disclaimer: I wrote this a while ago for another magazine I used to work at. But since a lot of things have changed since then, I modified some parts and added new things.
I sometimes cannot help but dream and imagine who would I be in a different reality. I wonder how would I be in another socially constructed world, one without binaries, without regimes, without forced identities. How much freer would I be. How much would I ebb and flow. How much all of my desires would just run through in and out of my body. I would be as beautiful as the ocean.
In the Euphoria episode, “Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob”, Jules, like me, connects her desire to be ocean-like with her sexuality and gender. One of the best things I’ve seen on television so far (btw that's because Hunter wrote it instead of Sam Levinson). Hunter Schaffer’s explorations of her identity and sexuality in this episode are incredibly vulnerable, but they are what made it such a painful delight to watch. First time I ever realized what compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) looks like was when watching this episode.
‘Compulsory heterosexuality’ refers to how a patriarchal, heteronormative society socially conditions women to view interactions and connections with men as the only available option. In the Euphoria episode, Jules refers to comphet as she talks about how she has framed her entire womanhood around men when she is not even interested in them anymore. As a trans girl, the pressure that Jules must feel to conform to patriarchal expectations of what it means to be a woman must be insufferable. However, her experiences are not exclusive to trans girls, compulsory heterosexuality affects all women.
In her 1980’s essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, Adrienne Rich asserts that a feminist critique of heterosexuality is long overdue. She argues, “to take the step of questioning heterosexuality as a “preference” or “choice” for women—and to do the intellectual and emotional work that follows—will call for a special quality of courage in heterosexual identified feminists, but I think the rewards will be great: a freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shattering of another great silence, new clarity in personal relationships” (27).
As someone who has identified as heterosexual most of my life, I can confirm Rich’s claims, questioning my heterosexuality has been an intellectual and emotional trainwreck. For most of my life, I’ve been convinced that either you are born that way (thank you Gaga), and you know it since you are 5, or you are not gay. And whereas the former is undoubtedly the truth for some people, it is not a comprehensive description of sexuality. Not until recently, I understood the sexuality spectrum with more clarity. Sexuality and gender identity can be fluid and they are really complicated (plus, claiming that there’s a gay gene can open up a eugenic can of worms.) Although I’ve been familiar with Rich through her poetry and mentions of her ideas in my literary theory classes, she is not the one who made me question my attraction to men. I must give credit to TikTok, once again (embarrasing, I know)
A couple of months ago, a document called The Lesbian Masterdoc1 started trending. When I read it, I already knew I was sexually fluid, but I still had doubts about the “validity” of my feelings. Reading it has helped me understand my sexuality, but it has also made me realize the terrifying nature of my relationships with men. The bullet points that scared me the most are the ones that follow:
– “You lose all attraction or get extremely uncomfortable if there are any implications that [men] might like you back. You get deeply uncomfortable and lose all interest in these unattainable guys if they ever indicate they might reciprocate” (11).
– “You mistake the desire for male approval as attraction. You don’t necessarily want a relationship with men, but you want men to want a relationship with you” (11).
– “Reading your anxiety/discomfort/nervousness/combativeness around men as attraction to them. Confusing your anxiety around men for “butterflies” or being flustered” (11).
-”Reading a desire to be attractive to men as attraction to them” (11).
I could have quoted twenty more bullet points but these are the most relevant because they underscore the nature of my power relationship with men. For the longest time, every time I had a crush on a guy, the moment they liked me back, I stopped caring. Look, this could also be due to problems I have with self-esteem but I know they are not completely to blame because I do let people love me (or at least sometimes, but that’s another discussion). What I have an immense problem with, however, is male validation. The desire for men’s validation has been so embedded in my appetite that as Adrienne Rich articulates “even when that attraction is suicidal, it is still an organic imperative” (35). I am painfully aware that I sound insane (or it is just the Bell Jar effect), but this is not an individual problem. Compulsory Heterosexuality is symptomatic of a culture that forces women to depend on men. Rich enumerates three different forces that the patriarchy uses to instigate comphet, she says they are material, physical, and mental. I won’t elaborate much on the material and physical forces because I feel like she does that pretty well. I'd recommend instead reading her essay since it’s not too long nor hard to understand, but, in a nutshell, she's referring to the material conditions of capitalism that force women to depend on heterosexual marriage, and to the physical violence (rape, arranged marriage etc.) women are subjugated to that so aggressively say that heterosexual love is the only option.
I am not sure how much of these economic and physical forces I have experienced YET. But the part that made me question how much I’ve been groomed into gender roles is when Rich questions the mental forces of the heteropatriarchy. Last time I wrote this, I tried to accept my queerness, but ever since then, the internalized homophobia hasn’t exactly waned. So I just keep asking myself repeatedly when did I became so brainwashed by compulsory heterosexuality. I am addicted to all the tales, myths, and stories that I’ve been told about my worth as a woman. They offer a temporary relief to the damnation of womanhood. The subjugation is acceptable as long as there is a “nice” guy that I end up with at the end of the story. I cannot get away from the script. I cannot play the part and love women at the same time. I feel like I am not enough of a woman, as if I need to be fixed. I cannot label myself as “lesbian” or “bisexual” and still center on male validation, but I just unconsciously keep asking myself if I am playing this part and I don’t get the applause of the intended audience then why the heck am I even playing it for? There's a famous quote by Kristin Chang that goes “godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed”. I would like to also add that girlhood, just like godhood, is a begging to be seen, and by seen, I mean validated and desired.
I use the word grooming intentionally. Florida won't stop babbling about how the LGBTQ community is grooming little kids with “gender ideology”. To me, that feels like the most ironic projection. I was conditioned like a Pavlov dog to wear dresses and have my hair a certain way just because I have a vagina (and btw I not only think gender is a construction, but also sex). And look a lot of it has been like taking medicine inside of a good treat, I like certain parts of girlhood. But more so in the sense that I identify with a community of marginalized beings and cherish our shared experiences. I like the memes of “girlhood is a spectrum”, I like watching Sophia Coppola's films, and thinking about Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 performance of Silver Springs (girls’ version of the Roman Empire). Recently there’s been discourse on the internet about how girlhood is messy, while womanhood is filled with unattainable standards. But while I like this less constricted meaning of girlhood, I still feel caged by it.
These rigid categories have restricted my flow of emotions and my ability to love freely. My mind goes back to that Jo March monologue pretty often. Most of the male crushes I've had can be translated as a yearning to be loved. And just like Marmee says, that’s not love. I know it's not love. But sometimes the loneliness Jo is talking about crashes and I am absorbed by a wave of incessant yearning for male love. bell hooks says that most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it is like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love and not receiving it. But I am also pretty sure that I have been incapable of giving it too. I have been so hurt by boys, but instead of processing that anger, I just stayed there with an infinite thirst for approval. Anything to avoid the fact that being a girl is just wailful. I’ve remained incapable of being vulnerable and seeking control in being wanted, in a Shiv Roy manner. I think that what I have been yearning for is power. That’s why I could never love any of those guys. I wanted to have the upper hand that comes with being desired2. I so naively thought it would give me power, and I sacrificed love in the process.
I think that for a generation borderline obsessed with individuality and pseudo-self-care, loving someone means keeping a border, never fully surrendering, never fully becoming the other. I like to believe that loving someone means fully fading into the other person (yes, that’s a Mazzy Star reference), being entangled, flooding within. I don’t know how you can love someone where your role in the relationship is so inelastically defined. I’ve tried to decode myself for so long to convince myself that a woman loving another woman is okay, but I am so worn, so washed-up. I am worried that as long as I keep thinking in a binary form, I will always feel this way. I am no longer Catholic. and yet I cannot stop thinking that this rib (me) is meant to fit in perfectly with a man’s body. So when a part of my womanhood does not fit with what men need, I wait to get this weaving shame that tells me that I am doing something wrong.
I ask again when I became so brainwashed, when did all the media and stories were injected like a chip in my brain, because no one explicitly told me that as a woman I needed to center men, but I don't think they needed to. Words are signifiers. We all can pretend to be the wokest, but whenever someone mentions the word woman, capital w, we all know that our minds don’t immediately think about lesbians. There’s no thinking of wo(men) without thinking of men, it’s literally part of the word, one defines the other. I cannot decode that. I have said this and I will say it again, I think words construct reality, and they are just so hard to escape. It is so laborious to escape narratives. I admire women who can decenter men from their lives and still feel comfortable in their womanhood but I can’t, I’ve tried and tried and I can’t. One day I asked myself the terrifying question of how would I feel if I let go of this identity that I’ve been clinging to with all of my nails. I felt the weariest weight off. I could see an open field filled with possibilities, and I just wanna wade through them. I still identify with parts of my womanhood (they/she) but I am opening the box to see how my squared body turns into the amorphous seablob that I desperately want to be. Like a geyser, I just want to explode and see what riches come out of it. I believe in the necessity of feminism, but I've always believed that queer liberation is more essential, if not central to the struggle. Adrienne Rich says that all women need to question their heterosexuality, I would add that they also need to question their assigned gender.
Before reading Rich’s essay I could have probably anticipated some ideas about why heterosexuality is compulsory thanks to my degree’s classes on Queer Theory and Poststructuralism. Simply put, the existence of the binaries of men and women, and gay and straight are one of the strongest upholders of the patriarchy. They enforce women’s dependency on men and limit gender identities in order to control them. Fittingly, as Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, the Western construction of gender and sexual identities regulates and reifies[1] desires. He argues that the idea that our desires reveal some fundamental truth about who we are is a Western construct. As Rich questions, “why species survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationship should ever become so rigidly identified with each other?” (17). The answer is simple: the reification of desires and the gender-sexuality dichotomy helps the patriarchy because it regulates women’s sexual drives, emotions, and bodies. Notwithstanding, reification does not only benefit the patriarchy, most regulatory regimes benefit from it. For instance, capitalism thrives on capitalizing on identity in order to force individuals to buy specific products designed for their groups. Anthropocentrism advantages from the belief that humans are complete and unified individuals who are not connected to anything around them, which is one of the reasons we have a climate crisis.
Challenging anthropocentrism and the patriarchy, Astrida Neimanis proposes that we are bodies of water—bodies that extend, transcorporeally, into other assemblages and release uncontrollable eruptions (46). This is rather similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of being a Body-Without-Organs: to be a BwO is to let “the connection of desire, the conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” move through in and out of your body (161). Likewise, water dissolutes and flows throughout the earth. Neimanis muses that we are made of mostly wet matter (from 60 to 70%), so as bodies of water “we leak and seethe, our borders always vulnerable to rupture and renegotiation” (2). So perhaps my dreams of being as free as the ocean are not dreams for I cannot dream to be something I already am. All the identities and categories the patriarchy has forced me to adopt have simply been ways to contain my waterness. But water drips and flows, and I am too tired to pretend that it doesn’t.
okay this doc is highly controversial, I do not agree entirely with it but it definitely has some questions that would undoubtedly make you think about your sexuality.
(whether that power is ever granted to women is debatable)