Compulsory heterosexuality and the heterosexual

It’s unfortunate that the go-to term for ‘that thing where people expect women to get married or be on that track’ is compulsory heterosexuality. (Insert ten paragraphs demonstrating that I know who coined it and have indeed read Adrienne Rich on this, and now, moving on.) It is unfortunate, that is, because the thing that most women are going to experience as compulsory isn’t heterosexuality itself, but the socially-encouraged parameters of it. There’s a lot of female heterosexuality out there that is not on the marriage track. Is the ‘slut’ doing compulsory heterosexuality? Is Anna Karenina? How about the plain-looking woman hung up on a man who doesn’t and will never know she’s alive? But compulsory heterosexuality flattens all this, and makes it seem like if only you told such women that it’s fine to be gay, they’d be like, oh right, never thought of that, problem solved.

For obvious reasons, compulsory heterosexuality is a problem for women who are not, you know, heterosexual. But it is also a problem for women who absolutely are, but who for whatever reason—political, disposition, or circumstance—do not want boyfriends or husbands. Not in the sense of, they want desperately to have a big ol’ wedding but fear being thought basic. More like, they are doing something else.

It’s not just that society discourages this. Every state will have its reasons for encouraging some family formations over others, and this is not the place where I lay out each of those and my opinion on it. It’s also—and this is getting closer to my realm—about how people in a woman’s life respond to her life arrangements.

Two things got me thinking about this angle. One was Jessa Crispin’s great refutation of the anti-4B takes (I say this having written—and standing by—my own) and the other was the 1981-1984 Judi Dench Britcom, A Fine Romance. What Crispin is getting at, among other things, is that people are treating the mere prospect of women decentering men as cause for alarm, when what they really should be doing is looking constructively at ways women who aren’t partnered with men can live—and, crucially, afford to live—fulfilling lives.

(Here is where I feel obliged to mention that the only tweet I’ve seen from someone who seems to earnestly be practicing 4B is a person using they/them *and he/him* pronouns, which even the most trans-inclusive of radical feminisms would I think find hard to square, but on the disembodied avatar space that is online, anything’s possible.)

Onto A Fine Romance. It’s a kind of terrible show, but I decided not to be Lucy Ricardo with all those hats for once and to go a bit between BritBox subscriptions. (For all the tens of clicks I’ve doubtless given them, they should totally be comping me, but this has yet to materialize.) So I’m delving into off-BritBox offerings, with a priority given towards that which will, around 11pm, cause me to fall asleep. But sometimes a kid is up in the middle of the night or I for some other reason can’t fall back to sleep and I end up watching more than the catchy, Dench-performed theme song. Between my initial watch however many months ago and now, I would say that I have watched enough A Fine Romance to be the premier A Fine Romance critic of this and perhaps any platform.

The reason the show is so hard to watch is that it is an anti-romance between two people, Mike and Laura, who were happy being single. They’re a good match in that they’re a lot alike, but the thing they have in common is a shared antipathy towards coupledom. Each has their own modest career (he’s a landscape designer, she’s a translator) and their own comfortably solo living quarters. Everything is going along just fine until Phil and Helen do their meddlin’.

Phil and Helen are the Jim and Pam of the show, referring of course to The Office (American). The stand-ins for the ‘normal’ audience member. They’re a happily married, sociable young couple, he’s doing well professionally, she had been his secretary but is now home in anticipation of the eventually-surfacing baby. Helen is also the Cerie to Laura’s Liz Lemon (30 Rock), the actress/character so beautiful that the protagonist, also played by a very nice-looking woman, convincingly plays plain.*

Helen is Laura’s doting younger sister, and she simply cannot stand that Laura doesn’t know the happiness she does. Much of the show consists of Phil and Helen gossiping about Mike and Laura, something that the tranquility of their own union allows, or maybe encourages because otherwise there’d be nothing to talk about.

The show follows the progression of their relationship, which is not a rom-com case of a couple hating each other at first but then it’s passion actionally. The segue from awkward strangers straight into the dynamic of an old married couple on the cusp of divorce. If they’re having dinner together, they’d rather not be. Moving in together, same. They both seem pained by the whole thing, it’s not a matter of acting but right there in the script. They’re like pandas being forced to mate. They both recognize that they’re in a lid-for-every-pot situation, that they make sense as a couple, and they have compatible sexual orientations. But they’d also rather not. This is played kind of as a too-British-to-sex thing, but also, they’re meant to be odd people.

What makes the show so hard to watch is that it wants you to root for these not-so-young people to make it work. To take Helen and Phil’s position that everyone must pair off and then you can do double-dates and won’t it be great once Mike and Laura have a baby, the source of a will-they-won’t-they plotline ignoring the fact that Laura is past the age where this is plausible. (She mentions this in the last episode, that she’s “probably” too old, and Mike says, “probably.”)

Let’s forget about Mike—into the 4B pile with you!—and focus on Laura. Laura isn’t gay. She’s not asexual. She’s not a rollicking-good-time single lady, nor a tragic case. She’s just sort of doing her thing. She knows to say she’d rather be like Helen, and probably on some level would rather be like Helen, but being who she is, with her own personality and all that, is content being herself and living as she sees fit. It’s the outside world that is presenting her unmarried state as a problem in need of a solution.

This version of compulsory heterosexuality has waned, but unevenly. It’s become socially unacceptable—in some settings—to assume a perfect stranger is straight, or if single, looking to couple off. This despite the fact that most people are straight and most people straight or not want partners.

Insofar as I’m an advocate for straight women (I am not any kind of activist, nor am I taking on the straight-women topic in that capacity), I think part of this is about making it as easy as possible for people who aren’t straight to live freely, thereby reducing the pool of coerced-into-‘straightness.’ Part is also about having the basic definition of a straight woman being, a woman with an exclusive sexual-romantic (not getting into the sexual-romantic split) attraction to men. It is not a sexual orientation towards any particular living arrangement or family structure.

*Helen’s played by Susan Penhaligon who was briefly married to Duncan Preston of Victoria Wood fame. Phil is the closest the show gets to a compulsory heterosexual, played by Richard Warwick, a gay actor who tragically died of AIDS in the 1990s, but the character himself comes across as the most generic straight dude that ever there was. And Mike is, as we have established, played by Dench’s real-life husband, Michael Williams, of striking and concerning resemblance to Ron DeSantis.