[“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 physical 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 queerness or asexuality, then this is itself an amazing fact—one that intervenes 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 heterosexual 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 agentic 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 acknowledge this but to recognize it as an utterly incomplete mode of desiring women—a feeble version of what heterosexuality could be. For straight women and men, accountability means piercing through the fantasy we’re all sold about the natural ease and happiness of heterosexuality and instead learning to recognize the structural and cultural conditions that have produced, but also stunted, their heterosexuality.”]
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
