The Latent Insanity of Woman
“Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.” ― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex.
One reason heterosexuality sucks for straight women is that practically everything a straight woman could want from her sexuality is hystericized.
Foucault was absolutely right when he observed that practically everything about women is hystericized, one way or another. So it doesn't really matter what women want from sexual liberation because women themselves are treated as latently insane.
Where I believe many social scientists have gone wrong in their study of contemporary heterosexuality is in their unexamined assumptions around autonomy, choice, and parity. Many contemporary researchers ground their empirical studies of heterosexual interaction in the empirically ungrounded assumption that men and women are interacting as equals, on par with one another in power, resources, and societal reinforcement. This would imply that our society has transcended gender inequity, which we plainly haven’t.
So a lot of scholarship on contemporary heterosexual exchange done by people who should know better is flawed and it is largely flawed in much the same way: it assumes what women are presently doing is what emancipated women would do under conditions of gender parity. That’s erroneous logic, wrong because it presumes conditions that do not presently exist.
So much of this research is flawed because it fails to ask the hypothetical question of what women would be doing differently if they were actually free, under conditions where they were no longer oppressed. Because that and nothing short of that would be women’s liberation.
When social scientists err in assuming that women are making choices when they are in reality trying to negotiate the best outcomes for themselves under conditions of gendered oppression, then that research has the effect of obscuring the very oppression constraining women’s choices. It thus ignores the working mechanics of gender oppression to imply that women are somehow free and their choices are the expression of freedom. Ironically, this critically unreflexive feminism thus works in the service of the patriarchy.
One thing I wish I could have gone back and understood before I started my dissertation fieldwork was this notion of unfreedom. I was interested in studying the ways in which women feel sexually unfree, how they feel their degrees of sexual freedom limited and conditioned by gender inequality, but I didn’t have this concept of antifreedom available in my head at all. And I think the reason why was that the hystericization of women by men is so hegemonic that even sociologists take it for granted.
Because no longer is it any specific sexual practice or behavior that is hystercized. Thanks in large part to the queer liberation movement, more and more of what goes on between two (or more) consenting adults is losing its stigma. Undoubtedly, this has increased sexual freedom for everyone and has been a very good thing.
But within heterosexuality itself, the hystericization of women is not about what they choose to do in the bedroom. It’s actually harder to pin down than that. The hystericization of women is seen most obviously when women try to set boundaries with men or express a desire that contrasts with what men want from them. That’s when it comes out. It’s in asserting freedom when ostensibly liberated women become pathologized.
If she wants a hookup and he wants more than that, well she’s a slutty crazy person.
If she wants a relationship and he wants less than that, well she’s a prudish crazy person.
It really doesn’t matter what women want. There’s actually very little point in straight women expressing what they want because anything they want that differs from what men want from them is what’s crazy. You can’t point to certain sex acts or desires and say that they are hystericized. A woman saying, for example, that she wants to date men who read books is not hysterical unless a man who doesn’t want to read books wants to date her. Then she’s nuts.
No matter what direction she chooses to go in, it’ll be wrong so long as what men want from her is something else.
That’s power. Getting to define what is and isn’t crazy is power. And under patriarchy, women are conveniently always crazy because if they weren’t crazy, they’d want exactly what men want. Yes, that’s completely tautological, but that’s the point. That’s the double bind that women find themselves in under patriarchy.
The hystericization of the feminine within heterosexuality itself is a huge basis of gender oppression. This is what Shulamith Firestone meant when she said that women and love are “underpinnings”—to understand how women are oppressed by love and sex is to understand how the mechanics of hegemony work more broadly. What men expect women to be and do changes over time, but not the latent expectation that women are pathologized, discriminated against, threatened, attacked, sanctioned, whatever, whenever they do anything that veers from the expectation that men have for women.
That’s also what Rosa Luxemburg meant when she said those who do not move, do not notice their chains. Like I said, it’s only when women move in ways that vary from what men want from them does it become apparent how unfree straight women really are. And what men want from women is everything.
So, you see, it doesn’t actually matter what women want.
They’re damned from the start.