Jane Ward (1)Recensioni

My friend told me I *had* to read this, so I did. For an academic book, it had some genuinely funny bits. For example, lots of memes and pop culture jokes about how miserable it is to be married and/or straight ("Tragically, we are heterosexual," says Leslie Knope about her and Anne).

Not to brag, but I am happily married so I could read most of this with a light heart. I read a bunch of passages aloud to my husband who pointed out that the author sort of cherry-picked the worst of heterosexuality (self-help books, seduction camps, straight culture vs. queer culture (no contest), fragile/toxic masculinity, the whole history of misogyny and patriarchy, etc.). I'm joking, but what are you going to do? It's not like we can choose who we fall in love with.

Or can we? I was surprised when the author implied that being a lesbian can be a choice (a "cultivated political stance"). Is this empowering? Is the "born this way" view of sexuality a way to avoid a more thoughtful and intentional view of one's sexuality? I don't know, but it's a really interesting idea to mull over.

I was glad to see the final chapter was about the goal of finding a "deep heterosexuality" in which women can be seen as equals in relationships of "mutual regard." I'll quote from the most hopeful passages:

"How might the heterosexual impulse be taken to its most human and fulfilling, and least violent and disappointing, conclusion? ...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 anything less becomes suspect as authentic heterosexual desire."

The author basically says we should all be feminists (duh). Sadly, we know that the misogyny paradox is real. How can you love a woman when you don't respect her? How can you call her your equal or partner when you don't acknowledge her full humanity?

This book contains descriptions of sex acts, and of genitals.

The author does mention trans people throughout, but the descriptions of sexual activities is still very cisnormative, which ignores that there are straight trans people too.

Having lived as a straight woman, a bisexual man, and now a queer non-binary person, I found myself relating to things in this book from several different perspectives. From all of them, I agree with the conclusion that modern heterosexuality is tragic for both the men and women involved, and that straight men are capable of much better.

DNF (why at end)

I came across this and am reading it as a NetGalley ARC. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am white, cis female, heterosexual, demisexual, and married for 40 years, child of parents happily married until death. I am very aware of problematic hetero nonsense, but have not experienced it personally. I know a reasonable number of het and queer couples & clumps (polyamorous) to claim I am familiar with what both success and failure look like.

I scrolled through the early reviews, and now I'm amused. Particularly at the reviewer who wants a more "unbiased" version of this book. Apparently they're new to humanity. But seriously, their problem is, they're new to an author different from themself. Jane Ward states her position in the human spectrum (lesbian) and her background as a teacher of gender studies, and with our own positions & experience, we--most of us--can understand why her observations might align with and/or differ from our own. This is how reading works.

The writing is a bit dense, as is common in academic work. It's not my favorite, but it's good so far.

Okay, DNF at 7%, because it's not just dense, it is repetitively dense, and I have no patience for that. It's too bad. I was interested, but the author's style stomped it into a pancake, sigh.

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A troubling account of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo

Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness.

In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships.

Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I grew up in a wealthy white suburban area, with parents whose last child I was. They had long since ended the honeymoon phase of marriage; they had two daughters they each pretty thoroughly disliked at least one of; their feelings about each other were still in flux. Along I came; everything changed in their middle-aged world and my sisters' teens. Absolutely no one came out of that pressure cooker unmangled.

I am, in other words, very much in sympathy with the author's thesis that heterosexuals aren't happier than we are.

The author puts the blame for the unhappiness squarely on men and their misogyny. The institutions men have built are designed to reinforce straight white male supremacy. Gay men, too, if white, participate in the male-designed system of woman-degrading misogyny. To their detriment, of course; to all male beings' detriment.

As far as it goes, this is pretty inarguably like the world one sees outside one's doors and windows, so am I going to beef with that? Hm. I'm not sure it counts as a beef, but allow me to assure you, Author Ward, that women whether heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian, or any combination thereof, are perfectly capable of being horribly racist, sexist, and abusive. Allow me to tell you about my mother's incestuous sexual abuse of my ephebe self; her phony "christian conversion" that enabled her to use a whole new vocabulary of hateful, denigrating, destructive invective aimed at making sure I was eternally off-balance and unsure of my male self's worth...the aforementioned sisters and their litany of belittling and insulting characterizations of me...so, yeah, about those awful and abusive men: they had mothers whose actions were, if examined carefully, pretty awful. Was that solely and entirely the mothers' response to patriarchy and heteronormativity? I beg to differ. Some people are just not very nice and should be not be encouraged to spread that by having children!

Yet now our QUILTBAG brethren and sistern are falling over themselves to get married and have kids! We're equal, we can do the same things straight people do! And here, Author Ward, you and I agree: Shouldn't we be liberating our straight family from this structure designed to control and contain women, not rushing into it for ourselves? Isn't that a better project all the way around? Allow people to design their own lives, and stay away from prescribed identities like "husband" or "wife" or "parent" if those aren't appealing.

Suddenly the blind panic of the red-meat right to clamp down on abortion first, then come after the rest of the bodily and spiritual autonomy that so threatens their control, makes all the sense in the world. Heterosexuality is, from a QUILTBAG person's perspective, a terrible tragedy indeed. It's conflated with heteronormativity. Demoting "heterosexuality" to a sexual behavior is a darn good project. I myownself have engaged in heterosexuality (didn't much like it). In heteronormativity, even, and I REALLY didn't like that. Stopped it a long time ago.

So Author Ward, standing outside the institution and hollering at the guards, is onto a winner for all of me. She wouldn't be if she hadn't decoupled "heterosexuality" to the straight version of "homosexuality"...that simply describes what sexual behaviors one engages in. Now the problem, the enemy, is identified as "heteronormativity" or the cultural monolith of patriarchal abuse and control. The inmates in the institution need freeing! They need it badly and now. This moment in history is an inflection point. We can see that because every single facet of the progressive social and economic agendas are being fought by the social-control freaks using every tool and trick the centuries of their ruthlessly enforced dominance have given them. Because they know that, given freedom to choose, people aren't going to choose their way in majority numbers.

Racists fear being made into a minority...why? Heteronormatives fear living in a world with people who love in different ways...why? Because they fear the repression they're nakedly, openly enacting against us. "Sucks to be you" is their silent, though getting less and less so, taunt.

So there's value in this exercise for me, a cis white American male, a scion of almost godlike privilege.

The problems with a lesbian-only critique of straightness are clear, including a lack of critical straight participants in this exercise and the exclusion of all Y-chromosome bearers. I refuse to believe not one male has ever made a critique of heteronormative culture that is valid, that does not wholly or partially exemplify the misogynistic mode of control. But there's another beam in the author's eye: TERFs like Adrienne Rich and Cherie Moraga. Of all the marginalized groups that need a voice in this chorus, the trans community is top of my list...not one word. I'm poking at the author's lack of inclusiveness because inclusion is what the author's demanding. But only for XXwomen...? I thought biological determinism was among the patriarchy's tools of control....

So I don't think the read is perfect. I do think it enlightened me and brought thoughts to the surface of my mind that I really enjoy having there. Yes, we need to educate our heteronormative society's mainstream about the costs to them all of the horrible system that's in place. But let's stop excluding people as part of that, and Author Ward's presentation of trenchant and valuable arguments does that regrettable thing.½

Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men: Certainly one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while, even if (or because) it provoked a number of “yes, but …” responses in me. Basically, Ward asks what would happen if we took accounts of sexual contact between white men who identify as straight seriously as “not gay” sex and not indicating any homosexual or bisexual identity. She looks mainly at fraternities and militaries, with some discussion of prisons; “fuck or die” slash (that seems kind of out of place, frankly, since it’s not generally a straight white guy fantasy as far as I can tell); gay-for-pay narratives in which paying, or being paid, for homosexual sex leaves the participant still unqueer; homophobic Republican politicians; and hazing porn, where the schtick is that “straight” guys are forced into gay sex.

Sexual contact, especially in hazing/initiation type situations, is both common and often surrounded by homophobia; there are narratives of “force” that surround this contact, but that’s often not the whole story. “Hazing rituals involving anal penetration or analingus … are extreme, exciting, humiliating, and effective at building cohesion and establishing hierarchy among men precisely because the participants know that these acts have sexual meaning.” (She counts contact as sexual if a queer couple would be likely to define the behavior as “sex” or “sexual” if they participated in it—like finger-in-anus contact.) To Ward, heterosexual identity is itself a “mode of engaging homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, disidentification, and heteronormative investments.” Heterosexuality and homosexuality were literally invented together; she quotes a 1923 Merriam-Webster definition of heterosexuality as “a morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.” By 1934, its definition was “a manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.”

Possibly the most interesting conclusion: if mainstream gay rights advocacy has normalized gayness by pursuing marriage equality, straight discourse has pushed in from the other side by defining homosexuality as identity rather than conduct, making straight white men “not gay” no matter how much sexual contact they have with men as long as they don’t fall in love with men and making the definitive condition of homosexuality a loving rather than sexualized relationship.

Ward connects straight white men’s fraught negotiation of male-male sexual encounters with the greater sexual fluidity accepted in women in American culture—it’s not a cultural trope for men to make out at parties for the pleasure of women, but they actually do make out at parties “and engage in virtually the same teasing/kissing/sex-for-show behaviors that straight young women do,” though there’s been little attention to that. For example, the discusses straight male college athletes “kissing, taking ‘body shots’ off of one another, and ‘jacking each other off’ during threesomes.” Another great quote: “this one girl said she’d fuck us both if we both made out.” It’s not gay if it’s done to have sex with a girl, they say—and Ward thinks that we ought to take them at their word, at least to see what it means to do so. (FWIW, my stolidly heterosexual trainer, a proud fraternity member, thought that two guys could legitimately make out for sexual access to a hot girl and the kissing would not be “gay.”)

We’ve overemphasized men’s sexual rigidity and undervalued “heterofluidity,” Ward argues. So for example “when straight-identified women have sex with women, the broader culture waits in anticipation for them to return to what is likely their natural, heterosexual state [e.g., lesbian during college]; when straight-identified men have sex with men, the culture waits in anticipation for them to admit that they are gay.” In such a culture, shame and secrecy surrounding same-sex contact among straight white men is no surprise—nor is it any evidence that male sexuality is less fluid than women’s. At the same time, our commitment to the fixity of sexual orientation actually enables sexual fluidity—if someone is really, at the core, straight or gay, then that frees us “to experiment, to stray, to act out, and to let ‘shit happen’ without fear that we have somehow hidden or misrecognized or damaged our true sexual constitution.”

If anything, we might want to encourage more steps in this direction, given that the other frame for straight white men’s sexual contact involves violence as the key to its non-homosexuality, which as she notes makes for a bad combo. But here’s another fascinating point: this connection between sex and violence is also prevalent in male-female relations.

What Ward deems “hetero-exceptionalism” posits that gay men have sex with men for intrinsic pleasure, while straight men have sex with men for instrumental reasons—meeting some need, making money, securing power, etc. But, as she points out, those reasons look a lot like why some straight women might have some sex with straight men—yet we don’t think of them as “not heterosexual” when they do so, or when they’re not sexually satisfied. If straight men tolerate sexual contact with other men in order to join a group/be liked, so do straight women. Relatedly, “straight-identified men’s sincere repulsion with homosexual sex and with other men’s bodies doesn’t signal innate heterosexuality any more than straight men’s sincere misogyny signals innate homosexuality.” In fact, expressing disgust with a partner’s body and a desire to see it abjected is common for straight men regardless of whether the partner is male or female—Ward provocatively suggests that “grossness, anality, and the homoerotic” are not distinct from normative white hetero-masculinity but rather central ingredients of it.

Straight white men also use white privilege to define their sexual contact with other men as not gay. By contrast, black men “on the down low” are often described as really gay, not “granted the sexual fluidity and complexity attributed to young white women.” Discourses around the DL are part of a general hyper-surveillance of black men’s sexuality and white fascination with black deviance. By contrast, white sexual practices are rarely racialized or attributed to white “culture.” Straight white men can recast their sexual contact with one another as “the necessary and nonsexual material of white male brotherhood, white male risk-taking, and initiation.” White men get the benefit of the doubt that their sexuality is “normal.” “[N]ormative masculinity alone—the absence of any hint at womanliness or effeminacy—has often been sufficient to signal that ‘there’s nothing queer here.’”

Relatedly, white politicians’ or pastors’ narratives of making mistakes are often accepted by conservative constituencies—at least if they aren’t caught with black men. One white Mississippi politician survived a few such revelations until he was arrested for giving a blowjob to a black man. It was one thing to want his own erection taken care of by any means available, and quite another to be penetrated. In another such incident, a different politician “claimed he offered to give a black undercover police officer a blowjob because he feared that a threatening black man was trying to rob him.” But Ward doesn’t want us to dismiss these guys as simply lying to themselves and to us. It’s not that their same-sex encounters are “mistakes,” but they may really want heterosexual privilege, which she sees as an erotic orientation of its own. Ward finds some fascinating expressions of these beliefs, like a guy whose whole website is about how it’s not gay to have sex with men if you’re really straight (“Straight guys, they may have a penis fetish, or maybe they’re into giving blow jobs … but it’s not about the entire man.”): gayness and straightness are biological facts that remain true regardless of behavioral evidence.

Ward also analogizes sexual contact between heterosexual men to sexual contact between children, which is often characterized as not really sex. Descriptions of both often use the same words: “experimentation,” “accident,” “friendship,” “game,” etc. For adults, though, “[p]articipants must painstakingly avoid being mistaken as sincere homosexuals by demonstrating that the sexual encounter is something other than sex, and in many cases, they do this by agreeing that the encounter was compelled by others.” Investment in heteronormativity, she contends, “is itself a bodily desire,” and it’s this desire that narratives of coercion and lack of choice fulfill. Heterosexuality is thus “a fetishization of the normal.”

I didn’t know that the Hell’s Angels sometimes performed homosexual encounters in the 1950s and 1960s as part of their bravado, showing they were free of any social convention—it was one way of being extra macho! Ward analogizes their same-sex kissing to young women’s same-sex kissing as spectacle now. During roughly the same period, she recounts, “tearooms” (bathrooms where nearly anonymous same-sex encounters could be had) were attractive to a set of men precisely because they weren’t places where “gay” men congregated; only a minority of participants were active in gay subculture. (She also offers a fascinating example of white solidarity, where a police officer breaks ranks to protect a white man, even one seeking sex with men, from the threat of blackness.) Tearoom participants often professed to love their wives, but to be getting insufficient sex from them, and tearooms were quick, inexpensive, non-entangling, and better than masturbation. Ward argues that we should take these reasons seriously, not read them as denial or fundamental “gayness.” Straight men often, she suggests, want to have sex with men—and they want to live normative “heterosexual” lives.

One worrisome risk is that broader culture might just accept a broader range of sexual behaviors from “straight” people, while still sustaining an underclass of the truly “queer.” Lots of straight men find sex with men acceptable when women are “unavailable” for some reason, like prison or military service, because of a cultural narrative that straight men just need sex, by whatever means necessary. These narratives of female unavailability are easily extended to other situations (like the tearooms above), and to situations in which men try to “prove” their masculinity by enduring hazing that includes sexual contact with other men. Thus, we avoid distinguishing between “material constraint, on the one hand, and the performance of constraint and necessity, on the other.” Because of the required performance of disgust/“being forced,” hazing shades into sexual assault. (Ward makes the disturbing point that the forms of forced contact portrayed in these rituals as gross and difficult to endure—“hands on penises, scrotum on faces, ejaculate in mouths”—are everyday sex for straight women and gay men.)

Ward also analyzes portrayals of accidental homosexuality in popular media, usually played as humorous. But as she writes, “the fact that homosexual sex is unexpected, deeply ambivalent, or brought on by altered consciousness,” while supposedly showing its difference from straight people’s straight sex, doesn’t distinguish it from many heterosexual experiences, which are also often accompanied by anxiety, awkwardness, and drunkenness. It’s investment in heteronormativity that distinguishes a straight person’s sexual encounter from a gay person’s.
Ward has some fascinating discussions of Craigslist ads for men seeking men for “not gay” encounters. Hand jobs, she theorizes, are “sometimes a ‘less gay’ way to be close to men than the more intimate and feminized realm of friendship.” The ads indicate men’s desires to sit back, relax, watch heterosexual porn together, and get each other off—as a form of male bonding, not gayness. These scenarios are often highly detailed, with “numerous hetero-authenticating details,” and homophobic disavowals of gayness (and the occasional misogynistic rape fantasy); they regularly seek dude-types with signifiers of whiteness (frat boys, skaters, jocks, surfers, etc.) and use straight props like beer, sports, and straight porn. Dude-sex is for straight guys who are strong and relaxed enough to handle it. It’s “a means of getting the kind of sex that [the ads implicitly posit] all straight men want from women, but can get only from men—uncomplicated, emotionless, and guaranteed.” Whiteness is important, and many ads specify whiteness, as a means of confirming that this isn’t a gay encounter but a “meaningless extension of a naturally occurring male friendship”; racial homogeneity helps give the friendship narrative more credibility. At the same time, the ads often use appropriated black-associated terms like “thugged out,” evoking a working-class masculinity that is more definitively not gay than other forms of masculinity. Some ads even specify working-class occupations like “consturction workers, mechanics, truckers, cable guys” but “NO GAYS.” By contrast, ads by white men looking for black men don’t use the language of buddies or bros. Mostly they use the language of service: usually white men are looking to blow big, muscular black men.

Another chapter explores the gay porn site HazeHim. She suggests that the site offers gay fans the opportunity to eroticize straight white men’s sexual culture. Though there are signifiers of fiction, such as the presence of lighting apparatus and recognizable gay porn stars, the key here is that the performers know how to perform not-gay homosexual sex, with repeated reference to force and to earning a place in the fraternity. Men of color appear only to intimidate, while the boys being hazed are “especially pale-skinned, scrawny, and nerdish.”

The military has another use for real hazing rituals: by making the line between gayness and straightness unclear, it can better control the self-image of its members—it can break them down and build them up by promising to instruct them on when it is ok to penetrate and when it is ok to be penetrated. This leads to a culture of sexualized violence and violent sexuality, where gay men often felt pressure from straight men to have sex. The narrative of constraint is very powerful—“on submarines they have a joke that ‘it’s only queer if you’re tied to the pier.”

Ward points out that many people—especially straights, and especially straight white men—are still very confident that they can discern the “true” nature of sexual behavior from a description of the behavior. “That’s just gay,” they say. And it’s love and domesticity that they find most gay. Ward finds this very disturbing, because it makes boring domesticity the only acceptable priority for gays or straights, and reinforces a narrative of “no choice” about identity, which supports ideologies of patriarchy and rape culture that also rely on men’s supposed vulnerability to their animal instincts and unstoppable sexual desires. These discourses of inevitability also prioritize men over women, since women are seen as inherently more flexible, whereas the concept of biological constraint means that gay men haven’t “chosen” to give up their male privilege over women and are thus more legitimately masculine.

Given the amount of homosexual contact involved in heterosexuality, Ward concludes, we need to push back against purely biological accounts and accept the possibility of male sexual fluidity. She also wants to recenter queerness and queer sex acts as what it means to be “gay,” to consider as part of sexual orientation one’s longing for gay bars, kink, and the differentness of “our tribe” in general. I’m not sure those two things are completely consistent, but it sure made me think.

I didn't understand how a woman could write a book that focuses on a man being gay. How do you know what it's like? Did not finish it.