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Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

At the base of a compulsively heterosexual society is the absence of female choice, not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that the act of choosing is entirely dismissed as a choice when made by a woman. The dismissal of female choice, Rich explains, is the model of control and exploitation of women. Many generations of women have been raised to be economically dependent on men through marriage or work place sexualization. Still today, when in the work place women are often held to higher standards of service than men, male colleagues are have expectations of physical and emotional access to female colleagues, or women risk perpetually passed up for higher levels of employment. These ideas begin early in adolescence, teenage girls are told that the penis has a mind of it’s own and cannot be controlled the same way that female impulses can be, perhaps because female impulses aren’t considered real without an equally magnetic male impulse. Similarity many women have been raised to associate love with control of male behavior, incessantly consciously or unconsciously self-sexualizing themselves for the male gaze. If a ‘sexualized’ woman is sexually assaulted or raped the man cannot be held responsible, due to the uncontrollable penis and her physical display of availability.
Not mentioned in Rich’s work is how this conditioning of female sexuality also attempts to demoralize female friendships, but I do think it ties into the persistent idea of women only depending on each other to spite men. If women are in constant competition to control men for economic stability and not fighting for our own interests and education then we continue to support the invalidation of our own ability to make choices. Additionally, with the erasure of lesbian history from feminist theory we have no point of reference. Female camaraderie is rarely separated from the erotic and due to the deviant associations many women don’t know the empowerment found in these relationships. Further, to dismiss the lesbian existence from female history is to disregard the continuing lack of privilege in relation to men, culturally and economically, which is specific to women because homosexual men can retain a respectable bachelor status at any age without social repercussions. Rich makes a clear argument that to really analyze gender equality is to also normalize all female relationships and their varying levels of intimacy.