Is Heterosexuality a Prison?

I went to the first-ever "Straight Studies" class to find out.

“There are certain towns I call ‘bro towns,” the sociologist Jane Ward told me. We were sitting in the kitchen of her sunny home in Santa Barbara, California; the yard outside was ringed with citrus trees.

Ward, a young-looking 51, was in a plaid romper and Birkenstocks, her sandy-blonde hair and a few natural grays tucked behind her ears. Maui is a bro town, she explained, with its surfer culture and white guys in dreadlocks shouting “braahh.” Lake Havasu, in Arizona, is a bro town, with its spring-breakers and wet-T-shirt contests. And Santa Barbara, home to the No. 1 party school in America, UCSB (also known as the University of Casual Sex and Beer), where Ward is a professor, is definitely a bro town.

“It has an ethos that just influences everything about life,” she said. “You know, how people drive, what people wear, how the men walk, how people date — everything.”

Ward is UCSB’s chair of feminist studies, and I had been following her work for some time. She was the author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, a book that tackles the gendered pitfalls of heterosexual relationships — from sexual satisfaction (women have way less orgasms) to child rearing (women do way more work, even when they’re also the breadwinners) — from the perspective of a queer woman.

I’d been thinking about writing my own book about straight relationships for the past few years, and the extensive pains I’ve taken in my own life to circumvent those hetero traps — from writing a marriage contract (renegotiated at every major life interval) to refusing to be called a “wife.” (Did you know that as soon as somebody is referred to as a “wife” and not a “girlfriend” she is immediately perceived as less attractive and more “naggy”? I kid you not, there’s a study on this — and it’s a perfect example of the way that hetero-patriarchy isn’t limited to straight women; gay “wives” are perceived as nags, too. I’ll be a forever gf, thx.)

More broadly, though, it was hard not to notice how many straight men seemed to think of their partners as a necessary evil, a “ball and chain,” someone they had to “report” to and appease rather than an equal; while straight women seemed to bond over the shared misery of dating/fucking/partnering with these men — and were seemingly fed up. Now, with a generation of women and men further apart politically than at any other time in history, with more people identifying as queer than ever before, with opinions on marriage and monogamy and procreation in rapid shift, it seemed bizarre — crazy, even — to presume that most women and men would simply end up happily together (or together at all).

There were endless questions I wanted to explore — but for now, I was here to profile Jane Ward, whose newest seminar was an intro to her area of expertise: Straight Studies.

And UCSB, where I had spent many-a-debaucherous weekend in my early 20s, as a student at a nearby college, presented something of a perfect sample for her work. Sitting along the Pacific Coast, it’s one of the only colleges in America that has its own beach, which sets the tone. Guys at UCSB ride shirtless on cruiser bikes — no hands! — with surfboards under their arms. Girls work on their tans after class. In Isla Vista, the square-mile main drag of the school’s party scene, one that has long been a popular scouting location for reality porn, it’s not uncommon after a night of drinking to find yourself walking home barefoot. The vibe of the place, at least on the weekends, is reminiscent of the scene in the Barbie movie where the Kens have turned Barbie’s house into the Mojo Dojo Casa House and decided to throw a party.

I visited Jane’s class in January, and the temperature was, per usual, a perfect 72 degrees. Over on the main quad, blonde frat guys with clipboards were recruiting potential members, a K-pop dance troupe rehearsed, and a student from the psych program handed out flyers for a campus dating survey. And, over in the social sciences building, Ward and I joined 28 undergraduates as they moved their desks into a circle. They looked a bit different from their peers outside, in baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts; there were a few septum rings and at least one “Fuck Tuition” sticker on a laptop. The course was formally called Critical Heterosexuality Studies, and Ward was about to become its lesbian sage.

“I feel like this class will answer a lot of, like, ‘Why are they like that?’” a student named Anthony told the group. He’s a global-studies major and identifies as gay.

“I feel bad for some of my straight friends,” said Sarah, a comparative-literature major from Long Beach. “They’re like, ‘Oh my God, my boyfriend got me flowers for the first time in two years.’ I’m like, ‘Can we raise the bar?’”

Dani, a psychology and brain-sciences major from Dallas, who is bisexual, confessed that she’d observed herself behave in ways that disturbed her when she dated men — she was more submissive, more self-conscious, inattentive to her own needs — and wanted to understand why. Julia, who revealed that she is “actually straight but queer enough to be here,” said she thinks that a lot of straight relationships create that kind of insecurity. Simran, a feminist-studies and psychology double major, who described herself as “constantly confused about my sexuality but definitely not straight,” said she has trouble imagining being a parent without a man in the picture: What was that about?

“Let’s try to answer that in the next few weeks,” Ward said. She was carrying a water bottle with a pink sticker reading “Good Luck, Babe!” — the title of a Chappell Roan song about a woman who ends up with a man, and, well … good luck with that.

“In this class, we’re going to flip the script,” she went on. “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.”

To Ward’s knowledge, and mine, her class is the first of its kind — approaching straight culture head-on as its primary subject. Strangely, few academics seem to have been drawn to the topic. Since the early days of sex research, from Freud to Kinsey and now today’s vast world of scientists and theorists, scholars have been trying to understand the elements of sexual and romantic desire. But investigation has tended to focus on deviations from the perceived norm: Was being gay a choice? Is sexual preference a spectrum? Does homosexuality have its roots in nature or nurture?

Heterosexuality tended to be studied only as the background condition of other phenomena — in the context of sexual assault, domestic labor, sexual satisfaction — and there was a brief period, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when some feminists demanded it be studied as a political institution, one they believed upheld the patriarchy. But as the study of LGBTQ identity and relationships has continued to expand and deepen, the world of heterosexuality has remained largely unexamined: It’s the wallpaper against which other exhibits are hung. Ward likens it to the way that racial justice scholars see whiteness: In the same way a white person is not asked to “explain” their ethnic identity, the same goes for straight culture as a hetero person. Heterosexuality seems to need no explanation; it just is.

Lately, it seems this may have been a mistake. After years of headlines about Gen Z being the most progressive generation in history, and after decades of what seemed to be broad, mainstream progress on sex and gender equality, a cold backlash has arrived, hitting the socially liberal among us like a Saratoga ice-water facial plunge.

You can read the rest of my article in New York Mag.

If you don’t have a subscription, click here for the full text (it’s too long for Substack, sorry!)

BUT BEFORE YOU GO! OR MAYBE AFTER YOU READ!

I’m curious to hear from you all:

In what ways have you observed the tropes, inequities or just plain cultural weirdness of heterosexual life play out in your own relationships? In what ways (if any) have you chosen to do things differently (and how hard was it to do that)?

What do you believe is the path forward for reluctant (or even enthusiastic!) heteros? Do you think heterosexuality is a worthy subject of inquiry? What would you like to see tackled in further inquiry into this subject?

Please tell me in the comments below, or feel free to send me a message <3