The disillusionment of a hetero-optimist

I had a colleague once who expressed a fervent wish not to be straight. She was an anthropologist, with broad knowledge of human societies, and she’d decided that, in ours, there was no hope for happiness as long as she was entangled with men. “I’ve tried extremely hard to be a lesbian, to will myself to be one,” she said. “Spiritually, politically, I think I’m there. But then I see a picture of Jason Momoa and I know I’m doomed.” Hers is a common affliction: one strain of what Asa Seresin calls “heteropessimism.” Whether this theoretical framework is really about heterosexuality, or more about men in particular, or an insurmountable chasm of misunderstanding between men and women is not entirely clear. In my understanding, it seems like it’s another word for the deep wound misogyny carves in us.

Before I met Steve, I was aware that men are trash in a somewhat abstract way. My own husband (whom we call Witt on this podcast) could not, and did not, escape male socialization, to be sure. He thus suffers from his kind’s lack of aggressive and early training from childhood in care, emotional labor, and the capacity to offer simple presence (rather than trying to fix things.) I, on the other hand, had all of those things instilled in me as part of my own upbringing in this society. Further, I internalized the belief that everyone else’s needs, and even their preferences, should be met and exceeded before turning to my own. As a result, Witt and I sometimes drag along each other, feeling the friction of our difference in these respects. We met and got together so young, however, that in some profound ways we formed each other, outside and in defiance of so many of our culture’s strictures. The sexuality we built together, in an era mostly before internet porn, was personal, an outgrowth of channeling our riotous adolescent horniness into each other. We dry humped and reached down each other’s pants in every dim corner and low traffic stairwell we could find. It was our own invention, and we were still close enough to childhood that it had the accreted feeling of the worlds that kids co-create together.

It was that world that I launched from when I met Steve, and within a week, decided to have sex with him. I expected the sex would be fair to middling. Maybe even kinda bad. I was prepared for this because my idea of good sex was probably not possible with a near stranger: built on trust, communication, and experience of each other, it seemed literally impossible that our first go around would be what I consider good. I figured if we kept at it, it would get good and then better with time and practice, and at least it would be exciting that first time, to counterbalance the weirdness of getting naked with a person I barely knew.

I took a picture of myself in the mirror at work, bundled in hat and scarf, before I went to meet Steve at his house. I think of that picture now, half-jokingly, as the last time the hetero-optimist was ever seen alive:

When what happened happened, when Steve suddenly closed the distance between us while I was standing in his kitchen mid-sentence, when he clamped my face in his hands and sealed his mouth on mine, I thought, “Oh, is this passion?” and I willed myself to like it. It felt like it should feel momentous, kissing someone for the first time, but I felt puzzled. I didn’t leave my body, but I felt myself shift to someplace deeper, farther away from my skin’s surface, and from there I would observe everything that came after.

I have always done this—this retreating within myself. It’s how I think of my introversion: a lot of the time, I scramble up a ladder into my own head, pull shut the trapdoor behind me, and peer out my attic window eyes at what’s going on. I had this response to sex with Steve. I was not distressed by it; I felt weirdly calm as he did things and I thought, “So this is one of those men who does not ask consent for anything. Interesting.” It didn’t occur to me to object to anything we were doing as we worked our way through the standard porn script—oral, oral, finger-banging, intercourse in the standard positions, finish up. I felt sort of numb for some of it. Some of it was moderately uncomfortable. I didn’t suggest anything different because there weren’t any specific acts I wished we’d do instead. All I had was a sense of how I wanted to feel about it all, and that just doesn’t seem like it stands up in the face of a man with a clear agenda of items to check off. So I gave up hoping to feel a certain way and helped him work on the checklist.

You’re probably wondering when things got better enough for me to stay with him. After all, this all happened two and a half years ago. The fact is, I endured months of this alienating sex before I said anything at all, and things did not get immediately better after that either. I can’t blame prior experiences for my low expectations; sex with my husband is reliably joyous, connected, life-affirming. It was, perversely, those experiences, and my resultant optimism about straight men that led me to tolerate so much mistreatment from Steve. I just thought it had to get better.

I was operating from the bare minimum expectation of consent when I hooked up with Steve, and when he did not meet even that standard, I settled for something even more impoverished. It didn’t feel like a choice I made. He enacted scripts he’d seen in porn, and I accepted his direction. Now, I think a lot about the arguments Christine Emba makes about what we should expect of sex partners, even casual ones. I know now that I should not have moved so quickly into having sex with Steve. But I also hate that that is true. I wanted to do him from the first time I saw him. I was exuberant, my insides leaping up inside me at the prospect. I was wildly unprepared for how he would quash that, constrain me, box me up and force me into his shame strangled and sexist straight-jacket, pardon the pun. But there were glimmers of something else from the outset. When that first sad sex bout was over, we went upstairs to his bedroom, and laid down together, limbs entangled, and we both fell asleep. Tucked into him, I drifted, warmed, dissolved. We should have started there. We should have stayed there a long time.

We’re doing now what we should have done then, and mostly, my optimism remains. If nothing else, I don’t share the heterofatalism that is the most severe of this family of conditions—where one ceases to believe anything can get better. I think straightness can get better. I think we can maybe queer it, maybe gender bend it, maybe massage it into something looser.

At work last week, I was using the porta-potty outside the job site and regarding the graffiti. It was mostly carved into the plastic walls and was mostly words. “Crackheads welcome” stood out to me. There was also artwork of a lady, depicted, inexplicably, under a gay slur carved in all caps. I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t take a picture, but when I got home, I reproduced it as best I could for Witt, and later Steve too. I couldn’t remember how her arms were arranged, or exactly what her face was like, but I was pretty certain she’d had curly hair, so I drew her like that. Her defining feature, anyway, was an enormous vulva that opened her nearly from stem to stern. A vague dot at the top of it might have been a clitoris, or might have been her navel. Her labia were a prominent w hanging down like a scrotum. There was a touching quality to the crudeness of it; the outsized genitals looking almost like naive forced perspective from the point of view of someone crouched between her legs. Or like a cortical homunculus, a model visualizing how much brain real estate our sensory systems occupy by showing a little manikin with a giant head— bulging eyes, lips, lolling tongue — and giant hands.

I was back on that same job site this week, and went to see the artwork again, and see if I’d remembered her face and hair and mouth roughly right. I got my phone out, laughing a little to myself at the project. And then the hetero-optimist banged up hard against reality again.

I know some really, really good men. I believe in their deep capacity to love, and care, and nurture. But sometimes, I feel doubt. Maybe men are always much worse than I think, because, listener, when I looked down at her to take her picture, I discovered she had no head at all.