queer tour through an evolving industry that provides straight men
around the globe with access to expert coaches—usually, but not always,
men—who will teach them “the game,” or how to seduce women. While
straight women constitute the overwhelming majority of consumers of
relationship self-help books, the seduction industry—with its tactical,
scripted, and scientific approach to attracting the opposite sex—has
been extraordinarily popular with straight men since 2005. Drawing
on field notes from two weekend-long seduction bootcamps, interviews
with seduction coaches, weekly updates and newsletters about how to
seduce women, and over one hundred videos and webinar clips from
pickup-artist bootcamps and in-field trainings around the globe, we will
take a dyke’s-eye view into the industry’s sympathetic embrace of the
“average frustrated chump,” or the schlub who never gets the hot girl.
Seduction coaches do the tripartite work of helping straight men grieve
their imagined birthright (access to sex with hot women), normalizing
men’s sexual failures by explaining the evolutionary and sociocultural
causes of sexual rejection using what they call “dating science,” and
teaching men to perform new styles of self-made masculinity aimed at
making straight women feel safe, seen, and humanized.
I hope to reveal that this development of a “woke” masculinity, a mas-
culinity that empathizes with straight women and recognizes their need
to protect themselves against the hordes of manipulative and aggressive
men, is a troubling and complex maneuver, one that reflects the prolif-
eration of instrumental feminisms aimed at men’s self-protection (legal
liability), profit (the co-optation and commodification of social justice
messages), good public relations, and in this case, sex. I show that for se-
duction coaches, “seeing the world through women’s eyes” is a pragmatic
strategy designed to bridge the gap between men’s desire for sex with
young, hot women and women’s desire for humanization.
Next we take a step back from the heterosexual-repair industry,
examining the misogyny paradox through a different lens: the lens of
queer people’s sympathies and frustrations with straights. Drawing on
queer subcultural materials and interviews with queer people about
straight culture, here I make the case that it is time to spill the tea—to
reveal what queer people say about straight people behind closed doors
so that we may help save straight people from themselves. Taking love
and empathy as core elements of my methodology, here I explore the
profound potential of reversing the “ally relationship” such that queer
people offer feminist intervention and queer guidance to straight people
suffering under the weight of the misogyny paradox.
I conclude the book with a meditation on the possibilities and prom-
ises of deep heterosexuality. Drawing on the diagnoses of heterosexual
culture offered by the queer commons in chapter 4, here we honor
the basic impulse of heterosexuality—that is, opposite-sex love and
attraction—but imagine how this impulse might be taken to its most
humane and fulfilling, and least violent and disappointing, conclusion.
Calling on the wisdom of the dyke experience—wherein lust, objectifi-
cation, humanization, and friendship live in complementary relation-
ship to one another—here we remind straight men about the human
capacity to desire, to fuck, and to show respect at the same time.
It is possible for straight men to like women so much, so deeply, that
they actually really like women. Straight men could be so unstoppably
heterosexual that they crave hearing women’s voices, thirst for women’s
leadership, ache to know women’s full humanity, and thrill at women’s
freedom. This is how lesbian feminists lust for women. I do not despair
about the tragedy of heterosexuality, because another way is possible.
2
HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU
The Misogyny Paradox
On a recent vacation with my partner, Kat, and

our nine-year-old son, we strolled by the storefront of a touristy T-shirt
shop. There were hundreds of T-shirts for sale inside the store, but a few,
presumably some of the shop’s most popular, were displayed in the front
window. One of the T-shirts hanging in the window depicted an image
of a stick-figure straight couple on their wedding day; she is smiling,
and he is frowning. The text below them reads, “Game Over.” A T-shirt
just next to this one showed another stick-figure straight couple holding
hands while the woman figure’s mouth is open, with speech lines indi-
cating that she is talking. Next to this image, the same couple is depicted
again, except the male figure has hit or pushed the woman, and she is
falling down, head first. The text below reads, “Problem Solved.” I was
walking, holding my son’s hand, when I noticed the T-shirts. I instinc-
tively walked a little faster, hoping he wouldn’t see them. I was not ready
for him to know—and for me to explain—that many people think it is
funny when men dislike or hurt their wives and girlfriends.
How did we get here? Today, we generally agree that straight people
are those who “like” the other sex. This attraction is often understood
to include mutual desire for intimate, romantic, love-based connection.
These are such basic, defining features of contemporary heterosexuality
that it can be tempting to imagine mutual desire and likability as the
long-standing forces that have driven most heterosexual coupling. But
historical evidence dispels us of this fantasy and helps us to understand
why it is easy to find examples, on T-shirts and elsewhere, of men’s si-
multaneous desire for and hatred of women—all wrapped together into
33
34 • HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU
Figures 2.1. T-shirts sold by Crazy Shirts depicting straight men’s heterosexual misery.
(From CrazyShirts.com)
one dysfunctional sexual orientation. Across time and place, most forms
of heterosexual coupling have been organized around men’s ownership
of women (their bodies, their work, their children) rather than their at-
traction to, or interest in, women. Women were men’s property, slaves,
and laborers, and women produced heirs to whom men could pass on
their lineage and possessions.1 Women were the people with whom men
had procreative sex, and women of privilege (wealthy women, white
women, women of high status) were sometimes perceived as delicate
and virtuous, in need of men’s protection and seduction (as in medieval
and Victorian traditions of courtly and chivalrous love). But in none of
these arrangements was “liking” women, or regarding them as men’s
most logical and beloved companions, a requirement in the way that

contemporary straight culture now presumes—or at least strives. Liking
women was hardly understood to be a fixed or defining feature of one’s
identity or “sexual orientation.”
In the United States, the notion of mutual likability between women
and men did not gain traction among American sexologists and social
reformers until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just
as the new concept of “the heterosexual” began to appear in medical
textbooks. It took decades for both concepts—the idea that men and
HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU • 35
women should feel sexually and emotionally drawn to each other and
that doing so meant that one was a heterosexual—to circulate widely
enough that most Americans would have internalized them.2 But by
the late twentieth century, they converged to create a new relationship
ideal, modern straightness, which represented a dramatic rupture in the
way that men had related to women for centuries. This campaign for
love-based heterosexual relationships was undoubtedly a positive de-
velopment, as it created tension between men’s violence against women,
on the one hand, and the image of happy heterosexuality, on the other.
But this transition from woman-as-degraded-subordinate to woman-as-
worthy-of-deep-love was hardly smooth, nor is it complete. This unfin-
ished transition, and its central role in the tragedy of heterosexuality, is
where we will begin.
Struggling for Straightness
The cultural expectation that men should like women, even as they
are socialized into a culture that normalizes men’s hatred of women,
constitutes what I call straight culture’s misogyny paradox. I first began
thinking about the misogyny paradox when I read the extraordinary
book Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and
Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, written by the feminist historian
Afsaneh Najmabadi. Though Najmabadi’s focus is on nineteenth-
century Iran, her book is a case study with global and contemporary
significance as it highlights the intersections between misogyny, hetero-

sexuality, and imperialism. In a nutshell, Najmabadi argues that as the
new concept of heterosexuality began to circulate in the nineteenth cen-
tury,3 Iranians resisted one of its defining principles—that men should
feel love for, and desire companionship with, women. This idea was
a “hard sell,” Najmabadi explains, not only because it conflicted with
long-standing beliefs about women’s subordination and degraded status
(how could men love their inferiors?) but also because most Iranians
had lived in gender-segregated and homosocial (if not homoerotic)
environments in which intimacy was reserved for people of the same

sex.4 Najmabadi further explains that even heterosexual lust was looked
upon with suspicion by some Iranian commentators, because it stood to
threaten men’s patriarchal power: “if a woman can satisfy a man’s desire,
he may become enamored of her, develop an affection bordering on
love, and consequently, become subordinate to her.”5 And yet, under the
imperialist influence of Europe, where new ideas about the superiority
of heterosexual romantic love and the pathology of homosociality were
rapidly taking hold, the Iranian state launched a cultural campaign to
encourage men and women to direct their affections toward each other.
This represented a dramatic shift in the way that men’s relationships
with women were conceptualized, and it presented something of a para-
dox: “falling in love was what a man did with other men . . . [and] falling
in love with women more often than not was unmanly,” but modern
heterosexuality compelled men to engage in precisely this unmanly act.6
Najmabadi’s book drew my attention to two seemingly obvious but
rarely acknowledged points: (1) modern notions of heterosexuality re-
quire men to feel love and affection for women, the very population they
have dominated and dehumanized for centuries, and (2) this has caused
many problems for straight people, who are struggling to transition
from the trauma and legacy of misogyny to something more authen-
tically “straight”—if by straightness, we mean authentic and noncoer-
cive heterosexual love. While Najmabadi’s focus was on Iran, there is
evidence across the globe of men’s resistance to loving their wives and
other women sexual partners and of the historically and culturally var-
ied manifestations of women’s horrific subjugation by men in marriage.7
The feminist scholar Gayle Rubin, for instance, famously offered a sum-
mary in her essay “The Traffic in Women,” in which she details how
economic and kinship systems around the world have relied on women
being “given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as
tribute, traded, bought, and sold” among husbands and male family
members.8 Some evidence of the misogyny paradox goes back centu-
ries, such as scholarship on ancient Greece that documents that Athe-
nian wives were regarded with contempt by their husbands and treated
as servants within the family, while sexual relationships between adult
men and boys were, in many cases, characterized by genuine affection
and treated by Greek male society as a valuable method of preserving
patriarchal power and strengthening male bonds.9 Other evidence of
the misogyny paradox comes from the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, the same historical period of concern to Najmabadi. For instance,
the historian Hanne Blank offers a telling account of heterosexuality in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and colonial America, cit-
ing the American preacher John Cotton’s concern that so many men
“despise and decry [wives] and call them a necessary Evil” and noting
that, for several centuries, men who loved women were perceived as “ef-
feminate” or “cunt-struck.”10
The idea that men’s romantic or even sexual interest in women is
threatening to patriarchy, or “unmanly,” may strike us as quite incon-
sistent with current understandings of heteromasculinity, yet there is
ample evidence of the persistence of this view. Indeed, my own earlier
research looked closely at the links between white heteromasculinity
and expressions of disgust or resentment for the object of one’s sexual
desire—especially in the US military, in US fraternities, and in other
male-dominated institutions in the United States.11 In some of these
institutions, girls and women are so degraded that for straight men to
express enthusiastic interest in them, as desirable humans rather than
as bitches, whores, and abject receptacles for penetration, is to subvert
their own masculinity (now sometimes called being “henpecked” or

“pussy-whipped”).
Following the model set forth by Najmabadi and others, we now turn
to the twentieth-century struggle for modern straightness in the United
States and the concomitant emergence of a heterosexual-repair indus-
try that capitalized on the difficulty of this project. Marriage experts
recognized men’s disinterest and violence toward women, and women’s
resentment and fear of men, as fundamental obstacles for straight re-
lationships, and, consequently, they produced an industry designed to
train men and women to like each other. But they were also commit-
ted to doing so without undermining men’s authority or challenging the
basic logic of the gender binary. These rehabilitative projects constitute
the modern heterosexual-repair industry, an industry that capitalized
on the difficult and unfinished transition from heterosexual coupling as
a patriarchal contract to straightness as a relationship, and an identity,
anchored in opposite-sex desire.
I focus on popular texts, accessible to lay women and men, that at-
tempted to define healthy or normal heterosexual relationships and that
also offered advice to readers about how to address conflicts in these
relationships.12 As our investigation of these texts will show, the emer-
gence of straightness in the United States was not only entangled with
misogyny and its effect on men’s capacity to love women but also bound
up with American racial projects. Eugenicist campaigns for white mari-
tal harmony profoundly shaped American heterosexuality through the
twentieth century and into the present. Romantic marriage—and the
forging of bonds between white men and women—was offered to white
couples as a white-supremacist strategy during the early Jim Crow era
and later offered to African Americans as a central pathway to member-
ship in American “normality.”13 As we tour through American self-help
and marriage education texts from the early twentieth century to the
present, we will see how various experts—eugenicists, physicians, sex-
ologists, social reformers (both Black and white), and psychologists—
aggressively marketed heterosexual love to Americans, campaigned to
make it appear more appealing than homosocial intimacies, and devel-

oped myriad techniques to both normalize and unravel the misogyny
paradox. As they did this, they built both an industry and a culture out
of the contradictions of straightness.
Heterosexual Repulsion in the Early

Twentieth Century
Investigating the writing of prominent early twentieth-century social

reformers interested in sex and marriage uncovers two striking points
about the development of modern heterosexuality. First, the earliest
“self-help” books about modern marriage were almost exclusively writ-
ten by proponents of the eugenics movement, a violent and ostensibly
scientific project aimed at encouraging reproduction among people of
good genetic stock and discouraging or preventing population growth
among undesired populations.14 The modern eugenics movement
began in the United Kingdom in the early 1900s and subsequently
traveled to the United States, where it was used to provide a justifica-
tion for Jim Crow segregation, antimiscegenation laws, and the forced
sterilization of Black and immigrant women. But the eugenics move-
ment also had an agenda for white Americans, which was to address
any obstacles, including men’s violence against women, that might pre-
vent the flourishing of white families. Eugenicist writers, often with
the support of the Eugenics Publishing Company, produced several
books designed to educate white readers about the benefits of friendly
and harmonious marriage, thereby laying the foundation for a new
heterosexual ideal.
A second point that we can glean from the content of these books is
that making white marriages “happy” was an uphill battle. Eugenicists
such as Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, William Robinson, and Harland

Long made perfectly clear what they understood to be the marital sta-
tus quo of the time: men and women commonly wished harm on each
other, found each other disgusting, and were made utterly miserable by
marriage. They made no pretense of their understanding that men’s sex-
ual orientation toward women was characterized, in part, by a desire to
cause women pain. Writing in 1903, the British sexologist and eugenicist
Havelock Ellis described men’s “latent cruelty in courtship” and women’s
receptivity to pain and domination as core heterosexual impulses:
A certain pleasure in manifesting his power over a woman by inflicting

pain upon her is an outcome and survival of the primitive process of
courtship, and an almost or quite normal constituent of the sexual im-
pulse in man. . . . In the normal well-balanced and well-conditioned man
this constituent of the sexual impulse, when present, is always held in
check. When the normal man inflicts, or feels the impulse to inflict, some
degree of physical pain on the woman he loves he can scarcely be said to
be moved by cruelty. He feels . . . that the pain he inflicts, or desires to in-
flict, is really part of his love, and . . . is not really resented by the woman
on whom it is exercised. . . . The feminine line delights in submitting to
that force, and even finds pleasure in a slight amount of pain. . . . We see,
also, that these two groups of feelings are complementary. . . . What men
are impelled to give, women love to receive.15
Men, in the eyes of the early sexologists like Ellis, were violent, driven
by instinct, and largely uninterested in women’s sexual pleasure. Ellis
optimistically speculated that women were receptive to these qualities,
as long as men’s primitive impulses were sufficiently contained.
But other marriage experts were more worried. Many viewed men’s
violence against women as a structural conflict for heterosexuality be-
cause what women most needed, in order to experience marriage as a
site of “love” rather than rape, was for men to gently guide them into a
state of sexual receptivity. Taking this conflict (i.e., women’s desire for
sexual pleasure and men’s lack of interest in providing it) as a starting
point, the most popular sexology texts on love and marriage written in
the early 1900s focused on “the scandal of female sexual ignorance, the
dangers of wedding night trauma, and the necessity of [men’s] prelimi-
nary wooing [of women].”16 These were the principal concerns put for-
ward in the incredibly influential and best-selling 1918 sex and marriage
manual Married Love, for instance, written by Marie Stopes, a British
botanist and proponent of eugenics and white women’s rights. Popular
in part due to its intensely romantic and hopeful approach to “love’s
mysteries,” the book also pulls no punches about the tragic state of het-
erosexual marriage for many women, including new brides shocked and
repelled by the revelation of their husbands’ naked bodies or “driven
to suicide and insanity” by “the horror of the first night of marriage.”17
Rape and trauma, Stopes implied, constituted many women’s introduc-
tion to marriage. Such texts make evident that in the early twentieth-
century imagination of (what we now call) heterosexuality, women were
hardly expected to feel an easy or instinctive attraction to men or their
bodies, nor were men expected to concern themselves with women’s
emotional or physical experiences of sex. Married couples, as these texts
proclaimed, needed to achieve mutual attraction and affection through
proper education about anatomy and natural sex differences, an educa-
tion that could be provided by sexologists and physicians.
A distinctive and common feature of early twentieth-century mar-
riage self-help texts is their concern with the problem of mutual physical
repulsion by wives and husbands. Sexologists and physicians by their
own accounts were very busy teaching women and men how to make
their bodies, and heterosexual sex itself, less repellent. Stopes was wor-
ried about the “mental revolt and loathing” that wives may feel in re-
action to their husbands’ sexual violence;18 Ellis warned of the “stage
of apparent repulsion and passivity” that seemed to be a normal part
of women’s experience of sex with their husbands (a stage he believed
would eventually give way to “active participation”);19 William Rob-
inson, another early twentieth-century sexologist and author whom I
discuss in more detail shortly, hoped that his marriage-advice manuals
would address the “disgust,” “deep hatred,” and “desire for injury and
revenge” that heterosexual couples felt for each other.20
If heterosexual, reproductive, married intercourse was a core orga-
nizing principle of American life in the twentieth century, how could
it also be so disgusting and rage inducing? On women’s end, the most
obvious answer comes from sexologists’ own accounts: marriage was a
site of repeated rape and dehumanization of women by their husbands,
a situation that women struggled to endure and survive. But even be-
yond the well-documented patriarchal violence of marriage were other
contributing factors. Intercourse between white American men and

women—even as it was the key to the eugenics project of passing on
“superior blood” and the patriarchal project of securing women’s free
reproductive labor—was also a sin of the flesh. Puritan beliefs about sex
as degrading and bodies as unclean were in widespread circulation in
the United States at the turn of the century, casting heterosexual inter-
course as “a mere matter of duty: to be permitted by sufferance; joyless,
disgusting in itself; a something to be avoided, even in thought, other
than it is a necessity for the continuance of the race.”21 Syphilis was also
a public health crisis and a dark cloud hanging over American sexuality
during the first decades of the twentieth century, with 10 to 15 percent
of the US population estimated to have been infected and with whites
claiming that African Americans carried higher rates of sexually trans-
mitted diseases.22 Added to this was the fact that before getting mar-
ried, most white women and men had limited access to heteroeroticism
or any significant experience with opposite-sex bodies, while opportu-
nities for homosocial romance and affection were relatively unfettered,
especially for women, given that these affections constituted neither
“sex” (defined by the presence of penis and vagina) nor evidence of a
stigmatized homosexual personhood, which had yet to fully take hold
in the United States.23
Eugenicists set out, then, to help white women and men find each
other’s bodies less repellent and to situate medical science, “or right
knowledge,” as a legitimate alternative to mutual disgust, religious anxi-
eties, and shame about sexual pleasure. A classic example in this vein
is a book called Married Life and Happiness; or, Love and Comfort in
Marriage, which was written in 1922 by Dr. William Robinson, a urolo-
gist at Bronx Hospital and an influential early birth-control advocate
and eugenicist. Robinson was a prolific writer of early twentieth-century
self-help books (he also wrote Woman: Her Sex and Love Life; Sexual
Problems of Today; and Sex Knowledge for Women and Girls), and his
writing offers us a remarkable diagnosis of the miseries of heterosexual
marriage. In one passage in Married Life and Happiness, for instance,
Robinson refuted the claim that heterosexual marriage makes people

happy or that women and men have been marrying for thousands of
years and getting along just fine (presumably the argument made by his
critics). He explained,
Yes, [they have] gotten along, but how? Have you observed the disillu-
sionments, the heartaches, the disappointments? Have you measured the
disgust, the indifference, the resentment, the mutual ill-will, the deep ha-
tred, the desire for injury and revenge? Have you estimated the amount
of ill-health, the grief, the pain, the daily suffering, the nightly tossing
and restlessness? Have you any idea of the number of neurotic wives and
neurasthenic [irritable] husbands? . . . I assert and could readily prove
that the lives of married couples, particularly married women, is not very
different from, not much better than, life in prison.24
This was Robinson’s description of heterosexual marriage in its natural

state, unguided by the counsel of expert physicians. For Robinson, like
his contemporaries, this misery and “deep hatred” were heterosexuality’s
default, yet he believed they could be ameliorated with proper sexual
hygiene and premarital education about opposite-sex genital anatomy.
Mirroring Ellis and Stopes, much of his analysis was focused on the
trouble of getting men and women to genuinely want to provide sexual
pleasure to each other, a desire that Robinson claimed could be culti-
vated if couples knew how to make their bodies more appealing. Doing
so required making sure that both parties do not have syphilis or other
sexually transmitted infections, that men are not sexually impotent, and
that both women and men receive full medical checkups and attend to
anything off-putting (including scrotal hernias, hemorrhoids, constipa-
tion, gas, rashes, acne, snoring, obesity, bad breath, vaginal odor, and
foot odor). Similarly, the 1918 book Womanhood and Marriage by the
nutritionist Bernarr Macfadden urged husbands to forbid their wives
to drink coffee and tea or risk encountering a flatulent wife in bed.25
Foreshadowing the twentieth-century explosion of soaping, douching,
shaving, bleaching, and other hygiene products marketed to white

women to promote gender and racial purity,26 Robinson encouraged
women to overcome any moral objections to wearing makeup, corsetry,
and perfumes that could make their bodies more enticing.
Early twentieth-century physicians viewed heterosexual attraction
as something of a gauntlet—there were so many ways that men’s and
women’s bodies could fail to be attractive to the other sex, and hence,
expert guidance and proper preparation were crucial to making het-
erosexuality functional. Exemplifying the common perception that
heterosexual love and intimacy are learned rather than instinctive ac-
complishments, Dr. Harland William Long, writing for the Eugenics
Publishing Company in 1919, spent several pages of the book Sane Sex
Life and Sane Sex Living asserting that young couples will rarely ever
experience sexual success without the supervision of a knowledgeable
medical professional to guide them at each step. Of particular concern
to Long was the way that husbands’ rape of their wives appeared to be
the wedding-night default and that this formative sexual assault stood
to ruin marriages from their outset. Speaking to other physicians and
sexologists in the foreword to the book, he contends, “Many a newly-
wed couple have wrecked the possibility of happiness of a life time on
their ‘honey-moon trip’; and it is a matter of common knowledge to the
members of our profession that the great majority of brides are practi-
cally raped on entrance into the married relation. Further than this, we
all know that these things are as they are chiefly because of ignorance of
the parties concerned.”27 Long goes to great lengths to renounce marital

rape and inform his readers about the value of approaching intercourse
slowly, stroking the vulva before penetration, prioritizing women’s
orgasm, and embracing masturbation in moderation. Exemplifying
what would become a trend in the marriage self-help industry, Long
advised that newlyweds read his book together in the hope that they
could develop some communication skills and come to some informed
agreements about what constitutes “sane sex.” Yet he also warned his
fellow physicians that “this book can only be used professionally. . . .
It needs the guiding hand of an expert physician to insure its reach-

ing only those who can be benefited by its reading” (Long confessed to
mixed results with couples who were already years into sexually violent
marriages).28
While white physicians described nonviolent, affectionate hetero-
sexuality as a difficult but necessary component of the stability of white
families, African American physicians and social reformers declared it a
social and political right—one that Black men and women had been de-
nied under the conditions of slavery and poverty and that held the key to
African American survival, freedom, and respectability.29 Marriage, and
the ability to choose and remain with one’s sexual and familial partners
more generally, was of paramount importance to former slaves and their
descendants following centuries of brutal rupture of enslaved families at
the hands of white slave owners. As the legal scholar Katherine Franke
has shown, many abolitionists in the United States viewed marriage as
central to the experience of emancipation, thereby laying the ground-
work for marriage to be reconceptualized as a freedom, rather than an
economic obligation or necessity, in the twentieth-century American
imagination.30 Although white male reformers continued to focus on
constraining women’s sexual autonomy and encouraging conformity
to Victorian ideas about women as temperamentally suited to mother-
hood and domestic pursuits, African American reformers focused on
the ways Black sexual respectability was best achieved through Black
women’s freedom of choice. Departing from the majority of white social
hygienists’ opposition to birth control, for instance, Dr. Charles Roman,

an African American physician and author, proclaimed that African
American women should be provided with “intellectual and moral” in-
struction about their options and then left “the freedom and responsi-
bility of a decision.”31 First-wave feminists, both Black and white, also
advocated for modern, companionate marriage in the hope that women
would experience less misogyny, and greater equity and fulfillment, in
what continued to be a legally sanctioned domain of women’s sexual and
domestic servitude.32 In the early twentieth century, the work of “mak-
ing marriage modern,” or less damaged by men’s violence, was a widely

embraced progressive value.33
But the American construction of modern heterosexuality was in-
separable from white-supremacist gender norms. White male social re-
formers, who possessed far greater power and authority than civil rights
and feminist activists, defined healthy heterosexual marriage in their
own image and according to their own interests. Marital rape may have
been discouraged by white male marriage experts of the twentieth cen-
tury, but their emphasis on men’s entitlement to women’s emotional and
reproductive labor, and women’s ostensibly innate vulnerability, virtue,
and tendency toward self-sacrifice, ensured that modern heterosexuality
served the interests of white supremacy. As the Black feminist scholar
Hortense Spillers illuminates, whites treated Black people with such de-
humanizing, “ungendering” brutality during slavery and its aftermath
that whites effectively barred Black men from the kind of patriarchal
power that constituted masculinity and Black women from the kind
of purity and fragility that constituted femininity.34 Slavery and anti-
Black racism positioned Black people outside the boundaries of a white
gender binary, as threats not only to white ideas about normative mas-
culinity and femininity but also to white men and women’s unity with
each other.35 Illustrating the inseparability of modern heterosexuality
and white supremacy, many early white feminists based their arguments
for nonviolent marriage and women’s rights on the claim that bringing
white women closer to equality with their husbands would ensure that
white people remained a united front against Black civil rights. If white
men forged egalitarian, companionate bonds with white women, they
argued, then white women would offer race loyalty in return.
In sum, eugenicists, sexologists, and social reformers of the early
twentieth century ushered in three concepts that would become endur-
ing features of the heterosexual-repair industry. First, they exposed the
ubiquity of violence and mutual loathing in heterosexual relationships
but also reassured their readers that these were natural impulses in need
of simple management. Rape could be curtailed by sexual and anatomi-

cal education. Mutual disgust could be diminished by better hygiene
and beautification of the body. Communication between the sexes could
be improved if couples read and discussed, together, the right marital
literature written by knowledgeable guides. Second, they secured their
own role and the role of expert white professionals more generally—
physicians, sexologists, and later, psychologists—in defining modern
heterosexuality and repairing heterosexual problems. By naming men’s
and women’s ignorance of the unique temperament and anatomy of the
opposite sex as the source of straight couples’ problems—rather than,
say, patriarchy and white supremacy—early promoters of modern het-
eroromance introduced self-help projects, guided by marriage experts,
as the new normal. Heterosexual desire and mutual likability did not
come naturally, they acknowledged, but could be cultivated with the
proper tools. Last, they accepted the premise that women and men often
found each other’s bodies undesirable and hence advocated for the con-
sumption of beauty products that help stimulate opposite-sex desire.
Laying the foundation for the midcentury explosion of beauty inter-
ventions targeted to women attempting to appear “fresh” and “lovely”
for their husbands while laboring at home, eugenicist advocates for hy-
gienic and modern marriage offered soaps, perfumes, makeup, douch-
ing, and other consumer goods as keys to happy heterosexuality. They
made explicit that heterosexual marriage was no longer a labor contract
in which both parties showed up “as is” but an ongoing affective proj-
ect requiring access to precise tools and information that would build
mutual affection.
Each of these interventions set the stage for straight culture’s emer-
gence as the romantic arm of misogyny, wherein the delicate coexistence
of hate and love, the slap and the kiss, would come to represent the het-
eroerotic. But this era also initiated straight culture as a gendered mode
of consumption in which the purchase of beauty products and relation-
ship advice were vital to maintaining this delicate balance.
Heterosexual Disinterest at Midcentury
Oh, there is nothing quite so explicit as the sexism of 1950s marriage

manuals! By midcentury, marriage experts had moved beyond the
problem of men’s and women’s disgusting and unhygienic bodies and
directed their attention to women’s annoying personalities—or men’s
irritation with listening to their wives speak and, in many cases, their
indignation about their wives’ disappointing cooking.36 As the Reverend
Alfred Henry Tyrer proclaimed in his 1951 book Sex Satisfaction and
Happy Marriage, “The happiness of homes is destroyed more frequently
by the habit of nagging than any other one thing. . . . The word home
may be defined as ‘a place where a man goes after business hours to be
nagged at.’ A man may stand this sort of thing for a long time, but the
chances are against his standing it permanently.”37 Midcentury marriage
experts’ focus on men’s irritation, or husbands and wives “not getting
along,” signals the popularity of mutual likability as a cultural aspiration
in this period; marital love and happiness were now common expec-
tations that could produce dissonance for married couples when they
did not appreciate each other’s company. To resolve heterosexual con-
flicts, women were counseled to be submissive and lovely, to put their
husbands’ concerns first, and to keep both themselves and their homes
quiet and beautiful—and the source of delicious, homemade meals. The
figure of the happy housewife was almost always embodied by white
women in 1950s popular culture, with African American women nearly
invisible in mainstream media or portrayed as servants and domestic

workers. But we can glean much about the construction of 1950s and
1960s Black heterosexuality from accounts of sexism within the civil
rights and Black Power movements, in which many women were sexu-
ally harassed, expected to follow men’s leadership, and asked to devote
themselves to men’s concerns and public visibility.38 In a telling and his-
torically significant example, Black women organizers and strategists
were not allowed to speak onstage during the 1963 March on Washing-
ton, despite being central to the very planning of the event.39
Numerous social, economic, and political trends shaped modern

American heterosexuality during this period. The eugenics movement,
associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, fell out of favor
in the United States by the 1950s, while the disciplines of psychology
and sociology—with their focus on family roles and societal prob-
lems, respectively—had gained momentum and institutional recogni-
tion. As psychology found its way into popular culture, so too did the
emergent concept of “gender roles”—a term popularized in the 1950s
by the psychologist John Money to give name to normative male and
female differences in “general mannerisms, deportment and demeanor;
play preferences and recreational interests; spontaneous topics of talk;
. . . content of dreams, daydreams and fantasies; . . . and erotic prac-
tices.”40 Technologies of the home, such as electric kitchen appliances
and time-saving household gadgets of all kinds, also proliferated dur-
ing the postwar economic boom, with advertisers speaking directly to
women consumers about how these products would keep husbands
happy and hence themselves. All of these developments provided the
backdrop for midcentury marriage-advice frameworks.
Midcentury gender ideology looked remarkably as it had in the de-
cades prior: modesty, caretaking, and domesticity were presumably
women’s realms, while emotional repression, restrained lust, autonomy,
and competition became even more strongly tied to masculinity. Despite
the entrenchment of a rigid gender binary constructing women and
men as opposite human types with little foundation for mutual inter-
est, 1950s gender ideology required that women, if not also men, strive
for romantic love—an endeavor resulting in an endless stream of ad-
vice books, magazine columns, and educational films aimed at helping
wives produce happy marriages.41 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 read-
ers 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”:
1. Don’t bother your husband with petty troubles and complaints when
he comes home from work.
2. Be a good listener. Let him tell you his troubles; yours will seem
trivial in comparison.
3. 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.
4. Let him relax before dinner, and discuss family problems after the
“inner man” has been satisfied.
5. Always remember he’s a male and marital relations promote har-
mony. Have sane views about sex.
6. No man likes a wife who is always tired out. Conserve your energy so
you can give him the companionship he craves.
7. Never hold up your husband to ridicule in the presence of others. If
you must criticize, do so privately and without anger.
8. Remember a man is only a grown-up boy. He needs mothering and
enjoys it if not piled on too thick.
9. Don’t live beyond your means, or add to your husband’s financial
burdens.
10. Don’t try to boss him around. Let him think he wears the pants.42
As with Podolsky’s book, much of the marital advice marketed to women

at this time attempted to normalize a midcentury gender binary in which
men were busy, important, and indifferent to their wives, whose own
lives were “trivial in comparison.” Midcentury self-help books urged

women to feel sympathy for men, who held the weight of the heart-
less world on their shoulders. Today, feminists have thankfully reframed
this claim as an example of “fragile masculinity,” but through much of
the twentieth century, self-help books made clear to women that they
should take men’s stress very seriously if they wished to remain married.
Being employed in the world of “business” was enough to push a man
over the edge. Accommodating wives should be mindful of household
sounds, including their children’s voices, be prompt with dinner, and
avoid subjecting their husbands to any unwanted conversation. Women

frustrated with this state of affairs could turn to marriage-advice books
written by authoritative men, such as Podolsky and Tyrer, but most
of these texts would simply affirm the gendered lopsidedness of het-
erosexual love: women are to appreciate men’s humanity—their ideas,
triumphs, and vulnerabilities—though they should hardly expect men
to offer the same in return.
Echoing this emphasis on men’s important pursuits and women’s
devotion to their husbands, the Black feminist Michelle Wallace ar-
gues that the midcentury was time of increased patriarchal control of
Black women resulting from Black men’s demands for power and man-
hood during the civil rights movement. Wallace notes that while Black
women were in many ways more engaged in economic and political life
than white women of this era were, they were nonetheless expected to
submit to the authority of their male partners, to center men’s interests
over their own in ways that resembled the gender dynamics of white
heterosexuality. A Black woman’s contribution to the struggle for ra-
cial justice was her intimate care of her man (cleaning and cooking for
him, raising his children, boosting his morale) and her agreement to
“keep her mouth shut” and “stand by silently as he became a ‘man.’”43
Wallace explains, “Day to day, these women, like most women, devoted
their energies to their husbands and children. When they found time,
they worked on reforms in education, medicine, housing, and their
communities through their organizations and churches. Little did they
know that one day their activities would be used as proof that the black
woman has never known her place and has mightily battled the black
man for his male prerogative as head of the household.”44 The nexus of
white supremacy and patriarchy positioned Black women in a complex
bind: the work they did to address racial oppression in their communi-
ties was urgently needed but was also viewed as a threat to Black men’s
leadership and self-worth. The 1965 government-sponsored report titled
The Negro Family, authored by the white sociologist Patrick Moynihan,
incited much of this fear about Black women’s autonomy and leader-
ship. It was Black women’s failure to be sufficiently domestic and sub-

missive to Black men, Moynihan argued, that was to blame for poverty
and violence in Black “ghettos.”45 Unlike for white women, Black wives’
loyalty to their husbands took center stage in a national discussion about
race and poverty. In the eyes of Moynihan and his many supporters, the
very future of Black communities rested on Black women’s capacity to
be compliant housewives.
Unlike in the early twentieth century, when healthy heterosexuality
was the responsibility of both men and women (i.e., marital-hygiene
manuals were given to both parties by their physicians), at midcentury
it was women, the managers of men’s morale and the stewards of house-
hold and community happiness, who became responsible for addressing
the contradictions of heterosexuality. As the eugenicists had introduced
earlier, a primary strategy that women could use was to make their bod-
ies more physically desirable. Print ads from the 1940s–1960s instructed
women on the importance of being hardworking, happy housewives
while also keeping their bodies “fresh” and sexually appealing to their
husbands: Lysol promised that a wife “can keep her husband and herself
eager, happy married lovers” by douching with Lysol to ensure good
feminine hygiene (a 1950s code for contraception, according to some
historians).46 An ad for Kellogg’s PEP vitamins promised wives that they
could cook and clean and still “look cute” for their husbands if they took
the right vitamins. An ad for LUX Stockings warned married women
not to neglect their stockings just because they were married: “husbands
admire wives who keep their stockings perfect.” An ad for the Wear Ever
Pressure Cooker assured women that they could “look pretty and daisy
fresh, yet serve the tastiest food he ever ate!” A1952 Edison Electric com-
mercial showed a teenage girl seducing her older brother’s friend by lis-
tening adoringly and complimenting his intelligence as he explains the
mechanical function of kitchen appliances.47 Ads marketed to African
American women in Ebony magazine reflected these same themes (e.g.,
Lysol’s “Be Confident!” vaginal-douche campaign appeared in white
magazines with a photo of a white model and in Ebony with a photo of a
Black model) but also included numerous ads for hair-straightening and
skin-lightening products that promised to make Black women “lighter
and lovelier” (and that depicted smiling Black women cradled by ador-
ing Black men).48 Advertisers skillfully connected their products—from
cosmetics to electric dishwashers—to the project of heterosexual repair
by depicting images of happy heterosexual couples seemingly unbur-
dened by men’s violence or fragility.
But the ads also capitalized on men’s still tenuous and largely trans-
actional attachment to women. If wives were not careful about their ap-
pearance and caretaking responsibilities, they were in danger of losing
their husbands or suffering their wrath. This looming threat became a
core feature of straight culture, one regularly depicted in music, televi-
sion, and film of the 1950s and 1960s. The tenuousness, or temporari-
ness, of heterosexual attraction is expressed quite clearly, for instance,
in Frank Sinatra’s 1964 song “Wives and Lovers”: “Hey, little girl, comb
your hair, fix your makeup. Soon he will open the door. Don’t think
because there’s a ring on your finger, you needn’t try any more. . . . I’m
warning you.” Phenomenally successful 1950s television programs like
The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy normalized heterosexual marriage
as a site of mutual dislike, manipulation, and men’s violence against
women (while Ralph threatened to hit Alice in nearly every episode of
The Honeymooners, Ricky actually spanked Lucy until she cried in two
episodes of I Love Lucy. Similarly, an image of a husband spanking his
wife was also used in Chase & Sanborn Coffee advertisements of the
1950s to depict the consequences of women buying stale coffee).49 Hus-

bands’ dislike of their wives, and the depiction of marriage as a trap
or a prison for men, was a basic ingredient of the comedic formula of
these shows (one that would appear again, with great success, in the
hit 1990s sitcom Married with Children). Wives like Lucy Ricardo, Ethel
Mertz, and Alice Kramden not only were nags and/or spendthrifts in
the eyes of their husbands but also were haggard and sexually unappeal-
ing compared with younger, unmarried women. But viewers were led to
believe that, despite all of this conflict and dissatisfaction, husbands like
Figures 2.2. Midcentury advertisements linking marital happiness to vaginal douch-

ing, good cooking, and skin bleaching (see facing page), respectively.
Ricky Ricardo, Fred Mertz, and Ralph Kramden were ultimately good
men who loved their wives—thereby inaugurating what would become a
long television tradition of braiding together marital misogyny, or men’s
aversion to their wives, with heterosexual love.
To the extent that self-help was targeted to men during this period,
it largely took the form of media that could help men escape women’s
expectations of romantic love. Playboy magazine, founded in 1953,
spoke directly to married men’s nostalgia for bachelorhood and their
craving for homosocial environments, encouraging men to seek time
away from their wives.50 Playboy offered men sexual images of women
they could eroticize without any expectation of love or friendship, but
it also created a virtual community of men—a space where real love
and friendship, the kind experienced among men, could at least be ap-
proximated on the page, between a sympathetic male columnist and his
male reader. Writing about Playboy magazine as an exemplar of com-
mercial men’s culture more broadly, the social critic Varda Burstyn has
argued that “instead of encouraging an equal division of paid and un-
paid work to resolve the problems between men and women within the
family in late capitalist society, commercial men’s cultures—both erotic
and sporting—proposed ways to keep men’s economic, social, and li-
bidinal energies tied up away from home, in nonprocreational sex with
young women, [and] in homosocial relations with men.”51 Serving a
similar function, fraternal clubs and stag parties were also popular en-
vironments for heterosexual men to seek refuge from the companion-
ship of their wives and find it, temporarily, with one another instead.
Such spaces arguably laid the groundwork for a later male space—the
1990s “man cave”—that would integrate the site of men’s escape into the
darker recesses (the basement, the garage) of the family home, though
now isolated from other men. As the gender theorist Paul Preciado as-
serts, 1950s fantasy spaces merging the corporate, the domestic, and the
pornographic—bachelor pads, the Playboy penthouse, Hugh Hefner’s
mansion—signaled the ways that modern masculinity would be marked
by a longing to escape the space of married life.52 But ultimately, because
these forms of homosociality were virtual or fleeting—forged among

Playboy’s far-flung readership or at periodic stag parties—they failed
to produce real-life or sustained connections among men, arguably in-
tensifying men’s reliance on women to meet their emotional needs, in
person, in the twentieth century.
Although midcentury representations of heterosexuality very often
told the story of wives struggling to please husbands who did not seem to
like them very much, some marriage-education films of the time showed
couples “working it out” or portrayed modern marriage as wholesome
and mutually fulfilling, akin to the idealized representation of marriage
in the 1957 television show Leave It to Beaver. For instance, the male nar-
rator in a film series titled Marriage Today, based on Henry Bowman’s
1948 book Marriage for Moderns, responds directly to men’s negative
perceptions about women and marriage, explaining that wives can be
interesting, independent people. In one scene, viewers learn that “Phyllis
met Chad at the university in a math course. She got the better grades.
Now he’s an engineer, and she’s a housewife.” The narrator explains that
while Phyllis used to engage in “useful and interesting” work in a labora-
tory, it was her desire for children that made her freely choose to marry.
(“Freedom of choice,” the narrator asserts at this moment in the film,
“it’s a modern privilege and a modern responsibility.”) In another vi-
gnette, the narrator illustrates women’s personhood through the story of
Katherine, a schoolteacher and a wife: “Just as she believes that a child is
a person and entitled to respect and consideration, Katherine Hartford,
another wife in our town, believes a married woman is a person too.

Katherine is modern. . . . For her, the husband is not a master, nor the
wife a slave. She doesn’t think the children in her classroom are inferior
to her, and she doesn’t think of herself as in any way inferior to [her hus-
band] Frank. Different, yes—as every man is from every woman, . . . but
one isn’t better than the other.”53 Here, modern marriage is character-
ized by the recognition of a wife’s personhood, just as one recognizes
the personhood of a child. As with the child, this discursive recognition
of personhood had no effect on the long-standing structural conditions
that assigned greater value and freedom to one person over the other—
whether adult-child or husband-wife. Instead, 1950s marriage-education
films offered straight women a mechanism to imagine that their con-
formity and submission had nothing to do with the patriarchal foun-
dation of heterosexual marriage itself but were instead individual acts
of self-expression. Representing what would become a persistent theme
in the American heterosexual-repair industry, such films obscured the
coercive pipeline that tracked women into heterosexual marriage, moth-
erhood, and free labor by situating the figure of the wife within a seem-
ingly feminist discourse about women’s “freedom to choose.”
In a relatively progressive marriage propaganda film of the 1950s,
Who’s the Boss? Married Life, Learning to Live Together, a wife named
Virginia and her husband, Mike, are both publishing professionals who
argue constantly and compete for power in their marriage until these is-
sues are resolved when the couple has two children. As a mother, Virginia
works only “once in a while,” and Mike helps out with the parenting.
While these modest gestures at gender equity, along with the depiction of
a dual-profession marriage, stand out among 1950s marriage-education
films, I mention Who’s the Boss? here because of a different feature of the
film. The film introduces without much comment a heterosexual strategy
that would become a centerpiece of John Gray’s advice four decades later
in the 1990s self-help classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
In the absence of clear and direct communication, Virginia and Mike are
shown in the film using obscure nonverbal signals to communicate their
needs to each other. The male narrator of Who’s the Boss? tells viewers
that Virginia learns to wear her apron backward to communicate to her
husband that he should “take it easy” because she “needs tender loving
care” that night. The narrator then explains that Mike spins his hat on
his finger to signal to Virginia that “it’s one of those days when a fella
needs a friend.” Whether these gestures hint at the couples’ desire for sex
or just physical closeness is unclear (to me anyway), but they exemplify
the kind of coy communication game that would later become a popular
therapeutic recommendation for troubled straight couples in the 1990s.
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 submis-
sion 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 midcen-
tury 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 hus-
bands.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 subordi-
nation 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
Heterosexual Misery in the Late Twentieth Century
Influenced by second-wave feminist critiques of gender inequality in

heterosexual relationships, the late twentieth century was witness to
dramatic shifts in the representation of straight culture. Popular 1980s
family sitcoms, such as Family Ties and The Cosby Show, depicted
feminist heterosexual relationships in which wives were successful
professionals, husbands were adoring and egalitarian, and marriages

were unions of best friends. By the late 1990s, the hit sitcom Friends
pushed the fantasy of happy heterosexuality even further, depicting a
seemingly postfeminist urban landscape in which single young women
and men forged enduring friendships with each other and later became
married soul mates. Wedding- and baby-themed reality television pro-
grams were also phenomenally popular with straight women viewers
during the 1990s, a fact that the cultural studies scholar Jennifer Maher
attributes to the disappointment of heterosexual rituals and institutions
in women’s actual lives.56 For Maher, the gap between the fantasy and
the lived experience of heterosexuality (or the reality of married life and
parenting after the wedding day and baby’s birth) left women disap-
pointed and wanting more, a craving that was soothed by watching the
fantasy reenacted on screen over and over again.
A review of the widely popular marital self-help books published dur-
ing this period supports Maher’s hypothesis. In 1985, the breakout book
Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood, a number-one New
York Times best seller, announced that millions of women around the
globe—“in the United States, . . . China and Brazil, France and Finland,
Ireland and Israel, Saudi Arabia and Serbia”—had become addicted to
unstable, immature, angry, cold, and abusive men and had found solace
in Norwood’s writing.57 Women who loved too much were “redeeming
men through the gift of their selfless, perfect, all-accepting love” and
would do almost anything for men’s company and approval.58 Draw-
ing heavily from twelve-step, addiction-focused approaches to code-

pendency, Norwood argued that women needed to learn to validate
themselves and stop trying to change men to meet their needs. In a
similar vein, the spiritual writer Iyanla Vanzant—a protégé of Oprah
Winfrey’s—also argued in her number-one best-selling book In the
Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love You Want that women need
to undertake a complete spiritual and emotional inventory in order
to ready themselves for men’s love.59 Promoting a sentiment that had
been, and would continue to be, circulated among straight women for
decades, Vanzant told women readers—her primary audience—that

they must first learn to truly love themselves, and to know that they are
complete without a male partner, before they can receive love from men.
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 femi-
nist 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, adora-
tion, concern, approval and nurturing.”60 In a particularly striking pas-
sage 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 re-
lationships: “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 hostil-
ity, aggression, contempt, and cruelty that the misogynist exhibits in his
behavior toward his partner.”61 Also echoing Afsaneh Najmabadi’s asser-
tion that nineteenth-century Iranian men recoiled at the idea of loving
women because doing so might give women power, Forward explained
that men’s abuse of women is driven by fear that “if he loves a woman,
she will then have the power to hurt him, to deprive him, to engulf him,
to abandon him.”62 Despite her sharp analysis of misogyny, Forward,
like Norwood, ultimately placed responsibility for change in individual
women’s hands. Women needed to stop normalizing men’s abuse, set
limits on what they would tolerate, and learn to assert their own needs.
This turn toward women’s self-worth and autonomy is inseparable
from late twentieth-century “postfeminist” messages about straight
women’s sexuality and consumer practices as their sources of power.
Late-1990s television shows like the phenomenally popular HBO series

Sex and the City (based on Candace Bushnell’s 1997 book by the same
name) linked “girl power” to straight women’s access to wealth and con-
sumer objects, desirability and casual sex. Straight Black women, al-
ready constructed as excessively sexual, bold, and independent by white
commentators like Patrick Moynihan, represented the extreme end of
women’s sexual freedom—or their capacity to be unapologetic freaks
and bitches—in the white-supremacist imagination. Citing the rise to
stardom of popular women performers like Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé,
and Missy Elliott, the Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins de-
scribes this period as a time in which Black and Brown women “were
convinced to perceive themselves solely in terms of the value of their
booties in marketplace relations” and in which the long-standing white-
supremacist obsession with Black and Brown body parts and sexual
deviance began to converge with neoliberal notions of freedom.63 At
the same time that best-selling self-help books of the era signaled that
straight relationships were characterized by the misogyny of husbands
and the lack of self-love and self-confidence of wives, straight women
were offered a new corporate-mediated and racially appropriative dis-
course that emphasized casual sex—and not feminist critique, which
was considered passé by many women during this era—as one way of
managing the disappointments of heterosexuality.
Another exceedingly popular response to the heterosexual tragedy
was simply to normalize it, and no book was as successful at spreading
the word that men and women do not like each other as the psychologist
John Gray’s 1992 book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Gray’s
book sold over fifty million copies and was the best-selling nonfiction
book during the entire decade of the 1990s, facts that are tremendously
significant given the book’s central and now familiar message: men and
women are so different, so at odds, that they might as well be from two
different planets. Gray confirmed for millions of readers that men and
women do not naturally like or respect each other, and therefore they
would need to learn to “fake it” for the sake of their relationships. While
Figure 2.3. John Gray speaks to an audience of women.
this may seem depressing, Gray reassured readers that heterosexual alien-
ation is perfectly natural and nothing to worry about. If straight couples
could learn to fake connection well enough, they might also learn to meet
each other’s needs and become authentically connected. What does this
faking entail? Gray told men that even though they may be bored and
irritated when their wives want to speak to them, it is men’s duty to listen
and pretend to be interested because women naturally thrive on commu-
nication and connection. Gray told women that even though they resent
their husbands for being adults who could not clean up after themselves
without being reminded, they must still lovingly remind husbands to do

their chores and, more importantly, express gratitude when they do, be-
cause men thrive on affirmation. He explained that men should be left
alone to watch football in their dens and basements (their “caves”) while
women take care of the children and the house because retreating to the
cave is a perfectly normal, ancient Martian tradition. Women should be
bought flowers and reassured that they are loved, because even though
Martians find these acts pointless, they are ancient Venutian traditions
that make women both happy and receptive to sex.
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Men Are from

Mars, Women Are from Venus as a self-help phenomenon that renor-
malized heterosexual misery for a new generation. This book—whose
central message was that women and men naturally find each other dif-
ficult to tolerate—spawned six follow-up books (Venus and Mars on a
Date, Venus and Mars in the Bedroom, Venus and Mars Starting Over,
and Why Mars and Venus Collide) and was published in Korean, Chi-
nese, Japanese, Spanish, Indonesian, Arabic, Sinhalese, and French. As
others have noted, the book’s gender essentialism provided a reassuring
counterpoint to the mounting feminist evidence that gender roles are
socially constructed and therefore mutable, and it provided readers an
alternative to the slow and difficult work of feminist social change.64
In this vein, John Gray offered a blueprint for a widely adopted, late-
modern “patriarchal bargain,” to use the feminist political-economist
Deniz Kandiyoti’s term, wherein women who perceive feminism to
threaten their symbolic capital, safety, or respectability could choose
instead a set of private, interpersonal negotiations (such as performing
dramatic displays of gratitude when male partners engage in equitable
behavior).65 Drawing from numerous global examples, Kandioyoti il-
lustrates that many women “would rather adopt interpersonal strate-
gies that maximize their security through manipulation of the affections
of their sons and husband” rather than resist in ways that might deem
them bad women—such as engaging in collective, public support for
the redistribution of gendered power.66 Playing right into this patriar-
chal bargain, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus offered a con-
temporary menu of the emotional compromises and manipulations that
women, and men, could take up when feminism seemed untenable. The
book opened the floodgates for a host of others that would take up the
same strategy.
For instance, a similarly successful 1990s phenomenon was the New
York Times number-one best seller The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chap-
man, which sold over ten million copies and continues to be a top-
selling marriage-advice manual despite being published in 1992. Though
The 5 Love Languages seemed at first blush to be a gender-neutral ex-

ploration of the different ways that partners express and receive love,
Chapman’s gendered language and examples made clear that the book’s
intended audience was Venutians—or ungrateful, disappointed, or nag-
ging wives—and that Martians, or husbands who just want to be praised
and then left alone, were the intended beneficiaries. In one example that
Chapman discussed at length, a wife is frustrated because she had been
asking her husband to paint the bedroom for nine months and he still
hadn’t done it. Chapman’s advice was for her to compliment her hus-
band on anything that he actually does do. Chapman told her never to
mention the painting job again and then stated,
The second suggestion I have is that the next time your husband does
anything good, give him a verbal compliment. If he takes the garbage
out, say “Dan, I want you to know that I really appreciate your taking the
garbage out.” . . . If you see him paying the electric bill, put your hand on
his shoulder and say, “Dan, I really appreciate your paying the electric
bill. I hear there are husbands who don’t do that, and I want you to know
how much I appreciate it.” . . . Every time he does anything good, give him
a verbal compliment.67
In the late twentieth century, readers consumed the idea that the job
duties associated with being a successful wife still included a significant
amount of performativity and husband-centered emotional labor, a kind
of “intensive wifing” that mirrored the intensive mothering and child-

centeredness popular during the same period.68
In the 2002 book Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women,
the Australian journalist Susan Maushart offered a hard-hitting critique
of precisely this “relentless routine of husband maintenance,” wherein a
heterosexually married man “does fewer chores, is happier, healthier and
generally more satisfied,” while a heterosexually married woman, “by
contrast, will perform two to three times more unpaid physical, emo-
tional, and organizational labor than her husband—and for a fraction
of the rewards.”69 Maushart, writing in 2002, almost a century after Wil-

liam Robinson described the “indifference,” “resentment,” and “mutual
ill-will” that characterized heterosexual marriage, painted a relatively
unchanged portrait, one in which straight women deeply resent—but
most often comply with—the pressure to reward their husbands for
basic tasks like paying bills or taking out the trash. One of the great
paradoxes of the heterosexual-repair industry is that this unrecipro-
cated care of husbands is, at least according to Maushart, the reason that
straight women initiate 75 percent of all divorces, but it is also relent-
lessly presented (albeit in ever-new forms of self-help) as the “solution”
to women’s misery. So great are the forces of patriarchy, misogyny, and
the perceived costs associated with being an unaccommodating woman
that slight variations on heterosexual misery are cast as preferable to
feminist interventions.
By the end of twentieth century, straight couples learned that women
and men are from two separate planets, with different languages, cus-
toms, and values. They learned that it is natural, or at least very com-
mon, for men to dislike spending substantial amounts of time in the
company of their wives and that women should embrace rather than
resist men’s desire for spaces of freedom from marriage. Straight women
learned that they, too, could seek freedom by maximizing their sexual
capital and relying on women friends, just like the ladies of Sex and the
City. Straight women learned that they should stop trying to change the
men in their lives and should focus instead on finding ways to meet their
own emotional needs. To the extent that women do need to ask some-
thing of men, they learned that they should do so with patient guidance
and a hefty dose of gratitude.
He’s Just Not That into You
Moving into the twenty-first century, best-selling self-help books offered

more nuanced and targeted messages about the link between marital
success and women’s willingness to provide men with exaggerated
proclamations of gratitude and affirmation. For instance, Steve Harvey’s

number-one New York Times best-selling 2009 book Act Like a Lady,
Think Like a Man sold over three million copies and was the first book
of its kind to repackage many of the aforementioned ideas for Black
women readers. Rehearsing a now predictable set of heterosexual-repair
recommendations braided together with Black cultural references, Har-
vey counseled Black women to be at home when their men come home
from work and to tell their husbands, “Baby, how was your day? Thank
you for making it happen for us. This family needs you and wants you
and is happy to have you.” Evidence of the book’s popularity among
straight Black women can be found in the humorous confession of the
feminist writer Brittney Cooper, who wrote in 2018, “I can ashamedly
admit that I was one of the millions of Black women who made come-
dian Steve Harvey a best-selling author when I ran out and purchased
his book. . . . Don’t make me hand over my feminist card, please. A sister
was desperate.”70 To the millions of Black women readers like Cooper,
Harvey asserted, “We’ve got to feel like we’re king, even if we don’t act
kingly. . . . A man needs that from his woman—he needs her to say,
‘Baby, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you do for me and the
kids. . . . You so big and strong and you’re everything that I need.’ Those
simple words give us the strength to keep on doing right by you and
the family.”71 Notable in Harvey’s book and its ilk is the continuation
of a decades-old theme about men’s emotional fragility and the tenu-
ousness of heterosexual relationships. Men are depicted as needing a
tremendous amount of praise, on par with what a mother might provide

to a toddler to reinforce desired behaviors. But Harvey also delivered
a more unsettling, though familiar, message by hinting that Black men
are teetering on the verge of leaving (or ceasing to “do right by you and
the family”) if women do not provide this level of praise. Exemplifying
the emotional labor expected of Black straight women and described by
Michelle Wallace decades earlier, Harvey made clear that because Black
men suffer the burden of anti-Black racism, it is in their homes and
relationships that they must be treated like kings. Elided by all of this, of
course, is Black women’s own experience of anti-Black racism and the

various ways it is compounded by the unique forms of misogyny that
Black women endure, or what the queer Black feminist Moya Bailey has
termed “misogynoir.”72
Straight women self-help writers, drawing on their own experiences
in the field of heterosexual dating, were more visible in the early 2000s,
especially when their books possessed bold or sensational titles. One of
these best sellers was Sherry Argov’s 2002 book Why Men Love Bitches:
From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own
in a Relationship. The book sold over one million copies, capturing the
attention of straight women who, presumably, felt like doormats in rela-
tion to the men they had married or dated. The aim of Why Men Love
Bitches was to help women readers elicit better treatment from men by
teaching them to manipulate their husbands and boyfriends in order to
earn their desire and loyalty. How would women do this? Here again, as
if a new idea, Argov implored women to make sure their male partners
always feel superior. Argov explained, “The three words guaranteed to
turn any man on? ‘You are right.’ You’ll never convince him otherwise,
so don’t bother trying. Let him be right. . . . Let a man think he’s in
control. When you appeal to his feelings of power, you charge up his
batteries. Then you’re giving him what he needs and he doesn’t even
know it.”73 A telling feature of the plucky “catch a man and keep him”
books written by women in the early twenty-first century is that they
advised women to relate to men in the most predictably sexist ways and
yet framed this advice as a new form of empowerment or as an innova-

tive set of weapons that a smart woman could use to manipulate men. In
these texts, written as if centuries of patriarchy never occurred, women’s
submission to men was presented as a hot, new idea. For instance, at first
glance, books such as Kara King’s 2014 The Power of the Pussy: How to
Get What You Want from Men (Love, Respect, Commitment and More!)
would appear to take a fundamentally different approach from Laura
Schlessinger’s 2009 The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, the for-
mer centering women’s needs and empowerment and the latter warn-
Figure 2.4. A scene from the 2012 film Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, based on
Harvey’s book.
ing women to focus on their husbands for the sake of their marriages.
But both books followed in the same well-worn tradition of encourag-
ing straight women to closely study men’s psychology, suppress “female
behaviors” that men “naturally” dislike (such as being too emotional),
carefully tend to men’s emotional needs, and manipulate men into a
committed relationship.
In another ostensibly empowering twenty-first-century best seller, the
2004 book He’s Just Not That into You (which inspired a movie by the
same title), straight women were depicted as so desperate to partner
with men that they would interpret any male behavior, including neglect
or aggression, as a signal of love or interest. Harking back to Norwood’s
book thirty years earlier, coauthors Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo dis-
pelled women of this misconception, presenting them with the tough-
love truth, “no, he’s just not that into you.” Seemingly a call to empower
straight women, yet again, to walk away from disappointing men, the
book’s primary accomplishment was to revive early twentieth-century
sexologists’ popular dictum that “male desire is far less complicated”

than women’s.74 Men don’t have trust issues or trauma, they aren’t griev-
ing their last relationship, they are not too stressed-out with work to go
on dates. The authors know this, they explained, because men are so mo-
tivated by sex that when they are sexually attracted to a woman, nothing
else matters. If women think men are sending mixed messages, they are
wrong; the truth is that men are just not sexually interested. Disguised
as a form of pop-feminist self-help, He’s Just Not into You reinforced the
notion of a simple gender binary wherein straight women desperately
grasp for men and straight men plod along with no logic, agency, or
emotional depth whatsoever.
Thus far this chapter has focused on self-help books, by far the most
popular and widely accessible forms of heterosexual repair. But it is
worth noting that the heterosexual-repair industry takes many forms,
several of which emerged or expanded in the late-capitalist period.
The global sex- and romance-tourism industry, for instance, now tar-
gets both women and men, capitalizing on the broad range of reasons
that straight people have become disillusioned with heterosexual court-
ship.75 Homosocial online communities have also proliferated, offering
spaces where straight men, in particular, can vent their frustrations with
heterosexual relationships. One such community in the “manosphere,”
called Men Going Their Own Way, aims to empower antifeminist men
to seek “sovereignty” from women by rejecting all heterosexual relation-
ships in favor of forging bonds with men and occasionally paying for
sex work.76 Dating and relationship coaching is also a growing, interna-

tional industry and the subject of chapter 3.
New Age self-actualization seminars and Christian megaevents are
also popular spaces for heterosexual repair, merging long-standing
bioessentialist arguments about gender difference—or masculine and
feminine “energies” and “destinies”—with the project of personal trans-
formation.77 According to this arm of the heterosexual-repair industry,
the secular world has promoted the false but politically correct idea that
women and men are generally the same, a misconception that encour-
ages people to deny their true essence and, consequently, wreaks havoc
in heterosexual relationships. There is perhaps no better example of this
approach than the seminars of the billionaire best-selling author, en-
trepreneur, business adviser, and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.78
A 2016 Netflix documentary about Robbins’s seminars, titled I Am Not
Your Guru, directed by Joe Berlinger, reveals the role of heterosexual
repair in the advice Robbins provides to the twenty-five hundred attend-
ees at each of his “Date with Destiny” megaevents. Robbins teaches his
followers that “feminine men” and “masculine women” are likely to be
blocked in their ability to “discover their purpose” or “ignite their pas-
sion” because they are resisting their true essence or calling.
For instance, the documentary shows Robbins counseling a divorced
woman named Hali, during which time he deduces that her father was
too adoring when she was a child, resulting in her belief that she is enti-
tled to men’s love instead of needing to “work for it.” When Hali explains
that she is currently dating a man who is kind and gentle and loves to
talk about his feelings, Robbins asserts that Hali has found herself an-
other “feminine man” and pressures her to call him on the phone imme-
diately and end the relationship. The film shows Hali breaking up with
her boyfriend on the phone, for being too feminine, while the twenty-
five hundred other “Date with Destiny” attendees look on, mesmerized
by Robbins’s power to change lives. In another intervention shown in
the film, Robbins ascertains that an attendee named Lance also had a
feminine father and that this made Lance too passive in his marriage
to his wife, Tami. Robbins tells Lance the story of a lion cub raised by
sheep who grows up believing he is a sheep, until the day an older male
lion comes and kills his sheep family and forces him to eat their bodies.
Robbins holds the microphone up to Lance, who, presumably inspired
by this parable to recover his lost masculinity, belts out a lion’s roar. Rob-
bins yells, “Fuck yes, brother!!” and the event technicians bring up the
“a dramatic breakthrough has occurred” music, the audience cheers and
dances, and the camera pans to Tami, Lance’s wife, who is smiling and
clapping too. Later in the documentary, Tami and Lance report that they
went back to their hotel room the night of the intervention, energized by
the parable of the lion, had hot sex and decided to have children.
Robbins’s seminars are a stunning example of the cyclical nature of
the tragedy of heterosexuality; the very gender binarism and misogyny
that produce heterosexual misery are also the interventions proffered to
consumers to remedy it. Robbins’s personal coaching also exemplifies
the self-improvement focus of twenty-first-century heterosexual repair,
in that it reframes men’s power over women not only as a winning rela-
tionship strategy but also as an act of spiritual wholeness that brings out
the best in men and women, aligning them with their “path.”79
The Long Campaign
Among the many expert discourses that emerged in the twentieth cen-
tury to give form to the new “heterosexual” and her/his desire for the
opposite sex, one message was consistently clear: heterosexuality was a
difficult accomplishment, a hard sell, a campaign in need of propaganda,
and a white-supremacist project. For early sexologists, heterosexual
marriage was synonymous with sexual violence and visceral repulsion.
If heterosexual identity were to succeed as the model for normal, healthy
sexuality in the modern era, men’s violence and misogyny would need
tempering. The emergence of “normal heterosexuality” also relied on
and bolstered anti-Black racism by positioning the benevolent patriar-
chy of white marriages as the standard against which African American
sexuality would be evaluated. Later, for midcentury psychologists, mar-

riage amounted to a tenuous merging of unequals, its success wholly
dependent on the selflessness, and emotional and domestic labor, of
white and Black women devoted to men’s public and private pursuits. In
the 1980s and ’90s, alarmed psychologists pointed out that millions of
straight men still hated women and that marriages were the battleground
where the war of the sexes was being waged. By the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, experts warned that men had grown tired of
women’s demands for autonomy, or tired of feminism, and were craving
women’s gratitude—yet again. By the late twentieth century, Black writ-

ers like Steve Harvey had adopted the same heteropatriarchal rhetoric
canonized by white male self-help writers in previous decades, advis-
ing straight Black women that submission and gratitude were the key to
Black men’s loyalty.
Our tour through the heterosexual-repair industry has also pointed
to a significant shift in the patriarchal contract. Under classic white-
supremacist heteropatriarchy, men extracted women’s reproductive and
emotional labor in exchange for the promise of economic and physical
protection—a promise often unkept given the violence that husbands
themselves committed against their wives. Married heterosexual women
also received some symbolic forms of power and respect in exchange for
their submission, providing them with greater status in the hierarchy of
women. But as early feminist critiques of this exchange gained traction
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so too did sexologists and
psychologists increase their investments in, and expectations of, hetero-
sexuality. Men were now urged to provide love and friendship in ex-
change for women’s subservience and deep gratitude. Men and women
would now aspire to like each other, even if this required tremendous
compromise, complaint, and feigned interest.
By the mid-twentieth century, as modern capitalism shored up the
links between American masculinity, rationality, and individualism—
making it no longer as viable for men to be romantically connected to
one another—it was with women, and within the private heterosexual
family, that men’s fragility could be expressed. Women, already de-

graded, became the figures who could witness men’s fragility, especially
given that fragility itself was cast as a degraded and feminized state of
being. But this, too, produced backlash, an amplification of the fear that
loving women too much, or being too dependent on their care and at-
tention, would threaten men’s power.
I hope this chapter has also illuminated the ways that straight women
have struggled with and against the tragedy of heterosexuality, not only
by consuming self-help strategies they hoped would improve their lives
but also by tirelessly calling out misogyny and its effects on their re-
lationships. As I write this book, the song “Truth Hurts” by the Black
feminist rapper Lizzo has topped the popular-music charts. Lizzo sings,
“Yeah, I got boy problems. That’s the human in me. Bling bling, then I
solve ’em. That’s the goddess in me. . . . You’re ’posed to hold me down,
but you’re holding me back, And that’s the sound of me not calling you
back” (incidentally, Lizzo wrote the song with three male songwriters,
two white men and one Asian man). Countless videos on Instagram
show girls and women belting out these lyrics at Lizzo concerts. Like
generations of straight feminist women before them, they are celebrat-
ing the possibility that women could just say no to bad men; they could
be goddesses, filled with self-love, who just don’t call those men back.
But the history, or rather the herstory, of heterosexual repair suggests
that, ultimately, straight women still experience desire and/or pressure
to find a male partner and get married, and with this desire/pressure the
opportunities for feminist resistance begin to narrow, the walls of het-
eronormativity close in, and straight women find themselves in the self-
help aisle of the bookstore, reading Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.
3
PICKUP ARTISTS
Inside the Seduction Industry
I am at a boutique hotel on the famed Sunset Strip

in West Hollywood. I wait outside the locked conference-room door, the
first to arrive. Soon a couple of men shuffle out of the elevator, surveying
the foyer sheepishly. I overhear one ask the other, “Are you here for the
Bible study?” They both laugh, the joke an ice-breaking acknowledg-
ment that perhaps the real seminar they are about to attend, the one that
will teach them the secrets of how to seduce young hot women, should
be kept incognito.1
After watching the online advertising trailers for the Love Systems
Bootcamp that we are about to enter, I am expecting a large banquet
hall full of men. I have learned from these promo videos that the Love
Systems Annual Super Conference in Las Vegas draws hundreds of men
seeking to learn how to “generate women’s attraction” and become in-
formed of the “newest / most powerful breakthroughs in dating science.”
But today, at this regional bootcamp in West Hollywood, I have been
granted access to observe a much smaller and more intimate Love Sys-
tems event. Ten men eventually filter into the small, sunlit conference
room, seated around an oval seminar table. I, the researcher, and the only
woman present, sit in the corner of the room. When invited to introduce
myself, I explain to the bootcamp participants that I am a sociologist
from UC Riverside, writing a book that will include a chapter on the
seduction industry and “what it might tell us about the state of contem-
porary gender relations.” I promise them confidentiality and explain that
while I am taking notes, I will not record their names or other identify-
ing information about them. But they are palpably uninterested in my
75
76 • PICKUP aRTISTS
short, obligatory speech. They have no questions for me. They are ready
to get started, to begin this two-day seminar “guaranteed to teach men
how to get out of the ‘friend zone’ and pick up beautiful women.” And, in
case you are wondering, I find out fairly quickly that I am not one of the
women they are interested in seducing. A thirty-eight-year-old feminist,
I am far too old, too serious. Perfect. I am just a fly on the wall.
***
In recent years, many of the self-help messages that were once directed
primarily at straight women have been extended to straight men. In
the new twenty-first-century self-help paradigm, men, too, have been
wronged by modern heterosexuality. As the experts explain, this is
because women now control the terms of seduction and sex, leaving men
feeling powerless and resentful. Men consumers of today’s heterosexual-
repair services learn that their desperation, insecurity, and aggression are
off-putting to women; that their bodies might be undesirable—too short,
too bald, too old, or too fat to compete with other men; that women
experience their flirtation tactics as creepy and awkward, if not threat-
ening and scary; and that men need the help of trained professionals to
overcome these deficiencies. In other words, straight men are finally bur-
dened with some of the labor of making heterosexual desire functional,
though they come to this work, as did their early twentieth-century
counterparts who resisted loving women, with fear and ambivalence.
One realm where men have turned for help is the dating and seduc-
tion industry, in which “seduction coaches” train men to relearn the

basics of heterosexual attraction in a post-#metoo era. Many of these
coaching businesses evolved out of the controversial and misogynistic
“pickup artist” subculture of the early 2000s but have since rebranded
their services as a more holistic and feminist-friendly approach to men’s
self-actualization. Dating coaches offer a broad array of psychothera-
peutic, informational, and strategic interventions into men’s troubled
relationships with women. They help straight men heal the anxiety and
depression caused by women’s sexual rejection. They normalize men’s
PICKUP aRTISTS • 77
sexual failures by explaining the evolutionary and sociocultural causes

of sexual rejection using what they call “dating science.” And they teach
men to perform new expressions of heteromasculinity aimed at making
straight women feel safe and understood.
The strategies used by dating and seduction coaches are composed of
old, new, and repurposed attempts to reconcile heterosexual desire with
misogyny; intimacy with “faking”; feminism with the science of gender
difference; and seemingly private problems with neoliberal interventions
(self-actualization seminars, personal coaching, and other financial in-
vestments in personal and relational improvement). Their industry is
also a transnational and imperialist one; as American and European
coaches offer seduction bootcamps around the globe, they name and
then “solve” the heterosexual disappointments and desires of men in the
global South. To illuminate these complex dynamics, this chapter draws
on field notes from two weekend-long seduction bootcamps I attended
in 2013–2014, interviews with seduction coaches, weekly newsletters
subscriptions about how to seduce women, and over fifty videos and
webinar clips from seduction bootcamps and in-field trainings. In 2013,
the year I began my investigation of dating and seduction coaching,
I obtained access to two well-established and high-profile seduction-
coaching companies: Love Systems, a company based in Los Angeles
and owned by a coach with ties to the original pickup-artist scene; and
the Noble Art of Seduction, a woman-owned London-based company
that regularly offered classes in Los Angeles.2 Later, in 2017, I shifted
focus to a newer training program, Project Rockstar, an immersive off-

shoot of Love Systems that offers men “a complete life transformation.”
Pickup artists: The Roots of the Seduction Industry
Seduction or dating coaching companies emerged in the early 2000s as

the purportedly more respectable, corporate arm of what had been called
the “pickup artist” community—a subculture that elicited widespread
controversy following the 2005 publication of Neil Strauss’s notorious
book The Game. Part ethnography, part how-to guide, Strauss’s book
chronicled the journalist’s entrée into an international secret society of
schlubby straight white men who claimed to have cracked the code for
getting “hot” women around the globe to have “same night” sex with
them. The Game was a global best seller, and pickup artistry subse-
quently expanded into a high-profile international industry in which
expert coaches—usually, but not always, men—offered weekend boot-
camps in which they taught other men “game,” or how to seduce women,
for a fee ranging from $1,500 to $4,000. Many of these expert coaches
were not conventionally attractive men. In fact, in the early develop-
ment of the industry, the more average the man (the balder, the older,
the chubbier, the less wealthy, the more effeminate), the more impres-
sive were his credentials as a seducer of young, attractive women. This is
because a key selling point of pickup-artist seminars was their embrace
of the AFC, or average frustrated chump. The frustrated chump took
many forms: the social outcast who stayed a virgin longer than his
friends, the introverted guy who was afraid to approach women and
felt stuck in “the friend zone,” the immigrant man who hadn’t mastered
American gender norms or was still learning how to flirt in English,
the involuntarily gay-acting straight guy, the socially awkward computer
programmer—and the list of frustrated men went on and on.
Seduction coaches promised to alleviate these men’s sexual suffering
by teaching them what kind of masculinity to embrace, and what kind to
avoid, in the service of attracting women. They warned men that the flip
side of being a seemingly harmless chump was appearing to be a creepy

dude, a man whose desperation makes him appear lecherous and unsafe
to the very women he is trying to impress. At pickup-artist trainings,
coaches welcomed these often depressed, vulnerable, and unintentionally
creepy men without judgment, assuring them that the power to seduce
women is not innate but simply a learned set of skills. During interviews,
coaches told me that most men believe that attracting women should
come naturally, so they enter trainings with a deep sense of personal de-
ficiency and, in some cases, self-loathing. To resolve this, coaches told
trainees that other men who appear to be “naturals” at seduction were

most likely taught by their fathers and brothers how to approach women.
For men who did not receive this early guidance, coaches were proxy
mentors, brotherly or fatherly figures, who could help bring them up to
speed. The coaches also offered lengthy testimony about their own sexless
lives before discovering the game; the more tragic their stories of failure
with women, the more powerfully the stories functioned as evidence that
attraction is an acquired skill available to all men willing to invest the
time and money to achieve it. These “former losers,” now financially suc-
cessful seduction coaches, explained that they have now had sex with
hundreds of hot women, or they have five women fuckbuddies on speed-
dial, or they have a gorgeous girlfriend, and so on—compelling creden-
tials coming from these bald, dorky, or otherwise unexpected Casanovas.
A stunning example of the misogyny paradox, pickup artists built
their success on helping other men resolve the tension between straight
men’s socialization, on the one hand, and straight women’s reality, on the
other. They spoke directly to men’s sense of a lost heterosexual birthright
and an unfulfilled media-fueled expectation that men, no matter how
average in personality or appearance, would have access to a reason-
able amount of uncomplicated sex with women they find attractive.3 The
filmmaker Sut Jhally calls this the “male dreamworld,” a fantasy world
in which young, beautiful women are presented to boys and men as an
entitlement,4 and the feminist writer Laura Kipnis, too, has noted the
perplexing disparity between powerful, straight, white men’s inflated
sense of their own appeal and their over-the-top requirements of the

women they desire (Kipnis describes men like Harvey Weinstein and
Donald Trump as “bulbous, jowly men; fat men who told women they
needed to lose weight; ugly men drawn to industries organized around
female appearance”).5 But as pickup artists knew, many men reached the
pinnacle of heterosexual misery when their dreamworld could no long
integrate real women. In reality, the women these men encountered had
grown tired of men’s sense of entitlement, their scripted flirtations, their
braggadocio, and their aggressive and self-centered approach to sex.
Figure 3.1. A session at the annual Love Systems Super Conference in Las Vegas. (From
Love Systems website)
The Love Systems Bootcamp was the first seduction training I at-
tended, and Love Systems is still in business in 2019 as I write this book.
Nick Savoy, its owner, had been involved in the early and notorious it-
erations of pickup culture described by Neil Strauss, but he had since
disavowed the term “pickup artist” and self-identified as a “dating coach”
whose work was based on “relationship science.” As I described at the
start of this chapter, I spent the weekend in the small hotel seminar room
with Savoy, two other male Love Systems trainers, a handful of their male
assistants, and the ten men students who had registered in the course.
Notwithstanding the fact that these men generously gave me permission
to observe the seminar, I expected to hate them. But, as other scholars
and journalists who have entered the seduction industry have noted,6 one
of the immediately observable features of the trainings is the likability of

many of the men who circulate within them, a feeling that stems largely
from their vulnerability and mutual care once inside the protected space
of the seminar. I described this mood in my field notes:
I am really struck by their friendliness with each other, their kindness,

the absence of posturing that I am accustomed to in male-dominated
faculty meetings! The mood is like one part friendly slumber party, one
part physical therapy—with trainers teaching the men to breathe from
the chest, to be more natural in their posture and movement, and to use
proper skincare products. They recommended a specific glycolic exfoli-
ant to use after shaving and the best height-increasing shoes for shorter
men! The intimacy of this part of the training feels sweet to me. During
breakout dyads, the trainer showed one of the men how to gently touch
a woman’s hair at a bar.
Some of the men’s faces flushed when it was their turn to speak, or
their voices trembled when they talked about problems they’ve had with
women. I feel sorry for them. The feeling is a lot like group therapy. It
seems like . . . the mood of an infertility group for women? These men
thought they were entitled to something (hot chicks!), but it isn’t happen-
ing. They are confused about why it isn’t happening.
During introductions, each participant explained his reasons for being

there: “I want to work on approaching women and having fewer dry
spells”; “I am forty-three and play volleyball, and I do meet girls doing
that. But I need the skills to close the deal”; “I feel awkward, and like
I’m not very interesting. I don’t have much experience with women”; “I
travel the world and have been with a lot of women, but I want hotter
women. I want more high-quality pussy!”; “I get tired after work, so I
just don’t have the motivation to go out”; “I can talk to girls, but it never
ends up being sexual. I end up being the friend guy.” Two European
men mentioned that they had success with women outside of the United
States but found American women to be unapproachable. Several men
mentioned that they wanted the ability be more selective, to have sex
with women who were more attractive than the ones who seemed
interested in them. One of the trainers quickly affirmed that this is a
common theme for men: “Men want to be able to choose, not settle for
the low-hanging fruit. We’re going to make that happen.” My sympathy
for some of these men—men heartbroken by the low-hanging fruit—
started to wane.
During a break, with my best tone of nonjudgmental, ethnographic
geniality, I approached the British man in his fifties who had expressed
his desire for more “high-quality pussy” and asked him what, precisely,
he meant by that. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, he
turned bright red and said, “Oh, now I am mortified you are asking me
that! I should not have said that! You must think I am terrible.” I told
him I genuinely wanted to understand what the comment meant. Was
it literally about the quality of women’s vaginas? I asked, playing naïve.
Was it about a certain type of woman? What did “quality” mean? He
said, “Yeah, it’s about the whole package. I would like to find a beauti-
ful woman who has a lot of energy for fun and adventure. That’s all I
meant, actually.” Over the course of both bootcamps I attended, older
men commonly named “fun” and “adventurousness” as among women’s
most desirable traits. The more they shared about the kind of women
they did not want (divorced women, serious women, jaded women,
women focused on parenting their children), the more it became clear
that “fun” and “adventurous” were codes men used to describe women
much younger than themselves.
At the second bootcamp I attended in 2013, this one offered by the
London-based company Noble Art of Seduction, a male seduction coach
conducted an exercise designed to reduce men’s anxiety around young,
beautiful women by helping trainees knock these women off their sym-
bolic pedestals. The coach painted an image for the male trainees of a
tall, thin, beautiful blond in her early twenties and then asked the men
to visualize the reality of her life. He said, “She makes minimum wage at
Forever 21, she’s sharing a small apartment with her friend, she’s just be-
ginning to understand how the world works, and if she’s like most girls,
she’s probably insecure about her body.”7 The coach then explained to
the men that they have the power. They have more life experience, they
probably have more money, and if they develop their game, they will
exude a competent masculinity to which these insecure young women
will be drawn. When two men in their early forties expressed that they
felt afraid to approach women in their twenties, the coach responded,
“[Your age] is your advantage. Think back to high school: girls dated
guys in higher grades. Women want to date older men.” Kezia Noble, a
woman and the company’s owner and lead coach, concurred, warning
an older student never to answer a younger woman’s question about how
old he is by saying, “Can you guess?” “Older men like to say that all the
time, but you should never say that. You are a grown man,” Noble told
him. “Tell her your age right away. You have lived. You’re experienced,
more mature. You have inner confidence. Your age is an advantage. Use
it. If she asks, ‘How old are you?’ you say, ‘Old enough to be your father.
And it’s past your bedtime!”
Kezia Noble’s seduction students included a mix of African Ameri-
can, Latino, white, and non-American men, both white and of color.
Over and over again, male students across a range of socioeconomic
and racial/ethnic backgrounds expressed desire for the most well-worn,
predictable, and arguably retro fantasy of an attractive woman: young,
thin, white, and blond.8 Despite being surrounded at the time by popu-
lar, booty-centric images of Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and other
women who had risen to fame, at least in part, on the power of their
curves (a departure from the blond, thin women in fashion in the 1980s
and ’90s, the Christie Brinkleys and Elle MacPhersons who appeared on
posters in boys’ bedrooms and mechanics’ shops around the country),
white-supremacist hierarchies of beauty ensured that the figure of the
skinny blonde still held sway over these men. When Chris, a twenty-
five-year-old African American man from Chicago was asked by a coach
to describe his ideal woman in more detail, he replied, “She needs to
believe in God, be down-to-earth, white, blond, and shorter than me.”
Demonstrating for trainees how to visualize in detail one’s ideal type be-
yond generic descriptions like “hot” or “nice,” a white male coach called
forth the image of his own ne plus ultra of sexy girls, “I love girls who
are skinny and blond with really good posture, like dancers. You know
those girls who have a curve in their back, from such great posture? Full
lips, high cheekbones, makeup that highlights her eyes, not big breasts.
I know it’s tough to be specific, because it’s the first time you have sat
down to think about something other than blond and big breasts. But
we’re doing this so we won’t settle out of convenience.”
Figure 3.2. Kezia Noble’s bootcamp. (From www.Kezia-Noble.com)
Sprinkled throughout these bootcamps were also numerous

confidence-building, self-improvement platitudes about how men need
to be willing to fail, trust the journey, have an abundance mind-set, know
that it takes time to build skills, and so on. Coaches also gave extensive
attention to what they called “inner game” by replacing men’s defeatist
psychology with a willingness to get “blown out,” or rejected by numer-
ous women, without being psychologically annihilated by it. Seduction
trainees were taught that the best mind-set for seducing women is not to
be attached to any particular woman but to approach enough beautiful
women to get rejected dozens of times, until men move into a relaxed,
abundance-oriented, nothing-to-lose frame of mind. This “fail harder”
ethos comes directly from corporate, sales-driven motivational frame-
works, which, as the sociologist Rachel O’Neill argues in her outstanding
study of London-based seduction bootcamps, makes seduction less of a
game than it is a form of work, in which men become sexual entrepre-
neurs who approach sex in terms of long-term investment and increased
returns.9 Bootcamps are also places where men learn “best practices,”
or proven seduction routines, which they practice together during their
group sessions and also out at bars and clubs during “infield training.”
Male trainees are given the opportunity, during infield training, to try
their approach on dozens of women, while their supportive coaches and
fellow trainees are waiting in the wings to debrief what did and did not
work and to encourage men to quickly move on to the next approach.
Trainees also learn the basic anatomy of seduction, with coaches offer-
ing examples of how to complete each step in the seduction process: the
initial approach, transitioning into conversation, attracting her (showing
her your value and building her interest), qualifying her (playfully getting
her to show interest in you, determining whether it’s worthwhile to con-
tinue the seduction), comforting her (offering some brief moments of an
authentic get-to-know-you connection), and finally, seduction (touching
her, making sexual comments, making clear that sex is your intention).
Love Systems trainers explained that one commonly used tactic to qualify
women, or build their interest, is to “neg” them, but that this “old-school
tactic” is now considered needlessly antagonistic.10 To neg a woman is
to make subtly critical or teasing comments about her to show a lack of
interest and trigger her insecurity, thereby leveling the playing field (such
as, “I wish you were a brunette. I’m taking a break from blondes for a
while,” or “Eww, you just spit on me!” or “Hey, just cause I’m Asian, you’re
not going to talk to me?”). According to the coaches at Love Systems, al-
though the negging technique has a bad reputation, some mild and play-
ful negs, used sparingly, are proven to work because they do the opposite
of what women expect. Instead of fawning over women and showering
them with false compliments, men can neg women to show that they are
confident enough not to beg for attention.
The Misogyny Paradox, Revisited
In 2014, it became clear that pickup-artist subculture was inspir-

ing real-life violence against women. First was Elliot Rodger, the
twenty-two-year-old male student who killed seven people in Isla Vista,

California, because, by his own admission, he wanted revenge on the
women who did not find him attractive. Rodger was a follower of pickup-
artist websites and used the lingo of the subculture in his suicide video.
Later that year, the horrific misogyny and racism of Julien Blanc, the
owner of a popular pickup-artist company called Real Social Dynamics,
caused international outrage. Blanc had posted a video to YouTube in
which he can be seen in Tokyo, grabbing Japanese women on the street
and in bars and pushing their heads toward his penis. In captured video
footage of his seminar, he was seen telling attendees, “If you’re a white
male, you can do what you want. I’m just romping through the streets,
just grabbing girls’ heads, just like, head, pfft [sound effect] on the dick.”
His Instagram profile also showed photos of him with his hands around
women’s throats, with the hashtag #chokinggirlsaroundtheworld. A few
years later, in 2018, Alek Minassian killed ten people in Toronto after
posting on Facebook that Elliot Rodger was his inspiration to kick-start
the “Incel Rebellion,” or the murderous revenge plot of “involuntarily
celibate” men.11 As the media exposed these cases as examples of the vio-
lence of the seduction industry, numerous commentators offered their
analyses of the seduction curriculum and its peddlers. Psychology Today
described the game as a set of “quasi-psychological tricks” used to prey
on and exploit women;12 The Guardian described the game as “sinister”
and “pathetic,” run by “alienated and dysfunctional” men intoxicated
by other men’s approval even more than heterosexual sex itself;13 Vice
called the game a “set of personal, tailored approaches and carefully-

crafted individualized steps for bamboozling women;”14 Jezebel echoed
these analyses, describing pickup artists as predators who believe that
women “can be ‘understood’ via dangerous, antiquated notions of femi-
ninity and conquered using emotional and physical manipulation,” with
seemingly no limit to how far men will go to exert sexual control.15
But some of these critiques also had the effect of obscuring the fact
that much of the seduction industry looks less like these extreme expres-
sions of hypermisogyny and more like a perfectly predictable outgrowth
of the heterosexual-repair industry, or the run-of-the-mill misogyny

that has troubled modern heterosexual relationships from the start.
Most seduction coaches and pickup artists base their work on the same
premise that was phenomenally popular when John Gray circulated it
in the 1990s with Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and when
Steve Harvey circulated it in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man in 2009:
namely, that men and women want fundamentally different things out
of heterosexuality, and as a result, their attraction and relationships are
fraught with conflict and misunderstanding. Seduction coaches, at some
level, know that heterosexuality’s continued fragility and failure produce
a demand for interventions that can build women’s sexual desire for av-
erage men and increase average men’s capacity to elicit that desire. So
while commentators critiqued the pickup-artist industry for teaching
men to be “fake” with women in order to have sex with them, this kind
of performativity was certainly nothing new; as self-help writers have
told the millions of straight people who have bought their books, hetero-
sexuality works best when men and women learn to say and do things
that they don’t actually want to say or do, for the sake of heterosexual-
ity—to express interest, gratitude, and connection, whether they feel it
or not. In the heterosexual-repair industry, this is not about manipula-
tion; it is about learning an advanced relationship skill.
Some journalists, observing that the seduction industry seemed to be
addressing problems endemic to heterosexuality, offered more equiv-
ocal accounts of the seduction curriculum by noting its emphasis on
fostering confidence and emotional intelligence in anxious men who

had been made emotionally deficient—awkward, creepy, and otherwise
unappealing—by male gender socialization. Quoted in Jezebel, a woman
and self-identified “feminist pickup artist” insisted that good seduction
trainers “are devoted to fostering intimacy, not creepy coercion.”16 A
journalist for Vice declared, “Everyone thinks the ‘trained’ pickup artist
is a sleazy, predatory lizard [who is] stalking women. The truth is some
are like that, but quite a lot of them, I can tell you, are painfully shy guys
who break out in sweats at the thought of even speaking to a girl.”17 And
a Jezebel blogger who described many seduction techniques as “sinister”

also confessed that much of what she saw while working as an employee
for a seduction company did not offend her: “the advice was based on
building men up, as opposed to denigrating women.”18
This equivocation about the meaning and effects of seduction coach-
ing mirrors some of the ambivalence I too had felt while immersed in-
side the bootcamps. For one thing, no one likes the idea that sexuality
is scripted and formulaic, even when it is. The idea that heterosexual
seduction can be reduced to such a predictable formula and that young,
straight women can be taken in by more or less clever pickup lines is an
affront to a centuries-long heteropatriarchal campaign about the unique
and mystical nature of romance itself (a campaign that has long served
as an ideological cover for women’s oppression at the hands of men who
claimed to love them). But, on the other hand, the seduction industry
also makes a kind of logical and familiar sense within the culture and
political economy of the twenty-first century. It not only builds on a
century of popular and scientific theorizing about purportedly natural
gender differences and the trouble they cause well-intentioned straight
people, but it also upholds the value of individual self-actualization
(i.e., taking dramatic steps to know yourself and get what you want,
right now) and embraces neoliberal mantras once reserved for cor-
porate motivational posters, applying them to heterosexual sex (“Fail
harder!” “Embrace a mastery mind-set!” “Show her your leadership!”).
As Rachel O’Neill contends, “The [seduction] industry borrows from
and is informed by many of the same knowledge formations that un-

dergird heterosexual sex and relationship advice more generally, most
particularly that of evolutionary psychology, a major purveyor of ‘two
sexes, two cultures’ paradigm.”19 Hence, for me the question was not
whether I “agreed” with the seduction coaches or thought they were
approaching heterosexuality in the most ethical, feminist way possible
(that answer would obviously be no) but whether their approach made
enough sense in the current cultural moment to perhaps actually work
on straight women and, dare I say, perhaps even be an improvement on
what straight men were doing before they learned to reflect on the dif-
ference between creeps and noncreeps.
Because misogyny has so profoundly overdetermined the ways that
most straight men approach women in bars and other sexualized set-
tings, many seduction coaches could fairly easily predict what it would
take for a given man to set himself apart from the legions of creepy
dudes, sexually aggressive men, and arrogant mansplainers. Their aim
was not an altruistic or feminist one; in the end, I did not believe they
were motivated by a desire to make straight men less creepy for its own
sake. Instead, they observed that women don’t like creeps and that men
can get what they want (sex) if they give women what women want
(connection, humble confidence, basic decency). Closely mirroring the
presumptions of twentieth-century sexologists and psychologists, seduc-
tion coaches worked from the premise that most men, in their natural
state, are not what straight women want. And most women, in their
natural state, are not what men want (if “natural” includes over thirty-
five, average-looking, divorced, fat, of color, mothers, etc.). Their work
illuminates that straight culture exists in a very conflicted relationship
to what I have elsewhere called “gender labor,”20 the intimate work that
must be done to make both heterosexual attraction and the gender bi-
nary appear natural. On the one hand, gender labor smooths out the
contradictions, but on the other hand, the very act of doing this labor
exposes heterosexuality as a high-maintenance, nonautomatic project.
Building Empathy and Safety: Seduction Strategies

That (Might) Work
What does it take for a straight man to set himself apart from the creeps
and earn a woman’s trust and desire? As Kezia Noble, the owner of
Noble Art of Seduction, explained to the men attending her bootcamp,
men must first understand the reasons that women refuse eye contact,
shut down conversation, and otherwise reject men who approach them
in public places. Noble does not use the phrase “rape culture” in her
seminar, though she arguably describes it. She encourages trainees to

view the world through women’s eyes by imagining what it must be like
to be endlessly and aggressively approached by men trying to coerce
women into sex. Men boast, lie, and play power games with women, she
explains. Women have seen it all and are exhausted. So when a “good
man” looking for a fun time approaches an attractive woman, of course
she is going to put up her “bitch shield” or give him a “shit test,” Noble
proclaims. In the seduction community, bitch shields (i.e., being rude to,
or ignoring, men) and shit tests (i.e., insulting men) are recognized as
survival strategies women have developed to manage sexual objectifica-
tion. Both Kezia’s team of coaches and the coaches from Love Systems
explained to the men in their seminars that when women ignore or dis-
miss them in social environments, it is not because they are actually
bitches but because they have put up a shield that is necessary to manage
the overwhelming sexual attention they receive from aggressive and/or
frightening men. Trainees learned to understand that the “AFOG,” or
the alpha female of the group—the woman who protects her women
friends from aggressive men in bars—is also a necessary figure in wom-
en’s social worlds, another component of women’s survival strategy.
A male coach working on Noble’s team asked bootcamp participants
to put themselves in women’s shoes by also considering the slut shaming
that prevents straight women from expressing desire in the same ways
encouraged of men: “If a man sleeps around, he’s celebrated. But there’s
a double standard, and women are called sluts. It’s ridiculous, but that’s
what women have got to deal with. So if she makes eye contact, that’s
her version of an approach. That’s all she can do.” Later he told trainees
to be highly attentive to women’s sense of safety: “Keep an arm’s reach
apart. . . . Fix yourself on a wall or pole, so she feels safe. She has the op-
tion to leave. Find something to lean on, so you don’t look like a threat.
As a rule, [say your opening line] and take one step back! Give her room,
a safe talking distance so she feels comfortable.”
Rather than resent women’s strategies for negotiating men’s sex-
ual aggression, trainees were told to recognize and work with them.
Coaches encouraged them to make self-deprecating jokes, to bond

with women about how creepy other men are, to befriend the AFOG,
and sometimes even to play-act at being gay in order to put women
initially at ease. All of these strategies at first seemed ridiculously
counterintuitive to the seduction students. They thought that in those
few precious moments after approaching a woman, they were sup-
posed to sell themselves by referencing how much money they had or
showing off some other form of power that would give them a compet-
itive edge over other men. But they gradually came to understand the
social context—the context of rape culture and male aggression—in
which self- deprecating humor and other displays of vulnerability,
including sexual, gendered, socioeconomic, and racial vulnerability,
make sense. Love Systems coaches gave the following examples of
jokes that trainees could try:
• “What? I was totally going to wear that [point to her outfit]. Oh how
embarrassing!”
• “My mom sent me here to lose my virginity. Do you think I have a shot?”
[The coach explains that “anything about being a virgin, having a small
penis, being gay, being dropped off by your mom—ironically, these all get a
laugh and really make women comfortable.”]
• Be goofy and wrong on purpose: “If the woman you’re approaching is
Black, you say, ‘So what part of Korea are you from? North? South?’”
• Point to a creepy or drunk dude and say, “Oh, your dad is really out of
control tonight. You shouldn’t have brought him.”

• For men of color seducing white women, say, “You think because you’re
white, you are better than me? Oh, so you’re a racist!”
• “I really like you, so it’s too bad I am broke. Yeah, I sleep in a dumpster
close to here. It’s convenient though!”
Coaches explained that role reversals, wherein men pretend to be wor-

ried about their own safety or offended by women’s objectification of
them, can also be humorous and subtle ways of acknowledging the
importance of safety, thereby putting women at ease, especially in club

or bar environments. They offered these suggestions:
• Point to her, and then turn to her friend and ask, “She’s gorgeous, but can I
trust her? Is she safe?”
• Say loudly, “No I will not make out with you!” or “No I will not show you
my penis in public!”
• Say, “Just so you know, it’s boys’ night tonight. We’re just here to dance
together, so don’t try anything.”
• If she says, “You’re funny. I like you,” you can say, “Whoa! Whoa! Don’t get
any ideas!”
Lines like these cast men as willing victims of women’s sexual lecherous-
ness, and as cheesy and absurd as they may seem and as much as they
may risk making light of women’s actual experiences of unwanted sexual
attention, coaches explained that they temporarily shift the objectify-
ing gaze to men’s bodies, giving straight women a reprieve and inviting
them—should they be interested—to inhabit the role of sexual aggressor.
While many critics of the seduction industry have dismissed its curricu-
lum as a set of garden-variety pickup lines that most women would “see
right through,” coaches are emphatic that their routines are effective pre-
cisely because they shake up the tired terrain of heterosexual flirtation
by teaching trainees to do the opposite of what most men do when they
are attracted to women.
During an interview with Ben, a Love Systems trainer, I shared my

surprise at how much of the seduction curriculum was focused on figur-
ing out the best ways not to be “creepy”—exactly the opposite of what
most commentators had imagined was happening in these men-only
seminars on how to pick up women. Ben smiled and responded, “People
are suspicious about this work at first. They have an impression of who
would do this, these creepy guys. I was worried about being part of it
myself. But really it’s not about that. . . . We are teaching guys who aren’t
naturals how to interact with women. One of the trainers tells his mom
all about what he does, and she’s proud of him! She says he is saving
the world from boring and creepy guys, one guy at a time.” Ben’s fram-
ing of the seduction industry as a gift, rather than a threat, to women
was echoed by other coaches I spoke with, both men and women, who
seemed to genuinely believe that they were helping to repair heterosexu-
ality by aligning straight men’s behavior with what women actually want.
As Kezia Noble instructed her trainees on how to be less boring and
weird, she offered them the following insight:
Some pickup artists will suggest you ask a kooky question, like, “I’m go-
ing to a costume party. Should I go as James Bond or Fred Flintstone?”
That’s weird. Let’s talk about the normal questions that come up. She asks,
“What do you do [for a living].” You tell her the truth. . . . Most of you are
doing a job that you wouldn’t do for free, that you don’t actually love. If
she asks, “Do you like your job?” and you don’t, you show your passion:
“This job I’m doing is not all that, but I’m making a lot of money, and I
get to do these other things I love with that money.” This [kind of answer]
is real. She will be attracted to your passion. What you need to convey is
that you love your life. You can even say, “I fucking hate my job, but I love
my life.” Even hating something is passion. It’s the opposite of boring.
In the sociologist Diana Scully’s study of seventy-nine convicted rap-

ists, she makes the compelling argument that men rape women when
they lack the ability to “role-take,” or to see themselves from wom-
en’s perspective and feel the role-taking emotions—guilt, shame, and

empathy—that produce self-control.21 Her work implies that the ubiq-
uity of rape should come as no surprise, given what limited training boys
and men have in how to identify with girls and women or to reflect on
what the world is like from women’s point of view. In many ways, a sig-
nificant portion of the seduction curriculum I encountered was aimed
at asking men to “role-take” in exactly the way Scully describes—to
consider how women are experiencing heterosexual flirtation. On the
surface of things, clients of seduction companies are purchasing an in-
creased chance at having sex with women; but more substantively, in the
seminars themselves, what men receive in return for their enrollment
fee is an entire weekend reflecting on what women actually want from
men and from heterosexual sex itself.
Witnessing this curriculum unfold, I felt a good amount of anger and
repulsion at the way so many straight men were still, after decades of
feminist and antiracist interventions, obsessed with young white girls
(seduction coaches commonly use the term “girl” to refer to women of
all ages). But I also felt cautiously optimistic in moments as I watched
these men struggle to understand sex through women’s eyes, an abil-
ity I had long believed, since reading Scully’s work years ago, to be a
key ingredient in the undoing of rape culture. I am under no illusion
that seduction training prevents men from raping, in part because these
trainings rarely spend much time attending to what actually happens
once trainees and the women they have seduced transition from public
to private space, where sex is believed by many men to be a foregone
conclusion. But the curriculum does ask men to actively disavow ag-
gressive masculinity, to exercise empathy, and to spend more time than
they’ve ever spent thinking about the rigged conditions under which
straight women must negotiate sex with men.
Masculinity and Sexual Leadership
One of the fundamental premises of the seduction industry is that

men and women are hardwired differently and that, for bioevolution-
ary reasons, straight women are attracted to men’s sexual leadership.
Male trainees learn that women want to be brought into a man’s fun and
already-complete world; they want men to “curate” the experiences they
have together. As one Love Systems coach explained, “You as the man
have to lead, and she has to come into your world. Don’t put pressure
on her to lead because she does not want to. She doesn’t want to take
responsibility for that. She wants you to be the rock, the one creating the
energy, and she is going to oscillate around it. You put masculine energy
out there, and girls follow it. This way you are giving value. You are
not taking something from her but offering something to her. You are
already having fun, and she wants to join in.” At the Noble Art of Seduc-
tion bootcamp, a coach made a very similar speech: “You are a man, and
she wants you to lead. If you’ve already determined that you aren’t wor-
thy of her, that she’s out of your league, then you have already failed her.
It’s not that complicated: women just want you to show up as a man.”
The same coach later proclaimed that trainees must never second-guess
the appropriateness of approaching women or doubt that women want
them to take charge of sex and romance: “Women will say that they want
to lead, but they don’t. They watch all these romantic comedies. They
want the fantasy, the fairy tale. All women want this. The woman who
met her partner because he came flying in out of nowhere while she was
getting coffee is the woman with the romantic story that all her friends
envy.” And because no discussion of male sexual leadership would be
complete without a war metaphor, a coach described it this way: “She
may tell you not to go off to war, but if you don’t, you won’t be a man and
now . . . she won’t respect you. It’s the same in a club.”
Love Systems promotional materials promise the men who attend
their bootcamps and conferences that they will learn “the biggest break-
throughs in dating science,” and indeed, coaches commonly made refer-
ence to the psychology of gender, the role of kinesthetics (which they
call “kino”) in attraction, and ideas about gender and human evolution.
As if quoting directly from the pages of Men Are from Mars, Women Are
from Venus, coaches explained that men and women are programmed
differently, a fact that must be recognized in order for heterosexual at-
traction to work. They offered several examples of these differences:
men know right away if they are attracted to women, but women’s de-
sire builds in response to social cues;22 men just want to be happy all
the time and live in the “high,” but women want a fuller range of emo-
tions and a compelling journey; men are “hunters” who measure success
by external accomplishment, whereas women measure experiences by
their emotional depth; men want to solve problems and be heroes, but
women want to be heard and to share intimate experiences. Coaches

asserted that the science of “kino” has shown that men who want to
avoid getting trapped in the friend zone must touch women early on
in their interaction, slowly transitioning from friendly to sexualized
forms of touch. They must place their hands on women’s backs and
arms to move women through space and walk women away from their
friends to the bar or to the dance floor because these kinds of smaller
movements establish men’s leadership and lay the groundwork for later
movement from the club to a new location—like his apartment—for
sex. For coaches to draw so heavily on scientific and corporate lingo—
kinesthesiological data, best practices, strategy, leadership, and so on—
may seem unsexy, but coaches believe that these are “male languages”
that resonate powerfully with their clientele.
Trainees learned how to escalate sexual touch—lifting women up,
locking arms around them, tugging slightly on their pants, pulling
women’s bodies toward them. During a debriefing of the previous night’s
infield training at a club, one man shared that at first he felt shy and dis-
couraged, but then, he said, “later in the night, I made a girl laugh about
how young she was. I told her, ‘I have socks older than you,’ and I pulled
her pants and she loved it. She gave me her number, we texted, and we’ve
made a date to go dancing next week.” The coaches congratulated him
for being “on fire,” using kino successfully, and getting “in state” (i.e.,
that nothing-to-lose frame of mind that allows men to approach women
they would otherwise find intimidating). Coaches at the Love Systems
training also recommended additional self-help reading—Psycho Cyber-

netics by Maxwell Maltz and The Way of the Superior Man by David
Deida—to support students in embracing their full masculine power
and potential.
Seduction students also learned how to “bypass” what coaches argued
is women’s culturally ingrained resistance to sex with men and tap into
their “primal” arousal response. In one promotional email I received
from Love Systems, aimed at selling students access to a video about
“stealth” methods of seduction, trainees were promised information
based on discoveries gleaned from both CIA psychological operations

and neurological research from Harvard. Some of the text from the
email read, “The research team at Harvard university has made a brand-
new discovery involving ‘Mirror Neurons’ that . . . combines the latest
developments in the fields of sexual psychology and unconscious com-
munication to create sexual and emotional desire in women, regardless
of the guy’s age, looks, social status or personality type. . . . [Our video]
shows you how to bypass a woman’s rejection mechanism . . . and force-
feed feelings of attraction, lust and desire directly into her subconscious
mind. [It’s] a system that’s so subtle, it’s impossible for women to even
notice you’re doing it to them.” The promotional materials went on to
explain to the men who purchase the video, “[You will learn how to]
covertly slip a few innocent words into your everyday conversation with
women and within seconds have them turned on, attracted to you, and
ready to go.”
Seduction trainers also drew on pop-sociological accounts of the
way that social norms constrain heterosexual attraction, disadvantaging
women and intensifying the need for men to take charge. Nick Savoy
sounded irritated but resigned to these constraints when he told me, “It
sucks that women feel like they have to pretend they don’t want sex, but
I’m not sure what we can do about that. We can only teach men to work
around it.” Referring again to the obstacles that slut-shaming poses for
straight women’s sex lives, another Love Systems coach told the trainees,
“Sex is not a prize handed out by women to men. Women love sex just
as much if not more [than men do]. The societal messages mislead us.
Movies suggest that [women aren’t as interested in sex as men], and it’s
not true. But a woman can’t just go home with a guy. She has to feel
like it was out of her control, not of her own volition. . . . You’re both
trying to get to the bedroom, but you have to take on the burden of
responsibility.”
I certainly agreed with this critique of the heteropatriarchal no-
tion that straight women are sexual gatekeepers by nature or hard-
wired to trade sex for emotional connection or “keepers of virtue”
who, over the course of their lives, bestow sex—as a gift—on a select
and fortunate group of lust-filled men. But I cringed at his conclu-
sion: women, as a result of patriarchy, can only express their sexual
desire through a performance of surrender, a reluctant participation
in theatrical scenes in which sex is controlled by, and for the benefit
of, men. Rachel O’Neill expresses a similar concern that this view of
women having a strong but socially repressed sex drive causes seduc-
tion trainees to paradoxically believe that challenging a woman’s “last
minute resistance” is a means of honoring women’s sexual impulses.23
In the seduction industry, acknowledging women as sexual agents
does little to intervene in long-standing claims that women say no
when they actually mean yes.
Coaches maintained their stance that seduction students were learn-
ing to better understand the world through women’s eyes, going on to
declare that the answer to the question “What do women want?” is . . .
a bit of masculine danger. Describing a technique that men can use to
escalate sexual attraction, a coach said, “Tell her, ‘If I get alone with
you, it’s going to be bad news for you, honey.’ Don’t be the nice guy. A
girl is going to sleep with you either because she loves you or because
she fuckin’ hates you. It’s like she’s getting back at you. . . . You can
even make rapey jokes, like hand her a drink and say, ‘Oh wait, that’s
mine! Now I have the drink with the roofie in it!” This kind of hetero-
erotic narrative may not lead to rape itself but arguably has its place on
the same slippery slope that the feminist psychologist Nicola Gavey has
termed the “cultural scaffolding for rape.”24 How are men to distinguish
between, on the one hand, straight women who want sex but feel soci-
etal pressure to pretend that they don’t (i.e., to create the appearance
that they are purely accommodating men’s sexual desires) and, on the
other hand, straight women who do not want to have sex with a given
man but consent to his sexual requests because doing so yields other
things that straight women want (safety, making nice, getting it over
with, money, straight privilege, etc.)?
For many straight men, it seems not to matter which of these sce-
narios is at play, but within the context of seduction training, male
trainees are led to believe that they are not taking anything from
women that women don’t genuinely want to give. They are trained
to understand that men and women want the same sexual outcome
but that men must take the lead, push a little, and allow women to
perform the sexual passivity expected of them. In the name of giving
straight women what they really want, men learn that what women
want can never be directly communicated and therefore must be
assumed—often based on the most crass and simplistic interpretations
of already-questionable research on the neurological, bioevolutionary,
and socially constructed differences between men and women. Differ-
ences among straight women themselves—their different sexual de-
sires and their varying capacities to take charge of sex—get flattened
out, if not ignored altogether.
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 ar-
chetype: “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 nauseat-
ingly 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, includ-
ing 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 narra-
tives that repackage men’s deficiencies as enticing challenges for women.
The Transformation: Seduction Goes New age,

Pop-Feminist, and Global
I wrapped up my fieldwork inside the seduction bootcamps in 2014,

during a time now understood to be the height of the industry. In that
year, I counted over fifty seduction companies based in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Croatia, India, South Africa, and
the Philippines, with new seduction coaches opening shop—virtually,
in person, or both—at a rapid pace. Many of these companies special-
ized in specific strategies, such as “day game,” or how to seduce women
during the day at ordinary and desexualized locations like coffee shops
and bookstores; others focused on specific populations, such as Asian
men or older men. Some companies had names that made clear their
focus on sex and dating and that retained the association with “pickup”
(such as Attraction Academy, Simple Pickup, Art of the Pickup, Absolute
Power Dating, Asian Dating Superstars, and Sinns of Attraction); others
had names like Alpha Confidence, Charisma Arts, and Love Systems
that evoked personal growth more generally. Though most companies
were based in United Kingdom and the United States, many offered
trainings in major cities around the world, especially where the seduc-
tion community was popular (like Rio, Melbourne, Mexico City, Tokyo,
Athens, Budapest, Beijing, Bucharest, and Cape Town). Some compa-

nies offered live trainings, which could be weekend-long (at a price tag
of $3,000–$4,000) or even more immersive, months-long experiences
(up to $20,000), but many provided their customers primarily with
online resources: apps, books, newsletters, webinars, phone coaching,
and membership in wingman forums (or forums of other supportive
men learning game).
When I returned to this project in 2017, the cultural terrain had
shifted significantly. Both Love Systems and Kezia Noble’s company
(now simply called “Kezia: Celebrity Dating Coach for Men”) were
going strong, offering multiple bootcamps per month across Europe,
Canada, and the United States. But many of the other, more salacious
and openly misogynistic companies seemed to have disappeared or re-
branded themselves entirely. The journalist Sarah Ratchford observed
this shift in a 2017 article she wrote for Vice: “[Pickup artists] figured
regularly in headlines until 2014, but by the end of that year they seemed
to have been scrubbed from regular annals of cultural consciousness. . . .
Where have these cretins gone? . . . Many pickup artists themselves are
now refuting involvement with the community: Ross Jeffries, a forefa-
ther of the movement, now strenuously insists that he be referred to as
a ‘transformational healer and thinker’ instead. . . . In a world where
overt misogyny is at least slightly less publicly tolerable, the relevance
[of] these men is . . . questionable at best.”25 As mentioned previously,
the industry received a spate of bad press in 2014, particularly with Real
Social Dynamics owner Julien Blanc, an American, being banned from
Australia and the United Kingdom (his visa was revoked in response
to protests)26 and dubbed the “Most Hated Man in the World” by Time
following the release of video footage showing Blanc promoting sexual
assault.27 Ratchford also notes that pickup-artist subculture died down
just as Tinder was coming into widespread usage, speculating that the
hookup app may be the new stomping ground for men who once set
out to seduce women at the club (“Could your average dick pic-sending
Tinder bro be the new PUA?,” she asks).28
But the fact that many of these coaches and their companies have not
closed down but rather have reinvented themselves is an important part
of the story of heterosexual seduction—a story impossible to tell now
without attention to the #metoo movement and its effects on the way
straight men are understanding casual sex. Julien Blanc, for one, had
always called Real Social Dynamic a “dating coaching, self-actualization
& social dynamics company” rather than a pickup-artist company, but
following the global criticism of his misogyny, he stopped offering se-
duction bootcamps and started offering New Age wellness seminars.
He renamed his courses “Transformation Mastery,” opened them up to

women, and shifted the content to meditation, deep breathing, emo-
tional release, and healing old psychological wounds—all aimed at
finding “true happiness and authenticity.” Video clips on his website
show mostly men but a couple of women, screaming with rage, sob-
bing loudly, roaring and barking like animals, and holding hands (with a
yoga-ready soundtrack of New Age music playing in the background)—
looking much like a hyperemotive version of Tony Robbins’s “Date with
Destiny” seminars described in chapter 2. According to Ratchford, Ross
Jeffries—the longtime pickup artist on whom Tom Cruise purportedly
based his egomaniacal pickup-artist character in the film Magnolia—
has also drawn on New Age rhetorical devices to rebrand himself as a
“transformational healer.”29 Under feminist scrutiny, seduction coaches
tamped down their focus on conquering women and instead ampli-
fied their focus on healing men. But this approach, too, takes its cues
right from the old mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s,
which sought to help men rediscover their lost masculinity through
spiritual healing with other men and with a strong dose of antifeminist
woman-blaming thrown in for good measure.30
The spiritually oriented transformation of the seduction industry
signals a broader tension in the ongoing reproduction of heteromas-
culinity. As straight men work to avoid exploiting women, sexually and
otherwise, they also reify masculinity, recasting its power as the power to
do good rather than bad, to protect rather than harm. Project Rockstar,
a newer offshoot of Love Systems, exemplifies this kinder, gentler itera-

tion of the seduction industry and its efforts to remake masculinity by
returning men to their true essence. Rockstar is an intensive, ten-week
program designed to help men completely transform their lives—to
improve their game, yes, but also to transform their professional lives
and even their bodies. Participants who can afford the $20,000 price
tag travel across the globe together, live in different cities together, work
out together, go to clubs together, and receive guidance from business
mentors, wealthy entrepreneurs, nutritionists, fashion consultants, and
Figures 3.3. The rebranding of Julian Blanc, from 2014 and 2017.
an entire team dedicated to their holistic self-improvement. As a result,

these men claim to cultivate a more refined and gentlemanly, but none-
theless powerful, masculinity than is offered at traditional weekend-long
seduction bootcamps.
As I began to follow Project Rockstar livestreams, I noted that the
instructors were younger, more conventionally attractive, more racially
diverse, and more familiar with feminist discourse than were most of
seduction coaches I had studied previously. In January 2018, I received
an email from Andrew, a young Asian American instructor for the com-
pany, announcing that he was going to colead “an emergency livestream
about the #metoo movement” in which he would teach men “how you
can talk to women without making them feel like you’re the next Harvey
Weinstein.” I tuned in to a discussion that, despite many flaws, ended

up being one of the more feminist-adjacent things I’d heard out of the
mouths of straight men in some months. Somehow, in a space that had a
few years ago seemed to me like one of the most misogynistic corners of
the internet, young men who had come together to improve their “game”
were standing up for #metoo, thinking beyond consent to consider the
quality of women’s sexual experiences, and using spot-on metaphors to
help each other conceptualize good, humanizing sex. The following is an
excerpt from the Project Rockstar #metoo livestream:
Andrew: Sex should be a win/win. If you can walk away from a cir-
cumstance with a girl, it should always feel like a win/win. And thank
god we have each other in Project Rockstar to talk about this and
learn. I honestly believe that . . . you can have everyone walk away
feeling positive, that it was additive, [so] the girl doesn’t feel like you
took something from her.
Alex: Yeah, I tell girls directly, “I would never want you to do anything
you feel uncomfortable with.” . . . I think it’s important for girls to know
they can always get out of an uncomfortable situation. Having sex with
a girl . . . is not the goal. It’s not the right place to come from. . . . Ideally
we’re building guys into a place where they don’t really need that gray
area where you have to push her and maybe she will feel bad about
what happened. . . . At the end of the day, women can feel when you are
trying to take something from them. Then it doesn’t feel right anymore
because she sleeps with a guy and goes home and feels, “All he wanted
was to take something from me, and I gave it, and it doesn’t feel good.”
It’s not always like an assault but just the general feel of the interaction.
It’s like talking to a used-car sales guy. No one would say he is assault-
ing you, but you feel . . . that he wants you to buy this shitty car.
Andrew: You have to see the world from women’s perspective. . . . One
of the things we did [in Project Rockstar] is go to the Tony Robbins
seminar, and one of the questions he asked was, “How many women
have felt unsafe walking through a parking garage?” I shit you not,
it was every woman in the room. . . . Most guys don’t realize this,
but safety is a continual and ongoing concern for women from the
moment they are a young adult until the day they die. . . . Statistically
speaking, the group of people who are most likely to harm women
is men. And so just kind of absorb that for a second, that this is the
reality most women go through. . . . The second you can understand
this . . . and empathize, that is the biggest game-changer to your game
ever. If you can recognize that women feel unsafe and make them feel
safe when they are with you, that’s everything. #Metoo exists for a rea-
son. It is an outcry against sexual assault. That’s a very positive thing.
Figure 3.4. Alex and Andrew’s “toxic masculinity” livestream.
These “Rockstars” elevated the conversation about #metoo far beyond

what most male politicians and many snarky journalists had to say about
women and sexual consent in 2018. In the context of President Donald
Trump’s “pussy grabbing,” their analysis seemed almost feminist. They
recognized, just as Rebecca Traister illuminated in her incisive essay
about “why sex that’s consensual sex can still be bad,”31 that women
often feel used or dehumanized by heterosexual sex, even during sex
to which they have consented. They knew their goal was to make sure
that women came to the sexual encounter, and left the sexual encounter,
feeling like enthusiastic and equal contributors.
But where does this more advanced analysis, this genuine interest
in women’s safety and happiness, come from? Andrew argued later in
the livestream that it is anchored in men’s ability to access their true
masculinity. “The culture of Rockstar is to be a very open and mascu-
line man,” Andrew stated. “A lot of it is about expanding yourself as a
man, exploring your limits, improving yourself. But when it comes to
game, as your most masculine free self, you are available to have authen-
tic conversations with women on an energy basis, a chemistry basis, a
masculine/feminine polarity basis.” Similarly, one year later, following
the January 2019 airing of Gillette’s Super Bowl commercial critiquing

toxic masculinity, Andrew and Alex offered a livestream to address their
students’ confusion about what constitutes toxic masculinity and how it
differs from healthy expressions of masculine strength and leadership.
Both men were emphatic in their assertion that sexual objectification
and mistreatment of women occur when boys and men have not been
taught how to properly express the “ancient, sacred” energy of masculin-
ity, which complements, rather than harms, women. As Alex explained
to his listeners, “The biggest thing you can do to make sure you have no
conflict with masculinity is to ask yourself if you are treating women like
an object or a person. If you are treating women like an object, you are
not in touch with your masculinity.”
These arguments bring to mind the long-running “My Strength Is
Not for Hurting” campaign by Men Can Stop Rape,32 an admirable
project led by feminist men but also an example of the fact that, ap-
parently, one of the most effective strategies for getting straight men
on board with profeminist, antirape messages is giving them space to
celebrate their masculinity in the same breath. From a queer perspec-
tive, this is one of the more discouraging elements of the heterosexual
tragedy: when straight men move toward feminism, they almost always
do so in ways that prop up the gender binary that causes their problems
in the first place! Straight men’s feminism—when anchored in gender-
essentialist ideas about “real manhood”—also relies on the emotional
labor of straight women who are compelled to celebrate and reward
men for putting their “masculine energy” or “male strength” to a non-

violent use.
Another revealing account of transformation of the heterosexual-
repair industry comes from Nawaz, a young Bangladeshi immigrant
and graduate of Project Rockstar. Again I had received an email from
Andrew, this time announcing a podcast titled “Can Brown Guys Pick
Up Women Too?,” in which listeners would hear the “legendary” story
of a young immigrant who came to the United States, “found himself on
Rockstar [and] walked away from the program with an understanding

of masculinity that far exceeds the average man’s.” During the podcast,
Nawaz described his culture shock after moving to the United States. He
explained why he pursued Project Rockstar: “[I wanted] to hook up with
all these hot chicks I’d heard so much about before, but I get there, and
I’m like, ‘I have no skills whatsoever!’” Rehearsing the same fantasy I had
heard from many trainees—both men of color and white men—Nawaz
told Andrew that he wanted to be able to have sex with “tall, blond,
white chicks”: “That’s what I was always after. That’s what I’m still after.”
Striking a different mood from that of the #metoo livestream, Andrew
chuckled and said, “Yeah, I mean, you were the typical brown guy that
wanted to come to America to get the hotter chicks!”
The two men proceeded to discuss Nawaz’s “amazing transformation”
into a successful seducer of blond women, a transformation that Nawaz
credited to learning the real meaning of masculinity:
[At first] I was following a lot of stuff I was finding online—um, just a
lot of weird stuff, a lot of pickup stuff . . . [where men are] having fun
with the women but they are not masculine with the women. . . . But in
Mykonos [during Project Rockstar], I realized that the skill that I had
developed was next to useless because the girls [in Mykonos] don’t speak
English all that well. . . . So it’s very difficult to [use] humor when there’s
not that much communication going on. In hindsight, I think that was
the best thing that could’ve happened to me. . . . I was lacking so much
masculinity. But [then I learned] to just stare in girls’ eyes and just let the
silence be there. The way girls would look at me completely changed. . . .
It changed to what the guys call “Bambi eyes,” where the girls just look at
you with these really big eyes, like, really into you.
Nawaz offered a narrative about the evolution of masculinity that

appears in other Project Rockstar promotional materials. While pickup
artists may have relied on jokey one-liners and cocky gimmicks twenty
years ago, today’s game is about exuding a more reserved and sophis-
ticated masculinity, an irresistible merging of male strength with a
worldly, near-feminist respect for women. As Andrew described it,
Project Rockstar cultivates “a more confident, strong foundation of mas-
culinity,” and it is this kind of masculinity that holds the power to create
“win/win” sexual encounters that provide women with space to build
their own desire. In this view, if men learn to perfect their masculinity,
no manipulation is necessary; the doors become wide open for women
to fully inhabit their own desiring bodies, to look men up and down
with Bambi eyes.
Nawaz’s story illuminates the role played by the seduction industry
in the global recirculation of white-supremacist, heteropatriarchal con-
structions of women’s sexual desirability. American and British seduc-
tion coaches invite and normalize the fetishization of white women’s
bodies. They all but promise white women to male trainees, men for
whom sexual access to “hot blondes” symbolizes not only heteromascu-
line success but also successful assimilation as an immigrant and/or the
achievement of a cosmopolitan masculinity. A desire for blond women
was actively produced in Nawaz, who had already “heard so much” about
the “hot chicks in the United States,” a narrative that was reinforced by
Andrew, an Asian American coach who described this kind of colonial,
sex-driven migration as a “typical” story. Though Nawaz did not directly
state whether he had participated in the pickup community in Bangla-
desh, it is quite possible that he had; Bangladeshi men can encounter
the seduction industry and its idealization of young, white women at

local, “underground” pickup-artist meetings held in Dhaka. In the full
livestreamed conversation between Andrew and Nawaz, Nawaz made
clear that he had spent years in the pickup community, slowly graduat-
ing from online self-study to short-term classes to the immersive Rock-
star experience. This multilevel education in a seduction curriculum,
produced by (mostly white) men in the United States and the United
Kingdom, culminates in a striking reversal of the colonial sex tourism
documented by many feminist scholars.33 Instead of producing path-
ways for white men from the global North to travel to the global South
in pursuit of sex with exoticized people of color, seduction coaches cre-
ate pathways for men living in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to take a
sex-themed tour through Europe and the United States (Rockstar par-
ticipants travel from the United States to Greece to Hungary to Sweden,
largely on a quest for blond women).
In this way, the seduction industry sells straight men the opportu-
nity to participate in a global homosociality, in which access to sex with
white women becomes the foundation of cross-racial and cross-national
solidarity and “love” among men. As if taken right from the pages of
Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of what she famously termed the “erotic trian-
gle,” wherein sex with women serves to strengthen the bonds of men,34
Nawaz described in his interview how he learned to love other men by
witnessing their success seducing hot women:
He [a fellow Rockstar student] grabbed this one girl, who was just so
smoking hot. . . . I had this huge gush of jealously flow through me. . . .
I think that was the first time I caught it when it was happening. Instead
of focusing on him and the girl, I started focusing on what I had with a
Rockstar fellow of mine I had spent the last seven weeks with. And all the
memories of us having fun in Budapest and Mykonos and all throughout
Vegas came to my mind. And from a place of jealously, I quickly went to
a place of “I hope he bangs this chick tonight because she’s smoking hot.
That would be really good for him, and if he could do it, that would just
make me so happy.” And I wasn’t just saying this. I actually felt it. . . . At
that moment . . . my love for him was bigger than any form of jealousy I
could have.
In Nawaz’s narrative, as in many of the stories that men tell about their
personal transformations in the seduction community, the romance lies
not in the relationships men have with women—which are described in
more transactional terms (the win/win)—but in the relationships they
have with one another.35
Threads of race- and racism-consciousness run through the seduc-

tion curriculum, but this consciousness is as instrumental—designed to
facilitate heterosexual sex—as are its gestures at empathic identification
with women. Seduction coaches go to great lengths to create a shame-
free environment in which men can freely express nearly any sexual
desire—from quick access to “high-quality pussy” to the search for a
“potential wife,” from young girls with big boobs to adult women with
life experience or money, from white blondes to the occasional fetish for
Asian women. With regard to men’s erotic aspirations, seduction train-
ers relate to racialized desires as neutral preferences, giving no atten-
tion to the way that the desire for young, white, blond women is shaped
by relations of power, the nexus of white supremacy and misogyny.36
Yet when it comes to circumventing women’s racialized desires, race is
indeed addressed within pickup routines, becoming fodder for playful
banter and another tactic that trainees can use to surprise or “neg” the
women they hope to seduce. When seduction coaches teach Asian men
to approach white women and say, “Hey, just cause I’m Asian, you’re not
going to talk to me?” they give students permission to playfully confront
white women’s racism, to use white women’s potential shame or defen-
siveness about racism as a pathway toward sex. When seduction coaches
suggest that a non-Black man approaching a Black woman might say,
“So what part of Korea are you from? North? South?” they teach stu-
dents to immediately address the racial difference between them but in
way that draws attention away from her Blackness and toward the “joke”
of his mistake, a tactic that quickly defaults to the kind of color-blind

and lighthearted flirtation that coaches believe works best.
The Tragedy Continues
An enduring feature of the tragedy of heterosexuality is straight

men’s sense of entitlement to women’s sexual and emotional service.
Numerous sociological and journalistic accounts of this entitlement
have documented the rage and anxiety men experience when their
sexual expectations are not met—a rage that, when taken to its most
violent end, has resulted in mass murder.37 Women’s sexual disinter-
est triggers not only anger in men but also a kind of heteropatriarchal
melancholy: a sexual loss that is difficult for straight men to mourn
because it is perceived to be unnatural and shameful, a denial of men’s
very birthright as men. As seduction coaches made clear in their
interviews with me, this heteromasculine shame—and the limited
number of spaces in which men believe they can express it without
judgment—produced a demand for new forms of repair. Pickup-artist
subculture, seduction coaches, incel communities, and Men Going
Their Own Way emerged as popular homosocial sites of heterosexual
repair, spaces in which the much-ignored misogyny paradox—how
do you seduce women if you hate women?— could be addressed out
in the open.
Like many personal and relational crises of the twenty-first century,
men’s heterosexual misery has been met with a neoliberal interven-
tion—a multilevel industry offering an array of packaged services that
monetize men’s ability to seduce previously off-limits women by per-
forming feminist empathy and seeing the world from “women’s point
of view.” This instrumental approach to humanizing women certainly
gives men some rudimentary training in recognizing and disavow-
ing sexism. I, myself, have used this approach in large “Introduction
to Gender and Sexuality Studies” classes, suggesting to straight male
students that if for no other reason, they should at least embrace fem-
inism because doing so will result in better heterosexuality—more

authentic relationships with women and better sex based on women’s
enthusiastic interest, rather than women’s placating and ambivalent
consent. But I don’t feel good about this approach; I want men to be
feminists because they value women’s humanity, because they identify
with women, and because they see that the gender binary is a histori-
cal, political-economic, and cultural invention that has caused no end
of suffering for women and also for themselves. When men extend
empathy and subjectivity to women out of self-interest, to grease the
wheels of sexual access or to continue receiving women’s emotional

labor, this makes no intervention into men’s profound sense of en-
titlement to women’s bodies and women’s love, nor does it pose any
challenge to men’s unrelenting attachment to their own masculinity
as the core of their identity, the foundation of their goodness, the basis
on which they connect with other men, and the primary contribution
they think they’re making to the world.
4
A SICK AND BORING LIFE
Queer People Diagnose the Tragedy
I’m going on record here to notify every heterosexual male and

female that every lesbian and every homosexual is all too aware
of the problems of heterosexuals since they permeate every as-
pect of our social, political, economic, and cultural lives. . . . I
think all of us are authorities on the heterosexual problem.
—Jill Johnston
Once you’re on this track, you’re pretty much a lesbian and you
think like a lesbian and you live with lesbians and your commu-
nity is lesbians, and the heterosexual world is foreign.
—Gloria anzaldúa
I n many years of teaching at UC Riverside, I’ve

noticed that the queer kids—almost all of them young people of
color—tend to sit together in my courses, often forming a boisterous
and gorgeously gender-diverse queer zone in the front two rows of the
lecture hall. This huddling together is about their comfort, safety, and
connectedness to one another and not about me, and yet I do sometimes
experience it as a protective shield for myself, a shield between my place
at the podium—standing there alone, a forty-five-year-old white dyke
who can still feel like a vulnerable queer kid—and the three hundred
other students who might not be receptive to the tidal wave of intersec-
tional feminism that my courses send their way. Educators have a good
idea by now why all the queer kids—or any other marginalized group
of students—are huddling together; as Beverly Daniel Tatum demon-
113
114 • a SICK aND BORING LIFE
strated in her groundbreaking 1997 book Why Are All the Black Kids
Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, self-segregation is a wise and powerful
coping strategy for kids who are underrepresented and unsafe in their
learning environments.1 We know, too, that this coping strategy extends
into adulthood, when we still need comfort and safety, and is part of
what drives the development of racial, immigrant, and sexual enclaves.
If we want to know why many queer people prefer their own company
to the company of straights, certainly one answer to this question is
about protection and mutual care—we hold each other up in a world
that pushes us down.
But there is also another, far less discussed facet to this story about
queer people keeping their distance from straight people—an element
that has less to do with queer vulnerability or oppression in the face of
straight privilege and more to do with queer power, freedom, abundance
or relief in the face of heterosexual misery and myopia. It is a story about
queer people sometimes finding straight culture and relationships too
sad or enraging to witness, too boring or traumatic to endure. It is about
queers often wishing to look away from the train wreck, by which I mean
the seemingly inextricable place of sexual coercion and gender injustice
within straight culture, or what the feminist writer JoAnn Wypijewski de-
scribed in 2013—as she reflected on the ubiquity of sexual assault among
teenagers—as heterosexuality’s relentlessly “primitive” attachment to
lies, manipulation, and violence as the formative route to sex.2 It is about
queer recoil, or something like the nausea that the French scholar Paul
Preciado has felt in response to both the aesthetics and the misery (the
miserable aesthetics?) of heterosexuality, described in an essay titled
“Letter from a Transman to the Old Sexual Regime”: “I am as far re-
moved from your aesthetics of heterosexuality as a Buddhist monk levi-
tating in Lhassa is from a Carrefour supermarket. . . . It doesn’t excite me
to ‘harass’ anyone. It doesn’t interest me to get out of my sexual misery by
touching a woman’s ass on public transport. . . . The grotesque and mur-
derous aesthetics of necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach.”3
Sometimes straight culture is quite literally repulsive; we feel it in the gut.
a SICK aND BORING LIFE • 115
We have insufficient language to describe queer people’s experience of

finding straight culture repellent and pitiable, given that heterosexuality
has been presented to us as love’s gold standard. But even without a suit-
able name for this contradiction—the fact that the world’s most glorified
relationship is often a miserable one—many queers have still spoken this
truth. In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to
an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precar-
ity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves:
“The so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. . . . The terrors
homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society
itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.”4 As
Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in
denial about it but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the
projection of terror onto the homosexual.
One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expres-
sion of heterosexual misery, a kind of subconscious jealous rage against
the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and dis-
appointments of straight culture. Added to this anger is also an unspoken
sadness—a chilling cloud of resignation—that is a palpable and some-
times repellent ingredient of the affect of straight culture. Straight people
have few opportunities to grieve the disappointments of straight culture
(the bad and coercive sex, the normalized inequities of daily life, straight
men’s fragility and egomania, straight women’s growing disillusionment
with men’s fragility and egomania, the failed marriages, the coparenting
that is really solo parenting . . .) because how does one speak about the
failure of the very system that defines people’s success? Often the problem
is described as a feminist one; it’s not straightness itself but the need for
men to relinquish power and privilege and reform their bad behaviors.
This analysis of the problem keeps many straight women discernibly sad
and angry as they trudge along in search of one of the few “good men”
or labor to reform the men already in their lives, often as consumers of
the heterosexual-repair industry. The Radicalesbians (Rita Mae Brown
among them) called out this problem in 1970:
What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to

the point of explosion. . . . She is forced to evolve her own life pattern,
. . . learning usually much earlier than her “straight” (heterosexual) sis-
ters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage
obscures). . . . As long as woman’s liberation tries to free women without
facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one rela-
tionship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow
into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man, into
finding how to get better sex, how to turn his head around, into trying to
make the “new man” out of him.5
Indeed, tremendous energy on the part of straight women continues

to flow in the direction of repairing straight men, resulting in a lot of
displaced disappointment and grief for which queer people (the gay or
lesbian best friend) can become sounding boards and confidants. This
heterofeminine grief is displaced to the extent that it remains focused
on fixing relationships with individual men rather than identifying het-
ero norms and heteromasculinity themselves as fundamental problems.
The point here is that straight people’s displaced and unmournable grief,
what Judith Butler has described as “heterosexual melancholy,” some-
times feels, from a queer point of view, like too heavy an emotional
burden to bear.6
The affect of straight culture is marked not only by repressed anger
and sadness but by a kind of emotional flatness, an antiflamboyance.
Here, straight culture and WASP culture overlap, highlighting the ways
that straight people of color, Jews, Muslims, people with disabilities,
sluts, fat people, and white queers—to name a few—depart from the
norms associated with straightness and/or whiteness. For example, a
common straight critique of gay affect in the mid- and late twentieth
century was that it was too flamboyant—too spectacular, too loud, too
sexual, too confident, too animated, too exposed, and overall just too
much. If we reverse the gaze, focusing on queer people’s assessment
of the look and feel of straight life, we can see how straight people—
especially straight white people—might seem to queers too passive, bor-

ing, unimaginative, and generally uninspired. If queerness is too much,
then straightness is too little, the relational manifestation of lack. Let us
not forget that “straight” was originally something of an insult, a slang
term first used by gay men in the mid-twentieth century to describe men
who had once been sexually fluid but had returned, at least temporarily,
to the confines of a straight and narrow life.7 The use of “straight” as an
insult continued into the 1960s and ’70s among hippies, self-identified
freaks, and counterculture enthusiasts who used the term to describe
the stifling and uninspired quality of mainstream American life. A 1967
Time magazine article titled “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture”
testified to the responsibility of every freak to help reform straight peo-
ple by describing the hippie credo as follows: “Leave society as you have
known it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you
can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty,
fun.”8 Concern and anger about straight life persisted well into the 1990s,
as activists in Queer Nation pointed to the fragility and obliviousness of
straight people who feared homosexuality and celebrated heteronorma-
tive rituals at every turn with seemingly no concern for the precarity of
queer life, especially at the height of the AIDS epidemic (see figure 4.1).
To return to my “queer kids sitting together in the classroom” meta-
phor, we might also consider that sometimes queer kids huddle together
because they know, or at least imagine, that the other kids, the straight
kids, have little or nothing to offer them. As Wypijewski asserts, “It is
a common fallacy for any majority group to believe that a minority’s

struggle for equality signals a wish to be just like the majority. . . . [But]
heteros have nothing to teach homos beyond, maybe, how to endure
childbirth, [while] the opposite—that heteros have something to learn,
from the history of gay liberation, . . . is surely true.”9 And, in a HuffPost
article titled “Why I Never Want to Be Just Like Straight People,” Noah
Michelson explains it this way: “From where I’m standing, it seems that
straight people haven’t done so hot when it comes to love, sex, marriage,
the family or gender roles, among other things. So why would I want to
Figure 4.1. Queer Nation poster.
buy into that dysfunctional system?”10 In other words, the queer kids
may be sitting together not because they are patiently waiting to be in-
vited to participate in straight culture (i.e., what we might call a politics
of inclusion) but because they have no interest in what straight culture
has to offer (i.e., a politics of refusal).
I gather that not all queers refuse straight culture, but this chapter is
about queer people who do. It is about clarifying for straight people that
many of us are not longing for access to heterosexual traditions but feel-
ing very troubled by straight people’s denial about their own gendered
suffering. I know this about queer people because the queer people in my
life—comrades, students, friends, colleagues—commonly bemoan what
is sad, boring, stifling, and uninspired about straight life. This is not to
suggest that queerness is any kind of multicultural safe harbor from sys-
temic injustice, of course. Many queer subcultures, like straight culture,
are built on intersecting forms of violence: anti-Blackness, misogyny,
transphobia, ableism, and economic injustice. Queer and trans people
of color refuse white queer culture and its endemic racism; queer femi-
nists refuse queer misogyny and femme-phobia and its long-standing
place within gay culture. But within many queer people’s own particu-
lar queer worlds (Black and Brown queer worlds, trans queer worlds,
feminist queer worlds), in the safest spaces we can fashion for ourselves
with other QTPOC folks, feminists, kink communities, and so on, we
look out at the tragedy of heterosexuality, and many of us feel gratitude
to have escaped it. Queer people of color may not feel any affinity with
queer white people, for instance, but they may feel strong political and
cultural alignments with other queer and trans people of color and have
significant critiques of (and often alienation from) heterosexual people
of color—even as strategic alliances among all people of color are es-
sential to fighting and surviving white supremacy. In other words, tak-
ing queerness seriously as a cultural formation distinct from straight
culture does not obscure hierarchies among queer people. It allows us
to sharpen our powers of intersectional analysis, noting how queerness
results in different kinds of group affiliation and practice.
To illuminate queer people’s perceptions of the tragedy of hetero-

sexuality, I put out multiple calls on social media (Facebook and Twit-
ter) for queer-identified people in my extended social network—my
queer friends, colleagues, comrades, students, acquaintances, friends
of friends—to complete a very brief survey that asked them two direct
questions (in addition to asking about their racial/ethnic and gender
identity): “1. In general, all else being equal, do you prefer the company
of queer-identified people over straight-identified people? Why or why
not? 2. Is there anything about straight people, or straight culture, that
you find off-putting? Uncomfortable? Sad? Strange? Tell me about it.” I
received fifty-eight substantive responses: thirty from queer-identified
people of color and twenty-eight from queer-identified white people.11
Of these, four respondents answered no to both questions, remarking
that they had fulfilling relationships with straight people, did not prefer
the company of queers, and felt no sense of alienation from straight cul-
ture; two answered yes, they prefer queer people’s company, but no, they
don’t find anything off-putting about straight culture; and the rest, the
remaining fifty-three people who kindly agreed to answer my questions,
replied with a resounding yes and yes.
I want to be 100 percent clear about the intimate, nonscientific, and
nonrepresentative nature of the ideas presented in this chapter. Clearly,
this is not a “representative sample” of LGBT people; speaking on behalf
of all queer people, or representing a very broad array of perspectives, is
not my goal. Instead, I imagine this chapter is more like an invitation to
a large queer, trans, feminist, multiracial, intergenerational dinner party

(with fifty-eight people!) in which guests have been asked to participate
in a critical discussion about straight culture. Personally, as a queer per-
son, I would be thrilled to be invited to that party, but I’d probably be
even more excited as a straight person to be given the opportunity to
listen, with the understanding that I generally do not have access to this
kind of opportunity to see, in a new and critical way, how some queer
people view the cultural context in which my sexuality has been formed.
This chapter should be read as an ethnography of my own social and po-
litical milieu, reflecting my feminist, queer social network and the kinds
of conversations that happen within it.
I hope, too, that readers will resist the temptation to react to the cri-
tiques raised here with the response “not all straight people are like that”
because, as I explained earlier, (a) no one is arguing that every single
straight-identified individual is boring or abusive or bad in bed and (b)
this is almost always a deflection tactic designed to shift attention away
from an uncomfortable critique (see #notallmen and #notallwhitepeople
as crystal-clear examples). As I have written about elsewhere, method-
ological critiques are also frequently used as a deflection strategy when
readers feel implicated or threatened by new and/or critical ideas.12 Be-
yond questions of representativeness, another methodological concern
a reader might raise is whether the questions I asked were “leading”
questions. In response to this concern, we might consider that whether
a question is a leading question is based on a collective agreement about
the taken-for-grantedness of the subject at hand. For example, questions
like “What is your first and last name?” “What is your race?” and “What
is your gender?” are generally not considered leading questions because
we presume that most respondents have a first and last name, a racial
identity, and a gender identity. But this kind of taken-for-grantedness is
also deeply influenced by the political zeitgeist, as well as by the extent
to which the person asking the question feels obligated to act as a seem-
ingly objective and naïve inquisitor. To ask a group of Black respondents
whether they find anything uncomfortable about white people or white
culture would probably have been perceived as an offensive and leading

question a few decades ago (#notallwhitepeople!) but less so today as
more researchers have come to expect that systems of power, and the
cultures of privilege that cohere around them, are almost assuredly going
to create suffering and discomfort for subjugated people (and that subju-
gated people have probably noticed this and have things to say about it).
In a similar regard, it is my experience—in the queer worlds I circulate
in—that critical assessments of straight culture are a common, though
perhaps relatively hidden, feature of what radical queers talk about
Figure 4.2. Many #notallmen memes appeared in 2017.
among ourselves. It can also be an uncomfortable topic for more assimi-

lationist gays who care little about queer and feminist critique, though I
am not interested here in that perspective. My friends and acquaintances

answered with wide-ranging, concrete, and unprompted details (e.g., the
remarkably frequent reference to what is “boring” about straight culture)
that illuminate both their unique and shared experiences. Their responses
contained complex and fascinating analyses of heterosexual suffering and
wide-ranging examples of the heterosexual rituals they found most trou-
bling. These narratives contribute valuable fragments to my larger story
about the tragedy of heterosexuality, and I use them as witness testimony,
as signposts in our tour of queer feelings about straight problems.
The Boredom
“I often feel bored and/or alienated by straight company. It’s all very
predictable and uninteresting. . . . Queers have more fun without
being shitty to other people (setting aside critiques of many white
gay boys that I know). Which is why, I assume, so many straight
people try to infiltrate queer spaces.” (queer Vietnamese-American
transguy)13
“I find straight Black folks boring. The ones I am thinking of are mid-
dle aged and upper middle class. They are boring to talk to. They tend
to be pretty one-dimensional in social settings and not very concerned
with the types of social justice issues that are most important to me
(LGBT issues, structural racism, gender inequities).” (queer Black
lesbian)
“I’m not sure why women put up with most men and their selfishness.
Men tend to suck the energy out of the room and replace it all with bor-
ing vapor. They have many, many thoughts and ideas, most of them va-
pid.” (queer, white, misandrist bitch)
“Just the normy-ness and the boring lives straight people can lead. . . .
Sometimes it sucks the joy out of me.” (queer Arab femme)
“I often reflect on Edith Massie’s [sic] quote in John Waters’s Female Trou-
ble: ‘the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life.’ Probably the
most obvious part is the inability for many straight couples to be honest
with each other about their additional attractions. . . . I think this is sad
and sews mistrust.” (queer Latinx male)
“I like straight people just fine. But straight culture is dull as dirt. It isn’t
even culture. It’s just what’s left over when all the interesting stuff has
been driven out.” (femme WASP)
“Straight men just seem like duds, like the worst person to get stuck
next to at a dinner party. They don’t ever seem equally matched to their
women partners—like the woman does all the socializing/connecting
and the man has little to say or mansplains and interrupts or dominates.”
(queer white trans)
“They all do the same thing as other single or coupled straight people as
if they are following a given agenda. It’s uncomfortable how boring they
are.” (queer Hispanic female)
Back in chapter 1, I quoted from the fabulously over-the-top character

Aunt Ida, played by Edith Massey in John Waters’s 1974 cult film Female
Trouble, who scolds her straight-identified nephew about being a het-
erosexual: “Queers are just better. I’d be so proud of you as a fag. . . . I’d
never have to worry. . . . The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring
life.” So too does one of the respondents above quote Aunt Ida’s wise
words; we both hark back to a dark and utterly bizarre film from 1974 to
find corroboration for something that remains true to our present expe-
rience and yet is rarely acknowledged. Indeed, “boring” was the most
frequently repeated descriptive term used by my queer interlocutors to
describe straight people and/or straight culture. Things that bore us are
not just uninteresting but often also often tedious, repetitive, unorigi-
nal, mechanical, and sometimes mind numbing. To bore something is
also to make a hole in it, to hollow something out; hence, sometimes
being bored feels like being completely empty. Significantly, Valerie

Solanas began SCUM Manifesto, her 1967 wild feminist screed against
the patriarchy, by reminding readers that oppression and boredom are
interconnected: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and
no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to
civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the
government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation
and destroy the male sex.”14
Queer conversations about the boredom of straight life take place

with different languages and at multiple registers. In the academic realm
of queer studies, the fact that straight culture feels tedious and repeti-
tive is sometimes traced back to the way gender itself is a repetition, a
never-ending process of attempting to achieve normative, or at least leg-
ible, femininity or masculinity.15 Everyone more or less follows the same
predictable scripts that signal gender success in a given time and place.
Sometimes queer scholars understand the mechanical and unoriginal
quality of straight culture to be reflected in its obsession with repro-
duction, or the ways that straight adults so often pin their own value
and happiness on their children’s future accomplishments—a literal re-
production of themselves.16 Numerous queer scholars have also argued,
in different ways, that heterosexuality is intended to be boring, its very
design aimed at control and predictability. Straight culture keeps people
having babies, buying products, working hard in the paid labor force to
support children, and fearing many of the potentially less boring sexual
desires and/or subcultural practices that are inconvenient for capitalism,
white supremacy, and the state.17
These same problems are critiqued in queer popular culture, where
queer commentators like to point out just how basic straight culture is.
(For older readers, to be “basic” means to be a follower, to lack any spe-
cial and unpredictable characteristics. As they say on Urban Diction-
ary, it means, for instance, drinking pumpkin spice lattes, wearing yoga
pants, and watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians or, for straight
dudes, loving sports and reading Maxim.) In 2018, Dayna Troisi and
Corrine Werder of the lesbian magazine GO (“the cultural roadmap for
city girls everywhere”) enumerated the basic rituals of straight culture
in an article titled “70 Things That Straight People Love.”18 The list—a
queer take-off of the hit blog “Stuff White People Like”—included prom-
ise rings, gender-reveal parties, boat shoes, “Live, Laugh, Love” art, sip
and paint events, Chinese-symbol tattoos, talking about the cut of en-
gagement rings, gendering everything, cruises, voting for white suprem-
acists,19 royal weddings, drag queens but not drag kings, Law and Order:
SVU, and parties for every single life event, among many other unin-
spired cultural preferences. Each item came with a short explanation:
• Spirit animals: I just don’t understand why straight people list a dolphin as
their spirit animal in their Tinder bio? Not to mention, this is racist AF.
• “Love is love”: Thinking this phrase is allyship is like getting a kiddy
pool to cool off on a 98 degree day. It’s just not going to cut it.
• Self-help books: The Secret is a favorite amongst the straights.
• Men explaining beer and women thinking they’re so different for liking
beer. Straight culture at its finest.20
This is a fluff piece, but the authors zero in on many of the same ele-
ments of straight culture that my friends quoted above also named.
The obsessive gendering, empty expressions of solidarity, mansplaining
husbands and boyfriends, addiction to mainstream media and mass-
marketed tchotchkes, and self-improvement programs run on delusions
and/or self-loathing (especially those offered by the heterosexual-repair
industry)—these are things that queers “just don’t understand,” accord-
ing to Troisi and Werder. For context, Troisi describes herself as “a dyke
princess who is passionate about sex + dating, beauty + fashion, Lana
Del Rey, and her badass bionic arm,” and Werder’s bio says she “looks at
the world through the lens of an anti-capitalist, pleasure activist, femme-
of-center queer woman.”21
There is debate among queers about how much we may be guiltily or

ironically consuming some of these same straight, or normcore, fetish
objects.22 But the problem isn’t really one of bad taste; it’s not about the
“Live, Love, Laugh” posters but about what they represent and why they
are being consumed. Returning to the responses that began this section,
straight people’s attachments to mainstream culture and the status quo
are sometimes accompanied by apathy about social justice projects, and
this is what makes heterosexuals the worst people to get stuck next to at
a dinner party. Straight culture is marked by a willful focus on keeping
things light and comfortable, and primary among those more urgent
subjects that straight people would rather not discuss is the straight men
problem. As described earlier, straight men suck the energy out of the
room, and straight men are the first to fill it with boring vapor. Straight
culture is what’s left over when all the interesting stuff has been emp-
tied out or bored through. Straight women do the emotional labor, and
straight men step in, or interrupt, when it’s time to explain things. And
how do queers know this? We have witnessed it, but we have also lis-
tened to straight women complain about it, which brings us to the next
element of straight culture I want to discuss.
It’s Sad How Much Women and Men Dislike Each Other
“Let’s talk about the sitcoms straight folks keep making for each other.
Do straight couples even know they should actually like each other?
Because I don’t think they do.” (queer, white, nonbinary)
“I find straight women a bit sad, because so many of them seem to detest
men, and despise the men they’re with.” (queer African American woman)
“Ugh, so I’m in this otherwise pretty progressive embroidery FB group,

and the straight women in the group so often complain about their
worthless husbands and boyfriends. These dudes are awful—no job, play-
ing video games all day, barely speaking to their partners, not sharing
chores or childcare, while women are doing all the things. Now,
I try to empathize with people’s struggles, but why dear god do these
women stay with these awful dudes? It drives me nuts! . . . I really don’t
get it.” (queer, white woman)
“Work is my life now so I spend my time with my work colleagues—

mostly straight cis white guys in their 30s and 40s. There is a lot of shit
talking about unsatisfied wives and midlife crisis feels. Which is incred-
ibly sad.” (queer Vietnamese-American transguy)
“Straight couples, on average, don’t seem to have very much fun with each
other. I frequently see men looking bored while their girlfriends chat with
each other, or vice versa. . . . I see lots of articles written by frustrated
wives who do more of the housework/childcare/managing of things and
I wonder why they bother dating men.” (queer white lesbian)
From a queer point of view, one of the defining features of straight cul-
ture is complaint. Straight women complain about men they date or
marry with such gusto that queer people are left shaking our heads and
thinking, “My god, why, why, why does this woman stay with some-
one she finds this pathetic?” In The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant
demonstrates that complaint was cultivated in women through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to create a singular and
normative “women’s culture” organized around the premise that het-
eroromantic love is what women want most and what they will seek at
all costs, even when it fails them and causes them great pain.23 Prod-
ucts marketed to women—cosmetics, romantic films and literature,
self-help programs—manufactured sentimental belonging in “shared
womanness” by celebrating women’s ability to survive their disappoint-
ing and failed relationships, and this survival became a defining feature
of women’s empowerment. For Berlant, the female complaint also keeps
individual women tethered to their own somewhat-unique expressions
of normative heterofemininity: “[Women’s culture] flourishes by circu-
lating as an already felt need, a sense of emotional continuity among
women who identify with the expectation that, as women, they will
manage personal life and lubricate emotional worlds. This commod-
ity world, and the ideology of normative, generic-but-unique femininity
trains women to expect to be recognizable by other members of this
intimate public, even if they reject or feel ambivalent about its domi-
nant terms.”24 By the twenty-first century, complaints about men, or the
collective recognition that “men are trash” (see the ubiquitous Twitter
hashtag), has become the endlessly meme-ified and T-shirt-emblazoned
slogan for empowered straight ladies. As Berlant explains, this ostensibly
Figure 4.3. Angela Bassett surviving heterosexuality.
universal women’s culture is marketed as one that spans race and class
hierarchies among women, attempting to hail all American women
into its membership. Indeed, to the extent that art and music by Black
women has been embraced by mainstream white feminism, it has often
taken the form of the sassy, resilient Black woman trope described by
Melissa Harris-Perry in Sister Citizen.25 Black women, already cast in the
white imagination as strong, aggressive, and hyperheterosexual, come to

represent the possibility that all straight women can survive bad men, a
hurdle that is arguably a heteroromantic rite of passage (with an anthem
by Gloria Gaynor).
Straight culture’s orientation toward heteroromantic sacrifice is also in-
fluenced by socioeconomic class. Respect for sacrifice—or sucking it up
and surviving life’s miseries—is one of the hallmarks of white working-
class culture, for instance, wherein striving for personal happiness carries
less value than does adherence to familial norms and traditions.26 Matu-
rity and respectability are measured by what one has given up in order
to keep the family system going, an ethos that is challenged by the pres-
ence of a queer child, for instance, who insists on “being who they are.”
Queerness—to the extent that it emphasizes authenticity in one’s sexual
relationships and fulfillment of personal desires—is an affront to the cele-
bration of heteroromantic hardship. As Robin Podolsky has noted, “What
links homophobia and heterosexism to the reification of sacrifice . . . is the
specter of regret. Queers are hated and envied because we are suspected of
having gotten away with something, of not anteing up to our share of the
misery that every other decent adult has surrendered to.”27
For many lesbian daughters of working-class straight women, opting
out of heterosexuality exposes the possibility of another life path, beg-
ging the question for mothers, “If my daughter didn’t have to do this,
did I?” Heterosexuality is compulsory for middle-class women, too, but
more likely to be represented as a gift, a promise of happiness, to be
contrasted with the ostensibly “miserable” life of the lesbian. The lesbian
feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has offered a sustained critique of the role
of queer abjection in the production of heteroromantic fantasies. In Liv-
ing a Feminist Life, she notes that “it is as if queers, by doing what they
want, expose the unhappiness of having to sacrifice personal desires . . .
for the happiness of others.”28 In the Promise of Happiness, Ahmed ar-
gues, “Heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy end-
ing; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life direction
or purpose, or as what drives a story.”29 Marked by sacrifice, misery, and
failure along the way, the journey toward heterosexual happiness (to be
found with the elusive “good man”) remains the journey.
Of course, any straight woman in her right mind would complain. As
Adrienne Rich argued in 1980, “Profound skepticism, caution, and righ-
teous paranoia about men may indeed be part of any healthy woman’s re-
sponse to the woman-hatred embedded in male-dominated culture.” But
Rich also highlighted that because misogyny is so profoundly normalized,
many women, even feminist women, “fail to identify it until it takes, in
their own lives, some permanently unmistakable and shattering form.”30
The normalization of misogyny, and women’s sense that although straight

men are often unlikable and/or abusive, women must endure them any-
way (because how else are women going to get their sexual and romantic
needs met?) continues to have such cultural resonance that it is often the
more or less explicit premise of self-help books marketed to women.
Notably, straight women’s feminist insights, but also their related
sense of resignation and hopelessness about heterosexuality, have ex-
panded in the past thirty years since the publication of Susan Forward’s
1986 self-help classic Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love
Them and Robin Norwood’s 1990 Women Who Love Too Much: When
You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change. While these earlier self-help
best sellers presumed that good men and healthy relationships could
be possible but were denied to women with low self-esteem and poor
decision-making skills, more recent titles, like Blythe Roberson’s 2018
book How to Date Men When You Hate Men, start from the feminist
premise that straight women face a double bind caused not by their own
emotional deficiencies but by patriarchy. Roberson asserts that, on the
one hand, men are systematically oppressing women, but on the other
hand, they are also hot. What to do? She identifies herself, for instance,
“as a horned-up perv, . . . a woman attracted to men who have all this
structural power . . . and have been told for millennia that it’s cool to
treat women in a very degrading way, consciously or subconsciously.”31
She goes on to wonder, “How do you date men when they don’t want to
date anyone more successful than they are? Why get married when mar-
riage benefits men in almost every way but makes women more likely to
die a violent death?”32 Roberson answers these questions with a critique
of romantic idealism and a willingness to embrace singleness, even as
she describes her plan this way: “keep trying to get men to kiss me while
not oppressing me.”33 With so much attention in these books given to
straight men who hate women and straight women who hate men, it is
a wonder that lesbians continue to be perceived as the ultimate man-
haters. Roseanne Barr once pointed to this contradiction in one of her
well-known comedy routines: “I don’t know why people think lesbians
hate men. They don’t have to have sex with them!”34 The joke works be-
cause people are familiar with the stereotype about lesbians hating men,
but many also know, as my dyke friend Robin recently put it during one
of our lesbian writing group meetings, “the real fury and vitriol directed
at men does not come from lesbians but straight women.”
Roberson acknowledges that she learned as a young girl that, in
straight culture, “flirting” is synonymous with opposite-sex “meanness.”
Like Roberson, I learned this lesson too, and I still remember being
told by my mother that a boy who had pushed me in elementary school
probably “liked me.” In this way, behaviors we associate with disliking
someone, like intentionally hurting them, get resignified by straight cul-
ture as indicators of like, of attraction. So it’s no wonder that there is no
disconnect between love and complaint, no shame in men “shit talking
their wives” or women staying with one of those “worthless husbands
and boyfriends” they complain about on embroidery-themed Facebook
pages. The dislike, dissatisfaction, complaint, and witnessing by others is
part of the heteroromantic ritual, albeit one that queer people find both
tragic and mind-boggling. From a queer feminist perspective, perhaps
humans do sometimes have sex with people we hate, but a sexual orien-
tation organized around mutual dislike (men’s misogyny and women’s
resentment) is not our best vision for the future.
Straight Men are the Worst (and Straight Women

are Enablers)
“I can’t handle how low the bar is for straight-identified men when it
comes to literally everything: emotional skills, sexual skills, communica-
tion, self-awareness. When I am not annoyed or enraged about this, it
makes me deeply sad.” (queer femme, white, cis woman)
“Straight men and the way they treat everyone makes me uncomfortable.
My guard is always fully up when I meet a new straight man. He might
hurt anyone, including himself at any moment to prove how manly he
is. . . . I am ready to fight for my life whenever I meet a new straight

man. . . . Also the way straight women coddle and excuse away the be-
havior of their partners as if they are children. They are enabling them to
do dumb shit.” (queer Latina)
“Toxic masculinity.” (queer Hispanic male)
“I find it depressing to see what my straight female friends put up with

regarding treatment from men. I really sympathize with these women, but
at the same time it makes me feel alienated from them. Our lives become
so different when theirs revolves around attachment to a cruel, insensitive,
self-centered, or simply boring man.” (queer white European cis female)
“As a femme lover of female masculinities, I loathe few things more than
hetero-masculinity. . . . Hetero-femininity, conversely, just saddens me.
Things I find particularly loathsome about straight people: entitlement,
smugness, disdain, exoticized same-sex curiosity guised as repulsion,
condescension, power, capital, oblivion, perceptual dissatisfaction with
‘self ’ masked as bourgeois self improvement, sexual repression, and
straight sex.” (queer woman of color of Pakistani descent)
“The gender dynamics between cis-het straight people are often disturb-
ing and not especially feminist. Even if the man ‘supports’ feminism, he
eats up more air time, . . . he looks for validation. . . . When I spend time
with single cis-het female friends, much of the conversation is dominated

by their dating lives, and sadly, pathetically, whether or not a man they
are dating is ignoring them. . . . I also hate it when cis-het women say
things like, ‘I wish I could just be a lesbian.’” (Filipino, masculine female)
“It’s wild how fragile straight masculinity can be, but also how much
straight women just accept that men will not know/understand/really
care about certain things about their experiences.” (queer, white, gender-
fluid, nonbinary)
“Heteronormativity, misogyny, transphobia, toxic masculinity, overbear-

ing gender expectations.” (queer Latina)
“Seeing brilliant straight women settle for men soooooo beneath them.”
(queer, white, butch)
“Straight men in particular are odd and uncomfortable to be around for

me. Those insecure in their masculinity very often police mine, which
manifests as gaslighting, invalidating my anxieties and ‘softer’ emotions.
And their constant performances of ‘toughness’ is just very exhausting.”
(mixed-race Black, no gender given)
“Women would be much happier if they weren’t enmeshed in the

nightmare of heterosexuality. Men and society harm them in so many
ways. . . . Why do people choose to be straight? I feel sorry for them.”
(queer white man)
“I cannot deal with straight white dudes at all (the mansplaining, their
privilege, their inability to feel emotions that aren’t anger, their homopho-
bia, etc). Straight women are fine, I guess, but they have so much baggage
(damage) from dating and interacting with straight white dudes that it’s
often hard to be around them. . . . If I have to hear one more straight
woman say ‘my brother/husband/son is one of the good ones,’ I’m prob-
ably going to punch someone.” (white, queer)
“It seems straight women . . . have it pretty shitty. . . . For example, there
was an article going around on Facebook that a lot of my straight female
friends were posting. . . . It was an ‘open letter’ by a [married woman]
to her husband and basically it asked him to watch the kids sometimes
so she could have a break, and help her with small tasks around the
house. . . . It [was] asking for basic things, so simple, I was shocked it was
even an issue for this woman, let alone every straight woman I knew on
Facebook.” (queer white female)
The reason it is unsettling for many queers to listen to straight women

complain about men’s deficiencies is not because we don’t agree with
this assessment (we agree) but because it is distressing to hear these
same women justify or resign themselves to men’s shortcomings.
The bar often seems to be set very low for straight-identified men.
They express a feeling or take care of their infant or do the dishes or
stop talking and recognize women’s authority on a subject or give a
woman an orgasm, and we are all so pleased. We are pleased because
we expect so little. Straight women are especially delighted when the
men they love display basic decency or reciprocity, and they tell us so:
“I am so lucky to have one of the good ones,” they say. Meanwhile,
many of us queers are thinking, “That’s what counts as good?” We
also know that the answer is yes, it is what counts as good, because
as the folks quoted above explain, many straight men are violent and
unpredictable. They are cruel, insensitive, self-centered, and simply
boring. They are entitled, smug, and condescending. They are fragile,
insecure, and in regular need of women’s validation. They are lazy
and less competent, but more respected, than are the women in their
lives. Knowing all of this, queers are braced for the inevitable moment
when a straight woman proclaims, offhandedly, “I wish I could just
be a lesbian.” Sigh. Why don’t you be one, then? some of us wonder.
It’s not that hard.
Roberson’s book, discussed earlier, is a good example of straight
women’s structural bind. Roberson wants to say that she hates men be-
cause she recognizes hate as a logical way for straight women to feel
(what’s not to hate about patriarchy and its subjects?). But if she fully
and sincerely claims this position, she has to quit dating men, or she
has to be a person who has sex with people she hates. Neither choice
appears to be an option for Roberson, and presumably many straight
women, so she goes on at length about how the title of her book is ac-
tually tongue-in-cheek, because while she knows men-as-a-group are
oppressing her, she adores individual men, “just like the suffragettes in
Mary Poppins.” Women’s swirl of heteroadoration and real or performa-
tive hatred can look to queer observers like a kind of gallows humor.
What can a straight woman do but laugh and/or cry about having a
husband she finds lazy and thoughtless,35 a terrible conversationalist,36
and as much work as taking care of a child?37
When I was young, my mother had a woman friend who spoke regu-
larly about how much she hated her husband. He used to blow his nose
in the shower and leave mucous clogging the drain, just one of the many
reasons she loathed him. I know another woman, the mother of a friend
of mine, who lives in a large house with a husband who has cheated on
her more than once; she sleeps on a love seat in the living room, her legs
dangling off the side, because that is how little she wishes to sleep with
him. I recently heard of a woman in my community who was left by her
husband within days of giving birth because he “couldn’t handle it” (he
ultimately came back but had a nice vacation away from his newborn
baby). I know a woman whose husband had an affair while she was ex-
periencing postpartum anxiety and nursing two small children. I know
a woman who shared with me that her husband’s body is completely
unappealing to her and that she has sex with him just to make him
happy. I know a woman who is embarrassed to introduce her husband
to her friends because he can’t keep up with her, or them, intellectu-
ally. Another woman I know has fallen out of love with her husband
because his lack of emotional presence has made her feel alone for many
years. I know a woman who used to be my neighbor until her fifty-
something-year-old husband started smoking weed every day, become
a Grateful Dead enthusiast, and moved his girlfriend into their home to
live alongside his two young children. She told me this while standing
on the curb outside her house, wanting to know if I had any ideas about
where she could live. I know a woman, my own mother, whose husband
cheated on her multiple times, became addicted to drugs and gambling,
and left her to raise two young children.
Queer observers of heterosexual misery don’t always know how to feel
about straight women’s suffering. Perhaps it is their own private busi-
ness; perhaps everything is fine as long as straight women, themselves,

are willing to forgive the men in their lives. And perhaps queers are doing
no better, as many of us also lie, cheat, and engage in no end of painful
behavior. But the thing about heterosexual misery that makes it irreduc-
ible 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 Lem-
onade, 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 heteroroman-
tic 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:
Male redemption narratives have rarely required of their leading figures

any meaningful restoration or atonement. The simple act of apologizing
is enough to warrant a second act. Of course, Beyoncé is entitled to for-
give her husband, . . . [but this] redemption tour is not simply a private
burying of grievances, but also a public statement, a literal performance
of absolution wrought through female suffering. [Their subsequent joint
album] Everything Is Love . . . ends with Jay celebrating Bey—and the
myriad other black women like her—by praising her ability to endure
his misdeeds. . . . But the suggestion . . . that women’s pain is the sole
vehicle for male redemption, is exhausting. Who rescues the rescuer?38
Giorgis speaks, indirectly, to one of the primary reasons that straight

culture remains unaddressed, or “unrescued” from itself: people can-
not be rescued from forms of suffering that they themselves relate to as
badges of honor.
The Lack of Imagination
“I find straight culture to be too ‘normal.’ In other words, straight people

are held to their own puritanical inhibitions with regards to sex, night life,
and overall interactions with the broader public. . . . I find most mainstream
straight people to be sad, repressed, and oblivious.” (queer Latino cis male)
“Their relationships are limited and the roles between cis men and
women are too traditional. . . . Straight cis men take up too much space.”
(queer Black woman)
“Maybe the worst part of straight culture/people is the limited imagina-

tion. I’m talking about straight, white, middle class American culture to
be specific. . . . Now that I am in the queer community, I love my body,
voice, hair, mind, etc.” (queer white transmasculine dyke)
“Many hetero identified people see the world in black and white, . . . but
I find that queer people are better able to see the black, white, shades of
grey, and colors too. Straight culture seems as foreign to me as learning
to speak a new language.” (queer Indigenous, Xican@ male)
“Mainly toxic masculinity . . . I also feel bad for straight people who feel
so confined in their sexual identities that they feel stifled.” (queer, His-
panic, Puerto Rican)
“Straight culture, I dunno. I don’t think they really have a culture outside
of the conformity and curious closets, like kink, mistresses, love children,
secret abortions, etc.” (queer African American woman)
“Their obsession with romantic love? I feel like queer people are more
open to intimate friendships and since we often choose our family units,
our friendships mean more. Straights are just completely obsessed with
monogamy and gender roles.” (queer white)
“The assumed normality of their lives. The preoccupation with my repro-

ductive plans (I am child-free by choice and that’s more than some can
comprehend).” (queer African American lesbian)
“What makes me sad and what seems to be a hallmark of straight culture

is the individual buy-in to the idea that women have no other options than
settling for disappointing romantic/sexual/everything relationships. . . . It
feels like your whole life path is scripted in straight culture. . . . I think I
would feel so hopeless and sad and bored and unexcited and trapped. . . .
It seems like straight culture grooms you to be a better tool of capitalism
by accepting ways of living that are boring and exhausting without ques-
tion.” (queer femme, white, cis woman)
“They tend to have a limited imagination for formations of sexual and

romantic relationships and base their own relationships on ownership.”
(queer Latinx, genderqueer)
“I think straight people’s obsession with monogamy and the nuclear fam-
ily unit makes people miserable. . . . If a partner does any sexual act with
another person, in straight culture the relationship is automatically ru-
ined with no possibility of reparation. Straight people get jealous, pos-
sessive, and I think all of these things make straight people miserable.”
(queer mixed, Mexican, Jewish woman)
Another standout feature of straight culture, in the eyes of many queers,

is that it feels myopic and constrained, as if straight people are unable
to see or understand all of the potentially liberatory sexual and gender
options available to them. This stands in stark contrast with one of my
favorite features of queer subculture: our love of elaborate sexual and
gender typologies. Having come up as a queer dyke shaped by a conver-
gence of lesbian feminist ethics, the HIV/AIDS movement, and queer
kink/BDSM subculture, it seemed to me that the guiding sexual ethos
of queer feminist life was to ask, How intimate, creative, debauched, and
caretaking can we get with one another, what names can we give to these
new forms of relating, and what rules do we need to put in place to make
sure we enact them safely, sanely, and consensually? While the topic at
hand is straight culture, we need to acknowledge this queer sexual ethos
in order to contextualize some of the queer frustration described above
about the smallness and scriptedness of straight life.
Queer efforts to stretch people’s erotic imaginations and vocabularies
are too numerous to list, but one of the most famous is the Handker-
chief Code, a color-coded system for publicly displaying one’s sexual
preferences that was invented by gay and bi men in the 1970s. Instead of
reducing desire to gender alone (e.g., “I’m a gay man, and you’re a gay
man, so having sex will probably work out just fine for us”), the Hand-
kerchief Code was premised on the queer understanding that desire for
particular sex acts, role play, or power statuses are equally important
elements of sexual desire and compatibility. Different-colored handker-
chiefs, worn in either one’s right or left back pocket, signaled whether
one wanted to be a top or bottom and what specific sex acts and role play
one was interested in. In a similar vein, the lesbian feminist anthropolo-
gist Esther Newton wrote an essay in 1984 titled “The Misunderstanding:
Toward a More Precise Sexual Vocabulary,” in which she reflected on the
time she had sex with her best friend, Shirley, an encounter they both
found surprisingly unsatisfying despite being attracted to each other and
finding the idea of sex with each other quite hot. After many conversa-
tions about why they ultimately had no erotic chemistry, they concluded
that the missing element had nothing to do with gender or sexual ori-
entation or body type. Instead, both of them like to be dominant during
sex; both of them were tops. This realization inspired Newton to develop
“a more precise sexual vocabulary” than the one available in straight
culture, one that could help distinguish between gender preferences,
one’s own self-identity and expression, one’s position within relations of
power, and the nuts-and-bolts sex acts that one enjoys (Newton termed
these “sexual preference,” “erotic identity,” “erotic role,” and “erotic acts,”
respectively).39 In yet another example, the lesbian theorist Kate Born-
stein bemoaned in 1994 that “sexual orientation/preference is based in

this culture solely on the gender of one’s partner of choice,” despite the
fact that many other creative possibilities could be equally or more sig-
nificant.40 Bornstein offered a tantalizing list of other ways of classifying
sexual desire, including a butch/femme-style model (in which attraction
to femininity, for example, could include desire for feminine women and
feminine men), a top/bottom model (in which people desire tops or bot-
toms or switches, regardless of gender), and a sex-acts model (in which
people desire others who like anal sex, for instance).
Sometimes queer sexual typologies are not just about desire but about
how to reimagine sexual partnerships so that they don’t suffer from the
cycle of possessive monogamy, lying, and infidelity that damages so
many straight relationships. In a 1997 article called “Flexible Fidelity,”
the queer scholar D. Travers Scott laid out a system of ten different types
of (non)monogamy that he and his partner, Dave, had imagined and ex-
plored, ranging from complete monogamy (“plus porn”) to monogamy
plus mutually-agreed-upon third parties to nonmonogamy only when
out of town to nonmonogamy only with strangers (no friends or exes)
and so on. Scott gave each of these options a fun name (for example,
“boomerang = do whatever you want, but always come home”). Scott
concluded, “Ultimately, your relationship can be as flexible, idiosyn-
cratic, and unpredictable as your libido. . . . Being not-straight taught me
that the old rules don’t work. I’m interested in new, tailored versions . . .
so [we] charted a map of possibilities.”41 As Scott indicated, the impetus
for many of queer culture’s best insights is the desire not to reproduce
the failed practices of straight culture.
And, of course, in queer life, gender and sexual identities themselves
continually proliferate, sometimes to the chagrin of straight people who
complain about our swelling acronym. As many of my queer students
will tell you, people are not simply straight, gay, or bisexual; we can also
be pansexual, polysexual, monosexual, asexual, demisexual, graysexual,
androsexual, gynesexual, skoliosexual, panromantic, demiromantic,
and questioning/curious. This increasingly precise sexual vocabulary
attempts to give a fuller picture of the variability of sexual desire—

differences that straight culture renders unimaginable by refusing to give
name to them.
The comments above about the lack of sexual (or even simply rela-
tional) imagination in straight culture resonate deeply for me, as straight
people often seem to me either incapable of or uninterested in learning
to think differently about gender and sexuality. Sometimes straight cul-
ture seems so totalizing, so hegemonic, that it can blind its adherents to
all other possibilities. Thinking psychoanalytically about straightness,
the French feminist philosopher Monique Wittig put it this way: “The
straight mind cannot conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexu-
ality would not order not only all human relationships but also its very
production of concepts and all the processes which escape conscious-
ness, as well.”42 Basically, straightness shapes everything, precisely by
narrowing the field of what is conceivable or limiting the imagina-
tion. This is one of the reasons why the late queer theorist José Esteban
Muñoz defined queerness not as a sexual orientation, per se, but as a
utopian longing, a feeling of being pulled toward a queerer future, as yet
unimagined.43
Of course, straight culture is now somewhat conscious of those ele-
ments of queer subculture that can be co-opted, especially when profit-
able. This slow drip of queer ideas in the straight mainstream accounts
for one of the reasons that straight culture is experienced by queers as
boring: straight culture can feel decades behind the curve (i.e., straight
people are constantly “discovering” things, like conscious uncoupling

or androgyny or 50 Shades of Grey–style kink, et cetera, that dykes and
fags spearheaded years ago). Relatedly, the feminist pornographer and
sex educator Tristan Taormino once gave a guest lecture in one of my
courses about the myriad ways that lesbians have mentored straight
people about sex and relationships. We can thank lesbian feminists for
the spate of well-lit, shame-free, and education-oriented sex shops (like
Good Vibrations and Toys in Babeland) where average straight couples
can now buy sex toys without feeling like deviants. We can thank les-
bian feminists for the concept of ethical nonmonogamy, the existence

of feminist porn, the bold notion that people can remain friends and
family with ex-lovers, the emphasis on consent and care within kink
practices, and the radical idea that women can strap on dildos and pen-
etrate people, including their boyfriends and husbands. It is no wonder,
then, that queer people feel sad about, and sometimes exhausted by, the
“limited imagination” characteristic of straight culture. What straight
people don’t know does hurt them, and queer people often find them-
selves launching a rescue effort.
Straight Rituals
“I find their flirtation rituals strange. Especially when I see a strong and
independent woman get coy and cutesy around men.” (queer, lesbian,
Caucasian)
“The hysteria around straight weddings is very off-putting. . . . It feels

very superficial with the pageantry of it all (even with all the events that
lead up to it, for example, the engagement picture where the couple is in
a random field/meadow/open land. Maybe it’s symbolic?).” (queer multi-
racial Asian American woman)
“It’s about taking off garters at weddings, and pink and blue cupcakes at
gender reveal parties, and His and Her towels. Basically, it’s not creative
and I am too busy.” (queer white FTM nonbinary dyke)
“I find that straight people have everyday rituals that require the partici-
pation of all people engaged around them. . . . I find there’s a lot of con-
versation that leads to comparing amassed goods around the household
that are coded in various ways. Questions about the latest home gadget,
decorative accent pieces. I think to myself, why is this important? These
conversations tend to evolve into who has ‘better stuff.’” (genderqueer
cis-passing man of color, Asian, Filipina/o/x)
“I find gender reveal parties absolutely bizarre. No one will ever convince
me that it is normal or healthy to celebrate the biological genitalia of an
unborn baby. That’s weird.” (queer, nonbinary, Caucasian)
“Baby gender reveal parties. Hating your wife. Straight men refusing to
do household chores, or worse, expecting to be congratulated for having
done even the smallest amount.” (queer, white cis fem)
Being a queer person compelled to participate in straight rituals can be

an alienating and cringe-worthy experience. This has happened to me
countless times, but one memorably uncomfortable example was when
I was hired at UC Riverside and was the only queer faculty member in
my department. Several of my older colleagues lived in McMansions in
gated communities, wore Dockers, and liked to host poolside depart-
ment parties at their homes during which they would stand around in
heterosexual married couplets, drinking white wine and talking about
sports cars, the successes of their grown children, or whether to buy a
boat. My whiteness and recent university degree marked me as someone
who would be welcomed into this life, but it was not a life that could
recognize me or one I wanted anything to do with. I was thirty-one
years old and lived far away from campus in a tiny apartment in a dyke
enclave with my punk trans partner. I spent my weekends dancing in
a naughty queer femme burlesque troupe. I was out to my colleagues
as a lesbian, but I was not out to them as a radical queer for fear that I
would make them uncomfortable and damage my chances at tenure (I

would later move to UCR’s Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies,
resolving this dilemma). The point here is that I spent those first sev-
eral years in my job witnessing, celebrating, and participating in straight
rituals without any of my colleagues even noticing the emotional labor
this required.
One could argue that all rituals can be strange or tedious to outsid-
ers, and of course queer people have our own rituals, many of them
now clichéd. I don’t know a single queer person who has hosted a baby-
gender-reveal party or a bridal shower, but I have been to a couple of

queer weddings that I found alienating and boring. I also find coming-
out stories, like detailed descriptions of other people’s dreams, to be
therapeutic for the teller but mostly uninteresting and platitudinous for
the listener. Drag-queen performances and dyke psychosexual dramas
are other queer traditions I enjoyed when I was younger but now find so
predictable that I can hardly bear them.
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 forma-
tion 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 As one comrade explains above, straight rituals
feel like they “require the participation of all [people] engaged around
them,” including queer people. This is because heteronormative rituals—
coming-of-age parties, engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelor/ette
parties, weddings, gender-reveal parties, baby showers, elaborately gen-
dered children’s birthday parties, Valentine’s Day, anniversary parties—are
the accepted traditions offered to all of us to celebrate passage through
life. Heteronormative rituals shape how we understand the difference be-
tween youth and adulthood, success and failure, loneliness and connect-
edness. In straight culture, if women don’t get married and have children
and figure out how to stay attractive and keep their man, a cascade of
tragic temporal consequences ensues: the clock is ticking, the window is
closing, youthful beauty is fading, expensive interventions are needed. By
contrast, while many of these heteronormative demands try to push their
creepy tendrils into lesbian feminist culture, there remains considerable
room for a feminist dyke to assert her disinterest in having children as
a point of queer pride (“No breeders!”) and to experience deep love and
connection through intimate feminist friendships. This is not to mention
my favorite aspect of aging in dyke subculture, which is that many ways of

being (swagger, fierceness, sexual skills, good politics, intelligence, artistry,
interest in particular kinks) are far more important than are youth and
other glorified hetero body aesthetics. A dyke can be chubby, silver-haired,
wizened, and sloppily dressed and still have a lot of game.
But straight culture is so hegemonic, so overdetermining, that it is
often challenging to imagine how to have certain experiences in queer
ways or without the imposition of heteronormative meaning. For in-
stance, I have known a few dykes and nonbinary queers who decided not
to get pregnant, despite some interest, because they sensed they would
be unable to escape straight culture’s rigidly hetero-gendered conceptu-
alization of the pregnant body. The association of pregnancy with het-
erosexual reproduction and essential womanhood is changing, but the
transformation is slow. Access to an experience like pregnancy requires
that one be prepared to be hailed by straight culture; or, as Wittig states,
“discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent
us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”45 I, too, have had dif-
ficulty speaking to straight people in my own terms, not theirs. When
I was pregnant and straight women shared with me their ideas about,
say, the differences between girl infants and boy infants, I weighed the
benefit of being authentic against the risk of sounding like a jerk. The
truth was that I did not share their perceptions of infant behavior and
that I planned to parent differently than they had, to parent queerly.
Sometimes I tried to explain what this meant to me, but I was often met
with expressions of defensiveness or bafflement.

I have also struggled to explain to straight people what it means for
an environment to feel straight, which is not simply about the presence
or absence of gay people. A couple of years ago, my partner and I at-
tended a banquet fund-raiser for our child’s school—a school where the
executive director is an out lesbian and almost all parents seem to us
like gay-friendly liberals. As soon as we left the banquet, we turned to
each other in the car and said, “Oh my god, was that one of the straight-
est events you have ever been to in your whole life?!” It was so validat-
ing to discover that we both felt that way, but at the time, neither of us
was quite sure what it was that was so straight. Later I pieced together
all of the straight rituals I observed that night, which had combined to
create an intense experience of hetero immersion: women complain-
ing about their husbands, middle-aged couples chatting about how the
school fund-raiser was their big night out that year, men making bad
jokes to which women responded with halfhearted laughter, women in
the bathroom trading information about diet and exercise, donors to
the school being referred to by their shared last name (“let’s all thank
the Petersons for their generous gift!”), the presence of many men I had
never seen before because this is the only school event they show up for,
“his” and “her” silent auction items, and more examples I can’t recall. My
partner and I, a genderqueer butch and a femme dyke, were welcome at
the event, but the event was not for us.
Obliviousness and the Straight Gaze
“Unexamined power and privilege; oblivious to perks they receive and

operate out of; assumptions and assertions about gender roles; how they
co-opt queer struggles, queer spaces, queer victories and take them as
their own (love wins!), how they don’t get on the front lines. Sometimes
I feel enraged, often, I feel unsurprised and protect myself before I even
know I am doing that.” (queer South Asian, Indian, genderqueer)
“I sometimes feel like I am a zoo animal to them. They love to watch and
observe but don’t care outside of that.” (queer Latino, biracial male)
“Most annoying of all might be the belief that all bisexual women are in-
terested in having threesomes with heterosexual couples—I have so many
straight people on dating apps who message me because they think I want
to fuck them and their GF/BF/spouse. The last thing I want to be is some-
body’s sexual unicorn fantasy plaything. Black women get fetishized too
much as it is.” (queer mixed-race, Black and white, cis woman)
“Straight people can’t seem to not talk about their sexuality or mine
for more than 15 minutes at a time. I wish they’d just read more or just
be queer since they seem so curious about it.” (queer Black femme cis
woman)
“The ‘you’re so brave and amazing for just being who you are’ kind of
comments feel patronizing and hard.” (queer, white, genderqueer)
“Straight people can be way too familiar. I am in a 21-yr relationship and

have been asked if I am the top or bottom, . . . unbelievably inappropri-
ate.” (queer Latino/Chicano male)
We can hardly blame straight people, and straight women in particu-

lar, for being interested in what’s happening in queer spaces. Queer
spaces are often a delicious mix of pleasure and danger; they can be
bacchanalian, performative, and unpredictable, while also— owing
to the general absence of straight men—being relatively safe envi-
ronments for women. When a bevy of straight women looking for a
good time decide to go to a gay bar—a phenomenon that has rankled
some gay men and gained the attention of many a journalist46—they
do this, understandably, to experience an exuberant and erotically
charged environment without enduring the sexual harassment of
straight men. But, ironically, a good number of straight women have
ended up sexually harassing gay men during their excursions to the
gay bar: they ogle and touch gay men’s bodies without permission,
they assume an automatic affinity between themselves and gay men,
they “let loose” by engaging in drunken and disruptive behavior that
centers themselves in a queer space, and they seem to be utterly oblivi-
ous to the effect of their presence. Writing about the popularity of gay
bars as destination spots for straight women’s bachelorette parties, the
drag queen Miz Cracker describes how the bachelorette phenomenon
has enabled the straight gaze to infiltrate precisely the spaces intended
to be free of it:
[Straight women] run roughshod over the nerves of a gay room with their
uncomfortable pronouncements and personal comments. I’m, like, an
honorary gay. I’m a gay man in a woman’s body. Yes, queen, I live for your
shoes! Ugh, why do gay guys have the best bodies? If you were straight, I
would totally make out with you. And so on. They declare their allegiance
to queers, they make jokes based on outmoded perceptions of queer
life—but most of all they make a lot of tone-deaf noise that can entirely
ruin the night for a room full of queer patrons.47
This combination of self-absorption and the straight gaze—viewing

queer people and places as novelties to be consumed—is yet another
hallmark of straight culture, one encouraged by media representations
of gay men as possessing special skills that they are just waiting to share
with straight people—a sense of style, campy humor, a natural empathy
for women, and so on. The TV series Queer Eye is the exemplar, featur-
ing a team of fabulous queer men who provide deep listening and style
advice to (mostly straight) makeover recipients.
But the story about how the straight gaze figures queer women is a
different one, one in which lesbians and bisexual women play a cen-
tral role in straight people’s homosexual curiosities and their fantasies
about threesomes. Like the respondent above, I have been asked for
sex by straight people multiple times, mostly in queer bars where I was
caught off guard by the presence of lascivious straight couples (who
let these people in here?!). I want to note, too, that there is a distinct
unevenness in the way straight women and straight men consume

queer life, and most likely due to sexism, the media tend to focus on
the irritating behaviors of straight women (who are easy targets) more
than the threatening and violent behavior of straight men. While a
bachelorette’s invasion of a gay bar is certainly an annoying display of
privilege, a straight man’s invasion of a lesbian bar is frightening. On
some of the occasions in which intoxicated straight men have tried to
coax me into a threesome, I was not just aggravated; I was worried I
might be raped.
Also illuminated in the comments above is the fact that even well-
intentioned gestures of alliance can feel, to queer people, like further
subjection to the straight gaze. It is not that queer people necessarily dis-
agree with proclamations like “love is love” or with the idea that queer
people are brave and beautiful. It is that these are platitudes that obscure
queer complexities: Love is not exactly the point of queer liberation. Not
all queer people want to be beautiful or brave. Telling us we’re beautiful
is telling us something we already know. Why do you think we care what
you think to begin with? And the list of internal objections goes on.
These kinds of statements—perhaps akin to “I don’t see color”—have be-
come such predictable staples of gay-friendly heterosexuality that their
very utterance has become a beacon of straight culture.
Bad Sex, Genital Obsession
“It’s also really upsetting how few orgasms straight women have. . . . You
deserve better, girl.” (queer Latina)
“Their sex lives are really boring and dishonest. They’ll ‘spice things up’
by using fuzzy handcuffs and think that it’s wild. . . . I don’t think that
straight people are generally very good at exploring their sexuality or
communicating their sexual desires to their partner. It seems sad and
boring.” (queer cis male, white)
“I find it strange how someone can not like someone based on their geni-
tals. Being pansexual, the concept of someone being ruled out of partner
status because of what their genitals are just is absurd to my mind.” (gen-
der fluid, Hispanic Latino)
“Actually, another article went around on Facebook among my straight

friends too—this one about ‘how men know when sex is over.’ Every. Sin-
gle. Man. Said ‘when I cum.’ . . . As a lesbian, I can’t imagine stopping sex
with my partner the minute I cum. It’s kind of hilarious to think about!
. . . But of course it’s also sad that this is apparently the reality for straight
women.” (queer white female)
The queer feminist scholar Angela Jones begins her essay “#Demand-
BetterStraightSex!” 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 rap-
ing 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.49
The #metoo movement—begun in 2006 by the antiviolence activist
Tarana Burke—has also helped reveal the ubiquity of straight men’s
sexual violations of women. Numerous high-profile and well-loved
men have raped women, drugged women, exposed their naked bod-
ies to women, and masturbated in front of women without women’s
consent and with impunity. By 2017, the tidal wave of these stories
was enough to make even the most jaded lesbian feminist ask herself
again, What the fuck is wrong with men? and How and why are straight
women surviving heterosexuality? You deserve better, girl.

Jones concludes that the answers to these questions are multiple
and intersecting. Coercive and male-centric straight sex is normal-
ized because heterosexual love is already constructed as a sacrifice for
women, a point that is a central theme in this book. Beyond this, pa-
triarchal power arrangements ensure that many straight women have
few choices but to endure men’s violence, as illuminated with gut-
wrenching clarity in the 2019 documentary series Lorena, about both
the long-standing sexual torture that Lorena Bobbitt endured at the
hands of her husband and the misogynistic ridicule she experienced

at the hands of the public. Men also pursue masculine validation
through sexual dominance, Jones explains, thereby benefiting from a
system that rewards straight men for dissociating from women’s ex-
perience of sex. But an even more basic problem is that straight people
define “actual sex” as penetration of a vagina by a penis, even though
few women (about 18 percent) experience orgasm from this activity
alone.50 This accounts for the fact that 86 percent of lesbians report
usually or always having orgasms during sex, compared to 65 per-
cent of straight women.51 Lesbians know that “sex” is hardly reducible
to penetration, but more importantly, lesbians wear their capacity to
make women cum as a badge of honor—a celebrated accomplishment
within lesbian subculture.52
A secret about lesbian sex that I don’t think I have ever seen writ-
ten about before is that lesbians appreciate different things about the
vulva and vagina than do straight men. If popular culture and the rise
of vaginal tightening and rejuvenation procedures are any indication,
straight men value a “tight” vagina. But this is incomprehensible to
me as a dyke. If I only had a nickel for every time I have heard queer
people brag about being size queens with capacious vaginas and/or
anuses that welcome fists and giant dildos, I’d be a rich woman! In
queer space, what makes an orifice “good” is not how it feels to the
person going inside it (for whom it might make sense for the emphasis
to be on tightness) but how the orifice feels about itself: what it wants,
what it can do, what it can enjoy. For many humans, the capacity to
take something very large into one’s body is extremely pleasurable,
and this is much more difficult when one has been told that the goal
is to keep all orifices small and tight. It is fine, of course, if size is not
one’s thing, but the point here is that it makes queer people—like my
comrades quoted above—quite sad that in straight culture, a vagina is
evaluated according to its capacity to please men and not its capacity
to experience pleasure.53
Another troubling feature of straight culture’s relationship to sex is

its obsession with gendered body parts: the genitals of fetuses (you’re
invited to our gender-reveal party!), the inherent homosexuality of men’s
anuses (even though it is my wife’s finger in my butt, something about it
still feels gay), the genitals of trans people (but who are you, really?!), and
so on. In addition to the creative ways that queer people have decoupled
sex from gender, and gender from sexuality, perhaps the fact that queer
people have a less genital-to-genital understanding of sex (queer sex also
looks like mouths to genitals and anuses, sex toys to genitals and anuses)
also helps account for the fact that many queer people are pansexual,
capable of intimacy and attraction to people regardless of their bodies
or gender identities.
The Goodness in Straight People
“I don’t find straight people or culture to be sad or off-putting, . . . but

then again, some of the straight people I know are really just discov-
ering their queerness and are beginning to open up to the possibili-
ties. Sexuality is such a fluid thing. . . . I have always felt that way. For
example, I remember when you were straight, Jane. I never thought
of you as sad or off putting. . . . I always thought you were amazing
to hang out with. And I remember when I was straight identified. . . .
I think I was just as awesome then. . . . Being queer didn’t make me
any better.” (genderqueer woman, Palestinian born, raised in United
States)
And lastly, this chapter comes to a close by acknowledging that, of

course, straight people are not reducible to straight culture. Many
straight people relate to their heterosexuality in dazzlingly feminist
and queer ways. Many straight people, including straight men, are
lovable, vulnerable humans. And many straight people have queer
futures ahead of them, like I once had. I love the person quoted above,
who brings us back to the goodness in straight people, though it does

not escape me that their two examples—myself and themselves—are
people who would later identify as queer. What does it mean that
“queering heterosexuality” is often offered as the best route forward
for straight people to achieve some degree of gender and sexual jus-
tice? Is it possible that heterosexuality, qua heterosexuality, can rescue
itself from its own tragic condition? These are the questions at the
heart of chapter 5.
5
DEEP HETEROSEXUALITY
Toward a Future in Which Straight Men
Like Women So Much That They
Actually Like Women
I wrote this book out of solidarity with straight

women, but the further into the project I went, the more my attention
shifted to straight men. Straight men have caused women unthinkable
suffering, and yet I share with them, presumably, something that has
been fundamental and significant in my life—a desire to partner with
women. In this chapter, I speak mostly to straight men about how they
might be even straighter than they are, if by “straightness” we mean an
orientation toward women. I implore them to put their politics where
their lust is: in alignment with women. I call upon the wisdom of the
dyke experience to illuminate for straight men the human capacity to
desire, to fuck, and to be feminist comrades at the same time. Once
again, I return to the insights of lesbian feminism, in this case to map
the ways that lust for women, and deep regard for women, have lived in
complementary relationship to each other.

My reflections on the possibilities for heterosexuality build on, but
also depart from, writing centered on the project of queering straight-
ness. Queer observers of the heterosexual miseries detailed in this book
have often speculated that the most direct path toward the subversion
of straight culture is for straight people to be more honest about their
perverse desires and gender-bending curiosities (think about all those
straight men waiting for Halloween, their one socially sanctioned op-
portunity to dress in drag). Gender scholars have wondered, for in-
155
156 • DEEP HETEROSExUaLITY
stance, whether heterosexuals could be kinky enough—by, let’s say,

having a sexual dynamic anchored in men’s submission and women’s
dominance or by being participants in BDSM communities in which
gendered and racialized power and consent are explicit and ongoing
topics of conversation—that their perversion poses a challenge to het-
eropatriarchy and white supremacy.1 Other queers have ruminated on
whether polyamory, which requires a less possessive and nonnuclear
approach to sexual relationships as well as a commitment to transpar-
ency about desire and jealousy, could pierce through some of straight
men’s sense of entitlement to, and ownership of, women.2 Some have
hypothesized that gender-subversive sex acts themselves, like “pegging”
(women’s anal penetration of men), could be a backdoor route to un-
dermining men’s patriarchal authority by redefining heteromasculinity
as receptive and vulnerable.3 In my teaching, I have shared all of these
examples with my students, offering them as ways that some straight
people transgress the bounds of heteronormativity. And yet I continue
to be concerned about their practical applications for the vast major-
ity of ordinary straight people (i.e., my intuition tells me that some of
my straight relatives and neighbors are not quite ready for BDSM or
polyamory—perhaps pegging . . . ?).
Some queer commentators have focused less on how straight people’s
sex practices might be queered and more on how straight people might
shake up their broader life choices by, for example, refusing marriage or
child-centeredness or valuing friendships and chosen family as much as
or more than blood connections. For instance, Jack Halberstam has ar-
gued for a queer form of feminism, a “gaga feminism,” in which straight
people embrace the postmodern instability of traditional heterosexuality
and let the impending queerness of the future wash over them.4 Among
the queer transformations that Halberstam believes have the potential to
reshape heterosexuality are reproductive technologies that enable late-
in-life pregnancies and “pregnant men,” disillusioned and heteroflexible
straight women who divorce their husbands in their forties in favor of
more satisfying queer relationships, and the rise in solo parenting and
DEEP HETEROSExUaLITY • 157
awareness of the doubtful value of fathers. While feminist projects have

long aspired to transform and enlist straight men into the movement
for gender equality, Halberstam’s vision seems to leave straight men,
deemed basically hopeless, on the cutting-room floor. In this version of
straight women’s lives, men play only a small role.
These are promising approaches, and there is no doubt that the grav-
ity 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 queer-
ness 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 het-
erosexual 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 unavail-
able. 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.
In light of all of these complexities, I want to come at straightness
with an interest in actualization, rather than undoing. As detailed in
chapter 2, the conditions of patriarchy have long damaged men’s desire
for women, and women’s for men, such that heterosexuality, as a sexual
orientation, was always already a contradiction. Women were too infe-
rior, too degraded, for men to actually like. Women could be sexually
desired, and they could be paternalistically loved; but they could not be
engaged as autonomous, self-determining humans in the way that men
related to other men. Consequently, much of men’s energy was directed
toward men and not women; this includes erotic energy, if we under-
stand the erotic as it was defined by the late Black lesbian feminist Audre
Lorde. For Lorde, “the erotic” is a kind of power that arises from know-
ing one’s own capacity for joy and pleasure, as well as in the encounter
between people who can share that self-knowing pleasure with one an-
other. Lorde explained that one of patriarchy’s tools is to deny women
this power, to offer it to us in only superficial forms “in order to exercise
it in the service of men.”6 Straight men, on the other hand, have cre-
ated countless rituals, games, art forms, traditions, and spaces designed
to explore and pursue their own pleasure, typically in the company of
other men. The formation of modern heteromasculinity is marked by
erotic competition among men for women’s bodies, public conquest of
women’s bodies as a spectacle for other men, and the construction of
sex itself as an act of men’s collective force or manipulation, women’s
collective gift or sacrifice, and a cultural encounter in which men’s plea-
sure is the driving impulse, the inevitable focal point.7 In other words,
straight men have spent an inordinate amount of time exchanging erotic
power and forging erotic bonds with one another but have struggled to
interest themselves with women’s sexual pleasure and consent. It is no
wonder, then, that one source of queer alienation from straight culture
is that heterosexuality often rings false; straight men do not actually like
the very people they have claimed as their object of desire and affec-
tion. Straight men do not need to be queered; they need to learn to like
women.
Deep Heterosexuality
Rather than pushing heterosexuality in queerer directions, what if we

honored its basic impulses—that is, women’s and men’s desire and/or
love for each other—but urged this impulse to go deeper, to reconcile
its contradictions? How might the heterosexual impulse be taken to its
most humane and fulfilling, and least violent and disappointing, con-
clusion? Is it not possible that women and men could feel an attraction
to each other that was so unstoppable, so expansive, so hungry for the
wholeness of the other that it forged strong bonds of identification and
deep mutual regard, rather than oppositeness and hierarchy?
In evoking “deep heterosexuality,” I borrow from the queer femi-

nist artist Allyson Mitchell, whose project “Deep Lez” weaves together
the old and the new, the most useful theories and practices from the
rich archive of lesbian feminist herstory with contemporary intersec-
tional, transfeminist politics. Deep Lez allows us to mine what is lib-
eratory about the practice of women loving women, without dismissing
this herstory outright for its essentialism, false universalism, or other
limitations.8
Similarly, I imagine deep heterosexuality as a framework for honor-
ing and preserving what straight people experience as fulfilling about
hetero sex and straight culture and for pushing further and deeper in
these pleasurable hetero directions. Deep heterosexuality turns to the
erotic, the hetero erotic, as a potential source of connection and mu-
tual regard built through the channels of desire, joy, and pleasure. Deep
heterosexuality proclaims: if straight women and men are actually at-
tracted to each other, that is excellent. Now let’s expand the notion of
heterosexual attraction to include such a powerful longing for the full
humanity of women, and for the sexual vulnerability of men, that any-
thing less becomes suspect as authentic heterosexual desire. Deep het-
erosexuality draws on lesbian feminist insights about the nexus of desire
and identification in order to help release straight people from the binds
of a sexual orientation characterized by attraction to people one dis-
likes.9 Deep heterosexuality accesses the erotic as a site of identification,
mutual recognition, and joy, and when this happens, as Audre Lorde
explains, “we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffer-
ing and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like
their only alternative in our society.”10
The most useful model I have found for how to like women, and to
fuck women feministly, comes from lesbian feminists. For the remainder
of this chapter, I look closely at two lesbian feminist interventions from
which we can draw insights relevant to the project of deep heterosexual-
ity. The first is a uniquely lesbian feminist approach to denaturalizing
heterosexuality, which I believe is an essential first step toward bring-
ing deep heterosexuality into its fullest expression. The second is a set
of lesbian feminist instructions, or examples, for how to identify with
someone and fuck them at the same time (i.e., how to desire women
humanely). I offer these gifts to straight men.
accountability: Choosing to Be Straight
One of the foundational principles of lesbian feminism is that each per-

son’s sexual desire is their own responsibility, if not something they can
choose, then at least something they can choose to examine and take
ownership of. Two decades before the emergence of what we now call
queer theory, lesbian feminists argued for a vision of sexuality as a site
of choice and political resistance. A far cry from today’s “born this way”
approach to sexual orientation, which has been most widely embraced
by gay men, lesbian feminists claimed their love of women as a culti-
vated political stance, an act of opposition to heteropatriarchy. As the
lesbian poet Cheryl Clarke explained in 1983, one might call oneself
a lesbian not only, or even primarily, because of a sexual attraction to
women’s bodies but for a host of other political, cultural, psychologi-
cal, and spiritual reasons: “I name myself ‘lesbian’ because I want to be
visible to other black lesbians. I name myself ‘lesbian’ because I do not
subscribe to predatory/institutionalized heterosexuality. I name myself
lesbian because I want to be with women (and they don’t all have to call
themselves ‘lesbians’). I name myself ‘lesbian’ because it is part of my
vision. I name myself lesbian because being woman-identified has kept

me sane. I call myself ‘Black,’ too, because Black is my perspective, my
aesthetic, my politics, my vision, my sanity.”11 Borrowing from this rich
lesbian feminist tradition of taking responsibility for one’s desire and
articulating what it accomplishes in the broader context of one’s life,
deep heterosexuality invites straight people to also develop accountabil-
ity for their sexual orientation, or to decide to own their straightness. If,
like Cheryl Clarke, straight women and men were to develop a list of rea-
sons that they have named themselves “straight,” what would be on this
list? If we abandoned all pretense that heterosexuality is the only option,

or that it is easy, simple, automatic, predetermined, and not worth talk-
ing and thinking about, how might straight women and men articulate
what propels them toward each other, despite all the difficulty? Though
we are all socialized under the force of heteronormativity, not all of us
are straight. But those who are could learn to relate to their heterosexu-
ality as a cultivated desire of which they are agent, rather than victim or
passive recipient.
This kind of reframe is, I believe, especially crucial for straight men,
who have been encouraged to relate to their desire for women as so
physiological as to be outside of their control and so compartmentalized
as to enable the disconnect between wanting women and liking them.
This very narrow and conditional way that men have learned to desire
women is arguably a fraction of what that desire could entail, making
heteromasculinity a strikingly feeble and impotent mode of attraction
to women compared with what is possible for dykes and other women-
desiring queers. As the Radicalesbians articulated it, women who desire
other women provide their counterparts not only with sex but also with
“personhood,” “a revolutionary force,” “freedom,” “mirroring,” “solidar-
ity,” “emotional support,” “the melting of barriers,” and “real-ness.”12 I
am not suggesting that sex should always reach such a high bar but in-
stead pointing out how revealing it is that when straight boys or men
describe a similarly comprehensive interest in the lives of girls or women
(say, perhaps, they are so attracted to women that they are interested in
books or movies about women, women’s art, women’s emotional lives),

they risk being perceived as a bit “gay.” Transforming straight men’s frag-
ile and damaged desire for women into something robust, convincing,
and worth all that braggadocio requires that men are willing to actively
cultivate and strengthen their heterosexuality, their desire for women,
rather than expecting nature to handle things—that strategy has clearly
not worked. Rather than feeling victimized by women (and deriding
women partners as people who “control sex,” who are the old ball and
chain, who talk too much, and so on), straight men could recognize that
heterosexuality is the path they have chosen, or at least it is the path that
they are on, and that this path is about being “oriented” toward women.
That is its very definition!
The increasing popularity of biological accounts of sexual orienta-
tion is one of the latest obstacles to deep heterosexuality. When people
believe heterosexuality is natural and hardwired, and when they have
never known a heterosexuality free from some degree of patriarchal
suffering, then this suffering also seems natural, even inevitable.13 If
straight people are born straight and cannot change the fact of their
straightness, and if patriarchy is a powerful, enduring system that is
painfully slow to change and also inextricably tied to heterosexuality,
then what is left for straight people to feel except some mix of resigna-
tion and cruel optimism? Indeed, this is what straight feminist women
often do seem to feel; they feel that the problem runs so deep that it is
unlikely to be resolved in their own lifetimes.
Through a queer lens, heteroresignation or heteropessimism appears
to be a rite of passage for straight women.14 As much gets conveyed in
a meme-worthy scene from the sitcom Parks and Recreation, in which
best friends Ann Perkins and Leslie Knope (played by Rashida Jones and
Amy Poehler) are asked if they are a couple, to which Knope lightheart-
edly retorts, “No, tragically, we are both heterosexual.” Poehler’s char-
acter acknowledges heterosexuality as “tragic,” but the scene remains
cheery because this acknowledgment is so familiar within women’s cul-
ture as to be taken for granted, almost cute. It poses no existential crisis
for these characters to describe their sexual orientation as tragic, nor is

it implied that something should or could be done to address the trag-
edy. On social media, a screenshot of the scene went viral, with straight
women tagging their women friends—the ones who inhabit a similar
(pseudowife) position in their own lives.
We know that straight culture likes to glorify itself, but it also, par-
adoxically, frames straight women as hapless victims of their sexual
orientation. Are they? Many lesbian feminists certainly believed this
(hence the call for straight women to leave men and become “political
Figure 5.1. Heterosexuality is tragic. (From Parks and Recreation)
lesbians”). Adrienne Rich famously argued in 1980 that heterosexuality

was imposed on women, and therefore women could not experience
freedom even in seemingly healthy heterosexual relationships: “The
question inevitably will arise: Are we then to condemn all heterosexual
relationships, including those that are least oppressive? I believe this
question, though often heartfelt, is the wrong question here. . . . The
absence of [women’s] choice remains the great unacknowledged real-
ity, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent on the
chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective
power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives.”15
But most straight feminist women with whom I have spoken about this
subject do not view themselves as having been manipulated or forced

into being straight. And even if they did, straight-identified women’s
ability to imagine that they have no choice but to partner with men is
arguably challenged by the growing public visibility of bisexual and les-
bian relationships.
Heteronormativity nonetheless erases the need for straight people to
justify or explain their sexuality, to others and to themselves: What does
being straight do for them? What do they like about it? When did they
first know they were straight? When I ask straight feminist women such
questions—including “Why are you straight?” and “What do you like

about men?”—I am struck by how often they look like deer caught in
headlights. Some feminist women suggest that there is not much they
like about straightness other than sexual encounters with men. They
believe straightness is a bad deal for women, and yet they feel a physi-
cal attraction to men that they don’t feel for women. My reaction to
that is, if it is true that desire for sex with men is powerful enough for
some women that it makes heterosexuality more desirable than queer-
ness or asexuality, then this is itself an amazing fact—one that inter-
venes in the oft-cited notion that women care more about emotional
connection than they do about sex. For straight feminist women, even
this assertion—“I am in it for the dick,” as one straight friend told me—
is an important first step toward deromanticizing women’s gendered
suffering and exposing the cost-benefit analysis that is part of any het-
erosexual encounter under patriarchy. In other cases, women may not
be in it for men’s bodies at all but for the respectability or security that
heterosexuality offers. This, too, is a powerful truth for women to own,
as it exposes the transactional bind in which straight women are still
positioned after centuries of servitude and exploitation. Ideally, women
are in it for pleasure—in which I would include the concept of love and
also the dick and even the social benefits of heterosexuality. But again, if
heterosexuality were a site of significant pleasure for women, this raises
questions about why so many straight women appear to be miserable.
For straight women, the work at hand is to cultivate some kind of agen-
tic relationship to the fact that they have not chosen queerness.
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 acknowl-
edge 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.
Liking Women, or, Women-Identified Men
A basic premise of straight culture is the idea that gendered bodies,

especially women’s bodies, require purification and modification to be
desirable—shaving, perfuming, toning, refining, shrinking, enlarging, and
antiaging. But in queer spaces, it is often precisely the hairy, sweaty, dirty,
smelly, or unkempt gendered body that is most beloved. I recall the first
time I entered a gay men’s sex shop, in the 1990s in the Castro district of
San Francisco, and encountered a barrel full of lightly stained and dingy-
looking “used jock straps” for sale. It was my introduction to the fact that
there were people in the world who desired men’s bodies so much that
they wanted deep, intimate, and seemingly unconditional contact with
them—even and especially the parts of men’s bodies that straight women
seemed to want to avoid. Most straight women I knew, no doubt due
to their socialization as girls and women, appreciated men’s bodies for
their sexual functionality but not as a site of objectification that they were
excited to dive into and explore—to smell, taste, or penetrate.16 Similarly,
I have been to dozens of dyke strip shows, burlesque shows, drag-king
shows, and sex shows in which women’s armpit hair and leg hair and facial
hair or their body fat or their genderqueer bodies have been precisely the
objects of the audience’s collective lust. Fat bodies and hairy bodies are
also staples of queer dyke porn, not relegated to a fetish category. In other
words, queer desire is marked by a lustful appreciation for even those
parts of men’s and women’s bodies that have been degraded by straight
culture. Like a food adventurer who delights in those parts of the animal
or plant deemed undesirable by the narrowing of mainstream tastes, queer
people’s desire for the full animal has been less constrained. Recognizing
this suggests that gay men may have a deeper or more comprehensive
appreciation for men’s bodies than do straight women, just as lesbians’ lust
for women is arguably more expansive and forgiving than straight men’s.
But most importantly, because queer circuits of desire do not rely on
the erotic encounter of “opposites” embedded in a broader culture of gen-
dered acrimony and alienation, queer lust need not reconcile a conflict
between wanting to fuck and generally disliking one’s fuckable population.

Queer desire does not immediately hit up against prescripted, institution-
ally sanctioned misogyny. This means that something very powerful is
possible in queer life that I rarely see in straight culture: a merging of ob-
jectifying desire, on the one hand, and a feminist, subjectifying respect for
those who are desired, on the other. In sex-positive queer feminist subcul-
ture, for instance, lust for women’s bodies is sometimes delightfully lewd
and lascivious but not at the expense of women’s subjectivity. One of the
many significant legacies of lesbian feminism is that its vision of “loving
women” integrated the libidinous and the subjectifying.
I want to consider whether it is possible to extend to straight men
this lesbian feminist mode of desire. Granted, many of the thinkers to
whom I now turn believed that heterosexuality was unsalvageable and
incongruous with feminism, but they nonetheless created a vision for de-
votion to women that is expansive enough, I believe, to be of use to peo-
ple of all genders who want to like women, including straight men. For
instance, being “woman identified” was a core element of lesbian femi-
nist practice, and while it often referred to women’s self-identification,
or learning to love the self through intimacy with other women, it also
referred to the practice of investing in women’s collective freedom and
self-determination. Lesbian feminist ethics dictated that to lust after
women, to want to fuck women—even casually or nonmonogamously or
raunchily—was inseparable from being identified with women as a whole
and with the project of wanting women’s freedom. It meant learning
about what lifted women up, and also what harmed them, and aligning
one’s desires in the direction of women’s collective liberation rather than
their suffering. For example, it looked like what Adrienne Rich called
“marriage resistance,” or the recognition that marriage and nuclear family
arrangements typically benefited men but disadvantaged women. There-
fore, Rich argued, to have genuine regard for women logically meant not
attempting to own them in marriage or otherwise block their intimacy
with friends and comrades or inhibit their capacity to live engaged and
meaningful lives. For the Radicalesbians, to desire women meant that
one’s “energies flowed toward women,” that one desired to “relate more
completely to women.”17 It meant disinvesting in “male identification,” or
in the practice of supporting, benefiting from, justifying, and being com-
plicit with patriarchal interests. It meant recognizing that while straight
men claimed to love women, in fact their energies flowed toward men—
toward admiring men, seeking men’s approval, forging bonds with men,
and so on. Heterosexuality, lesbian feminists recognized, was an oppres-
sively homosocial—and often homoerotic—institution that romanticized
men and women’s alienation from each other.
At the time of the nascent lesbian feminist movement, it was scarcely
imaginable that straight men might themselves be capable of woman
identification, and hence deep heterosexuality was largely unthinkable.
Heterosexuality relied not only on a gender dichotomy that positioned
men and women as opposites types incapable of identification with each
other but also on a subject/object erotic model in which desire could
only be forged and sustained through degrees of difference, distance,
and mystery. In 1992, the straight feminist writer Naomi Wolf repro-
duced this notion when she described, in Ms. magazine, a new mode
of straightness that she called “radical heterosexuality.” Radical hetero-
sexuality, according to Wolf, had roughly six goals: (1) straight women
needed to be financially independent and/or have the skills necessary to
leave an abusive relationship; (2) legal marriage needed to be abolished
in favor of something akin to (then illegal) gay and lesbian commit-
ment rituals and “chosen family”; (3) straight men needed to disavow
patriarchal privilege; (4) straight women needed to disavow the privi-

leges associated with femininity; (5) radical heterosexuals needed to re-
sist their “gender imprinting,” or their erotic investment in traditional
gender roles; and, relatedly, (6) feminists needed to forgive one another
for their attachments to the gender binary given that gender roles are
such a ubiquitous and powerful part of erotic life. Of course, all of this
sounds great, if not a bit broad and perhaps overambitious for the 1990s,
if not also for today. But as Wolf ’s essay shifted toward sex itself, or what
radical heterosexuality might look like “in bed,” she doubled down on
gender essentialism, imagining similarity and identification as antitheti-

cal to straightness, reserved only for lesbian and gay relationships. Wolf
proclaimed, “I want the love of two unlikes. . . . These manifestations of
difference confirm in heterosexuals the beauty that similarity confirms
in the lesbian or gay imagination. Difference and animality do not have
to mean hierarchy.” Wolf went on to explain that women and men are
so different, at least so differently socialized, that they are, for all intents
and purposes, in a “cross-cultural relationship.”18
This logic remains quite popular today, notably in the work of the
internationally best-selling author Esther Perel, a relationship therapist
known for recirculating the familiar argument that sexual desire is weak-
ened by intimacy and identification. Perel explains, “Love enjoys know-
ing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink
the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized
by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is
numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the
unexpected.”19 The notion that the erotic depends on distance and unfa-
miliarity, or “keeping the mystery alive,” is one of the conceptual anchors
of the heterosexual-repair industry, probably due to its resonance with
the gender binary (for instance, a peddler of heterosexual repair might
say, “It’s a good thing that men and women are from two different plan-
ets. . . . It may lead to some miscommunication and resentment, but it
keeps things hot!”). Of course, gender differences are sexy—in queer
relationships, too—but in straight culture these differences are almost
always taken to be essential, unchangeable, and of great consequence.

They are imagined to be so significant as to produce inevitable cross-
cultural misunderstandings and tense encounters, battles even, between
people from two different planets. They are believed to cultivate the at-
traction of “opposites” and to inhibit identification and sameness.
Lesbian feminists and gay-liberation activists challenged this logic
by arguing that their eroticism was actually forged through identifica-
tion; when women had sex with women or men had sex with men, they
discovered what was desirable about themselves through the mirror of
their partners’ bodies and desires. As in Audre Lorde’s description of

the erotic meeting of joyful equals, lesbian feminists argued that lesbian
sex represented a kind of feminist praxis wherein lust and identification
were not mutually exclusive but radically interconnected. Harry Hay,
the early gay-liberation activist, called this praxis “subject-to-subject
consciousness” and believed it was impossible within straight culture,
wherein sexual partners were perceived as “other.”20 But I believe this
convergence could occur in heterosexual sex, wherein straight men
might have the capacity to feel such enthusiastic and irrepressible desire
for women that their energies flow in the direction of women. Straight
men could be so deeply heterosexual, so drawn to women, as to be
“woman identified,” to see themselves mirrored in the faces, bodies, and
lives of women.
For many lesbian feminists, to feel genuine lust for women involved
an enthusiastic interest in what gave women sexual pleasure. Adrienne
Rich and Andrea Dworkin called this orientation “antiphallic sexual-
ity,” or the decentering of sex acts principally organized around men’s
pleasure and women’s accommodation. One place where we can find a
clear example of this antiphallic sexuality is, perhaps ironically, in the
sexual encounter of the stone butch and the femme. The stone butch is
often defined by what she did not want to do—she did not wish to be
penetrated or even to be sexually touched in some cases—but the les-
bian writer Joan Nestle has highlighted what the stone butch did wish
to do, to experience erotic gratification from her capacity to bring plea-
sure to women.21 The irony here is that critics of butch/femme genders

perceived the stone butch, with her masculine appearance and gestures,
as the epitome of women’s potential for male identification, a troubling
mimicry of “phallic” heteromasculinity. But, Nestle asks, what could be
further from straight men’s approach to sex than determinedly decen-
tering one’s own body and defining sex as that which brings pleasure to
women? I am not suggesting here that straight men become stone, or
untouched, but rather that the figure of the stone butch symbolizes the
possibility of erotic generosity and woman identification anchored in
masculinity and (often) in the generous use of the dildo/phallus (or in

straight men’s case, the bio-dildo, also known as a penis).
For lesbian feminists, liking women also meant liking the whole
woman, or the less coercively modified woman. Accounts of this expan-
sive lust for women can be found in lesbian feminist memoirs, in which
body fat, cancer scars, power exchange, disability, aging, radical activ-
ism, self-love, years of sexual experience deemed “slutty” in the straight
world, and various forms of embodied “ridiculousness” are all fodder for
lesbian feminist arousal. I offer a few examples:
Audre Lorde, in Zami, reverently describes Ginger, her first lover, as “gor-
geously fat, with an open knowledge about her body’s movement that was
delicate and precise. . . . She had pads of firm fat upon her thighs, and round
dimpled knees. . . . Loving Ginger that night was like coming home to a joy I
was meant for.” Lorde later describes her lust for a different woman, Eudora,
whose “pale keloids of radiation burn” were part of her irresistible body: “If
I did not put my mouth upon hers and inhale the spicy smell of her breath
my lungs would burst. . . . I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy
nipple to her scarred chest. . . . I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar. . . .
The pleasure of our night flushed over me like sun on the walls.” By contrast,
Lorde describes sex with men in terms similar to those used by many femi-
nist straight women of her generation; sex with men was “pretty dismal and
frightening and a little demeaning.”22
Dorothy Allison, illuminating her gleeful dis/identification with the phal-

lus, recounts her pleasure in “fucking, fucking, fucking” Alix, a woman
who wore a dildo named “Bubba,” a cock “fat and bent”: “[It] jiggles ob-
scenely when she walks around the room. Obscene and ridiculous, still
no less effective when she puts it between my legs.” Allison goes on to de-
tail the shifting power dynamics between her and Alix, evoking her erotic
identification with the vilified old woman, the crone: “She is ten years
younger than me . . . sometimes. Sometimes I am eight and she is not born
yet, but the ghost of her puts a hand on my throat, pinches my clit, bites
my breast. . . . When I am fucking her, I am a thousand years old, a crone

with teeth. . . . She is a suckling infant, soft in my hands, trusting me with
her tender open places.”23
Highlighting the lesbian feminist disinvestment in female sexual innocence

and modesty, Jeanne Cordova recalls that her status as a handsome butch
lesbian and high-profile radical organizer “brought dozens of women” to
her bed, one of whom, Bejo, Cordova describes as “the most accomplished
femme lover” she’d ever met. “Old-school bar femmes were far better lovers
than newly coined lesbian feminists.”24
Cherríe Moraga, too, desires a woman with age, accomplishment. Of Elena,

the woman she lusts for, Moraga states, “I am ready for you now. I want
age. Knowledge. Your body that still, after years, withholds and surrenders—
keeps me there, waiting, wishing. . . . Willing. Willing to feel this time what
disrupts in me. Girl. Woman. Child. Boy. Willing to embody what I will in
the space of her arms.”25
Lesbian feminist desire, in these accounts, is defined not purely by two

women’s sexual attraction to each other but by a quality of desiring
women in which the objects of one’s lust are women’s complexities and
accomplishments, both corporeal and otherwise. The best women lov-
ers have the scars, the hunger, the weight, the teeth, and the political
and sexual experience that allows them to know and harness their erotic
will. Through Lorde’s desiring gaze, physical features that are often cast
as deeroticizing imperfections in the straight world are remade into
sites of pleasure. In Allison’s writing, sex with women is transforma-
tive and dead serious in its intensity, but it is also an inevitable send-up
to the phallocentric self-seriousness of heteronormativity. In Cordova’s
retelling of her life story, there is no erotic without the movement, the
revolution, and the battle scars and street cred earned by women at its
helm. In Moraga’s account, her lust is shot through with desire for the
fruits of her lover’s lived experience.
I dare say that this way of loving women, this understanding of the
erotic, need not be owned by lesbians but is among the basic require-
ments of deep heterosexuality, wherein men’s lust for women is triggered
by women’s actual temperaments, bodies, and experiences. Men’s sense
of being sexually orientated toward women must signal, as it does for
most lesbians, an acute interest and investment in women’s lives and ac-
complishments because, within deep heterosexuality, attraction is mea-
sly and half-baked if it is not a synthesis of lust and humanization. From
this viewpoint, the hyperstraight man possesses an unstoppable interest
not only in women’s bodies but also in women’s collective freedom. To
be into women, one must be for women. To be an authentically straight
man, or a deep heterosexual—and not a pseudoheterosexual who uses
women to impress men—one must be a feminist.
It Can Get Better
The discourse surrounding queer suffering and the ease of heterosexuality

reflects a certain kind of reality, but it also obscures another. It masks the
gendered suffering produced by straight culture, as well as queer sensa-
tions of freedom that result from having escaped not homophobia but
heterosexual misery. My hope is that three main conclusions can be taken
away from this project. The first point is that the normalization of violence
and mutual dislike was central to straight culture from its modern incep-
tion, and even when this was recognized as a problem, efforts to address
it simply reproduced the same binaristic, subject/object frameworks that

undergirded the problem in the first place. The important point here is
that while many people remain attached to the notion that embracing
men’s and women’s purportedly unchangeable and complementary differ-
ences is the key to heterosexual harmony, this framework has never made
a dent in the violence and misogyny that cause straight people to suffer. It
is an unworkable foundation on which to build a sexual orientation. The
suggestion I offer here, that straight men consider woman identification,
or subject-subject eroticism, is one alternative.
Second, we cannot underestimate the capacity of neoliberal projects,

like the self-help movement, to repackage and monetize feminist ideas,
reducing them to matters of self-interest and economic exchange. As
I have shown, the heterosexual-repair industry has turned to feminist
concepts—about consent, male privilege, and toxic masculinity—to
train men to be less offensive and seemingly more empathic, in the
service of seducing women or managing their own public image. I an-
ticipate that this trend will continue and expand. It can be seen, for
instance, in recent headlines about powerful men seeking redemption
and a return to their former financial success, following accusations of
sexual harassment and public accountability in the context of #metoo.26
Ultimately, this approach is anchored in straight men’s self-interest, or
what they can extract from women—often by exchanging empathy and
decency for sex or forgiveness. From a queer feminist perspective, this is
an example of the fragile and illusory character of straight life, wherein
interest and identification must be faked. As an ally to straight people,
I wish for them that their lust for one another might be genuinely born
out of mutual regard and solidarity.
Lastly, queer people—and dykes in particular—are keen observers of
the tragedy of heterosexuality. And we are already engaged in the work
of alliance: as prochoice activists, sex educators, staff at women’s centers,
rape crisis advocates, and confidants for straight women in distress. We
would not be doing this work if we didn’t know that another way is pos-
sible. We know that straight men could be so attracted to women that
they might as well rename their sexual orientation, recognizing that the
term feminist, and not straight, is the best way to describe the expan-
siveness of their desires for women. We know that it is, in fact, the only
way to truly capture how fully straight men could desire to love and
lust for women, to live and struggle alongside women. We know, too,
that straight women, for their part, must be bold enough to expect this
from men, to demand so much more of straight men’s ostensible love
of women. Men who say they love women need to show women the
receipts. They can do it. You can do it. We are here for you.
acknowledgments
This b o ok is the product of many exhil arating

conversations, only some of which occurred in real life. The others took
place in my imagination, in dialogue with bold and brilliant lesbian fem-
inist writers who are no longer with us—may they rest in power. It also
reflects many feminist chats with straight-identified friends, students,
and colleagues. Thank you to everyone who answered thoughtfully
when I asked questions like “Can you explain to me in detail why you
are straight?”
The LA-based queer feminist writing group Lezerati is the birthplace
of my ideas for this book and where it ultimately took form. My deep
gratitude goes to Lynn Ballen, Robin Podolsky, Judith Branzburg, Talia
Mae Bettcher, Alicia Vogl Saenz, Claudia Rodriguez, and Sam Cohen
for their inspiration and straightforward feedback. I don’t know how
anyone writes a book without several razor-sharp and supportive dykes
in their corner.
Thanks also to my friends and colleagues who talked through ideas,
read drafts, or listened to me present this work and gave me their ex-
cellent feedback: Tey Meadow, Angela Jones, Jack Halberstam, Amin
Ghaziani, Eric Stanley, C. J. Pascoe, Jade Sasser, Moon Charania, Bran-
don Robinson, Todd Reeser, Lisa Brush, Elsie Rivas-Gomez, Amy
Tahani-Bidmeshki, and Shawn Schulenberg. Thank you to the organiz-
ers and participants at the American Men’s Studies Association annual
conference—Frank Karioris, Jonathan Allan, Andrea Waling, Kristen
Barber, Jeffrey McCune, Tristan Bridges—who provided comments that
shaped chapter 3. Special thanks are due to the editors of the NYU Press
Sexual Cultures series, especially Ann Pellegrini, for their continued
support of my writing, and to my editor, the ever-fabulous Ilene Kalish,
175
176 • aCKNOWLEDGMENTS
for her many readings of this book and her embrace of my weird sense
of humor.
Without a beloved community and family, I cannot write. Thank
you to Layla Welborn, Vassilisa Kapila, Mel Dase, Rachel Luft, Gloria
Williamson, Rachel Hall, Maren Ross, Steven Ross, Shirley Ward, Alex
Ward, and Laurie Gow for the love and connection that provide the nec-
essary balance to my work life.
And to Kat and Yarrow, my anchors: thank you for valuing queer and
feminist ways of life as much as I do. I love you both so much.
Notes
Chapter 1. Let’s Call It What It Is

1. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Women’s Studies
International Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1979): 183–194.
2. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New
York: St. Martin’s, 2018), 25.
3. Jasbir Puar, “In the Wake of It Gets Better,” The Guardian, November 16, 2010,
www.theguardian.com.
4. For the depressing evidence, see Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers,
and the Myth of Equal Partnership (New York: Harper, 2019).
5. I am using the terms “queer feminist” and “lesbian feminist” interchangeably here.
While in some cases I do this to signal the revolutionary and counternormative
sexual politics of many lesbian feminist activists writing in the 1970s and ’80s (see
Roderick Ferguson’s book One Dimensional Queer [Medford, MA: Polity, 2018]
for more on this), I also note that some lesbian feminists, including Cherríe
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, referred to themselves as “queer” in their early
writing, years before the early 1990s emergence of queer as a widely embraced
political umbrella. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza
(San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years
(Boston: South End, 1983). I am also using “queer/lesbian” as an umbrella term
designed to signal a very broad range of queer feminist critiques that have called
themselves “lesbian and . . . [fill in the blank].” Akin to the trans* use of the
asterisk, we might imagine queer/lesbian as lesbian*: the term evokes many
varying identifications and modes of critique that have understood themselves to

fall within the category lesbian. Thank you to Lynn Ballen for drawing my
attention to lesbian* uses of the asterisk.
6. The violence of heterosexual relationships was a core issue for lesbian feminists
during the gay-liberation era, but it arguably became less central to later queer
thinkers who turned their attention to the urgency of AIDS-phobic, antiqueer,
anti-Black, and antitrans violence of state institutions and to the various ways that
queer people survive and resist. The popularity of bioevolutionary theories of
sexual orientation in the 1990s and early 2000s also chipped away at the notion
that every woman was a potential lesbian (the “political lesbian” hypothesis); the
majority of Americans now believe that we are born with an unchangeable
heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual constitution. Straight people’s homophobic
177
178 • NOTES
contempt for LGBT people, fueled in the 1980s and ’90s by the AIDS epidemic
and conservative “family values” campaigns, also did not help inspire queer
people’s sympathies for straight women’s gendered and sexual suffering. For all of
these reasons, the lesbian feminist conversation about what feminist straight
women should do with their desire for men, and vice versa, died on the vine by
the 1990s, rendering straight people’s problems seemingly irrelevant—if not also a
bit satisfying—to queers.
7. The Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” in Out of the Closets:
Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: NYU Press,
1972), 178.
8. “Mary” (anonymous), “A Letter from Mary,” ibid., 178.
9. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1982),
104.
10. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 39, 41.
11. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).
12. Moraga, Loving in the War Years, 102.
13. Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (New
York: Perigee Books, 1987), xi.
14. bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Boston: South End,
2000), 67.
15. Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), in
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2000), 266.
16. See Anzaldúa, Borderlands; and Moraga, Loving in the War Years. In 2013, the
Black queer women founders of the Black Lives Matter movement described this
as a continuing problem: “Black liberation movements in this country have
created room, space, and leadership mostly for Black heterosexual, cisgender
men—leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the
movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no
recognition.” See Black Lives Matter, “Herstory,” accessed December 11, 2019,
https://blacklivesmatter.com.
17. Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Super Woman (1978; repr.,
New York: Verso, 2015), 16 (emphasis in original).
18. Moraga, Loving in the War Years; Anzaldúa, Borderlands; Carla Trujillo, Chicana
Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman,
1991).
19. Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (Ithaca, NY:
Firebrand Books, 1994).
20. Gay Revolution Party Women’s Caucus, “Realesbians and Politicalesbians,” in Jay
and Young, Out of the Closets, 178.
21. Jill Johnston, “The Comingest Womanifesto,” in Admission Accomplished: The
Lesbian Nation Years (1970–75) (Collingdale, PA: Diane, 1998), 212.
NOTES • 179
22. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no.
4 (1980): 631–660.
23. For more on the patriarchal bargain, see Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with
Patriarchy,” Gender & Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274–290; and Carole Pateman, The
Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
24. Karen Martin, “Hetero-romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated
Films,” Gender & Society 23, no. 3 (2009): 315–336.
25. Lorena Garcia, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity
(New York: NYU Press, 2012).
26. See C. J. Pascoe’s examination of high-school-aged boys’ sex talk and its focus on
what is abject about girls bodies in Dude, You’re a Fag (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
27. Michael Flood, “Men, Sex, and Homosociality: How Bonds between Men Shape
Their Sexual Relations with Women,” Men and Masculinities 10, no. 3 (2007):
339–359; Sharon Bird, “Welcome to the Men’s Club: Homosociality and the
Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity,” Gender & Society 10, no. 2 (1996):
120–132.
28. Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography,
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (1985; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
30. See Leta Hong Fincher, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in
China (London: Zed Books, 2014). For the US context, see Susan Faludi’s
Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women (1991; repr., New York:
Broadway Books, 2006).
31. Lockman, All the Rage.
32. Gloria González-López, Family Secrets: Stories of Incest and Sexual Violence in
Mexico (New York: NYU Press, 2015).
33. Diana Scully, “Convicted Rapists’ Perceptions of Self and Victim: Role Taking and
Emotions,” Gender & Society 2, no. 2 (1988): 200–213.
34. Beth Richie, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black
Women (New York: Routledge, 1995).

35. See Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in
Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Audra Simpson, Mohawk
Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014), chap. 6; and Hilary Weaver, “The Colonial Context of
Violence: Reflections on Violence in the Lives of Native American Women,”
Journal of Interpersonal Violence 24, no. 9 (2008): 1552–1563.
36. See, for instance, JoAnn Wypijewski. “Primitive Heterosexuality: From
Steubenville to the Marriage Altar,” The Nation, April 9, 2013; Rebecca Traister,
“Why Sex That’s Consensual Can Still Be Bad,” The Cut, October 20, 2015; Jessica
Valenti, “Elliot Rodgers’ Shooting Spree: Further Proof That Misogyny Kills,” The
180 • NOTES
Guardian, May 24, 2014; Susan Rohwer, “It’s Time to Silence ‘GamerGate,’ End the
Misogyny in Gamer Culture,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2014.
37. Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sujata Warrier, “In the Footsteps of Arundhati: Asian
Indian Women’s Experience of Domestic Violence in the United States,” Violence
Against Women 2, no. 3 (1996): 238–259.
38. See Sunny Woan, “White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist
Jurisprudence,” Washington & Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice 14, no.
2 (2007): 275–301; Kat Chow, “Odds Favor White Men, Asian Women on Dating
Apps,” National Public Radio, November 30, 2013, www.npr.org.
39. Traister, “Why Sex.”
40. Kim Wallen and Elisabeth Lloyd, “Female Sexual Arousal: Genital Anatomy and
Orgasm in Intercourse,” Hormones and Behavior 59, no. 5 (2011): 780–792.
41. Martha McCaughey, The Caveman Mystique (New York: Routledge, 2008).
42. Melanie Heath, “Soft-Boiled Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender and Racial
Ideologies in the Promise Keepers,” Gender & Society 17, no. 3 (2003): 423–444.
43. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (1991; repr.,
New York: Broadway Books, 2006); Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working
Families and the Revolution at Home (1989; repr., New York: Penguin Books,
2003).
44. Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (New York: NYU Press,
2015).
45. For a reprinting and analysis of correspondence from gay male readers for Not
Gay, see Jane Ward, “Dyke Methods: A Meditation on Queer Studies and the Gay
Men Who Hate It,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 44, nos. 3–4 (2016): 68–85.
46. Erin Sullivan, “Are Straight Women Okay?,” Autostraddle, March 23, 2017, www.
autostraddle.com.
47. Erin Sullivan, “It Appears Straight Women Are Not Okay,” Autostraddle, June 8,
2017, www.autostraddle.com.
48. For research suggesting that the old adage that “it’s funny because it’s true” may be
accurate, see Robert Lynch, “It’s Funny Because We Think It’s True: Laughter Is
Augmented by Implicit Preferences,” Evolution and Human Behavior 31, no. 2
(2010): 141–148.
49. Beth Eck, “Men Are Much Harder: Gendered Viewing of Nude Images,” Gender &
Society 17, no. 4 (2003): 691–710.
50. Reina Gattuso, “What I Would Have Said to You Last Night Had You Not Cum
and Then Fallen Asleep,” Feministing, August 4, 2016, http://feministing.com.
51. Lea Winerman, “Helping Men to Help Themselves,” APA Monitor on Psychology
36, no. 7 (2005): 57.
52. Melanie Hamlett, “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden,” Harper’s
Bazaar, May 2, 2019, www.harpersbazaar.com.
53. Ibid.
54. Cooper, Eloquent Rage, 23, 25.
NOTES • 181
55. Ward, Not Gay, 31.

56. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1990).
57. Tristan Bridges and C. J. Pascoe, “Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the
Sociology of Men and Masculinities,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 3 (2014): 246–258.
58. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” 637.
59. Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (New York: Riverhead
Books, 2012).
60. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (New York:
Beacon, 2013), 47.
61. Fincher, Leftover Women. A fascinating component of Fincher’s analysis is the
role of the Chinese state in inciting women’s fear of being “leftover” (or never
married). A popular Xinhua News column on the subject was reposted by several
government media sites including the All-China Women’s Federation website.
The column warned, “[Women] excessively pursue perfection. The problem is
that many of these women are too clear-headed, they can’t tolerate weakness in
their partner, especially since more and more women seek the ‘three highs’—high
education, high professional achievement and high income. Their standards for
their careers and partners are so high, that by the time they want to marry, they
discover that almost all of the men who are their equal in education and age are
already married. For the group of white-collar women who don’t find a partner,
loneliness is a common occurrence. As these unmarried women age, the feeling of
loneliness gets worse and worse.”
62. D. A. Frederick, H. K. S. John, J. R. Garcia, and E. A. Lloyd, “Differences in
Orgasm Frequency among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Men and
Women in a U.S. National Sample,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 47, no. 1(2018):
273.
63. Melanie Brewster, “Lesbian Women and Household Labor Division: A Systematic
Review of Scholarly Research from 2000 to 2015,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 21, no.
1 (2017): 47–69.
64. Marieka Klawitter, “Meta Analysis of the Effects of Sexual Orientation on
Earnings,” Industrial Relations: Journal of Economy and Society 54, no. 1 (2015):
4–32.
65. Nanette Gartrell, Amalia Deck, and Carla Rodas, “Adolescents with Lesbian
Mothers Describe Their Own Lives,” Journal of Homosexuality 59, no. 9 (2012):
1211–1229.
66. Francisco Perales and Janeen Baxter, “Sexual Identity and Relationship Quality in
Australia and the United Kingdom,” Family Relations 67, no. 1 (2017): 55–69.
67. Andrew Gelman, “Same Sex Divorce Rate Not as Low as It Seemed,” Washington
Post, December, 15, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com.
68. Taylor N. T. Brown and Jody L. Herman, Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual
Abuse Among LGBT People: A Review of Existing Research (Los Angeles: Williams
182 • NOTES
Institute, 2015), https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu; see also Sarah Schulman’s

book Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the
Duty of Repair (New York: Arsenal Pulp, 2016) for a nuanced discussion of LGBT
intimate-partner violence reporting.
69. See Tanya McNeil, “A Nation of Families: The Codification and (Be)Longings of
Heteropatriarchy,” in Toward a Sociology of the Trace, ed. Herman Gray and
Macarena Gomez-Barris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010),
57–86.
70. See Maggie Hadleigh-West’s 1998 documentary The War Zone (Film Fatale Inc.)
for footage of these interactions between men and women on public streets.
71. See C. J. Pascoe’s ethnography of “River High,” Dude, You’re a Fag, in which she
documents how boys’ stories about sex were frequently detached from any
positive erotic meanings, including their own personal pleasure or orgasm.
Instead, mastery and conquest of girls’ abject bodies took center stage in their
tales. Boys’ stories emphasized what they found disgusting about girls bodies
(namely, blood, farts, and feces), and these stories included violent imagery of
ripping vaginal walls and making girls bleed.
72. Jason Schultz, “Getting Off on Feminism,” in To Be Real: Telling the Truth and
Changing the Face of Feminism, ed. Rebecca Walker (New York: Anchor Books,
1995), 107–126.
73. Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex, and Power in Music Video, directed by Sut Jhally
(Media Education Foundation, 2007).
74. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on
the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016); see also Jason DeParle’s review
of Hochschild’s book: “Book Review: Why Do People Who Need Help from the
Government Hate It So Much?,” New York Times, September 19, 2016, www.
nytimes.com.
75. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2,
24.
Chapter 2. He’s Just Not That into You

1. See Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive
Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in
Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” (1975), in The Second Wave: A
Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 27–62.
2. See Hanne Blank’s book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality
(New York: Beacon, 2012) for a pre-twentieth-century overview of the long and
controversial emergence of heterosexual romantic love.
3. Men and women have coupled—in sex and in marriage—for centuries, but “being
heterosexual” is a modern development. The terms “heterosexuality” and
“homosexuality” were not invented until the late nineteenth century, when they
appeared in European medical journals, and it would be decades later before they
NOTES • 183
embedded themselves in medical, legal, religious, and state institutions in Europe

and the United States and subsequently became tools of imperial influence across
the globe. See Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (New York:
NYU Press, 2015), for a review of this history.
4. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and
Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005).
5. Ibid., 159.
6. Ibid., 156, 160.
7. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Boston: Small, Maynard,
1898), for a first-wave feminist account of romantic marriage as false promise, a
lure that seduces women into providing free labor. See also Blank, Straight; Rubin,
“Traffic in Women”; Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender &
Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274–290; Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of
Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), for a historical
overview of the modern campaign for heterosexuality; and Stephanie Coontz, The
Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic
Books, 1993), for a historical debunking of romanticized notions of marriage in
the United States.
8. Rubin, “Traffic in Women,” 38.
9. Marilyn Katz, “Ideology and the Status of Women in Ancient Greece,” History and
Theory 31, no. 4 (1992): 70–97; David Halperin, One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Also see the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, who argues in Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985) that love and sexual intimacy among men and boys in ancient Greece did
not threaten men’s power but served patriarchal interests: “for the Greeks, that
continuum between men loving men and men promoting the interests of men
appears to have been quite seamless” (4).
10. Blank, Straight, 70–72.
11. Ward, Not Gay.
12. The number of marriage manuals produced in the early twentieth century was
small enough that I was able to access all of the most impactful, or widely cited,
texts. As this genre expanded into the mid- and late twentieth century, I have
focused on best sellers, texts with international audiences, and other iconic
examples from popular culture.
13. Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
14. Marriage laws and forced sterilization were strategies used to discourage
childbearing within “unfit” communities.
15. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 3, Analysis of the Sexual
Impulse (1903), excerpted in Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual
184 • NOTES
Science, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 108–109.
16. Lesley Hall, “Introduction to Part IV,” ibid., 108.
17. Marie Stopes, Married Love (1918), excerpted ibid., 118.
18. Ibid., 119.
19. Ellis, Studies, 115.
20. William Robinson, Married Life and Happiness; or, Love and Comfort in Marriage
(New York: Eugenics Publishing, 1922), 25–26.
21. Howard W. Long, Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living (New York: Eugenics
Publishing, 1919), 60.
22. John Stokes, The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1920), 26; Elie Metchnikoff, The New Hygiene: Three
Lectures on the Prevention of Infectious Disease (Chicago: W. T. Keener, 1907), 77;
Christina Simmons, “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social
Hygiene Movement, 1910–40,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 1 (1993): 71.
23. See Lilian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991); George Chauncey, Gay
New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World,
1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
24. Robinson, Married Life, 25–26.
25. Bernarr Macfadden, Womanhood and Marriage (New York: Physical Culture
Corporation, 1918).
26. See Anne McClintock’s discussion of the patriarchal and white-supremacist
imagery in late nineteenth-century soap advertising, in Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
27. Long, Sane Sex Life, 17.
28. Ibid., 19.
29. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the
New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Julian Carter, The Heart of
Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007).
30. Katherine Franke, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (New York: NYU
Press, 2015).
31. Simmons, “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism,” 71.
32. For a thorough and fascinating account of this partnership between male
physicians and early feminists, see Christina Simmons, Making Marriage Modern:
Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
33. See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American
Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–174.
34. Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 203–229.
NOTES • 185
35. See Saidiya Hartman’s stunning speculative history of the sexual modernism of
freedom-seeking Black women in early twentieth-century American cities:
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (New York: Norton, 2019). Hartman offers
a counternarrative that resists white-supremacist characterizations of Black
women at the turn of the century as “promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward,”
pointing instead to their utopian longings and feminist/queer innovations (xiii).
36. Some midcentury physician’s manuals did continue to emphasize the possibility
of new wives’ repulsion at the idea of sex with their husbands. For instance, in
Herman Pomeranz and Irvin Koll’s The Family Physician (New York: Greystone,
1957), the authors assert that girls who have not been counseled about hetero-
sexual sex “may be greatly shocked and even disgusted by sexual relations in
marriage” (201).
37. Alfred Henry Tyrer, Sex Satisfaction and Happy Marriage: A Practical Handbook
(New York: Emerson Books, 1951), 127, 129.
38. See Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle:
African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York:
NYU Press, 2001); Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women
Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement,” Gender & Society 7, no. 2 (1993): 162–182;
Dennis Urban, “The Women of SNCC: Struggle, Sexism, and the Emergence of
Feminist Consciousness, 1960–66,” International Social Science Review 77, nos.
3–4 (2002): 185–190.
39. See Dorothy Height’s essay “‘We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard’:
Black Women and the 1963 March on Washington,” in Collier-Thomas and
Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle, 83–92.
40. Money, quoted in Terry Goldie, The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the
Ideas of John Money (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014), 45.
41. “The happy housewife” was a popular midcentury American archetype, even as
this fantasy was out of reach for many white women (who weren’t made happy by
heterosexual marriage) and an impossibility for many women of color, many of
whom were employed in the service of white women’s striving for heterosexual
happiness (by working as maids, child-care providers, etc.). As the feminist theorist
Sara Ahmed inquires in The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010), “How better to justify an unequal division of labor than to say that
such labor makes people happy? How better to secure consent to unpaid or poorly
paid labor than to describe such consent as the origin of good feeling?” (50).
42. Edward Podolsky, Sex Today in Wedded Life: A Doctor’s Confidential Advice (New
York: Simon, 1947), 236.
43. Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, (New York:
Verso, 1990), 14.
44. Ibid., 15.
45. Daniel Greary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
186 • NOTES
46. Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New
York: Macmillan, 2002).
47. “Young Man’s Fancy,” film advertisement produced by General Electric, 1952.
48. See, for instance, Ebony, November 1959, 121, 142.
49. Advertising in women’s magazines also spoke directly to women’s fears about
their husbands’ violence against children. For instance, to market a pediatric
laxative, Fletcher’s Castoria ads of 1939 and 1940 depicted wives protecting
children from brutal fathers willing to use force to make children take their
medicine. The ads, appearing in women’s magazines such as Redbook and
Women’s Home Companion, linked gentle parenting—the responsibility of
women—with the use of a gentle children’s laxative.
50. See Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth, and Leisure Style in
Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001).
51. Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 130.
52. Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
53. Marriage Today, short film produced by McGraw-Hill, 1948. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=BKfbDrYpcqw.
54. Joanne Meyerowitz, “Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material: Responses to
Girlie Pictures in Mid-Twentieth-Century U.S.,” Journal of Women’s History 8, no.
3 (1996): 9–35.
55. By contrast, see Alexandra Chasin’s Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement
Goes to Market (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) for an investigation of the
difficulties marketers encountered attempting to figure out how to commodify
lesbian culture or to determine what might motivate lesbians to buy their
products.
56. Jennifer Maher, “What Do Women Watch? Tuning In to the Compulsory
Heterosexuality Channel,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan
Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 197–213.
57. Robin Norwood, Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and
Hoping He’ll Change (1985; repr., New York: Pocket Books, 2008), xvii.
58. Ibid., 150.
59. Iyanla Vanzant, In the Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love You Want (New
York: Atria Books, 1998).
60. Susan Forward, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When
Loving Hurts and You Don’t Know Why (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 38.
61. Ibid., 98.
62. Ibid., 97.
63. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the
New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51.
NOTES • 187
64. Kylie Murphy, “What Does John Gray Have to Say to Feminism?,” Continuum:
Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2001): 159–167.
65. See Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender & Society 2, no. 3
(1988): 274–290.
66. Ibid., 280.
67. Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts (Chicago:
Northfield, 1992), 38.
68. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven, CT: Yale
69. Susan Maushart, Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2002). Quotes from the publisher’s description of the book on its
website: www.bloomsbury.com.
70. Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New
York: St. Martin’s, 2018), 234.
71. Steve Harvey, Act Like Lady, Think Like a Man (New York: Amistad, 2009), 42.
72. Eliza Anyangwe, “Misogynoir: Where Racism and Sexism Meet,” The Guardian,
October 5, 2015, www.theguardian.com.
73. Sherry Argov, Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman’s
Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship (New York: Adams Media, 2002), 77.
74. Hall, “Introduction to Part IV,” 107.
75. See Bianca Williams, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams,
and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018); Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and
the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Elif
Batuman, “Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry,” New Yorker, April 30, 2018, www.
newyorker.com.
76. See the website Men Going Their Own Way, www.mgtow.com.
77. For a fascinating study of a megaevent designed to repair heterosexual men,
see Melanie Heath, “Soft-Boiled Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender and
Racial Ideologies in the Promise Keepers,” Gender & Society 17, no. 3 (2003):
423–444.
78. According to Robbins’s website, “Robbins has empowered more than 50 million
people from 100 countries through his audio, video and life training programs.
He created the #1 personal and professional development program of all time, and
more than 4 million people have attended his live seminars.” (Robbins’s other
credentials include being a personal adviser to President Bill Clinton and being
named “CEO Whisperer” by Fortune magazine.) See “About Tony Robbins,” Tony
Robbins’s website, www.tonyrobbins.com.
79. Some of these ideas have their origins in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the
1980s. See Michael Messner, “‘Changing Men’ and Feminist Politics in the United
States,” Theory and Society 2, no. 5 (1993): 723–737.
188 • NOTES
Chapter 3. Pickup artists

1. But then again, perhaps the reference to the Bible is not entirely code. The
New York Times best-selling book that launched the pickup-artist industry,
Neil Strauss’s The Game (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), has a black
faux-leather cover, faux-gold-gilded pages, and a red-satin ribbon to mark
one’s favorite “passage.” Passed among men as the essential handbook for
successfully “sarging on HBs” (picking up hot babes), The Game has taken
on the quality of a rare and sacred text— even as it is a click away on
Amazon.com.
2. The owners of both companies enthusiastically agreed to allow me to observe
their bootcamps free of charge, explaining that they would like to see the public
have a more nuanced and accurate understanding of their work.
3. As Jack Halberstam has argued, popular film and television loves to pair
unappealing men and remarkable women, with numerous Hollywood films often
centered on ostensibly romantic situations in which “the stupider and more
pathetic the male heroes become, the more they are loved by exceptional women.”
Halberstam, “Dumb Getting Dumber: Sideways, Spongebob, and the New
Masculinity,” Bitch, February 28, 2005, www.bitchmedia.org.
4. Dreamworlds 3, directed by Sut Jhally (Media Education Foundation, 2008), www.
sutjhally.com.
5. Laura Kipnis, “Kick against the Pricks,” New York Review of Books, December 21,
2017, www.nybooks.com.
6. Sarah Ratchford, a reporter for Vice, provided sympathetic coverage of pickup
artists in her article “I Spoke to a Pick-Up Artist to See If They’re as Bad as I
Think They Are,” Vice, July 9, 2014, www.vice.com; see also Rachel O’Neill,
Seduction: Men, Masculinity, and Mediated Intimacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2018).
7. During this exercise was the only instance in which a coach referred to my
presence. Kezia, the lead coach, gestured at me and said, “See this woman over
here, sitting quietly? I saw many of you speaking with her during the break. She
has a PhD. Why are you not intimidated to speak with her but intimidated by a
nineteen-year-old bimbo?” Though one of the men responded, “Well, we didn’t
know that about her,” I knew from their previous comments that I, then in my late
thirties, was well over their desired age.
8. Regarding socioeconomic status, seduction coaches commonly emphasize to their
students that anyone can afford to take their classes if they are willing to make
necessary sacrifices. They share stories about men who have gone into debt or
scrimped and saved—one man reportedly slept in his car in order to save money
on rent—in order to fund their seduction course work.
9. O’Neill, Seduction.
10. See Madeleine Davis, “An Easy Guide to Fending Off Pickup Artists,” Jezebel, June
21, 2013, https://jezebel.com, for an especially funny critique of negs.
NOTES • 189
11. The incel community grew out of the pickup-artist movement, though incels
often reject pickup artists for being “too humanizing” of women. “What Is An
Incel?,” New York Times, April 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com.
12. Malcolm Forbes and Ryan Anderson, “The Psychology of the Pickup Artist,” The
Mating Game (blog), Psychology Today, November 11, 2014, www.psychologyto-
day.com.
13. Rafael Behr, “Girls, If You See This Man, Run a Mile,” The Guardian, September
24, 2005, www.theguardian.com. For feminist analyses of the way that straight
men are often motivated by homosocial and homoerotic bonding more so than
heterosexual sex itself, see Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex,
Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus (New York: NYU Press, 2007); and Jane
Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (New York: NYU Press, 2015).
14. Sarah Ratchford, “I Tried to Find Out If Pickup Artists Are Still Influential in
2017,” Vice, August 25, 2017, www.vice.com.
15. Elizabeth Haag, “The Secret World of Men,” Jezebel, March 22, 2010, https://
jezebel.com; Katie Baker, “Is There Such a Thing as a Feminist Pickup Artist?”
Jezebel, June 25, 2013, https://jezebel.com.
16. Baker, “Is There Such a Thing as a Feminist Pickup Artist?”
17. Ratchford, “I Tried to Find Out.”
18. Haag, “Secret World of Men.”
19. O’Neill, Seduction, 17.
20. Jane Ward, “Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes, and the Collective Work of
Transgression,” Sexualities 13, no. 2 (2010): 236–254.
21. Diana Scully, “Convicted Rapists’ Perceptions of Self and Victim: Role Taking and
Emotions,” Gender & Society 2, no. 2 (1988): 200–213.
22. See Lisa Diamond’s similar argument in Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s
Love and Desire, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
23. O’Neill, Seduction, 98.
24. Nicola Gavey, Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (London: Routledge,
2005).
26. Melissa Davey, “U.S. Pickup Artist Julien Blanc Forced to Leave Australia after
Visa Cancelled,” The Guardian, November 7, 2014, www.theguardian.com; Alan
Travis, “Julien Blanc Barred from Entering UK,” The Guardian, November 19,
2014, www.theguardian.com.
27. Megan Gibson, “Is This the Most Hated Man in the World?,” Time, November 4,
2014, http://time.com.
29. Ibid.
30. See Abby Ferber, “Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors: The Construction of
Masculinity in Mythopoetic and White Supremacist Discourse,” Men and
Masculinities 3, no. 1 (2000): 30–35.
190 • NOTES
31. Rebecca Traister, “Why Sex That’s Consensual Sex Can Still Be Bad. And Why
We’re Not Talking about It,” Cut, October 20, 2015, www.thecut.com.
32. Men Can Stop Rape has since eliminated this campaign due to such critiques. See
its announcement, “Say Goodbye to ‘My Strength Is Not for Hurting,’” Men Can
Stop Rape Blog, December 14, 2011, http://mencanstoprape.blogspot.com; see also
Tristan Bridges and C. J. Pascoe’s analysis of this campaign as an example of
“discursive distancing” in their 2014 article “Hybrid Masculinities: New
Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinity,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 3
(2014): 246–258.
33. O’Connell Davidson and Julia Sanchez-Taylor, “Travel and Taboo: Heterosexual
Sex Tourism to the Caribbean,” in Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and
Identity, ed. Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Schaffner (London: Routledge, 2005),
83–100; Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western
Declines, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2015); M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations
on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
34. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 21–27.
35. See Ward, Not Gay.
36. See Brandon Robinson, “‘Personal Preference’ as the New Racism: Gay Desire and
Racial Cleansing in Cyberspace,” Sociology of Race & Ethnicity 1, no. 2 (2015):
317–330.
37. Helen Smith, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and
the American Dream (New York: Encounter Books, 2014); Susan Faludi, Backlash:
The Undeclared War against Women (New York: Broadway Books, 1991). See also
the self-help books discussed in detail in chapter 2.
Chapter 4. a Sick and Boring Life

Epigraphs: Jill Johnston, “Lois Lane Is a Lesbian” (1971), in Admission Accomplished:
The Lesbian Nation Years (1970–75) (London: Serpent’s Tale, 1998); Gloria Anzaldua,
interview by AnnLouise Keating, October 25–26, 1991, published in Frontiers,
September 22, 1993.
1. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the
Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
2. JoAnn Wypijewski, “Primitive Heterosexuality: From Steubenville to the Marriage
Altar,” Nation, April 9, 2013, www.thenation.com.
3. Paul Preciado, “Letter from a Tranman to the Old Sexual Regime,” Texte Zur
Kunst, January 22, 2018, www.textezurkunst.de.
4. James Baldwin, in the Village Voice, 1984, quoted in Jonathan Ned Katz, The
Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 103.
NOTES • 191
5. The Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” in Out of the Closets:

Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: NYU Press,
1972), 172.
6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1990), 70.
7. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the
Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
8. Marty Myron, Daily Life in the United States, 1960–1990: Decades of Discord
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 125, quoting Time, July 7, 1967, 20.
9. Wypijewski, “Primitive Heterosexuality.”
10. Michelson offers a caveat that commonly accompanies these kinds of assertions
and with which I agree: “I’m talking about straight people and culture—the
collective, the institutional—not necessarily individual straight persons, many of
whom are allies and friends and who would like to see a queer revolution as much
as I would.” Noah Michelson, “Why I Never Want to Be Just Like Straight People,”
HuffPost, December 11, 2013, www.huffpost.com.
11. I discarded one-word responses (namely, “yes” and “no”) because I had no way of
assessing their meaning.
12. Jane Ward, “Dyke Methods: A Meditation on Queer Studies and the Gay Men
Who Hate It,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 44, nos. 3–4 (2016): 68–83; Ward, “The
Methods Gatekeepers and the Exiled Queers,” in Other, Please Specify: Queer
Methods in Sociology, ed. D’Lane R. Compton, Tey Meadow, and Kristen Schilt
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 51–66.
13. I asked respondents how they identify their race and gender, and I include these
self-identifications alongside their responses.
14. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (1967; repr., London: Verso, 2016), 35.
15. Butler, Gender Trouble.
16. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
17. See John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 467–476; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Part I (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1976); E Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Roderick Ferguson,
Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2003); Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and
Scott Lauria Morgensen, eds., Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in
Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).
18. Dayna Troisi and Corinne Werder, “70 Things Straight People Love,” GO, October
2018, http://gomag.com.
19. Fourteen percent of LGBT voters are estimated to have voted for Donald Trump
in 2016, compared with 53 percent of men and 42 percent of women in the general
192 • NOTES
population. See NBC News, “NBC News Exit Poll: Trump Fails to Peal LGBT
Voters Away from Democratic Party,” November 8, 2016, www.nbcnews.com; and
BBC News, “Reality Check: Who Voted for Donald Trump?,” November 9, 2016,
www.bbc.com/news.
20. Troisi and Werder, “70 Things Straight People Love.”
21. “Author: Dayna Troisi,” GO, accessed December 11, 2019, http://gomag.com;
“Author: Corinne Werder,” GO, accessed December 11, 2019, hattp://gomag.com.
22. See Karen Tongson, “#Normporn,” Public Books, August 1, 2015, www.public-
books.org.
23. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality
in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
24. Ibid., 5–6.
25. Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
26. See Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York:
Norton, 1972).
27. Robin Podolsky, “Sacrificing Queers and Other Proletarian Artifacts,” Radical
America 25, no. 1 (1991): 57.
28. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 119.
29. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 88. Relatedly, Ahmed accounts here the story of Vin Packer, author of the
first bestselling lesbian pulp novel Spring Fire, first published in 1952: “The novel
will be published, but only on condition that it does not have a happy ending, as
such an ending would ‘make homosexuality attractive.’”
30. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1986): 658.
31. Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men (New York: Flatiron
Books, 2018), 6.
32. Ibid., 7.
33. Ibid., 267.
34. See Barr’s quote in Joe Kort, Gay Affirmative Therapy for the Straight Clinician
(New York: Norton, 2008), 110.

35. Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward (New
York: HarperCollins, 2018).
36. Samantha Rodman, “The Wife Who Wants More and Her Annoyingly Satisfied
Husband,” Dr. Psych Mom (blog), December 28, 2014, www.drpsychmom.com.
37. Kasey Edwards, “Why Having a Husband Can Be Like Having a Third Child,”
Sydney Morning Herald, March 11, 2018, www.smh.com.au.
38. Hannah Giorgis, “Do Beyoncé Fans Have to Forgive Jay-Z?,” Atlantic, June 18,
2018, www.theatlantic.com.
39. Esther Newton and Shirley Waltons, “The Misunderstanding: Toward a More
Precise Sexual Vocabulary” (1984), in Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal
NOTES • 193
Essays, Public Ideas, by Esther Newton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000), 167.
40. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 32.
41. Travers Scott, “Flexible Fidelity,” in Gay Men at the Millennium: Sex, Spirit,
Community, ed. Michael Lowenthal (New York: Tarcher/Putnam 1997), 72–73.
42. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 28.
43. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York: NYU Press, 2009).
44. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” 648.
45. Wittig, Straight Mind, 25.
46. “How Gay Should a Gay Bar Be?,” New York Times, June 24, 2017, www.nytimes.
com; Brock Thompson, “Women in Gay Bars: A Defense,” Washington Blade,
August 31, 2016, www.washingtonblade.com; Miz Cracker, “Beware the
Bachelorette! A Report from the Straight Lady Invasion of Gay Bars,” Slate,
August 13, 2015, https://slate.com.
47. Miz Cracker, “Beware the Bachelorette!”
48. Angela Jones, “#DemandBetter Straight Sex!,” Bully Bloggers, January 21, 2018,
https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com.
49. Nicola Gavey, Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Sex (New York: Routledge, 2005).
50. Debby Herbenick, Tsung-Chieh (Jane) Fu, Jennifer Arter, Stephanie A. Sanders,
and Brian Dodge, “Women’s Experiences with Genital Touching, Sexual Pleasure,
and Orgasm: Results from a U.S. Probability Sample of Women Ages 18 to 94,”
Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 44, no. 2 (2018): 201–212.
51. David A. Frederick, H. Kate St. John, Justin R. Garcia, and Elisabeth A. Lloyd,
“Differences in Orgasm Frequency among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and
Heterosexual Men and Women in a U.S. National Sample,” Archives of Sexual
Behavior 47, no. 1 (2018): 273–288.
52. See Joan Nestle’s discussion of how butch masculinity, unlike heteromasculinity, is
often oriented toward the sexual pleasure of femmes, in The Persistent Desire: A
Femme-Butch Reader (New York: Alyson, 1992).
53. For a deep dive into this dynamic as it relates to vaginas after the age of fifty, see
Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural
Life (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019). Steinke offers the example of how a
male doctor at a medical conference on menopause speaks about the vagina: “He
talks of shrinkage, lack of pliability, dryness. All his descriptions explain how the
vagina might feel to an incoming penis. The vagina as a viable penis holder. Not
how a vagina might feel to the woman it belongs to” (163).
Chapter 5. Deep Heterosexuality

1. See Ariane Cruz, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (New
York: NYU Press, 2016).
194 • NOTES
2. For a review of much of this literature, see Angela Willey’s introductory chapter in
Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); see also Mimi Schippers, Beyond
Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities (New York: NYU
Press, 2016).
3. For instance, Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian argue in The Ultimate
Guide to Prostate Pleasure (Minneapolis: Cleis, 2013) that pegging can build men’s
empathy for women, liberate men from elements of toxic masculinity, and
fundamentally transform heterosexuality.
4. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Boston:
Beacon, 2012).
5. Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (New York: NYU Press, 2015).
6. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister/Outsider:
Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 1984), 54.
7. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985); C. J. Pascoe, Dude, You’re a Fag:
Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011); Ward, Not Gay.
8. In the 2009 “Deep Lez: Statement,” Mitchell explains, “Deep Lez was coined to
acknowledge the urgent need to develop inclusive libratory feminisms while
examining the strategic benefits of maintaining some components of a radical
lesbian theory and practice. . . . In so doing, ‘lesbian’ is resurrected as a potential
site of radical identification, rather than one of de-politicized apathy (or worse,
shame). . . . For example, the language of Deep Lez has been adopted by those at
the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival who lobby for trans inclusion, as well as the
organizers of Camp Trans, who use an article about Deep Lez in their annual
trans solidarity packages. Here, Deep Lez is mobilized to move radical lesbianism
and identification with or allegiance to trans communities out of the realm of
either/or and into the space of both/and.” Allyson Mitchell, “Deep Lez:
Statement,” NoMorePotlucks, 2009, http://nomorepotlucks.com. The feminist
scholar Sara Ahmed, in her book Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), also calls for a “revival of lesbian feminism,” a returning to
its archives to bring feminism “back to life” by centering the intersectional
interventions of lesbian feminists of color and trans lesbian feminists (213–214).
9. I recognize that there is an irony in turning to elements of 1970s and ’80s lesbian
feminism as a model for heterosexuality. It is ironic because many lesbian
feminists during this era agreed that heterosexuality—which required identifica-
tion with men—was incompatible with feminist practice, and hence, they urged
straight women to become “political lesbians” by leaving the men in their lives.
Lesbianism, for many white, lesbian, feminist activists in particular, was feminism
taken to its logical conclusion, or as Ti-Grace Atkinson reportedly proclaimed,
feminism was the theory, lesbianism was the practice. In a similar vein, the group
NOTES • 195
Radicalesbians declared that feminism and lesbianism were inseparable in their

1970 manifesta “Woman-Identified Woman” (in Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay
Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young [New York: NYU Press, 1972]. A lesbian,
the group boldly explained, was “the rage of all women condensed to the point of
explosion” (172). But this conceptualization of feminism erased a vast array of
heterosexual feminisms by declaring them an impossibility, an idea that,
thankfully, has little traction now. Lesbian feminists of color, such as those
involved in the Black feminist Combahee River Collective, pointed to the
essential role of alliances with men of color to survive and resist racism, poverty,
and systemic oppression. It was also undeniable that women around the world
who were in relationships with men were also establishing life-saving feminist
projects that attended to the daily needs of women and girls by acknowledging,
without judgment, the actual conditions of their lives. And more, straight women
were often on the front lines of the movement to raise men’s consciousness about
patriarchy, an absolutely vital part of the feminist project. We can now see that to
abandon straight women, to erase their feminist contributions, to declare them a
lost cause, and/or to pathologize their attraction men is not only embarrassingly
sanctimonious but also an utterly ineffective strategy for creating gender justice.
10. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 58.
11. Cheryl Clarke, “New Notes on Lesbianism” (1983), in The Days of Good Looks:
The Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980 to 2005 (Boston: Da Capo, 2006), 81.
12. Radicalesbians, “Woman-Identified Woman,” 172–177.
13. This is the logic behind the claim that “boys will be boys,” a notion with broad
political implications as demonstrated by thousands of white women Trump
supporters, for instance, who chalked up Trump’s boasting about sexual assault to
normal behavior for men.
14. Indiana Seresin, “On Heteropessimism: Heterosexuality Is Nobody’s Personal
Problem,” New Inquiry, October 9, 2019, https://thenewinquiry.com.
15. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1986): 631–659.
16. Boys and men are typically socialized to have a more visual and aggressive
relationship to sex than girls and women do; see, for instance, Beth Eck, “Men Are
Much Harder: Gendered Viewing of Nude Images,” Gender & Society 17, no. 5
(2003): 691–710.
17. Radicalesbians, “Woman-Identified Woman,” 176.
18. Naomi Wolf, “Radical Heterosexuality,” in Women’s Lives: Multicultural
Perspectives, ed. Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2004), 144.
19. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (New York: Harper,
2007), 37.
20. Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will
Roscoe (Boston: Beacon, 1997).
196 • NOTES
21. Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (New York: Alyson,
1992).
22. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (London: Persephone, 1982).
23. Dorothy Allison, “Her Body, Mine, and His,” in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People,
Politics and Practice (Boston: Alyson Books, 1991), 46–47.
24. Jeanne Cordova, When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution
(Tallahassee, FL: Spinsters Ink, 2011).
25. Cherríe Moraga, “The Slow Dance,” in Loving in the War Years (Boston: South
End, 1983), 26.
26. Tovia Smith, “This Chef Says He’s Faced His #MeToo Offenses. Now He Wants a
Second Chance,” National Public Radio, October 7, 2019, www.npr.org; Lucia
Graves, “How Famous Men Toppled by #MeToo Plot Their Comeback,” The
Guardian, May 27, 2018, www.theguardian.com.
Sexual Cultures
General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers-Letson
Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Titles in the series include:
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of
Samuel R. Delany Religious Tolerance
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
of Social Relations Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization
Phillip Brian Harper of American Culture
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies Frances Négron-Muntaner
Mandy Merck Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Jim Crow Era
Latino America Marlon Ross
José A. Quiroga In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender Subcultural Lives
and Violence in the American Crime Novel J. Jack Halberstam
Gregory Forter Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and Race and Sexuality
the National Interest Dwight A. McBride
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Black Gay Man: Essays Michael Cobb
Robert F. Reid-Pharr Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the
Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Black American Intellectual
Race, and Religion Robert Reid-Pharr
Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American
Schlossberg Literary and Cultural Memory
The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Lázaro Lima
Sexual Subjectivity Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in

Paul Morrison Nineteenth-Century America
The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Dana Luciano
Theater Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla Futurity
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the José Esteban Muñoz
Afterlife of Colonialism Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Scott Herring
Manalansan IV Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Sexuality in the African American Literary
Spaces Imagination
Juana María Rodríguez Darieck Scott
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and
Karen Tongson Post-Humanist Critique
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature Robert F. Reid-Pharr
and Queer Reading Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A
Martin Joseph Ponce History of the Impossible
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled Malik Gaines
Michael Cobb A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Christina Crosby
Performance in the Asias The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical
Eng-Beng Lim Phenomenology of Transphobia
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Gayle Salamon
Articulations of the Law Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious
Isaac West Parody
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Melissa M. Wilcox
Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color
Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Life
Dwight A. McBride Joshua Chambers-Letson
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown
Latina Longings Jouissance
Juana María Rodríguez Amber Jamilla Musser
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black
Amber Jamilla Musser Life
Tavia Nyong’o
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America:
Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies Queer Times, Black Futures
Rachel C. Lee Kara Keeling
Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in
Jane Ward the Secular Love Tradition
Melissa E. Sanchez
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist
Art and Performance Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the
Uri McMillan Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde
Robb Hernández
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and

Cosmopolitan Desire Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black
Hiram Pérez Diaspora
Keguro Macharia
Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality
Katherine Franke The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
Jane Ward
The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and
Pornography For a complete list of books in the series, see
Ariane Cruz www.nyupress.org
Index
Italic page numbers refer to figures Black Lives Matter, 178n16

Black Nationalist movement, 11
abortion, 13, 138 Black Power movement, 48
Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (film), Blanc, Julien, 86, 101, 103. See also Real
69 Social Dynamics
advertising, 12, 30, 49, 53–55, 59, 75, Blank, Hanne, 37
186n49 Bobbitt, Lorena, 151–52
Ahmed, Sara, 2, 21, 130, 185n41 boredom: heterosexuality and, 4, 7, 19, 114,
Allison, Dorothy, 11, 170 119, 121–27, 138–45, 150; men and, 24,
allyship, 7, 17, 32, 126, 173, 191n10 93, 127, 133, 135
antifeminism, 12, 70, 102. See also incels; Bornstein, Kate, 140–41
Men Going Their Own Way; misogy- Bowman, Henry: Marriage for Moderns,
noir; misogyny; patriarchy; postfemi- 57
nism; sexism; sexual violence; toxic Brown, Rita Mae, 115
masculinity Burke, Tarana, 151
antiphallic sexuality, 169 Burstyn, Varda, 56
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 9, 11, 113, 177n5 Bushnell, Candace: Sex and the City
Argov, Sherry: Why Men Love Bitches, 68 (book), 62
Atkinson, T-Grace, 194n9 Butler, Judith, 22, 116
bad sex, 150–53 “Can Brown Guys Pick Up Women Too?,”

Bailey, Moya, 68 106–7
Baldwin, James, 115 capitalism, 56, 70, 73, 125–26, 139. See also
Barr, Roseanne, 131 neoliberalism

Bassett, Angela, 129 Chapman, Gary: The 5 Love Languages,
BDSM/kink, 8, 10, 119, 138–39, 142–43, 146, 64–65
156. See also Handkerchief Code Chicano Power movement, 11
Behrendt, Greg: He’s Just Not That into children, 7, 18, 34, 65, 72, 82, 144, 156; child
You, 26, 69–70 care labor, 14, 23, 50–51, 63, 127–28, 136,
Berlant, Lauren, 29, 128 185n41; eugenics and, 183n14; hetero-
Berlinger, Joe: I Am Not Your Guru, 71–72 normativity and, 3, 12–13, 21, 29, 125,
Beyoncé, 62; Lemonade, 137 145; queer, 4–5, 130; with queer parents,
binary gender, 22–23, 26, 38, 46, 49–50, 5–6, 26, 146; as reason for marriage,
70–72, 106, 111, 167–68 57–58; violence against, 14, 186n49
199
200 • INDEx
choice, 156; Black people’s, 45; choosing divorce, 26, 66, 71, 82, 89, 156
to be straight, 134, 160–64; hetero- domestic labor, 8, 14, 23, 58, 72, 164, 183n7;
sexuality and lack thereof, 135, 151, 163; child care labor, 8, 14, 23, 50–51, 63,
men’s, 81; queerness and, 2–5, 9, 138, 127–28, 136, 185n41; gendered divisions
141, 160; reproduction and, 57–58, 139; of, 6, 8, 26, 65, 128, 185n41. See also
women’s, 9, 45, 57–58, 64, 151, 163. See parenting
also abortion domestic violence, 3, 10, 14, 26, 53
#chokingirlsaroundtheworld, 86 Dworkin, Andrea, 9–10, 169
Christianity, 29, 70 dyke subcultures, 17, 139, 146, 152
Clarke, Cheryl, 160
class, 29, 123, 138, 194n9; intersectionality Ebony, 52
and, 2, 5, 10–11, 14, 45, 52, 129–30, 157 educational films, 6, 30, 49, 57–58. See
coercion, 170; heterosexuality as, 1, 3, 15, also Marriage Today; Who’s the
58, 114–15, 151; men coercing women, Boss? Married Life, Learning to Live
9, 87, 90 Together
Collins, Patricia Hill, 62 Ellis, Havelock, 39–41, 43
colonialism/imperialism, 14, 35–37, 77, emotional labor, 20, 46, 58, 65, 67, 72–73,
108, 182n3 106, 112, 127, 144
Combahee River Collective, 194n9; state- the erotic (Lorde), 157–58
ment, 10–11 erotic triangle (Sedgwick), 109
complaint, 141; heterosexuality and, 1, 16, essentialism, 16, 64, 70, 106, 159, 168
23, 24, 73; queer/lesbian, 8; women’s, ethics, 88, 139, 143, 166
50, 127–32, 135, 147 ethnography, 30, 78, 81, 120, 182n71
Cooper, Brittney, 3, 20–21, 67 eugenics, 30, 38–49, 52, 183n14
Cordova, Jeanne, 171 Eugenics Publishing Company, 39
The Cosby Show, 59
Cotton, John, 37 Facebook, 86, 120, 132, 134, 150
Cracker, Miz, 148 Family Ties, 59
cruel optimism, 29, 162 feeling straight, 146–47
Cruise, Tom, 102 femininity, 23, 105, 125, 141, 167; hetero-
normative, 116, 128, 133, 137; in marital
Dasgupta, Shamita Das, 14–15 education texts, 40; racialized, 46; in

dating science, 31, 75, 77, 95. See also self-actualization seminars, 70–71; in
relationship science self-help books, 15
deep heterosexuality, 32, 155–73 feminism, 32, 58, 67, 79, 124, 153; Black, 2–
Deep Lez, 159, 194n8 3, 10, 14, 45–46, 51, 62, 68, 74, 185n35,
Deida, David: The Way of the Superior 194n9; critiques of heterosexuality,
Man, 96 2–4, 7–16, 19–27, 35–36, 73–74, 115,
disappointment: heterosexuality as, 4, 130–33; critiques of masculinity, 50–51;
23, 25, 43, 62, 77, 115, 139; men’s, 16, 48; critiques of rape culture, 98, 114, 151;
women’s, 8, 16, 60, 65, 69, 116, 128 feminist desire, 159–60, 166, 168–72;
Disney/Pixar, 13 feminist worlds, 119–22; first-wave,
INDEx • 201
45; gaga, 156–57; heterosexual repair Halberstam, Jack, 24, 156–57, 188n3
version, 31, 76–77, 87–89, 94, 102–11, Hamlett, Melanie, 20
173; instrumental, 31, 110–11; intersec- Handkerchief Code, 140
tional, 113, 159; lesbian, 2–4, 130, 139– happiness, 8, 60, 63, 95, 102, 109, 192n29;
45, 155–60, 166–72, 177n6, 194nn8–9; in advertising, 47, 52–53; classed, 129;
men’s, 8, 133; men’s lack thereof, 6, gendered, 14, 65, 105; heteronormativ-
72; opportunistic, 31, 76–77, 87–89, ity and, 1–2, 12, 28–29, 35, 44, 48, 52–
102–11, 173; pop-feminism, 24, 70; 54, 136, 164; lacking in heterosexuality,
queer, 68, 132, 139, 177n5; rejections of, 26, 130; in marital education texts, 39,
64–66; second-wave, 59; straight, 20, 42–43, 48–49, 59; queerness and, 6, 25,
74, 162–64, 167; white, 46, 129. See also 26–27, 130; reproduction and, 125. See
antifeminism; postfeminism; woman- also “happy housewife” figure
identified politics “happy housewife” figure, 48, 52, 185n41
femme-phobia, 119 Harris-Perry, Melissa, 129
fetishism, 126, 165; racially gendered, 108, Hartman, Saidiya, 185n35
110, 147; straight fetish for normalcy, Harvey, Steve, 73; Act Like a Lady, Think
15 Like a Man, 67, 69, 74, 87
Fincher, Leta Hong, 13, 24 Hay, Harry, 169
Forward, Susan: Men Who Hate Women Hefner, Hugh, 56. See also Playboy
and the Women Who Love Them, 26, heteroflexibility, 8, 156
61, 131 heteropatriarchy, 10–11, 21, 29–30, 73, 88,
Franke, Katherine, 45 97, 108, 111, 160
Friends, 60 heteropessimism, 162
“friend zone,” 76, 78, 96 heterosexual melancholy, 116
heterosexual misery, 34, 59–66, 72, 79, 111,
Gattuso, Reina, 19 114–15, 136–37, 172
Gavey, Nicola, 98 heterosexual-repair industry, 73–74, 76,
gay men, 117, 140, 148–49, 165; “born this 111, 115–16, 126, 168, 173; in early twen-
way” rhetoric and, 160; queer suffer- tieth century, 39–47; in late twentieth
ing narrative and, 3–4, 15 century, 59–66; in mid-twentieth
Gaynor, Gloria, 129 century, 48–59; seduction coaching
Gay Revolution Party, 12 and, 30–31, 87, 93, 106; in twenty-first

gender labor, 89 century, 66–72. See also pickup artists;
gender reveal parties, 143–44 seduction coaches
gender roles, 1, 23–24, 49, 64, 91–92, #hetnonsense, 17
117, 138, 147, 167. See also femininity; @hets_explain_yourselves, 17
masculinity Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 29
Giogis, Hannah, 137 homophobia, 1, 5, 115, 130, 134, 172, 177n6
girl power, 62 homosociality: contrasted with hetero-
González-López, Gloria, 14 sexuality, 35–36, 38, 42; within hetero-
Gray, John: Men Are from Mars, Women normativity, 56–59, 70, 109, 111, 167
Are from Venus, 58, 62–64, 87, 95 The Honeymooners, 53
202 • INDEx
hooks, bell, 10 Love Systems, 77, 85, 90–98, 100, 102;

hygiene, 30, 39–48, 52 Bootcamp, 75, 80–82; Super Confer-
ence, 75, 80. See also Savoy, Nick
I Love Lucy, 53
incels, 86, 111, 189n11. See also antifemi- Macfadden, Bernarr: Womanhood and
nism; Minassian, Alek; misogynoir; Marriage, 43
patriarchy; Rodger, Elliot; sexism; Maher, Jennifer, 60
sexual violence Maltz, Maxwell: Psycho Cybernetics, 96
Instagram, 17, 74, 86 March on Washington (1963), 48
intersectionality, 1, 7, 10–11, 35, 119, 194n8 marriage, 24, 28, 115–17, 128, 144–45,
“It Gets Better,” 5 181n61, 182n3; companionate, 30; com-
pulsory, 3; marital education texts,
Jay-Z, 137 38–74, 183n12, 185n36; marital rape,
Jeffries, Ross, 101–2 10, 40–47, 72; as patriarchal, 36–37,
Jhally, Sut, 28, 79 131; queer vs. straight, 26; racialized,
Jim Crow, 38–39 38–39, 45, 48–55, 72, 183n14, 185n41;
Johnston, Jill, 12, 113 refusal of, 8, 156, 166–67
Jones, Angela, 151–52 Marriage Today, 57
Married with Children, 53
Kandiyoti, Deniz, 64 masculinity, 6, 56, 73, 125; butch, 133, 169–
King, Kara: The Power of the Pussy, 68–69 70, 193n52; fragile, 50, 133; heteronor-
kink. See BDSM/kink mativity and,–20, 29, 37, 116, 152, 156,
Kipnis, Laura, 79 158; in marital education texts, 49, 82;
Koll, Irvin, 185n36 racialized, 46; in seduction coaching,
77–78, 94–112; in self-actualization
Leave It to Beaver, 57 seminars, 70–71; toxic, 4, 8, 105–106,
lesbians, 1, 125, 144–46; critiques of het- 106, 133–34, 138, 173, 194n3; woke, 31
erosexuality, 2–12, 16–17, 19–21, 23–24, Massey, Edith, 6, 123–24
30, 113, 115–16, 130–32, 151; “I wish I Maushart, Susan: Wifework, 65–66
could be a lesbian” remarks, 133, 135; Men Can Stop Rape, 106
lesbian feminism, 2–12, 130, 139–45, Men Going Their Own Way, 70, 111
155–60, 166–72, 177nn5–6, 194nn8–9; #metoo, 13, 76, 101, 103–7, 151, 173
lesbian parents, 4–5; lesbian separat- Michelson, Noah, 117, 191n10
ism, 12, 25; lesbian sexuality, 24, 26, Millet, Kate, 9
32, 139–43, 150, 152, 157–61, 165–72; Minassian, Alek, 86
straight fetishization of, 149. See also misogynoir, 68. See also misogyny; patri-
dyke subcultures archy; racism; sexism
Lizzo: “Truth Hurts,” 74 misogyny, 10, 26, 166, 172; within hetero-
Long, Harland William, 39; Sane Sex Life sexuality, 1, 3–6, 9, 13, 30, 130–34, 152;
and Sane Sex Living, 44–45 misogyny paradox, 27–74, 79, 85–89, 111;
Lorde, Audre, 9, 157–59, 169–71 queer, 119; within seduction coaching,
Lorena (documentary series), 151 76–77, 85–89, 101–3, 110–11. See also
INDEx • 203
antifeminism; incels; Men Going Their 64; in heterosexual repair industry, 88,
Own Way; misogynoir; patriarchy; sex- 97–98, 108; marriage and, 41–42, 58,
ism; sexual violence; toxic masculinity 72; patriarchal bargains, 64; racialized,
Mitchell, Allyson, 159, 194n8 20, 46, 51, 72–73. See also antifemi-
Money, John, 49 nism; misogynoir; misogyny; sexism
Moraga, Cherríe, 9, 11, 171, 177n5 Perel, Esther, 168
Moynihan, Patrick, 62; The Negro Family pickup artists, 30–31, 75–112, 188n1, 189n11
(Moynihan report), 51–52 Playboy, 56–57
Muñoz, José Esteban, 142 Podolsky, Edward: Sex Today in Wedded
Life, 49–51
Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 35–37, 61 Podolsky, Robin, 130
Nazis, 49 polyamory, 8, 141, 156
neoliberalism, 27, 62, 77, 88, 111, 173. See Pomeranz, Herman, 185n36
also capitalism postfeminism, 60–61
Nestle, Joan, 169 Preciado, Paul, 56, 114
New Age seminars, 70, 101 privilege: class, 34; heterosexual, 2–3, 15,
Newton, Esther, 140 20, 98, 114, 147, 149, 157; male, 23, 115,
Noble, Kezia, 82–83, 82–84, 89–90, 93, 99, 134, 167, 173; racial, 2–3, 34, 121
100–101. See also Noble Art of Seduction Project Rockstar, 77, 102–8
Noble Art of Seduction, 77, 82, 89–90, Puritans, 42
95, 100
normative male alexithymia, 20 Queer Eye, 149
Norwood, Robin: Women Who Love Too Queer Nation, 117–18
Much, 60–61, 69, 131 Queer Pride, 17
#notallmen, 18, 121–22 queer studies, 24, 29, 125, 141–42, 160
#notallstraightpeople, 7 queer subcultures, 1, 22, 31, 119, 139, 142;
#notallwhitepeople, 121 dyke subcultures, 17, 139, 146, 152
O’Neill, Rachel, 84, 88, 98 race, 7, 18, 37, 114–18, 134, 144, 178n16, 185n35;
orgasms, 15, 19, 26, 44, 135, 150, 152, 182n71 cruel optimism and, 29; in heterosexual-
ity, 2–3, 10–11, 14–15, 20, 67–68, 72–74,
Packer, Vin, 192n29 129, 137, 147, 185n41; in heterosexual

parenting, 4–5, 60, 82, 156; gendered labor repair industry, 30, 38–55, 62; in queer
of, 8, 26, 58, 115, 186n49; passing on cultures, 3, 5, 119–20, 123, 156, 160;
heteronormativity, 21; queer, 27, 146 racial justice, 10; racial privilege, 2–3,
Parks and Recreation, 162 34, 121; in seduction coaching, 78–79,
Pascoe, C. J., 182n71 83, 86, 91, 94, 103, 107–10; “Stuff White
patriarchy, 38, 124, 135, 183n9, 194n9; chal- People Like,” 125; white defensiveness,
lenges to, 36–37, 111, 156; heteropatri- 8, 121; white Trump supporters, 195n13.
archy, 10–11, 21, 29–30, 73, 88, 97, 108, See also eugenics; feminism: Black;
111, 160; heterosexuality and, 2, 9–11, feminism: white; Jim Crow; misogynoir;
15–16, 22, 47, 64–68, 97–98, 131, 156– racism; slavery; white supremacy
204 • INDEx
racism, 123; anti-Blackness, 46, 67–68, 72, sexism, 8–10, 12, 27–28, 48, 68, 111, 130,
119, 177n6; challenges to, 8, 11, 18, 94, 149. See also antifeminism; incels;
194n9; eugenics, 30, 38–49, 52, 183n14; Men Going Their Own Way; misogy-
in heterosexuality, 6, 11, 15, 67–68, 72, noir; misogyny; patriarchy; sexual
126; in queer cultures, 119; in seduc- violence; toxic masculinity
tion coaching, 86, 91, 94, 110. See also sexology, 34, 39–41, 44–47, 70, 72–73, 89
eugenics; Jim Crow; misogynoir; sex/romance tourism, 70, 108
slavery; white supremacy sexually transmitted infections, 42–43
Radicalesbians, 9, 115, 161, 166, 194n9 sexual violence, 3, 13, 28, 48, 148, 173;
radical heterosexuality (Wolf), 167–68 Donald Trump’s, 195n13; heterosexual
Ratchford, Sarah, 101–2 sex and, 19, 104, 114; Julien Blanc’s, 101;
Real Social Dynamics, 86, 101. See also marital rape, 10, 40–47, 72; patriarchy
Blanc, Julien normalizing, 9–10, 14, 22; rape crisis
relationship science, 30, 80. See also dat- advocates, 173; rape culture, 89, 91, 93–
ing science 94, 98, 151. See also incels; Men Can
Rich, Adrienne, 2, 12, 23, 130, 163, 166, Stop Rape; #metoo
169 sex work, 10
Richie, Beth, 14 Sinatra, Frank: “Wives and Lovers,” 53
Robbins, Tony, 102, 104; I Am Not Your slavery, 34, 45–46
Guru, 71–72 Smith, Barbara, 2
Roberson, Blythe: How to Date Men Smith, DeAnne, 17–18
When You Hate Men, 26, 131–32, 135 Solanas, Valerie: SCUM Manifesto, 124
Robinson, William, 39, 41, 61, 66; Married Spillers, Hortense, 46
Life and Happiness, 42–44 Steinke, Darcey, 193n53
Rodger, Elliot, 28, 85–86 Stopes, Marie: Married Love, 39–41, 43
Rodgers, Erin, 20 straight gaze, 18, 147–50
Roe v. Wade, 13 straight men’s mediocrity, 13, 99
role-taking, 93 straight rituals, 16–17, 60, 117, 122, 125–26,
Roman, Charles, 45 132, 143–47, 158
Rosin, Hanna, 24 Strauss, Neil, 80; The Game, 77–78, 188n1
Rubin, Gayle, 36 Sullivan, Erin, 17
Savoy, Nick, 80, 97. See also Love Systems Taormino, Tristan, 142
Schlessinger, Laura: The Proper Care and Tatum, Beverly Daniel, 113
Feeding of Husbands, 68–69 Tinder, 101, 126
Schultz, Jason, 27–28 toxic masculinity, 4, 8, 105–106, 106, 133–
Scott, D. Travers, 141 34, 138, 173, 194n3
Scully, Diana, 14, 93–94 Traister, Rebecca, 105
Sedgwick, Eve, 109, 183n9 Troisi, Dayna, 125–26
seduction coaches, 30–31, 75–112 Trujillo, Carla, 11
self-actualization, 70, 76–77, 88, 101 Trump, Donald, 13, 79, 191n19; sexual
Sex and the City (TV show), 62, 66 violence by, 28, 105, 195n13
INDEx • 205
Tuccillo, Liz: He’s Just Not That into You, weddings, 7, 12, 16, 33, 40, 60, 126, 143, 145
26, 69–70 Weinstein, Harvey, 79, 103
Twitter, 120. See also #chokinggirl- Werder, Corrine, 125–26
saroundtheworld; #hetnonsense; white supremacy, 38, 83, 119, 125, 185n35;
#metoo; #notallmen; #notallstraight- heteropatriarchy and, 11, 14–15, 30,
people; #notallwhitepeople 46–47, 51, 62, 72–73, 108–10, 156;
Tyrer, Alfred Henry, 51; Sex Satisfaction heterosexual privilege and, 2. See also
and Happy Marriage, 48 eugenics; racism
Who’s the Boss? Married Life, Learning to
US Congress, 13 Live Together, 58
Winfrey, Oprah, 60
Vanzant, Iyanla: In the Meantime, 60–61 Wittig, Monique, 142, 146
Wolf, Naomi, 167–68
Wallace, Michelle, 3, 51, 67; Black Macho woman-identified politics, 160, 166, 169,
and the Myth of the Super Woman, 11 194n9
Waters, John: Female Trouble, 6–7, 123–24 Wypijewski, JoAnn, 114, 117
about the author
Jane Ward is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University

of California, Riverside, where she teaches courses in feminist, queer,
and heterosexuality studies. She is the author of Not Gay: Sex between
Straight White Men (NYU Press, 2015) and Respectably Queer: Diversity
Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations.
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Copyright © 2020. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

ISBN 9781479851553 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479895069 (ebook) |

1 Let’s Call It What It Is: The Tragedy of Heterosexuality 1

2 He’s Just Not That into You: The Misogyny Paradox 33

3 Pickup Artists: Inside the Seduction Industry 75

5 Deep Heterosexuality: Toward a Future in Which

About the Author 207

I am worried about straight people. And I am not

sexuality had been a site of violence, control, diminishment, and disap-

seemingly gender-neutral claim that no one would ever wish queerness

and adults, to women, men, and trans people. It happens to straight

But misogynistic and racist violence happens to straight people too,

you’ll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries!

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality: a Lesbian

nebulous racial category of whiteness, one of the ways that we avoid

They also function, however, to invalidate queer critiques of straight cul-

feminists have argued that straight life is characterized by the inescap-

documented and theorized the tragedy of heterosexuality beginning in

the “control of women begins through the institution of heterosexuality,”

men remain in denial about patriarchy, many gave up on the feminist

theorized that the forces of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy often

liefs about women as natural caretakers; both sets of beliefs intersected to

painfully slow or nonexistent results. In 1972, the women’s caucus of the

speaking, heterosexual romance’s defining moment.23

of the ubiquity of straight men’s sexual harassment and sexual assaults of

colonial violence has shaped indigenous heterosexuality and its miseries

unexpected and counternormative. Several gay men wrote to me and

attention to heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution, one that has long

are Straight Women Okay?

be perfectly acceptable for straight couples to share few interests, to

rituals that are intended to mark important moments in their lives.

Instagram page @hets_explain_yourselves is a digital archive of #het-

I don’t know how to speak to straight women but I do have something to

Perhaps something like white audiences’ laughter at the work of Black

While straight men’s desire for women’s bodies is often portrayed as an

seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern

have concluded before her, Cooper wonders if “perhaps straight women

1970s, my analysis of the tragedy of heterosexuality has brought me to a

Where Patriarchy and Heteronormativity Intersect

increasingly agree that these gender expressions are not determined by

revised in some form—unless that thing is heterosexuality, for which

being an arguably more logical and fulfilling arrangement for women, it

Inequality in China. The professional and university-educated young

coaching industry designed to smooth over heterosexual antagonisms

these destructive behaviors to a romantic story about a natural and in-

some countries, report higher relationship happiness than heterosexual

titative research on LGBT life tends to be motivated by a conservative

One of the core dysfunctions of straight culture—and a centerpiece of

Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it

proval. But when confronted with insurmountable evidence that heter-

I hope to have sufficiently introduced the idea of the tragedy of hetero-

On a recent vacation with my partner, Kat, and

most logical and beloved companions, a requirement in the way that

Struggling for Straightness

significance as it highlights the intersections between misogyny, hetero-

environments in which intimacy was reserved for people of the same

their own masculinity (now sometimes called being “henpecked” or

make it appear more appealing than homosocial intimacies, and devel-