I found this video very fascinating and would love to hear all my fellow non-cishets feel about it. Personally I found it really cool and extremely informative, particularly the bit about "heterosexuality" particularly as an identity being fairly new concepts. Really makes ya think.
It's a good overview of the subject, but ofc she could go into more detail on some crucial bits. I think it would be helpful to get deeper into how strongly gender roles play into this. The reason that so many heterosexual relationships are rife with problems is, ultimately, how men behave in these relationships and that's not inherent to being a man, assuming otherwise would be gender essentialism (on a sidenote, it's not surprising that so many political lesbians later became massive terfs, it's hardly avoidable when you subscribe to gendered traits being innate and immutable fundamentals of a person's being).
Toxic masculinity is not the natural state of being a man, it is a product of a material need under capitalism, the logical outcome of a society that actively produces masculinity as a skillset for violence, competition and oppression and femininity as a skillset for economic, emotional and sexual servitude. Both of these skillsets are indispensible in a capitalist system, which will require both imperialist aggression to expand into new markets and a systematic devaluation of economically unproductive, but socially indispensable labor in reproduction, care and education. Patriarchy can only be fully overcome when capitalism dies. Anything else will only lead to girlboss feminism, and a thorough critique of patriarchy is only possible when it is an intrinsically anti-capitalist one. Ofc, that cannot mean we just have to wait until after the world revolution to fix this, we have to start today - once you understand that some form of patriarchy is required for capitalism to function, attacks on the patriarchy can become attacks on a central support beam of the capitalist machinery. So let's put a pin in the whole Marxist angle here and get back to discussing sexuality, gender and their relationship.
As Tara rightfully points out, the solution for straight women isn't to abandon heterosexuality, it's deconstruction. But i do not think it helps much to deconstruct the societal notions around heterosexuality, but the oppositional sexism that shapes so fundamentally how many heterosexual relationships play out in our society. When you view men and women as polar opposites and actively police and reinforce that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and that there cannot be anybody outside of these binarist categories, you end up with the majority of people being in a relationship with an alien who is deeply incapable of connecting to them. I feel that this is at the core of many of the conflicts that straight couples struggle with.
When you view men and women as polar opposites and actively police and reinforce that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and that there cannot be anybody outside of these binarist categories, you end up with the majority of people being in a relationship with an alien who is deeply incapable of connecting to them. I feel that this is at the core of many of the conflicts that straight couples struggle with.
Which is why you get the paradox of men bemoaning the death of traditional relationships and the social tragedy of men unable to find partners, but then also producing “I hate my wife” and “marriage is a trap” memes. “This makes you happy and complete, but also it’s fundamentally incompatible with you” is a circle that can’t be squared.
Good post. Too many people don't seem to go beyond "men bad" and totally ignore how patriarchy is pretty critical to capitalism.
First off, calling those cheesy reality dating competition shows “straight camp” is brilliant, definitely gotta start using that.
I do find it rather illuminating, the statistic on French partners having lower dissatisfaction rates due to a more robust welfare state for child care. Like, there’s this standard assumption that in these double income households with kids, if the men just did more laundry and “mental labor” things would be happier. While I’m not saying men should shirk responsibilities, thinking that all that can be done by two people and they’ll both be satisfied is wrong. One thing the video didn’t mention is that the modern nuclear conception of the family is a big contributor to this because the standard for most of history was, you had extended family that would share child and household duties. Even a lot of those “ideal” nuclear households of the mid-20th century with stay at home moms were dependent upon nannies and housekeepers.
I also liked the section on the podcast guest being frank about liking men because, men’s arms and abs and yes, penises are hot. Even after all these decades of “sexual liberation” there’s still this stigma around women saying they enjoy sex for the carnal pleasure. And not just from the usual social conservatives. That was the fundamental problem in the political lesbianism she discussed, it assumed female sexuality could be divorced from what women actually desired. Which is fundamentally the same mentality as the Victorian era “just close your eyes and think of England.”
This is true. Most housework is pretty low impact or can be done in a couple of hours every few weeks. Childcare is pretty much all of your child's waking hours and there is an economy of scale to multigenerational living. In a lot of cultures, it's older people who are not fit for other forms of labor that do the bulk of the childcare.
Not to mention the standards for childcare have increased considerably, due to 1) living in a low trust society 2) less social mobility. No longer can school age children cross a couple of lawns and go to the park by themselves. And middle class women are tasked with a lot of the enrichment that can be hired out by the wealthy or is provided on a public basis in better-run societies.
Also something I only learned about years after choosing this name is that it is very very similar to an adult lesbian visual novel and the word neko which in Japanese can mean just cat or also catgirl
is quite the coincidence.No idea I just looked it up once because I kept getting asked if my name was a reference to it.
essay this video is based on: On Heteropessimism - Asa Seresin
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
