Maddy

“Similarly, in attempting to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so many women are investing in straight relationships, when these relationships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.”
― Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

“Many straight women spend dozens of hours planning each detail of their weddings or baby showers or baby gender-reveal parties, while straight men keep their distance from the very rituals that are intended to mark important moments in their lives. In no way do I intend to imply that couples should spend every minute together, but if we held straight couples to basic standards of good friendship—mutual respect and affection and a sense of comfort and bondedness based on shared experience—many straight relationships would fail the test.”
― Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

“Your biggest fear ought to be wasting your life and time, not "Am I going to have x number of dollars when I'm 80?”
― Bill Perkins, Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

“We might also examine the patriarchal and white-supremacist anchors of heterosexual desire in the United States, where Asian American women and white men are consistently ranked “most desirable” in surveys, with the former valued for beauty and docility and the latter for power.”
― Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality