Centrist feminism, or you're all way off

The world's premier straightwomanologist delivers some verdicts

In this essay I will…

…dose it out, in not-quite-equal measure, to the left and the right.

***

When I first saw that there was a big ol’ The Cut article about the end of heterosexuality, I was all not again. Did someone steal my topic, the one that is mine and mine alone?

Then I remembered that while I am not capable of pressing a button and thrusting the book I’ve written and edited a draft of but that is not yet available into the hands of anyone else who might have dared tread on my turf (“turf,” can we still use that word?), I absolutely already wrote and published about the subject of the shiny new The Cut article. Specifically, the professor Jane Ward’s 2020 book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. I have been on this beat so long, so very long, that I remember worrying that Ward had scooped me. (No danger. We have, let us say, different approaches to the material.)

Ward’s book is the basis for a course, and the course is the occasion of Jessica Bennett’s profile of Ward and her research. And while the overall environment has changed in a number of ways since 2020—as in, I found myself stunned/relieved that gender studies still exists at American universities—things have gotten in some ways more as-they’d-been, in that the discourse about young women being so done with men has not let up.

Yes, in the ancient days of 2021, I wrote for The Hedgehog Review about the burgeoning field of what I called straightness studies. I pointed out the value of examining straightness on its own terms, but identified a number of issues with the way this is done in practice. Specifically, just about no one researching The Straight is straight. This is meant to lead to some kind of superpowers of insight (as in, the marginalized can see through the privileged), but this is not how it plays out. It reliably leads to the mistaken impression that straight people are basically all closeted not-straight people, suffocating under the weight of an orientation that just feels wrong. That we’re being forced to partner with the opposite sex under duress, and not because we (even the lady-we) have these things called sex drives. That our youthful crushes are to conform heteronormatively, which, well, explain me this.

It was a clever idea (not original to Ward, but to LGBT scholars generally, yes) to study straightness as such, and probably did take not-straight people to come up with it. But straightness-as-imposition is a terrible starting point if the goal is understanding straight people. Understanding us, or as Ward claims, helping straight women. (Interestingly, at least one of her students, quoted in the piece, sees through this.) If your goal was doing something of use for straight women, you would be bare minimum asking us about our attractions, not just our gripes with men (the book sticks with gripes), but you also wouldn’t do a book about how basic-bitch we are aesthetically and how queer people are just so much more interesting. Insulting people isn’t ‘allyship,’ and Ward, who is a smart person, is I’d imagine well aware.

Oh, and the thing about how Ward ‘chose’ to be a lesbian, when she is by her own admission bisexual, and then offering this up as an and you can, too to straight women, to women with no sexual or romantic interest in women, is patently ridiculous, and I felt more heartened than scooped when I saw I was not alone in picking up on this.

***

So that’s the left taken care of. Onto the right.

Never have I ever read an article with as many moment-by-moment absurdities as this, by Suzanne Venker, a woman I had never heard of, but who is Phyllis Schafly’s niece. It appeared somehow in the algorithmic mystery that is the Substack timeline, and seemed my-beat enough I had to click. It’s written in that ‘I tell it like it is’ style where if you disagree with it you are most definitely going to be interpreted as PROVING THE AUTHOR’S POINT. It is here that I will let Venker know that I do not come at this topic as a ban-men feminist, but rather as the world’s foremost straightwomanologist. (I can claim this, who can stop me?)

Venker’s responding to a WSJ article of the young-women-are-giving-up-on-men beat. She begins by asserting that some woman mentioned in this piece feels screwed over by her now-ex boyfriend, who earns less and also does less housework. She also has a client in her how-to-live-your-life business in a similar boat. She says that things would be different if these couples were married, but does not spell out how. I say this as someone who is married and would be receptive to there being some explanation, but none is provided. What there is, instead, is the first bizarre assertion of many:

“‘Unpaid labor’ isn’t a phrase a married mother who’s not employed would use, for example—because her husband’s paycheck is her paycheck, too.”

Really, a stay-at-home mom would never use such terms? Really?

Next claim of dubiosity: “More and more women are out-earning men and as a result are struggling in love.” (Bold in the original!) This, Venker claims, is important because, she argues, men but not women will marry lower achievers. I’m getting to that argument, but first, just how girlboss are things, exactly? And where is she getting this?

Per the WSJ article: “the wealth gap between single men and women appears to be shrinking.” Which paints rather a different picture. Venker writes, “It is undeniable that American women are surging ahead of men educationally and professionally,” and yet here I am, denying this. More schooling and more officework doesn’t mean women are now in charge. Indeed, as I have been saying ever since attending some NYU grad school graduation ceremonies and observing who was getting which degrees, that there are a lot of women getting MAs in not-super-lucrative fields does not mean the ladies now out-earn the men in the aggregate.

Next: “How many men do you know who would divorce their wives because she makes half as much money as he does? Or because she isn’t as career-oriented or as educated as he is? Or because the labor involved in running a household—paid work, housework, and child care—isn’t evenly distributed?”

Here I can point people to Cartoons Hate Her’s great piece surveying what high-income men look for in a woman, and it is almost as if there’s something called assortative mating and Venker has never heard of it. This isn’t about what would cause men to divorce their wives, as these are women the men wouldn’t have married in the first place.

Next: “Men and women are deeply different, yet we treat them as though they are one and the same—and then wonder why relationships fail.” We as in the culture have not done this since 1992, I don’t know what Venker is talking about. She’s arguing against some version of feminism that was unchic for years even before #MeToo.

Next: “Women would rather go it alone than be the dominant partner in their relationship.” If this is the case, explain to me why in maybe a third of the man-woman couples of my acquaintance, that’s exactly the deal, and the people in these households seem quite happy. That it isn’t fully half speaks to men and women being different, sure. But that it’s as many as it is speaks to men and women not being all that different, and to individual traits and preferences often being more important than all-things-equal sex-specific trends.

Next: “Women are the ones who get pregnant” well spotted Venker, I’ll give you that one.

Next: “Men are providers and protectors by nature and thus want to hand over their earnings so their families can thrive…. When a married woman earns money, she thinks of it as hers and hers alone.”

Where is she getting this? There is no shortage of men who resent handing over of earnings, or else literally how are we explaining Lucy Ricardo and the hats. And the idea that a breadwinner woman thinks she’s earning pin money is… why? Where is this idea coming from? It seems like a strange mishmash of two things that are true: a woman who’s the much-lower earner b/c SAHM may see her income as for-treats, and a higher-earner woman may resent working hard to support a man if that man is not pulling his weight in other ways, i.e. chores and childcare. But if the woman earns more and the man househusbands more, then that’s how they’ve arranged things and her income is shared money and what is the issue exactly?

Next: “Men aren’t ‘nesters’ by nature and are thus more flexible about what goes on at home, often ceding to their wives about what needs to be done domestically.” Here I can only go with #NotAllMen. Many men have opinions about home decor and child-rearing! These are things that come more easily to some men than to some women. I’m sorry if the evolutionary psychologists and 1991 stand-up comics disagree but I have seen it with my own eyes. (Exciting note here: I had made an offhand reference to “1992” above, before adding in/looking up this clip, and look how close I was to the mark!)