Is Heterosexuality Good For Women?

Why do women put up with men who feel entitled to women’s emotional, sexual and domestic labor?

In philosopher Kate Manne’s latest book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, she references an article written anonymously by a woman — a humanities professor who teaches feminist theory — who felt sexually violated by her husband throughout their eight-year marriage. All she could do was comply:

“All the feminist texts I had read could not drown out what I had absorbed from society and popular culture: that it was my duty to satisfy my husband, regardless of my own feelings.”

For Manne, it’s a prime example of male entitlement, an aspect of misogyny that prioritizes what men believe they deserve and what women should give them, which is, obviously, problematic.

No woman belongs to any man, she writes, and men are “not entitled to have any woman’s love, care and admiration in an asymmetrical moral relationship.”

Exactly. And yet as we have seen during the pandemic, women are still doing more than their share of the household labor, about which countless articles and books have been written, and curbing their work hours to manage children while most men have not. And thus is the state of heterosexual marriage.

Why do men feel entitled to women’s emotional, sexual and domestic labor? It’s as if men don’t really like women all that much. A case could be made that they don’t. As author and activist Stanley Fritz writes:

“Similar to the way the average white person relates to black and brown people, men have an aggressively problematic relationship with women. We love them in theory, but not in practice. Do men love fucking women? Yes. Looking at them? Absolutely. Dating and even marrying women? Sure. But when it comes to acknowledging their humanity and seeing them for more than just an object, things get fuzzy.”

And that is the premise of gender and sexuality studies professor Jane Ward’s new book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, which takes a deep dive into what heterosexual women have to put up with to get and keep what society tells them we need — the love of a man and a happily-ever-after narrative. But a patriarchal society that for so long has made women dependent on men and supported romantic relationships that are overwhelmingly unequal has not made that all that pleasant for us.

“Their sexual relationships with men have been maintained by force, both through cultural propaganda targeting girls and women and more directly through sexual assault, incest, compulsory marriage, economic dependence, control of children, and domestic violence.”

Which makes her question whether heterosexuality is a good thing for women when it requires so much coercion. Being a hetero woman is, she writes, really hard.

For the record, I am a cis hetero woman and I happen to love men. I am the daughter of one, the former wife of two, the former lover of numerous male partners and the mother of two young men. That said, I am all too aware of how men have felt entitled to my emotional, sexual and domestic labor, and how that has often exhausted me and, like many other women, made me lose some of myself.

If you have ever read a self-help book or just about any article on romantic relationships in media geared for women, you know that it’s always up to women to be on top of the emotional temperature of our romantic relationship and to accept the imbalances in them —regardless of, as the anonymous Vox writer observes, our “own feelings.”

As Manne notes, women are socialized to be aware of others’ feelings, especially men’s, perhaps to the detriment of our own. She, too, questions the wisdom in that.

“Why, and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct? And, relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for protecting and ministering to them?”

No doubt much of that comes from the advice women often turn to in an effort to figure out men, which has grown exponentially — what Ward calls the “heterosexual-repair industry.” And that advice stems from some questionable and disturbing white supremacist beliefs, Ward discovers, that also seem to indicate that men and women, especially women, need to be convinced that they should overlook and accept a lot of bad behavior in their partner — better than being alone, right?

“Women were not expected to feel an easy or instinctive attraction to men, nor were men expected to concern themselves with women’s emotional or physical well-being. One point nearly all sexologists agreed upon: Women needed to understand that men were naturally inclined toward aggression and sexual selfishness, so they should cut their husbands a little slack. … Straight culture seems to rely on a blind acceptance that women and men do not need to hold the other gender in high esteem as much as they need to need each other and to learn how to compromise and suppress their disappointment in the service of this need.”

When it comes to hetero sex, Ward considers it a sad situation, what with all the coercion (hello #MeToo), the fact that many women put up with crappy sex to “get it over with” or to “be nice” (we are overwhelmingly engaging in “maintenance sex” during the pandemic even though we’re not in the mood, a new study indicates) and the disturbing orgasm gap. All hetero women need to enjoy sex more and have orgasms is a dude who knows what he’s doing and “technically competent genital stimulation” and while we’re at it, gender equality, as Emily Willingham details in her new book Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis. How hard can that be?

And yet as Ward notes, straight men seem confused by or perhaps just disinterested in knowing more about how to turn on women, no matter how much they may want to have a female romantic partner.

“While straight men’s desire for women’s bodies is often portrayed as an incredibly power force, many men’s notorious confusion about what produces female orgasm, their disinterest in providing oral sex to women, and their dramatically narrow ideas about what constitutes a female body worth desiring (waxed, shaved, scented, dieted, young, etc.) suggests that heteromasculinity is characterized by a much weaker and far more conditional desire for women’s bodies than is often claimed.”

Which makes the sexologists’ claim that men are “naturally inclined toward aggression and sexual selfishness” seem pretty accurate. Obviously, this is not how all men treat women. But it’s clearly been so many women’s experiences with men that while it may not be all men, it’s far too many of them.

The true tragedy of heterosexuality, Ward writes

“is about men’s control of women, but it’s also about straight women’s and men’s shared romantic and erotic attachments to an unequal gender binary, or to the heteroerotic fantasy of binary, biologically determined, and naturally hierarchical gender oppositeness.”

And the often playful way that power over women is presented —like husbands getting away without doing their fair share of the chores and child care, cue the exasperated eye rolls — helps to fuel “romantic tales of the redemption of violent, aggressive, entitled and self-obsessed straight men.”

There’s that word again — entitled.

No, men are not entitled to have “any woman’s love, care and admiration in an asymmetrical moral relationship,” Manne writes, but the bigger challenge may be getting them to see women as “fully a human being, and not just a human giver of love, sex and moral succor. She is allowed to be her own person, and to be with other people.”

Or, as Fritz says, getting men to acknowledge women’s humanity.

It shouldn’t be too hard for men to do that. And yet.

Claiming to be a feminist doesn’t cut it either, Ward states, unless men are willing to fundamentally change how they view and treat women.

“I want men to be feminists because they value women’s humanity, because they identify with women, and because they see that the gender binary is a historical, political-economic, and cultural invention that has caused no end of suffering for women and also for themselves. When men extend empathy and subjectivity to women out of self-interest, to grease the wheels of sexual access or to continue receiving women’s emotional labor, this makes no intervention into men’s profound sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and women’s love, nor does it pose any challenge to men’s unrelenting attachment to their own masculinity as the core of their identity, the foundation of their goodness, the basis on which they connect with other men, and the primary contribution they think they’re making to the world.”

So why do so many women continue to turn to men even though they know they’re most likely going to end up in an unequal romantic relationship? “I’m just in it for the dick,” a friend tells Ward. (Sometimes that’s all women want.) Others say they seek the “respectability or security that heterosexuality offers.” Ward hopes women are in it for the pleasure, which for her includes “the concept of love and also the dick and even the social benefits of heterosexuality.”

Cool, cool, cool. But, as she writes,

“If heterosexuality were a site of significant pleasure for women, this raises the question about why so many straight women appear to be miserable.”

That kind of stopped me in my tracks because it’s true — a lot of women just are not all that happy in their hetero romantic relationships, especially marriage. Maybe we would be if men cared about our pleasure and orgasms. Mostly I think we’d like men to see our humanity, and that we don’t just give — we also have needs.

Want to know how to have a more equal marriage? (Of course you do!) Read The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press). You can support your local indie bookstore (please do) or order it on Amazon. And we’re now on Audible.

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