Pacer Pillowtalk: Compulsive heterosexuality
Compulsive heterosexuality was originally conceived as a women’s issue, though the effects of the social compulsion are felt across all genders and identities. The representation of heterosexuality as a default orientation is in part to blame for heterosexual impulses. This impulse can be “adopted by people regardless of their personal sexual preferences,” wrote Emma Gunde, a contributor to A Feminist Theory Dictionary.
Beyond orientation, the originator of the term and phenomenon, Adrienne Rich, also argues that “compulsory heterosexuality ensures men’s domination of women.”
Heterosexuality is argued to be the result of “social arrangements that normalize opposite-sex relationships while erasing, marginalizing, and pathologizing same-sex affection and sexuality,” as described in the Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Heterosexuality thus becomes naturalized. It may not present explicitly. In A Feminist Theory Dictionary, Gunde asserts that “A person’s heterosexuality is generally assumed until proven otherwise; by both one’s self and those around her;” maintaining that heterosexuality is nothing but a “learned behavior,” rather than an obligatory or required state.
Even in gay male relationships, compulsory heterosexual impulses are evident. The notion of child-bearing and the nuclear family is considered a precedent for all mature, romantic relationships. Compulsive heterosexuality denies self-determination by insisting on the traditional model of love: existing between opposite genders and sex and “reinforced by interlocking institutions—including political, religious, economic, legal, medical, familial, and educational,” according to The Equality Archive.
Straight people are also manipulated by this phenomenon, experienced as the societal expectation “to marry and reproduce.”
Compulsive heterosexuality is grounded on the gender binary, the assumption that everyone is either male or female and that the “proper sexual pairing” must be exclusively between men and women.
This extends into sexual pleasure, too. Penetrative sex is seen as the natural form of pleasure, intended solely for the purpose of child-bearing. This assumption limits “erotic possibilities—especially between and among women.” Adrienne Rich, the coiner of the social phenomenon, describes this as an institutional tactic to maintain womens’ social position and sexual needs as below mens’.
Rejecting the status quo, especially in regards to self-expression and romantic, sexual desires is difficult, but will “allow for more equal relations to emerge among people with a variety of gender identifications and expressions.”
People may not consider external possibilities for their sexual and romantic gratification because of this conception of heterosexuality as being natural, something that occurs within the individual and not because of outside sources. Media plays a significant role in reinforcing these stereotypes, even in the LGBT community (viewing bisexuality as an in-between orientation, as half-gay, half-straight). The expressions of love are also limited, which may be confusing to individuals with same-sex attraction, because the most common depictions of love are almost exclusively opposite-sex.
Since the coining of the term in 1980, resources for individuals questioning their sexual identity or curious about the systemic effects have surfaced, most popularly the “Am I a Lesbian Masterdoc.”
