Swaye’s Reviews > Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence > Status Update

"Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality."

"While women may, indeed must, be one another’s allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other’s company and attraction to each other’s minds and character, which attend a recognition of each other’s strengths."

"Another layer of the lie is the frequently encountered implication that women turn to women out of hatred for men. Profound scepticism, caution, and righteous paranoia about men may indeed be part of any healthy woman’s response to the misogyny of male-dominated culture. Lesbian existence is also represented as mere refuge from male abuses, rather than as an electric and empowering charge between women."

"It is asserted that primary love between the sexes is “normal”; that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; and that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women."

"The lie keeps women psychologically trapped, trying to fit mind, spirit, and sexuality into a prescribed script because they cannot look beyond the parameters of the acceptable. The women imprisoned in prescriptive ideas of the “normal” share the pain of blocked options, broken connections, and lost access to self-definition freely and powerfully assumed."

"The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today afflicts not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers."

"I suspect that the problem of the married woman who would prefer emotional–physical relationships with other women is a statistic surely no one will ever really have. How could we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to believe was their “natural” destiny?"

"Women have married because it was necessary, in order to do what was expected of women, because coming out of “abnormal” childhoods they wanted to feel “normal,” and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment."

"Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on
women."

"Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life."