The New York Times Book Review, in yet another review of a book attacking heterosexuality, writes, “In examining the pressure to partner with the opposite gender we find the extortions of capitalism, the misogyny of violence against women, the racist and xenophobic erasure of nonwhite families, and the homophobic hatreds that pervade so much of everyday life.”
Writer Haley Mlotek, reviewing, “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality,” authored by Jane Ward, asserts, “’The Tragedy of Heterosexuality’ wastes absolutely no time getting to the point, but while many of the sentences (including the title) made me laugh out loud, it is at heart a somber, urgent academic examination of the many ways in which opposite-sex coupling can hurt the very individuals who cling to it most.”
“Ward distinguishes straightness as a practice from straight culture, which is the very heart of society’s most disgraceful failures,” Mlotek continues. “It is not, as one popular joke goes, that straight people are ‘not OK.’ It is that heteronormativity creates a powerful, privileged form of sexuality against which, historically and currently, all other forms are compared. In examining the pressure to partner with the opposite gender we find the extortions of capitalism, the misogyny of violence against women, the racist and xenophobic erasure of nonwhite families, and the homophobic hatreds that pervade so much of everyday life.”
Mlotek states that Ward believes that a queer theory … “might be just the thing to rescue heterosexuality from its unearned hegemony in our shared cultural imagination.”
In 2012, The New York Times Book Review took the time to review a book titled, “Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality.” Reviewer Abigail Zuger wrote of the author, Hanne Blank, that she got a “pat on the back for dispatching the equally murky entity of heterosexuality …”
Zuger wrote of the term “heterosexuality,” “In fact, it was coined in Germany only in the second half of the 19th century and was first used in English several decades later with the classical sense of ‘hetero’ (‘other, different’), making it initially a term of opprobrium. Only in the first decades of the 20th century did it settle in to its present niche, cushioned with overtones of romance, pleasure, health and normalcy.”
Zuger cited the infamous and now largely discredited researcher Alfred Kinsey, who, among others, “made it clear that sometimes it (heterosexuality) is exactly what it is not — or, rather, it is what many feel it should not be. From same-sex adults sharing a bed (for warmth? from friendship?) in the 19th century to married men ‘on the down low’ in the 21st, self-defined heterosexuals have routinely behaved in ways that seem to contradict the basic principles.”
Zuger breathed, “Ms. Blank offers the provocative solution that soon we will move on from our present fixation on the binary to a more fluid understanding. ‘If male and female are two of a variety of sexes, and masculine and feminine two of a variety of genders, then heterosexual and homosexual are two of a variety of ways to combine them,’ she notes.”