"A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance."

Subheadline for a New York Magazine article titled, "If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More?" The teaser title on the front page is "Do Straight Women Really Exist?" The author of the article is Jessica Bennett.

“In this class, we’re going to flip the script,” [said sociologist Jane Ward to her students on the first day of class]. “It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.”...

Flipping the script is a good approach to studying the topic, and the topic is worthy of study. However, I don't like being directed to "worry" or "feel sympathy" or "be allies." I'd look at the subject head on. But neutrality is cruel, and women want to present as empathetic. 

The online world seems to get weirder and more retrograde about heterosexuality every day. Idealized masculinity has become more aggressive, more jacked up, and also more high maintenance... while femininity gets ever “softer,” more nurturing and domestic, and somehow still more sexy....

The rise of transgenderism fits in right here but is not discussed in the article.

In 2019, the gender scholar Asa Seresin coined the term heteropessimism to describe straight women’s “performative” expressions of regret, embarrassment, and hopelessness about their hetero lives. (It is performative, Seresin writes, not because it is insincere, but because it is “rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment” of straight relationships.)

I add my "performative (the word)" tag. 

Ward refers to all this anguish as “the tragedy of heterosexuality”.... She finds that straight relationships are full of contradictions, antagonism, and boredom; they are “erotically uninspired,” paralyzed by “punishing” gender expectations, and burdened by countless daily injustices. The common narrative about gay relationships and gay life, Ward writes, is that it’s a difficult path, and she admits it certainly can be hard. But she believes straight women actually have it worse — that the cards are fully stacked against them....

Ward is a product of her own heteropessimism.... Ward dated boys in high school and college and considered herself straight until grad school, when she broke up with her boyfriend and hooked up with her female best friend. In terms of pure attraction, she felt bisexual, but the more she considered it, the more she thought, Why would I ever settle for people who I don’t have basic value alignment with, which is most men? 

“Chosen,” she told me, was not the exactly right word for the life she’d ended up with. It was more that she had “cultivated queerness.”...

In other words: not born that way. 

Recently, she’s been amused to learn that Gen Z has a hashtag that refers to “compulsory heterosexuality” — the idea that women are socially conditioned to be straight, a concept she’d been teaching for years, originated by Adrienne Rich....

When we spoke, data had just come out showing that more and more people are identifying as queer.... “That’s just so fascinating,” she said. “Because it’s like, ‘Well, do you think something’s in the water?’ Or is it possible that young people are choosing another way?”...

Maybe RFK Jr. will check that out. I can picture him prioritizing the hypothesis that there is literally something in the water. 

[Straight women, Ward says, should have] to answer the same questions that gay people have been forcibly confronted with for so long: What propels them toward the opposite sex, despite all the difficulty? And what does being straight do for them?