The alleyways of heteropatriarchy

I want to thank Spotted Elephant over at The Bipolar View for sending me a thoughtful email today, which lit a fire under my ass to write this post that I should have written some time back. It's a follow-up to my i'm sick of heterosexism too post, which received strong reactions and some thoughtful responses from a few of my sister bloggers. But the thing that struck me the most about all the responses, thoughtful or not, was the way that my critique of heterosexism was interpreted by almost everyone as a kind of all-or-nothing demand. I'll grant that I may not have explicitly articulated what I was actually thinking, but I also think it's extremely interesting that almost everyone who commented had close to the same reaction.

Before I go there, though, I want to note something that Yawning Lion recently told me that Sonia Johnson wrote about separatism, which is that Sonia didn't call herself a separatist because that would still be defining herself in terms of men. I think that is a legitimate critique. I'll readily admit that the term "separatist" does sound kind of cut-and-dried; a lot of people interpret it as meaning that separatists never have any contact with men, which is not at all accurate (let alone possible in patriarchy), which misperception seps have been trying to correct for many years. I use the term because there is a very rich history and culture that's developed among separatists over the last 30 years, a great deal of writing and creating and analyzing and theorizing, by and among women who did or do call themselves separatists, and I want to make it very clear that I am completely aligned with radical lesbian feminist separatist politics. Separatism as a theory and a (micro)movement has been thoroughly trashed by mainstream feminism, the left, the queers, and society in general over the last 30 years and I don't want to contribute to that by quibbling about the terminology.

With that said, I want to point out some assumptions that I noticed in a lot of the responses from other feminists to my writing about heterosexism. It seems to me that most of the comments I read interpreted "prioritizing relationships with women" and "building things with other women" to mean ending relationships with men and/or children. And if you read what I wrote, I didn't say anything like that. When I first read the comments I was really surprised, but then I realized it shouldn't come as that much of a shock, because that's what heteropatriarchy as an institution is--a denial of other possibilities. Heterosexuality is defined as a particular structure with particular parameters in this culture to the degree that ways of doing it differently are almost unthinkable.

So I see that I need to ask you all explicitly, in the most open, respectful, loving, feminist-sisterly way possible, to really try to think about what heterosexuality might look like in an egalitarian world. I don't know that it's really my place to have those visions, since I don't choose to relate sexually or emotionally to men. Nevertheless, I want to ask you all, why does "prioritizing relationships with women" translate in your minds into abandoning your relationships with men? Why do you think that the only way of doing it differently from the way it's been laid out for you is not doing it at all? I mean, seriously, who benefits when you think that? These are not rhetorical questions; male supremacy maintains itself by training women's minds to work in this way, by limiting the possibilities we are able to conceive for our lives. To think that relating sexually and emotionally to men, or raising children, requires, as I wrote, "the McMansion in the suburbs and 2.5 kids and a golden retriever and a white picket fence and a minivan" is not only heterosexist and classist, it's ahistorical and ethnocentric to boot. Do you really think all cultures and all historical periods saw heterosexual relationships organized the way they are in 21st century Western culture? Who says that you can't love your husband just as much even if you don't live with him? Or if you only live with him part-time? For those of you who have "good" men, why do you assume that your good man is not capable of part-time or full-time parenting? For those of you who wouldn't entrust your children's father with the care of a houseplant, what about that idea of shared parenting with another woman?

Do you see where I'm going with this? Take one alternate possibility. You're developing your feminist autonomy off in the company of other women five days a week. On Friday night, you visit your husband at his apartment. He's cooked a lovely dinner; the two of you enjoy it, then you go to the bedroom for sex. The two of you enjoy that, and after some prolonged cuddling and deep intimate pillow talk, you say, "Oh, darling, that was just wonderful. I'll see you next week." You get up, get dressed, and head back to your feminist commune for the weekend of serious political meetings, or working in the garden, or building a community building, without worrying about his socks on the floor or the dirty dinner dishes. You've got enough to think about getting things straightened out in the commune. In other words, you get loving, quality time with your husband--the parts of your relationship that you enjoy and that you come to as a free woman. He does not get your labor, your money, or a lifetime of your undivided attention. Shocking, I know.

Men who are really in support of women's autonomy and freedom will be okay with this. They may miss you, they may resent it, they probably will have to work really hard at overcoming their sense of entitlement and male privilege that tells them you should be in the bed whenever they want you, you should at least be doing the dishes when he had the decency to cook--but men who are truly our allies will ultimately support women in overcoming our oppression by working together. They will understand that their discomfort is the measure of how much they've benefitted from sexism in the past.

And here's the part I think is so ugly about all this--the men who are not our allies will pitch fits large and small. Regardless of what women might think prioritizing relationships with women means, men know that it means them losing privileges. They know this. And we know they know it, and we're afraid of that. We don't want to scratch that good man and find a screeching misogynist underneath, particularly since open spots in feminist communes are currently pretty few and far between. But I do think it's that awareness, and that fear, that leads otherwise brilliant and expansive feminist minds down the narrow alley of "I can't prioritize women because I'm not leaving my husband."

Trust me. I don't want you to leave your husband if you don't want to. The last thing I want at my feminist commune is a bunch of disgruntled sexually frustrated straight women who don't really want to be there. But it does make me sad to realize how many of you have swallowed patriarchy's blueprint for intimate relationships. Creating radical feminist change requires questioning everything and trying to envision how it might be different if we were free. I think this is a useful exercise even if some of the things we are envisioning are changes we'll never live to see. Eschewing relationships with men does not make me immune to this process, believe me. Like Yawning Lion says, we're all always stopping, and we'll always be stopping, our participation in capitalist patriarchy. We'll all always be uncovering new narrow alleys down which our imaginations have been shunted and taking down the walls brick by brick until dawn breaks over Marblehead as some new bit of the horizon comes into view, and suddenly, well, lots of things become possible that weren't a year or a month or a day or just a minute before. And that sense of possibility, my dear sisters, is what I wish for us all.