‘

Assignment 06

I agree with Rich’s idea that heterosexuality is institutionalized. There are so many ways we see women being forced to be subservient to men, or to care what men think of them more than what they think of themselves. We are taught from a young age that women marry men and we become housewives who take care of the men and the children and clean and cook, etc. There is this idealized idea of a woman as a 1960’s housewife that enforces the idea of a woman as a heterosexual. MY best friend is bisexual and the first time she told her boy friend at the time, the first words out of his mouth were, “Cool! Are we going to have a threesome?” Lesbianism is a sexualized fantasy for men, even the thing that Rich argues is the one thing women can really have, is still taken to this perverse place.

I’ve heard many arguments about women being more open to homosexuality than men are; since we tend to be more comfortable touching each other and showing affection. If this is true, it does not make the public more open to it. If you look even at TV shows, gay couples such as in Modern Family, we see that the male homosexual couples are much more accepted, shown as family oriented and funny or cute, while their female counterparts tend to be heavily focused on sexual arousal and sex scenes. Lesbian couples seem to make society more uncomfortable than male homosexual couples. Even in lesbian couples we often try to force a heterosexual model onto it by asking, “Who is the man and who is the woman in the relationship?”

I believe Rich is arguing that women are drawn to each other because they are oppressed by men, and because men can never fully understand what it means to be a woman because they do not have the same types of harassment and oppressions that we do, yet women are still forced into heterosexual relationships.