If homophobia is the disapproval and fear of homosexuality, we now also have what we could term heterophobia, the disapproval and fear of heterosexuality.
Marcie Bianco, writing for NBC news, no less, has written an article on dancer Julianne Hough’s declaration that she is “not straight” and pop singer Miley Cyrus leaving her husband for another woman. From this celebrity news, she generalizes about all women, further generalizing about all men, lumping them together with Jeffrey Epstein and the mass shooters. She concludes that “As the status quo, heterosexuality is just not working.”
From Marcie Bianco, Miley Cyrus’ split with Liam Hemsworth isn’t just celebrity gossip — it’s a blow to the patriarchy, NBC News:
Over the past week, an assortment of trending stories — from Jeffrey Epstein to the Dayton and El Paso mass shooters, to Miley Cyrus’s separation and Julianne Hough’s declaration that she’s “not straight” — together have laid bare the strictures of an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown. As the status quo, heterosexuality is just not working.
As a snapshot of 2019 America, these stories present a startling picture: Men continue to coerce, harass, rape and kill girls and women — and go to extreme lengths to avoid responsibility for their actions. On the other side of the issue, girls and women are challenging heterosexuality, and even absconding from it altogether.
Framed differently, the picture is this: Men need heterosexuality to maintain their societal dominance over women. Women, on the other hand, are increasingly realizing not only that they don’t need heterosexuality, but that it also is often the bedrock of their global oppression.
First of all, I thought sexual orientation was supposed to be innate! Gays and lesbians cannot help their same-sex attraction, we were told. But it sounds here as if woman can “abscond” from their heterosexuality, embracing lesbianism as a way to escape the oppression of the patriarchy. Can someone who is gay or lesbian “abscond” from their homosexuality? To think so has been characterized as “homophobic.” This notion that heterosexuals can change their orientation is surely heterophobic.
The “essentialist” argument, that sexual orientation is an essential, non-changeable facet of a person’s identity was an assumption of the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. This view was also a factor in the extraordinarily rapid social acceptance of homosexuality in the culture as a whole. Now, though, after that victory, we are hearing that sexual identity is “fluid.”
The apologists for same-sex marriage also assured the general public that such a redefinition would have no impact on heterosexual marriages or traditional families. But here we have a condemnation of families with men in them as being intrinsically oppressive to women, who are being urged to pursue sex with women instead.
The assumption seems to be that men and women should keep away from each other. That way, men cannot “coerce, harass, rape and kill girls and women.” Abandoning heterosexuality can make that happen. Men should marry men, and women should marry women. If everyone would just stay in his or her own lane, the patriarchy would cease to exist.
As for heterosexuality not working, we have to ask, working to do what?
Live happily ever after? But lesbian marriages have a much higher divorce rate than either heterosexual or male gay marriages. Two women who marry each other are not immune from conflicts or even abusive behavior. (Just ask the wife of the female astronaut who responded to a bitter divorce and custody battle by committing identity theft from outer space.)
Most men are not, in fact, mass shooters, abusers, rapists, or murderers. And most heterosexual relationships and marriages, I dare say, are “working.”
One way that heterosexuality “works,” in a way that cannot be disputed, is for the biological imperative of reproducing the species. Having a baby still requires the two different sexes, even in same-sex marriages that employ artificial conception or surrogate mothers.
Of course, technology keeps advancing. Just as sex has been separated from reproduction, reproduction will be separated from sex. We could move to reproduction by means of cloning. Those who are sexually oriented to someone like themselves can have a child who is exactly like themselves.
Such a triumph over nature would indeed render heterosexuality obsolete.
If that happens, heterosexuals might become a closeted minority.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
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