Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Posted: Wed, May 7, 2025

Ward’s intervention: So far the lesbian feminist analysis of heterosexuality has focused on how compulsory heterosexuality oppresses lesbians, but the same analysis also reveals a suffocating confluence of misogyny and compulsory heterosexuality in the case of straight women.

• The misogyny paradox: Men are socially expected to love women in ways that show hatred, contempt, and disgust for them.
  • “He hit you because he loves you.”
  • “My Boyfriend Keeps Hitting Me. I Still Love Him. How Can I Get Him to Change?”
  • In extreme cases, men even rape and kill women out of “love.”
• This is tragic because straight people genuinely buy into it.

Ward’s reading of MacKinnon: Heterosexuality is the eroticization of hierarchical gender difference, which creates the gender division between women and men as we know it.

• Not just that “opposites attract” but that unequal opposites are attractive.
• Hierarchical gender difference: dominant/submissive, hard/soft, strong/weak, big/small, assertive/receptive, rational/emotional, serious/frivolous, etc.
• Gender division: man/woman.
  • A binary, biological opposition enhances the gender difference.
• For Ward, what makes heterosexuality tragic is not only “men’s control of women” but “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” (22).

What to do then? Ward suggests that “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” (32).

• To do this, straight people need to learn from queer people. “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” (32).
• “This is not to say that we shouldn’t eroticize gender differences. Gender differences are hot! Queer subculture delights in celebrating what is sexy about a whole array of ever-evolving gender expressions (nonbinary 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 sexual desire in any predictable way” (22–23).

Some misgivings:

• Entirely misses the point about how thinking of sex/gender as “opposites” erases and harms nonbinary people?
• So much of dyke culture is precisely about the eroticization of hierarchical gender difference?