More on Being Straight

Of course, it's not precisely accurate to speak as if it "just happens" that the people I'm attracted to also all (or effectively all) happen to be female (to be interpreted as female, to present as female, etc.). My heterosexuality, my feminism, and my misandry are all interrelated in complicated ways, intertwined elements of my fuller psycho-politico-sexual self. I can be attracted to the long hair or short skirt at least as much as the more privileged set of sexual signifiers known as the secondary sex characteristics, signifiers which still simply point to other signifiers with this notion of a transcendental signified, "femaleness" or "femininity" lurking somewhere in the background. And there are signifiers which lie in between, like the slender waist, which seem rooted in the body until we look at how standards of beauty have changed over the ages, and we realized just how much--I'm not claiming all--of my sexual desire is sexually constructed. (It's also raced in complicated ways, but that's a conversation for another day.)

My feminism is strongly influenced by the radical feminism of the 1970s. For many of those thinkers, lesbianism--women desiring women, women loving women--was a political act. Wikipedia quotes one female participant in a 1970s survey: "I see lesbianism as putting all my energies (sexual, political social, etc.) into women. Sex is a form of comfort and to have sex indiscriminately with males is to give them comfort." My heterosexuality is obviously of a much less radical character, but I can't helpt but see it in a similar light: I value women both as bodies and as agents, and the one type of appreciation can't really be divorced from the other. This is an understanding which, in addition to its debt to the aforementioned "second-wave" radical feminists, has been worked out largely in conversations taking place in the predominately-female, heavily queer spaces I inhabit online.

No one--I don't think, or at least I hope not--loves or desires with their bodies alone. We do so as sexual beings, as social beings, as psychological beings, as intellectual beings, as political beings. The flip side of this is that when I swoon over a young woman wearing thick-rimmed glasses--a preference which is clearly not biologically determined--my desire, that reaction of guh, is as visceral and embodied as any other desiring reaction of mine. Body and mind aren't things which can be separated here.

When I demand that the majority of the media I consume pass the Bechdel test, I don't separate the parts of myself which do this because enjoy watching attractive young actresses from the part which thinks there needs to be more representation of women with agency in media. (I suspect, for that matter, that neither does Alison Bechdel, for what it's worth.) It's all of the same piece; call it the consistent garment of "F--k You, She's Awesome."

But this is an awesome of resistance (thus the "F--ck You"); it makes sense only within the context of a patriarchal culture which systematically denies women's agency and thus their awesomeness. The awesomeness of everyone--male, female, intersexed, genderqueer--should be able to be taken for granted and not need to be ostentatiously celebrated, or at least just on the merits using a scale not specifically designed to keep women (and everyone) oppressed.

That is not the world we live in today.

So, yes, I am a heterosexual, and that says something, something profound even, about me and my experience. Some, although by no means all, of that can be generalized to other heterosexuals. But to acknowledge this is similar to acknowledging that I have a certain set of experiences as a white man, as a middle-class man, as a temporarily abled man, or whatever: important, not something to be ignored under the excuse of color-blindness (or *-blindness), but not the point in and of itself. We notice these difference in order to diagnose the problem of systemic injustice, to work towards the day when they no longer matter.