However, the term has also been used to exclude and invalidate other queer women, particularly trans and bisexual and pansexual women. Many young women online have found the term useful to describe why it took them so long to figure out their queer identities they had internalised the idea that they had to be attracted to men and therefore created crushes or misconstrued their interest in male friends or celebrities. Compulsory heterosexuality: The controversies Rich argued that women’s attraction to men was in fact internalised patriarchy and not genuine. Unlike some advocates of political lesbianism and lesbian separatism, Rich believed that everyone, including all women, is innately attracted to women, whereas attraction to men is learned. Rich advocated for political lesbianism (choosing to either not have relationships with men, or pursue relationships with women, regardless of your sexual orientation, for political reasons) and lesbian separatism claiming that women could only be free to be their authentic selves when free from men’s - and by extension the patriarchy’s - influence by pursuing lives with other women. Rich proposed that women’s sexuality existed along a ‘ lesbian continuum’, wherein women had more to gain from intimacy and relationships with women, whether that intimacy was friendship, romance, or sexual, than from any relationships with men. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings - and our sensuality - have not been tamed or contained within it,” she writes. “Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of ‘abnormal’ childhoods they wanted to feel ‘normal’" and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfilment. “Compulsory heterosexuality is what forces lesbians to struggle through learning the difference between what you’ve been taught you want (being with men) and what you do want (being with women),” the document explains. The document, which has recently been doing the rounds on TikTok, was written by Angeli Luz when she was a teenager and draws on her own struggles with figuring out her lesbian identity. The term compulsory heterosexuality is having a moment online right now, possibly due to a viral Google Doc known as ‘ The Lesbian Masterdoc’. Like all women, I’ve been conditioned from childhood to see all feelings I have towards men as attraction. For example, I’m currently trying to work out whether I’m actually hot for the dishevelled, unstable version of Bo Burnham, or whether I’m just in awe of what a phenomenal piece of art Inside is. Have you ever looked back on a crush, or maybe even a relationship with a man, and realised you maybe weren’t actually into him like that you just thought he was super cool, or you liked his style, or you admired his accomplishments and you weren’t sure how to process or show that beyond romantic/sexual interest? Welcome to compulsory heterosexuality.Ĭompulsory heterosexuality or ‘comphet’ as it’s colloquially known, is a term used to describe the way in which our culture coerces us into viewing all intimacy or connection between men and women as sexual or romantic.
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