What he wants
Today: Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the recently published Sloppy.
Issue No. 603
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
Rax King
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
by Rax King
When I think about what most straight men prize in the women they desire—youth, slimness, blondeness, whiteness—I feel helpless rage.
Let’s hustle through the necessary disclaimers: not all straight men (nor all straight women, nor all queer people, nor any of the other types of person we will be considering here). Not everyone is bound up in such narrow perspectives on what makes women attractive, nor does everyone slack off on the housework and childrearing; nor is everyone a selfish lover. But when I read the “seduction bootcamp” chapter of Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality recently, I could fend off my helpless rage only so far. Like most women who love men, I grade them on a steep curve and am still routinely forced to flunk them.
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality is a lively look at how and why, exactly, heterosexual women are suffering. Its author, sociologist Jane Ward, is a queer woman who comes to this analysis from a place of profound sympathy for her hetero sisters—the dedication is a poignant, funny wish for straight women: “May you find a way to have your sexual needs met without suffering so much.” Ward is unsparing in her analysis of why the “heterosexual repair industry” of self-help is unequal to the task of deepening the connections between men and women who claim to love each other. And for straight men, she prescribes a hearty dose of lesbian feminism. After all, heterosexuality entails sleeping with the enemy and lesbianism does not:
Our relationships, unlike straight relationships, aren’t presumed to be subject to gender-based antagonisms or in structural conflict from the start. We are not always already set up in such a way that someone risks being a nagging wife or feeling trapped or needing to buy self-help best sellers like He’s Just Not That into You or Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them or How to Date Men When You Hate Men or worrying about how to catch a man and keep him or resenting that our gender means we will do most of the parenting and housework or needing to convince our dating pool that we aren’t bitches, whores, stupid, weak, or available to be grabbed by the pussy.
If men can learn to empathize with women the way lesbians do, Ward believes they might even find a cure for that epidemic of male loneliness we’re forever hearing about. She also visits a few seduction bootcamps to research what, exactly, these men need to be cured of.
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