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The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
The TRAGEDY of
HETEROSEXUALITY

Jane Ward

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2020 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the au-
thor nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed
since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ward, Elizabeth Jane, author.
Title: The tragedy of heterosexuality / Jane Ward.
Description: New York : New York University Press, [2020] | Series: Sexual cultures |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004725 (print) | LCCN 2020004726 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781479851553 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479895069 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781479892792 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Heterosexuality. | Sexual minorities. | Feminist theory.
Classification: LCC HQ72.8 .W37 2020 (print) | LCC HQ72.8 (ebook) | DDC 306.76—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004725
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004726
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials
are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers
and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
For straight women.
May you find a way to have
your sexual needs met
without suffering so much.
 Contents

1 Let’s Call It What It Is: The Tragedy of Heterosexuality 1

2 He’s Just Not That into You: The Misogyny Paradox 33

3 Pickup Artists: Inside the Seduction Industry 75

4 A Sick and Boring Life: Queer People Diagnose the Tragedy 113

5 Deep Heterosexuality: Toward a Future in Which

Straight Men Like Women So Much That They
Actually Like Women 155

Acknowledgments 175

Notes 177

Index 199

About the Author 207

 1
LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

I am worried about straight people. And I am not

the only one. Queer people have been concerned about straight culture
for decades, not only for our own sake—because we fear homophobic
violence or erasure of queer subculture—but also because straight cul-
ture’s impact on straight women often elicits our confusion and distress.
Erotically uninspired or coercive, given shape by the most predictable
and punishing gender roles, emotionally scripted by decades of inane
media and self-help projects, and outright illogical as a set of intimate
relations anchored in a complaint-ridden swirl of desire and misogyny,
straight culture for many queers is perplexing at best and repulsive at
worst. And yet queer people often leave the issue alone because no mat-
ter how worrisome straight culture may appear to us, we know all too
well the problems with denying people their erotic attachments or cri-
tiquing an entire population’s sexual orientation.
Am I am being hyperbolic when I say I am worried about straight
people? Granted, this is an unfamiliar way of thinking about heterosexu-
ality for most straight, and many gay, people. Living under the weight of
heteronormativity means that a lot of people have come to understand
heterosexuality as the most instinctive and fulfilling form of sexual re-
lating. We are subject, as children and adults, to an onslaught of institu-
tions and media images that link basic human happiness and nearly all
significant rites of passage to heterosexual desire and coupling. And,
as many queer people will attest, it can be very difficult—depressing,
shameful, lonely, frightening, vulnerable, violent, and traumatic—to be
lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Many queers have wished to be straight, and

1
2 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

many have come to the conclusion that the undeniable easiness of het-
erosexuality relative to queerness is evidence of the idea that no one
“chooses” to be queer—what rational person would choose a life of anti-
gay oppression? Through the lens of queer suffering, it seems almost
ludicrous to feel concern for straight people, at least not on account of
their straightness. For straight people experiencing other violent and
dehumanizing forms of oppression—poverty, white supremacy, patri-
archy, ableism, religious discrimination—straightness offers a degree of
respectability and privilege. As the African American feminist and ac-
tivist Barbara Smith explained in 1979, “Heterosexual privilege is usually
the only privilege that Black women have. . . . Maintaining ‘straightness’
is our last resort.”1 Straightness is a means through which people can
access some (unearned) cultural and institutional rewards vis-à-vis the
marginalization of their queer counterparts. Straightness ameliorates
other forms of suffering and creates an easier life. So if being straight
makes life easier, why on earth would queer people spend any time feel-
ing worry or sympathy about the effects of straight culture on straight
people’s lives and relationships?
This book argues that the basic premise of this question—that het-
erosexuality is easier than queerness—requires renewed investigation.
For instance, if we were to take this premise to the contemporary les-
bian feminist Sara Ahmed, we would be encouraged to consider that
one of the ways heteronormativity sustains itself is by telling and retell-
ing a story about how heterosexuality makes people happy, while queer-
ness produces difficulty and suffering. This story about queer suffering
under the force of heteronormativity is true; but it is also only a sliver
of the story about queerness, and it is one that masks not only queer
joy and pleasure but also queer relief not to be straight. The story about
the benefits of heterosexuality is also one with wildly differing levels of
truthfulness, or explanatory power, once subjected to an intersectional
analysis. The late lesbian feminist poet and theorist Adrienne Rich con-
tended that while being straight was largely beneficial for men, the same
was not always true for women, for whom the institution of hetero-
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 3

sexuality had been a site of violence, control, diminishment, and disap-

pointment. Similarly, straight Black feminists, from Michelle Wallace
to Brittney Cooper, have long raised questions about the gap between
the promises of heteronormativity and the realities of Black women’s
relationships with men. Straight Black men benefit considerably from
straight relationships, while, as Cooper explains, “the privileges of
straightness [have] eluded me and a whole generation of overachieving
Black women.”2 Perhaps most urgently, an important indicator of the
relatively negligible value of heterosexuality for many women is the fact
that their sexual relationships with men have been maintained by force,
both through cultural propaganda targeting girls and women and more
directly through sexual assault, incest, compulsory marriage, economic
dependence, control of children, and domestic violence. This book will
provide ample evidence of these dynamics. The question, then, is, Is het-
erosexuality optimal for women when it requires so much coercion?
Gay men, especially white gay men, are often the greatest defenders
of the narrative about queer suffering, probably because they have more
power and privilege to lose as a result of inhabiting a nonnormative
sexual orientation (and sometimes a nonnormative gender). Relatedly,
gay men are also more likely than lesbians to embrace biological theories
of sexual orientation and the corresponding claim that people are only
gay because they have no choice in the matter. These perspectives have
drowned out lesbian feminist discussions about erotic agency and the
appeal of queer joy, and they have prevented us from investigating the
various ways that a woman might respond when, to use Cooper’s phrase,
the privileges of straightness elude her. It is my belief that gay men’s per-
sistent ownership of the meaning and origins of queerness, along with
many gay men’s lack of concern about the lives of women, has made it
difficult to shift our attention away from what is sad about being gay to
what is even sadder about being straight. My aim is to show that when we
hold the relationship between misogyny and heterosexuality in full view,
we are able to see beyond the male-centric claim that queerness consti-
tutes a tragic and unwilled loss of power, a loss that no one would ever
4 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

choose (even as it brings sexual pleasure and fosters the “pride” of the
oppressed). Still today, misogyny is rarely ever meaningfully scrutinized
in mainstream gay-rights discourse, so the reasonable suggestion that
women stand to gain more than they lose by extracting themselves from
heterosexual culture and cultivating queerness has become nearly im-
possible to hear amid the born-this-way chorus. For all of these reasons,
I am of the mind that lesbian feminist critiques of heterosexuality, now
sometimes dismissed as outdated, have renewed relevance and urgency.
This book is about a critical but still largely overlooked consequence
of the drowning out of lesbian feminist ideas and experiences. When
lesbian feminist ideas are sidelined, we keep our focus on queer misery,
and we fail to name the contradictions and miseries of straight culture—
the entrapment, the disappointment, the antagonism, the boredom, the
unwanted sex, the toxic masculinity, and the countless daily injustices
endured by straight women. This book is about the failure to recognize
these not only as feminist problems but more specifically as straight prob-
lems that many queer women are wildly grateful to have escaped. While
conservatives have long promoted the belief that queer relationships are
unnatural, damaged, and fraught with various kinds of dysfunction, this
project examines what might be gained from raising similar questions
about the health and sustainability of heterosexual culture—a culture
arguably damaged by misogyny, even as it has been unwilling to address
the structural causes of this damage.
I will show that the narrative about the “tragedy of queerness”—the
seemingly gender-neutral claim that no one would ever wish queerness
upon themselves—does not reflect many queer women’s lived experi-
ences. And yet there is no denying that countless lesbians have adopted
this narrative. Is it possible that this story about the tragedy of queerness
is more a rhetorical habit, an idea we’ve internalized from gay men—
not to mention worried family members, bad television, or the church?
Some years ago, I was chatting about parenting with a lesbian couple
with a child close in age to my own. We arrived at the topic of children’s
sexuality, and one of the lesbian moms made a comment I have heard
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 5

before, a comment that lesbian and gay people are perhaps more likely
to share openly than lefty straight parents: “If I am to be totally honest,
I would prefer, for our child’s sake, that he isn’t gay. We don’t want him
to have to deal with the challenges that come with being gay.” Despite
the stark reality of homophobic bullying, this logic didn’t ring true to
me, and I was struck by how normalized it had become to say some-
thing about queerness (“No one would choose to be gay” or “I don’t
want my child to be gay like me”) that most people I know would be
quite unlikely to say about almost any other form of difference subject
to violence and oppression. I then asked these lesbian moms, “Do you
really feel that way? Do you feel like your own life has been so terrible
that you wish your parents could have saved you from it? Do you feel
that being straight would have been better for you?” These women both
smiled, looked at each other, laughed, and said, “No. I see your point.” I
didn’t probe further, but what I imagined those sly smiles were reflecting
was their instantaneous flashback to all that was pleasurable and joyous
about their lesbian lives. I have no idea what they were actually think-
ing, but the point here is that I suspect many queers love (the queer part
of) their lives, even when they have been trained to rehearse a narrative
about how hard and tragic it all is. This narrative bolsters heteronorma-
tivity not only by obscuring the profound forms of queer joy that accom-
pany and often compensate for queer suffering but also by implying that
heterosexual lives are free of gendered violence and suffering.
Let me be clear. Homophobic violence happens—to young people
and adults, to women, men, and trans people. It happens to straight
people when they are gender variant and/or are presumed to be queer.
And it happens most harshly to queer people of color and poor and
working-class queers. In all cases, it is tragic. The ideas behind the pop-
ular 2010 “It Gets Better” campaign—namely, that queer kids can ex-
pect to grow up, become autonomous, make money, and discover their
entitlement and civil rights—were critiqued, for good reason, for eliding
the persistent race, class, and gender disparities that shape the lives of
many queer people.3
6 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

But misogynistic and racist violence happens to straight people too,

and in many ways, gendered and sexualized and racist forms of violence
and suffering are much more unrelenting for straight women than for
anyone else. When I teach “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Stud-
ies” at UC Riverside, I show a series of documentary films about gen-
dered violence and suffering. These are films about the horrific violence
(sexual, physical, emotional) that women endure at the hands of men
and the state, about the incredible toll that masculinity takes on men’s
bodies and mental health (as well as women’s bodies and mental health),
and about the tedium and unequal division of labor that destroys, or
threatens to destroy, an astounding number of heterosexual relation-
ships. Even though I have seen these films a dozen times, I still cry when
I watch them, and I have always assumed that I am crying feminist tears.
I have assumed I am crying for women. But more recently, something
shifted. After watching the films, rereading the numerous articles about
gender oppression I had assigned, and listening to countless stories from
straight women students about their abusive or just plain not-feminist
male partners, I got in my car and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I am
queer. I went home and told my partner, “Thank god we are queer.” And
I realized that I was crying queer tears for straight people. It became
clear to me: Straight women’s lives are very, very hard. It’s not that it “gets
better” for queer people; it’s that heterosexuality is often worse.
Often anger is the dominant mode of relating to heterosexuality
among radical queers. But this book argues that it is more appropriate to
worry about heterosexuals, to feel empathy, to “call them in” rather than
call them out, and ideally, to be in solidarity with them as they work
to liberate heterosexuality from misogyny. Here I take inspiration, in
part, from the queer worry expressed by the dazzling figure of Aunt Ida
(played by Edith Massey) in John Waters’s 1974 cult film Female Trou-
ble. In an unforgettable scene in which Aunt Ida counsels her straight-
identified nephew Gator that she’d be so happy if he “turned nelly,” she
begs of him, “But you could change! Queers are just better. I’d be so
proud of you as a fag. . . . I’d never have to worry. [But now], I worry that
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 7

you’ll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries!

The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life.” Like Aunt Ida, I
reverse the direction of the “ally relationship,” such that queers become
concerned allies to the straights in our families and communities, es-
pecially the women who may be experiencing more gendered suffering
than we are, and without the hot sex, queer humor, and political solidar-
ity to which many of us queers have access.
There is no doubt that my own queerness, femmeness, whiteness,
able-bodiedness, and position as a scholar living in the United States
have shaped, and limited, my ways of thinking about straightness. To
understand the intersectional complexities of lesbian feminist critiques
of straightness, I have leaned heavily on the writings of queer feminists
of color and placed their insights at the forefront of my analysis. I could
not be more grateful to have access to their pathbreaking work, much of
which offers an extraordinary model of how to balance critique and love,
pain and solidarity. To the straight people reading this book, let me say
with all my love and solidarity, I am your ally.

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality: a Lesbian

Feminist Diagnosis

Let me quickly assure you that this book is not so much about straight
people themselves but about the straight culture in which they are
embedded and to which they are held accountable. As with the often
nebulous racial category of whiteness, one of the ways that we avoid
looking critically at straightness is to keep it indefinable, to imagine that
it is so vast and irreducible to any one way of being. A queer person
makes a critical statement about straightness to which a straight person
will object: “How can you say that? There are so many different kinds of
straight people. Many straight men, like my husband/boyfriend/brother,
are gentle and feminist. Many straight relationships are egalitarian, lov-
ing, and based on feminist principles.” We might even characterize these
claims as #notallstraightpeople. And of course these claims are true.
8 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

They also function, however, to invalidate queer critiques of straight cul-

ture, to silence or otherwise shut down queer witness testimony about
the straight world. As when white people protest that critiques of racism
should not tar all whites with one brush, the intention behind this kind
of request to avoid “overgeneralizations” is typically to focus on excep-
tions. Many people like to identify with the exceptions, which soften
the sting of critique and accountability. So let us acknowledge those
exceptions. Feminist straight men, and feminist men’s projects, do exist
(though I can count the ones I know personally on one hand, maybe
two). Men do more housework and parenting labor than they used to
(though not much more, recent evidence suggests).4 Some straight peo-
ple live queer-ish lives, engaging in polyamory, heteroflexibility, kink,
marriage refusal, and so forth, though it is unclear the extent to which
these practices challenge the real problems at the heart of straight cul-
ture. There are straight couples that are very happy. There are men who
love and respect women deeply. There are men who were raised by femi-
nists, lesbians, and lesbian feminists. There are men who are attracted to
aging women, hairy women, fat women, powerful women, and feminist
women. But none of these feminist modes of relating have made much
of a dent in straight culture, the subject of my analysis.
So what is “straight culture,” as seen through a queer, feminist lens? As
this book will explore in depth, queer/lesbian complaints about straight
culture have circulated around two overarching themes (with several
additional subthemes considered in the chapters to follow).5 First, queer
feminists have argued that straight life is characterized by the inescap-
able influence of sexism and toxic masculinity, both of which are either
praised or passively tolerated in straight spaces. Second, queer observers
of straight life have pointed to straight women’s endless and ineffective
efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight wom-
en’s optimism and disappointment. While some queers might now balk
at the idea of spending our precious time theorizing heterosexuality or
standing in solidarity with straight women, these were central projects
for lesbian feminists in the 1970s and ’80s.6 Lesbian feminists thoroughly
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 9

documented and theorized the tragedy of heterosexuality beginning in

the early 1970s, though they used different terms and came to different
conclusions than my own. Their archive is vast, and I offer only a very
quick a summary here.
As for the normalized sexism inside straight culture, lesbian femi-
nists wrote volumes. With righteous rage, they detailed the ways that
straight men desired women’s services—emotional, sexual, reproduc-
tive, domestic—rather than actual women, and they exposed the toll
this took on women’s mental health. The Radicalesbians declared, “by
virtue of being brought up in a male society, we have internalized the
male culture’s definition of ourselves . . . as relative beings who exist not
for ourselves, but for the servicing, maintenance, and comfort of men.”7
They described recoiling from men’s misogyny (“I began to avoid him,
. . . to sleep with him to shut him up, to be silent out of exhaustion, to
take tranquilizers . . .”).8 Audre Lorde described sex with men as “dismal
and frightening and a little demeaning.”9 Gloria Anzaldúa recounted
the misogyny inside straight Mexican culture, wherein “woman is the
stranger, the other, . . . man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-
Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of fear,” and consequently,
Anzaldúa explains, “I made the choice to be queer.”10 Kate Millet put
forward a theory of patriarchy as a heterosexual political system main-
tained through men’s sexual power over women, in families as well as
in the public sphere, that had naturalized rape and other forms of men’s
sexual coercion and control of women.11 Cherríe Moraga concurred that
the “control of women begins through the institution of heterosexuality,”
adding that a man wants “to be able to determine how, when, and with
whom his women—mother, wife, and daughter—are sexual. For without
male-imposed social and legal control of our reproductive function . . .
Chicanas might freely ‘choose’ otherwise, including being sexually inde-
pendent from and/or with men.”12
Lesbian feminists noted that even men on the left, the seemingly good
men who promised to respect women, ultimately caused women tre-
mendous suffering. Andrea Dworkin, who is now often vilified for her
10 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

fervent opposition to porn, BDSM, and sex work, came to lesbian femi-
nism after experiencing severe physical and sexual abuse at the hands of
her anarchist activist husband (he hit, kicked, burned, and raped her)
and subsequently engaging in sex work for survival. Dworkin experi-
enced multiple other instances of misogynistic violence in her life, and
as she delved more deeply into feminist work, the astounding ubiquity
and normalization of misogyny and men’s violence against women be-
came clear to her: “I heard about rape after rape, . . . women who had
been raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by
one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed,
torn, women who had been sleeping, women who were with their chil-
dren . . .”13 In the mid-1970s, at the height of lesbian feminist writing,
marital rape was legal in every state in the United States, and hence, rape
was understood by lesbian feminists not only as an act of patriarchy but
also as a normalized expression of heterosexuality. Though not a lesbian
but arguably queer, the African American feminist scholar bell hooks,
too, described the frequency with which straight women fled abusive
relationships with ostensibly enlightened men: “Individual heterosex-
ual women came to the movement from relationships where men were
cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical think-
ers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on
behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice.
However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their
conservative cohorts.”14 As lesbian feminists witnessed radical straight
men remain in denial about patriarchy, many gave up on the feminist
possibilities for straight men and for straight relationships.
During the 1970s and ’80s, lesbian feminists also established that while
sexism was a foundational element of straight culture, how sexism mani-
fested itself in women’s lives was significantly variable (what would later
be termed “intersectional”). Race, culture, socioeconomic class, and re-
ligion produced specific forms of heteropatriarchy, and hence, straight
culture itself was never monolithic. In 1977, the Black feminist members
of the Combahee River Collective Statement, many of whom were queer,
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 11

theorized that the forces of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy often

overlapped, serving two functions at once (“[Black girls are] told in the
same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ‘ladylike’ and to make
us less objectionable in the eyes of white people”).15 Like white lesbian
feminists, Black and Chicana lesbians detailed men’s violence against
women partners and family members, but they also extended this analy-
sis to radical movements (the Black Nationalist movement, the Chicano
power movement), contexts in which women of color were expected to
provide service to men and to follow men’s leadership.16 Though not a
lesbian feminist text, Michelle Wallace’s 1978 feminist classic Black Macho
and the Myth of the Super Woman painted a powerful image of the self-
sacrifice expected of straight Black women vis-à-vis the racist oppression
of Black men: “Every time she starts to wonder about her own misery, to
think about reconstructing her own life, to shake off her devotion and
feeling of responsibility, to everyone but herself, the ghosts pounce. . . .
The ghosts talk to her. You crippled the Black man. You worked against
him. You betrayed him. You laughed at him. You scorned him. You and
the white man.”17 Wallace, echoing the Combahee River Collective, knew
that antiracist political solidarity with men was vital to the survival of
women of color but that true liberation must also center an analysis of
patriarchy. In similarly intersectional work, Chicana lesbian feminists,
including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Carla Trujillo, showed
that one-dimensional concerns about the effects of racism on men of
color (and not women) were exacerbated by religious and cultural be-
liefs about women as natural caretakers; both sets of beliefs intersected to
amplify women’s sense of emotional, sexual, and political duty to men.18
Similarly, lesbian feminist analyses of socioeconomic class, such as found
in the essays of the white, working-class lesbian writer Dorothy Allison,
illuminated the ways that white, working-class cultural values—self-
sacrifice, silence, survival, and tradition—reinforced men’s control over
women inside straight relationships.19
Lesbian feminists were also alarmed by the amount of time and energy
straight women were investing in trying to gain men’s respect, with either
12 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

painfully slow or nonexistent results. In 1972, the women’s caucus of the

Gay Revolution Party issued a statement in which they expressed serious
concern that straight women “seem to believe that through their attempts
to create ‘new men’ they will liberate themselves. Enormous amounts of
female energy are expended in this process, with little effect; sexism re-
mains the overwhelming problem in the most ‘liberated,’ ‘loving’ hetero-
sexual situations.”20 The white lesbian separatist Jill Johnston pronounced
that she was identifying as a “woman committed woman” rather than a
“feminist,” explaining, “so many feminists advocate a change in our situ-
ation in relation to the man rather than devotion of our energies to our
own kind.”21 Lesbian feminist writers also documented the ways that
girls and women were groomed by straight culture to desire relation-
ships with men despite the overwhelming evidence that heterosexual
relationships were unequal. The promise of love and happiness, accord-
ing to Adrienne Rich, was the lure that seduced girls and women into
a thinly veiled relationship of subjection. As Rich explains, “the ideol-
ogy of heterosexual romance, beamed at her childhood out of fairy tales,
television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool
ready to the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use.”22
Lesbian feminist writing made exceedingly clear the contradictions and
precariousness of heterosexuality as a system equally organized around
love and abuse, manifest in the story told to countless little girls: “He hit
you because he likes you.” Indeed, as feminist historians have argued, this
exchange of potential love and protection for servitude is, historically
speaking, heterosexual romance’s defining moment.23

a Mountain of Evidence

But let us get more specific and more current. Part of why it is important
to return to classic lesbian feminist texts, and why lesbian feminist ideas
have arguably been making a comeback of late, is because so much has
not changed or has been repeatedly subject to men’s antifeminist back-
lash. As I write, every major media outlet has attempted to make sense
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 13

of the ubiquity of straight men’s sexual harassment and sexual assaults of

women (what the media is calling “the wake of #metoo”). Multiple states
are enacting abortion bans with the aim of overturning Roe v. Wade at
the federal level. Currently, the president of the United States and many
men in Congress are shamelessly displaying their misogyny with regu-
larity and great entitlement. This is all happening on the political stage,
and it’s also happening in girls’ and women’s daily lives, in their relation-
ships with boys and men.
It is difficult even to know where to begin the project of catalogu-
ing the daily violence that men commit against girls and women in the
name of love and desire. We could start with childhood, wherein adult
men who work as writers for Disney/Pixar are still using the big screen
to communicate to little girls that finding a prince makes magic hap-
pen, changes the world, wins wars, beautifies everything, and brings
girls closer to the divine.24 We could look to high schools, where sex
education teachers are still training girls in how to relate to themselves
as (inevitably straight) sexual victims and gatekeepers and to boys as
sexual agents and predators.25 We could take notice of the fact that bla-
tant expressions of misogyny have become the commonplace language
of heterosexual sex itself (“fuck that bitch,” “murder that pussy,” “beat
that pussy up,” “grab her by the pussy,” “choke her out,” “dig her out,”
“nail her,” “pound her,” and so forth).26 We would also want to exam-
ine the ways that so many boys and men value other men’s approval
more than women’s humanity, continuing a now centuries-old tradition
of positioning bros before hoes and using control over women’s bodies
to earn male respect,27 to make money for men,28 and to reroute their
disavowed desire for one another through a more socially acceptable
object.29 We might choose to focus, as the Chinese feminist journalist
Leta Hong Fincher has done, on the role of the state in encouraging
women to embrace men’s mediocrity, to pretend to desire men they do
not want, and to roll back their own accomplishments for the good of
the nation.30 We could look closely at recent findings that the hopeful
story about the new, engaged father has been greatly exaggerated and
14 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

that straight women across race, class, and job status still do the major-
ity of the child-care work.31 We could steel ourselves for the sociologist
Gloria González-López’s brave and chilling study of father-daughter and
uncle-niece incest in Mexico, in which she demonstrates that the script
of heterosexual romance has helped to normalize incest by cultivating
men’s attraction to girls and young women in need of care or rescue, by
cultivating women’s attraction to men of higher status than themselves,
and by recirculating the idea that men have unstoppable sexual needs
that women are obligated to meet.32 We could also consider the grav-
ity of the sociologist Diana Scully’s argument, based on interviews with
seventy-nine convicted rapists in the United States, that rape happens as
frequently as it does because so few boys and men have been trained to
identify with girls and women, to empathize with their experience, and
to humanize them.33
The tragedy of heterosexuality is about all of this and more. There
are complex and multiple forms of heterosexual suffering that vary ac-
cording to women’s positions within hierarchies of race, socioeconomic
class, and immigration status. To understand this suffering, we could
also look, as the Black feminist criminologist Beth Richie does, at the
ways Black women in the criminal justice system have been seduced
and entrapped by the expectation that they will be made happy by, and
must remain loyal to, Black men—even as some of these men rape, beat,
and torture them and their children.34 We could turn to research by
indigenous feminists that shows, in brutal detail, the way that settler-
colonial violence has shaped indigenous heterosexuality and its miseries
(through the imposition of white colonial gender norms; through the
theft of land, resources, and culture that sustained community health
and cohesion).35 We could examine—as numerous feminist writers
have—the white-supremacist structures that sustain white boys’ and
men’s profound sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and attention
and their willingness to yell at, stalk, threaten, rape, shoot, and kill
women who dare to be unavailable or uninterested.36 We could notice,
as demonstrated by the South Asian American feminist scholar Sham-
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 15

ita Das Dasgupta, that immigrant women often hide their husbands’
violence because they are under pressure to present an “unblemished”
image of their families and communities in order to avoid racist dis-
crimination and state terror.37
We might also examine the patriarchal and white-supremacist an-
chors of heterosexual desire in the United States, where Asian Ameri-
can women and white men are consistently ranked “most desirable” in
surveys, with the former valued for beauty and docility and the latter
for power.38 We might decide to place a spotlight on the sad state of het-
erosexual sex itself—the coercion,39 the missing female orgasms,40 girls’
and women’s agreement to sex so as “to get it over with” or “be nice.”
And we could, and should, keep a watchful eye on the copious ways that
straight culture repackages itself to make all of these tragic injustices
appear inevitable, if not desirable: bioevolutionary theories about the
needs of cavemen, the tsunami-like force of testosterone, and the un-
avoidable nature of locker-room talk;41 biblical justifications for strong
male leadership and the return to a more harmonious prefeminist era;42
self-help books designed to help straight women rediscover their lost
femininity and turn over the reins to men (explored in chapter 2); and
the persistent maligning of feminist and queer strategies and interven-
tions that stand to address the root causes of these problems.43
When my last book was published,44 I heard from many gay male
critics that they disagreed with my argument that straightness can be
understood as a fetish for normalcy, and queerness as a desire for the
unexpected and counternormative. Several gay men wrote to me and
explained that this argument made no sense to them since “every gay
man wants to be normal” or has wished that he were straight.45 These
men, though speaking from their experience as gay men, seemed to have
generalized their aspirations for normalcy to queer people more broadly.
They seemed to believe that wishing for the ease and privileges of het-
erosexuality is part of every queer person’s lot in life. But as I hope my
brief review of the tragedy of straight culture has illuminated, this argu-
ment simply does not hold water when we pay even a modest amount of
16 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

attention to heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution, one that has long

benefited men and harmed women.
Furthermore, while the daily tedium of heterosexual culture, charac-
terized in part by a predictable and incessant wellspring of antagonisms
and unresolved complaints (often termed “the battle of the sexes” by
mainstream commentators), is less violent than many of the aforemen-
tioned examples, it is nonetheless distressing. One of the sadder features
of straight culture, as the lesbian feminists quoted earlier made clear, is
that straight people keep going back for more, even as men don’t seem
to like or respect women much at all and as feminist straight women
(at least in my experience) are quick to confess that they have little re-
spect for men. Often propelled by the essentialist and heteronormative
logic that male and female “energies” are incomplete without each other
or that “opposites attract” or that heterosexual desire is hardwired and
nonnegotiable, straight culture seems to rely on a blind acceptance that
women and men do not need to hold the other gender in high esteem as
much as they need to need each other and to learn how to compromise
and suppress their disappointment in the service of this need.

are Straight Women Okay?

These compromises take strange and varied forms that can easily pro-
duce shock and concern for feminist queers. In my now forty-five years
as an observer of the straight world, I have noted that it appears to
be perfectly acceptable for straight couples to share few interests, to
belittle or infantilize each other, or to willingly segregate themselves
during important moments in their relationships. Straight couples
experience significant rites of passage like weddings and baby show-
ers nearly separate from each other, even though these rituals, at least
theoretically, are intended to signify something about the evolution
of their partnerships. 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
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 17

rituals that are intended to mark important moments in their lives.

In no way do I intend to imply that couples should spend every min-
ute 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. This is precisely the observation that led Erin Sul-
livan, a blogger for the popular lesbian website Autostraddle, to write
the essay “Are Straight Women Okay?”46 Though lighthearted in tone,
Sullivan’s review of products marketed to straight couples—husband
and wife “conversation starter” cards, his and her coffee mugs in which
the “his” mug is larger than its counterpart, and a novelty “sex check
book” that helps straight couples maintain a fair sexual balance of
giving and receiving—compels her to ask, “Are straight woman okay?
Like, not in a joking way— do they need assistance?” In a follow-up
essay, she extends her alliance to straight women, pondering how to
best reach them: “I’m not sure where we go from here. Do we put up
flyers? Wear a special pin? Maybe when you see [straight women] at a
Pride event this month crowding the very bar you’re trying get a drink
from, make sure to remind them that we are their allies in this fight
and then wait for instruction.”47
Concern about straight women’s well-being, and agreement that
straight men would benefit considerably from some basic instruction
on how to treat women, is something of a running joke in queer sub-
culture—or, to be more accurate, in dyke subculture. For instance, the
Instagram page @hets_explain_yourselves is a digital archive of #het-
nonsense that includes in its bio the rhetorical question “Are Hets OK?”
Followers of the page can scroll with befuddlement or horror through
images of infant clothing proclaiming, “I heart boobs just like daddy,” a
beer garden called “Husband Day Care Center,” numerous memes about
how to keep a man, a diet book that promises women they can use nutri-
tion to control the gender of their future babies, and so on. In a similar
vein, the queer comedian DeAnne Smith has a comedy routine based on
precisely this blend of queer shock and confusion about straight people’s
18 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

lives. Speaking first to straight women and later to straight men, Smith
proclaims during her routine,

I don’t know how to speak to straight women but I do have something to

tell you. . . . You have set the bar in your relationships too low. How would
I know that? . . . The girl I am dating now, until now, has exclusively dated
men. It is so easy to impress her! . . . It is ridiculous. I just show her basic
human decency and she loses her mind. . . . Straight guys, it’s not that
hard to impress women. Show minimal, minimal, minimal, minimal in-
terest in things your lady is passionate about. . . . Take care of your ladies.
I don’t have time for all of them.

Perhaps something like white audiences’ laughter at the work of Black

comedians whose humor hold ups a mirror to centuries of white vio-
lence and inhumanity, straight audiences laugh at Smith’s disarming
suggestion that basic human decency is missing from straight men’s
relationships with women. The joke is “funny” in part because pointing
to many straight men’s egomania and unbridled sense of entitlement
is simultaneously shocking (anyone who dares to seriously make this
claim is met immediately with the #notallmen brigade or worse), but it
is also familiar. It’s funny because it’s true.48
In addition to wondering about whether most straight men and
women have a foundation of mutual interest or respect, another ques-
tion that queers sometimes ponder about straight people is whether they
are actually sexually attracted to one another. Studies show that many
straight-identified women find penises “unattractive,” are “turned off ”
by images of nude men, and prefer to gaze at naked women when given
the option.49 We also know that girls and women consent to a tremen-
dous amount of sex with men that they don’t want to have and/or that is
not pleasurable and that straight women are frequently in relationships
with men for reasons other than attraction (financial security, obliga-
tion, to retain resources for children, etc.). For instance, in an essay titled
“What I Would Have Said to You Last Night Had You Not Cum and
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 19

Then Fallen Asleep,” the feminist blogger Reina Gattuso illuminates the
banality of straight women’s dissatisfying sexual experiences with men
as she reflects on her orgasmless recent sexual experience with a “decent
guy.” Speaking as if directly to this decent but self-centered male sex
partner, the representative of “anyman, everyman,” she explains,

You’re a decent guy. . . . I do not feel like you are going to rape me. . . .
The sex wasn’t particularly bad, either. . . . It was normal sex. Normal,
boring, vaguely dehumanizing hetero sex. Which is precisely the point:
The normalcy. . . . Because there was something in the choreography of
the whole thing that just struck me as, I don’t know—unsatisfying in a
way only feminism can remedy. . . . Here, supposedly, is what you con-
sider sex: We make out, you play with my boobs, I blow you, you do not
go down on me even though I ask [*insert some bullshit on how “I only
go down on women I’m in love with. Now put it in your mouth.”]. Penis
goes in vagina, penis moves in and out of vagina, . . . penis ejaculates. . . .
Sex is now over because you have decided it is over. You have decided
sex is over because you are a man, and because this choreography that
favors men with penises—man becomes erect, man penetrates woman,
man ejaculates—is what we have been told sex is.50

While straight men’s desire for women’s bodies is often portrayed as an

incredibly powerful force, many men’s notorious confusion about what
produces female orgasm, their disinterest in providing oral sex to women,
and their dramatically narrow ideas about what constitutes a female body
worth desiring (waxed, shaved, scented, dieted, young, etc.) suggests that
heteromasculinity is characterized by a much weaker and far more con-
ditional desire for women’s bodies than is often claimed. To lesbians,
men’s countless missed opportunities to actually like women are baffling.
Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by
straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting
for men who have no close friends and won’t go to therapy. Men are less
likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, to
20 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern

so common as to be termed “normative male alexithymia” by psycholo-
gists.51 For straight men in relationships, all of these needs get aimed
at women partners. In 2016, the writer Erin Rodgers coined the term
“emotional gold digger” to describe straight men’s reliance on women
partners to “play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secre-
tary, emotional cheerleader, mom.”52 Elaborating on this dynamic and
the emotional burnout it produces in straight women, Melanie Ham-
lett further explains that the concept of the emotional gold digger “has
gained more traction recently as women, feeling increasingly burdened
by unpaid emotional labor, have wised up to the toll of toxic masculin-
ity, which keeps men isolated and incapable of leaning on each other. . . .
While [women] read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek
out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or
spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current
problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.”53 Similarly, in the
book Eloquent Rage, the feminist Brittney Cooper points to men’s strik-
ing absence as supportive figures in her life, a role that is filled by other
straight women friends. Cooper explains, “When my patriarchal nuclear
fantasy didn’t happen and the privileges of straightness eluded me and a
whole generation of overachieving Black women, it is my girls who have
celebrated my success, showered me with compliments, taken me out on
dates, traveled the world with me, supported me through big life deci-
sions, and showed up when disasters struck.” As other straight feminists
have concluded before her, Cooper wonders if “perhaps straight women
need to become less invested in the project of straightness altogether. . . .
Far too many women leave behind the freedom feminism offers because
they want to stay on patriarchy’s dick, which is to say they want to secure
their straightness and their options of getting chosen.”54
All of this evidence that women get a raw deal in relationships with
men does not suggest, however, that straight women are not “really
straight” and should just go ahead and become lesbians, or celibate, al-
ready. While many lesbian feminists actually made this argument in the
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 21

1970s, my analysis of the tragedy of heterosexuality has brought me to a

very different conclusion. While I view Cooper’s suggestion that women
should “become less invested in straightness” as an important option,
later I will argue that another way forward is to redefine heterosexuality
itself, to expand its basic ingredients to include more, and not less, at-
tachment and identification between women and men.
While a detailed analysis of the origins of sexual orientation is beyond
the scope of this book, which is concerned with straight culture, it is im-
portant to note that sexual desires are developed by a complex of forces
that are not always conscious to us, or under our control. For instance,
from a Freudian perspective, human infants have an expansive capacity
to experience pleasurable sensations in response to humans of all kinds,
one’s own bodily functions, and even objects and animals that are soft or
interesting to the touch. This expansive desire gets disciplined to conform
to social norms, with heterosexual desire being the primary imperative
communicated to most children. As I have summarized elsewhere, the
cultural theorist Sara Ahmed offers a powerful account of the way het-
erosexual desire is reproduced, passed on by parents, as both an obliga-
tion and a “gift,” to their children: “[For Ahmed] . . . the child’s entire
social world is oriented toward heterosexuality while other object orien-
tations are cleared away. Heterosexuality, as the intimately close, familiar,
normalized, and celebrated couple formation, is the space in which the
child lives and becomes the space in which the child feels ‘at home.’ The
child’s body itself, like bodies desiring familiar foods, gets shaped by its
cultural context and begins to tend toward the familiar.”55 Queerness, too,
is shaped in part by forces beyond our control, but I am not a believer
that these forces are hormonal or neurological. It is quite possible, for
example, that children who are attuned to the tragedy of heterosexuality,
or who are keen observers of the misery wrought by heteropatriarchy in
the lives of their parents or other significant adults, are oriented other-
wise by a desire to avoid such suffering. This may well have been my own
story, no matter how much my queerness now feels animated by the raw
hotness of butch dykes and other queer objects of my lust.
22 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

Where Patriarchy and Heteronormativity Intersect

Some readers might wonder whether the problems that this book
describes are best understood under the umbrella of patriarchy, rather
than heterosexuality. Why focus on straightness at all? There is no doubt
that the problems that plague straight culture are the problems of patriar-
chy, or men holding power over women, and this means that the tragedy
of heterosexuality requires feminist intervention. But patriarchy is also
too blunt a conceptual instrument to capture the nuances of heterosex-
ual dysfunction, in part because, as the gender theorist Judith Butler
has argued, the relationship between patriarchy and heterosexuality is
more mutually constitutive than unidirectional.56 Heterosexuality (or
the investment in a normative sexuality organized around the attraction
of opposite bodies) is not an outgrowth of preexisting binary gender
differences but a force that requires and produces binary gender dif-
ference. In other words, the tragedy of heterosexuality is about men’s
control of women, but it is also about straight women’s and men’s shared
romantic and erotic attachments to an unequal gender binary, or to the
heteroerotic fantasy of binary, biologically determined, and naturally
hierarchical gender oppositeness. This last feature, straight culture’s
eroticization of men’s power over women, is often presented as a kind
of benign playfulness—a joke shared among straight women about how
husbands always get away without doing their fair share, let’s say. But the
heteroerotic appetite for situations in which straight men can display
power over women also fuels sexual violence, infusing straight culture
with endless eroticized representations of men hurting women and with
romantic tales of the redemption of violent, aggressive, entitled, and self-
obsessed straight men.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t eroticize gender differences. Gen-
der differences are hot! Queer subculture delights in celebrating what
is sexy about a whole array of ever-evolving gender expressions (non-
binary genders, gender fluidity, femme, butch, and the broad spectrum
of gender expressions that go by the name trans); but queer people also
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 23

increasingly agree that these gender expressions are not determined by

people’s body parts or sex assignment at birth, nor are they linked to sex-
ual desire in any predictable way (femmes are often attracted to femmes,
queers of all stripes can find nonbinary folks desirable, and so forth).
There is no doubt about it, straight culture’s obsession with genital-based
gender and sexual identity (i.e., only women can be feminine and only
people with vaginas can be women) is one of its defining features, one
that influences how straight people understand not only what is sexy
but also what is safe and equitable. Straight culture encourages panic at
the idea that someone of “the wrong sex” might be using the women’s
restroom and thereby threatening women’s sexual safety, while a queer
approach to safety broadens our analysis to include gender policing and
gendered violence of all kinds—including violence against trans and
nonbinary queers who just need to pee and face no end of harassment
in public bathrooms. Similarly, straight culture’s version of gender equity
often looks like men taking on “women’s work” (housecleaning, child
care) but needing a ton of gender affirmation in the process or using
their strength and privilege to lovingly protect the girls and women in
their lives.57 These changes make a certain kind of progress, but they rely
on and sustain well-worn, binary notions about the roles of men and
women that make many queer people cringe.
Typically, when there is a general consensus that something is terri-
bly disappointing or dysfunctional, like a new restaurant or a workplace
policy, let’s say, that disappointing thing is shut down, protested against,
revised in some form—unless that thing is heterosexuality, for which
there is an uncanny attachment to returning, after no end of complaint
or disappointment, right back to its original form. Adrienne Rich ad-
dressed this problem by highlighting that while numerous feminist writ-
ers have made it their life’s work to document the expansive list of ways
that heterosexuality fails women, these same writers have all too often
authorized this failure by being unable to imagine an alternative or by
treating heterosexuality as an inevitable biological inclination that “does
not need to be explained.” Rich goes on to say that despite lesbianism
24 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

being an arguably more logical and fulfilling arrangement for women, it

is “lesbian sexuality which . . . is seen as requiring explanation.”58
Pop feminist texts, such as Hanna Rosin’s buzz-worthy 2012 book
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, are notorious for producing
heterofeminist complaints that ultimately go nowhere except back to
blaming women for being too dominant and successful or for setting
their romantic standards too high.59 Queer critiques of Rosin’s book
point not only to the failures of this kind of pop-feminist project and its
conclusions but more generally to the tragedy of heterosexuality, itself
“the sinking ship.” Of Rosin’s book, the queer scholar Jack Halberstam
explains, “Like a romantic comedy that throws up every objection to
the coupling of the male and female leads only to manufacture some
farcical event that brings them back together again and makes them see
the error of their ways, Rosin shows men and women moving in radi-
cally different directions and then concludes that maybe we need to opt
again for traditional gender roles to right the sinking ship of marriage,
family, and the social world built on the bedrock of heterosexuality.”60
For straight women like Rosin, who are intimately bound to men, the
need to tend to male feelings and preserve male entitlements is the cost
of making a degree of feminist progress (i.e., as Rosin details, women
are now equitably represented in the workforce and in universities and
are performing well in those spheres, for instance). The feminist writer
Leta Hong Fincher documents a similar bind for upwardly mobile Chi-
nese women in her book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender
Inequality in China. The professional and university-educated young
women whom Fincher interviewed described their boyfriends as self-
ish, jealous, insensitive, boring, arrogant, and generally unappealing,
and yet they also described a high likelihood that they would marry
these men because they did not believe better men were available and
they feared being lonely.61 This tragic arrangement on which hetero-
sexuality was founded—“I don’t really like you, but I am going to get
(or stay) married to you out of fear or practicality”—remains alive and
well, giving rise to an enormously profitable self-help and relationship-
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 25

coaching industry designed to smooth over heterosexual antagonisms

and disappointments.
My aim in the following chapters is to describe the tragedy of het-
erosexuality in sufficient detail that we might be able to make some sus-
tainable queer feminist interventions into straight suffering, while also
laying to rest once and for all the idea that queer women have any reason
to envy straight culture or to mourn its loss in our lives. In fact, queer
women have a long history of attempting to forge places away from the
influence of straight culture (communal households, lesbian land, etc.),
not simply to get away from straight cisgender men but to take respite
from witnessing the tragedy of heterosexuality more generally.
My partner and I take this respite every summer when we visit a
genderqueer feminist friend who lives in Hawaii, a woman we initially
heard about through mutual friends but had never met. She used to live
happily among a sea of queers in Berkeley, California, but after needing
to move to a remote part of Hawaii for family and health reasons, she
found herself without much of a queer community. So she put out a
call through the queer feminist grapevine for queers to come visit. She
missed queer people so much that she opened her home to us (and oth-
ers) without having ever met us. Now she is family to us, and we bring
new queers with us when we go. But it is also a no-straights-allowed
kind of arrangement, which makes some of our straight friends look at
us askance. And yet I understand perfectly that our friend has plenty
of straight people in her social circle already; and even though many of
these straight people are kind and good and feminist, the point is that
queer people yearn for one another, and they yearn for a break from
witnessing straight life.
All of this said, my intention is not to romanticize queer life. Being
queer hardly means we are saved from sexual abuse, intimate-partner
violence, unhealthy relationships, or traumatic breakups. Queer people
act out and hurt each other in numerous ways, including violence, ad-
diction, lying, and so forth. But the key difference between straight cul-
ture and queer culture in this regard is that the latter does not attribute
26 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

these destructive behaviors to a romantic story about a natural and in-

escapable gender binary. Lesbians, for instance, do not find ourselves
attracted to a gender category that is principally defined by its inability
to understand or identify with our own. We are not mansplained by the
people who claim to love us. We are not expected by our partners to
shoulder the most devalued household and parenting labor because we
are women. On the whole, misogyny has not cast a shadow of fear over
our flirtations. Our relationships, unlike straight relationships, aren’t
presumed to be subject to gender-based antagonisms or in structural
conflict from the start. We are not always already set up in such a way
that someone risks being a nagging wife or feeling trapped or need-
ing to buy self-help best sellers like He’s Just Not That into You or Men
Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them or How to Date Men
When You Hate Men or worrying about how to catch a man and keep
him or resenting that our gender means we will do most of the parenting
and housework or needing to convince our dating pool that we aren’t
bitches, whores, stupid, weak, or available to be grabbed by the pussy.
Quantitative data on quality-of-life comparisons between straight
and queer women are not easy to come by, and within this limited body
of research, one study often conflicts with another. There is evidence
that lesbians have significantly more orgasms than straight women do,62
engage in a more equal distribution of household labor than hetero-
sexual couples do,63 have higher earnings than straight women do,64
have better-adjusted children than heterosexual couples do,65 and, in
some countries, report higher relationship happiness than heterosexual
women do.66 Other studies suggest that lesbians get divorced at rates
equivalent to heterosexual women, though the meaning of this finding
is unclear given that same-sex marriage is a recent phenomenon.67 Some
studies report similar rates of intimate-partner violence among lesbian
couples and heterosexual couples, but questions remain about whether
lesbians are more likely to report violence than heterosexual women are
and/or are more likely to have their relationships misperceived by po-
lice.68 I approach all of this data with caution, as so much of the quan-
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 27

titative research on LGBT life tends to be motivated by a conservative

or neoliberal agenda (e.g., antigay research finds that queer people are
miserable and die young; progay research finds that queers are normal
citizens, happily monogamous, and excellent parents).69 Suffice it to say
that the kind of quantitative data that would be most useful to the queer
feminist investigation at hand are, by their very nature, limited. The field
of critical heterosexuality studies is still in its infancy, and “straight cul-
ture,” so hegemonic as to be unnamable outside of queer space, is a rela-
tively new object of inquiry.

The Paradox

One of the core dysfunctions of straight culture—and a centerpiece of

my analysis—is the misogyny paradox, wherein boys’ and men’s desire
for girls and women is expressed within a broader culture that encour-
ages them to also hate girls and women. If you have experienced life
as a girl or woman, you know the misogyny paradox all too well. Men
shout “compliments” about girls’ and women’s bodies on public streets
(“You are looking mighty fine today!” or “You’re a beautiful woman.
Why don’t you smile?”) and then, a moment later, when they are not
met with a response, hurl violent and misogynistic threats (“Fuck you
bitch!”).70 Young boys cannot wait to have sex with girls, and once they
do, many describe girls’ bodies in the most abject terms possible, seem-
ingly disgusted by their very objects of desire.71 Men love women’s
bodies, we are told, but only after women spend an inordinate amount
of time whipping their bodies into a lovable shape—by dieting, shav-
ing, waxing, dying, perfuming, covering with makeup, douching, and
starving them. Young men, we are encouraged to believe, have a lot of
desire for women, but they dare not talk to each other about sex in ways
that center girls’ and women’s pleasure, power, or subjectivity because,
paradoxically, this kind of talk feels gay. Such was the paradox that Jason
Schultz, a feminist writer, was faced with when he wanted to have a non-
sexist bachelor party and suggested to his male friends that they actually
28 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

talk about sex and desire together (“What makes us feel sexy?”) rather
than hire a stripper.72 When my students read about Schultz’s alternative
bachelor party, they are struck by how “gay” it seems, even as Schultz’s
request was for straight men to share stories, sans sexism, about their
experiences of having pleasurable sex with women.
Sometimes, the misogyny paradox takes a dramatic and violent form,
such as when men rape and/or murder women they purport to have
desired or even loved. For instance, by twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rod-
ger’s own account, he shot and killed six college students in Isla Vista,
California, in 2014 because he desired the girls he saw on campus but
could not bear that his desire wasn’t returned (as he said in his suicide
video, “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will pun-
ish you all for it”). Violent expressions of the misogyny paradox appear
frequently in popular culture, taking the form of men’s “animal attrac-
tion” to women they simultaneously desire and loathe for talking too
much, saying no to sex, being vain or disloyal, and so on. According to
the documentary filmmaker Sut Jhally, this theme—men want women
and also hate women—appears across musical genres and reproduces
itself anew in each generation.73 Perhaps no one has been a more bra-
zen and high-profile exemplar of the misogyny paradox than President
Donald Trump himself, a man who has bragged publicly that “no one
loves women more” than he does and also bragged about sexually as-
saulting women. In mundane everyday life, however, the misogyny
paradox takes the subtler form of straight men claiming to love women
and yet speaking over them, explaining things to them with no regard
for women’s knowledge or expertise, and training their sons to repro-
duce this lack of respect for women’s humanity. As explored in the chap-
ters to follow, what is paradoxical here is not only that straight men say
they love women and then turn around and express their misogyny but
also that this love/hate relationship is successfully marketed to straight
people as a source of happiness despite overwhelming evidence that it is
a primary contributor to straight people’s misery. As we will see, many
straight women find themselves dating or married to men who feel to
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 29

them like tyrants or children, and many straight men find themselves
with women they don’t actually want to talk to; both parties learn to fake
interest in the name of relationship success.
In some ways, this paradox bears resemblance to the one examined
by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 2016 book Strangers
in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochs-
child traveled to rural Louisiana—where waterways are among the most
polluted in the nation—to ask how it is that poor southern whites whose
land, water, and bodies have been devastated by industrial toxicity con-
tinue to vote for probusiness conservatives committed to deregulation
and, hence, environmental destruction.74 In other words, why do poor
southern whites undermine their own best interests? Hochschild finds
the answer in a complex mix of rural whites’ gratitude for their industrial
jobs, their Christian belief that God will ultimately restore any human
damage done to the Earth and to their own bodies, and their belief that
the government cannot be trusted to help them. Similarly, in attempt-
ing to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so
many women are investing in straight relationships, when these rela-
tionships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Ber-
lant’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 insta-
bility [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.”75
Cruel optimism strikes me as an apt lens through which to think
about straight people’s attachments to heteropatriarchy. The promises of
heteropatriarchy are central to most ideas about what it means to live a
good life: children are tracked toward heterosexual romance in their ear-
liest years; boys and men achieve legible/successful masculinity largely
through sexual access to women and their labor; and girls and women
achieve value—and “happiness”—through access to male desire and ap-
30 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

proval. But when confronted with insurmountable evidence that heter-

opatriarchal arrangements are not all they have been promised to be,
then what? It is this moment of disillusionment, or the discovery of the
cruelty of the heteroromantic fantasy, which sets the stage for this book.

What’s ahead

I hope to have sufficiently introduced the idea of the tragedy of hetero-

sexuality and pointed to the work of several other queer/lesbian writers
who have attempted to document, theorize, and dismantle it. Next I will
move back in time, tracing the emergence of companionate marriage
as a difficult but worthwhile heterosexual ideal, as well as the evolution
of self-help texts and “relationship science” offered to straight couples
to help them understand why women and men do not naturally like
each other and how they might learn to cultivate, or at least present
the appearance of, mutual affection. We begin with an examination of
eugenicist “marital hygiene” texts of the early twentieth century, move
on to a survey of midcentury advertising campaigns and educational
films, and conclude with the late-century explosion of a self-help indus-
try built on biopsychological claims about gender difference.
I will lay the historical groundwork for understanding how both mi-
sogyny, in the form of husbands’ violent aversion to their wives, and
white supremacy, in the form of eugenicist campaigns for white marital
harmony, shaped American heterosexuality through the twentieth cen-
tury and into the current period. The lens is focused on the particular
ways that white Americans labored to produce heterosexual empathy
and mutuality and Black Americans labored to produce heterosexual
recognition and respectability, from the moment the term “heterosexu-
ality” was invented and imported from Europe.
Narrowing our view of the heterosexual-repair industry, chapter 3 de-
scribes my ethnographic study of the international industry of “pickup
artists” and “seduction coaches” for straight men. Here we will take a
queer tour through an evolving industry that provides straight men
 LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS • 31

around the globe with access to expert coaches—usually, but not always,
men—who will teach them “the game,” or how to seduce women. While
straight women constitute the overwhelming majority of consumers of
relationship self-help books, the seduction industry—with its tactical,
scripted, and scientific approach to attracting the opposite sex—has
been extraordinarily popular with straight men since 2005. Drawing
on field notes from two weekend-long seduction bootcamps, interviews
with seduction coaches, weekly updates and newsletters about how to
seduce women, and over one hundred videos and webinar clips from
pickup-artist bootcamps and in-field trainings around the globe, we will
take a dyke’s-eye view into the industry’s sympathetic embrace of the
“average frustrated chump,” or the schlub who never gets the hot girl.
Seduction coaches do the tripartite work of helping straight men grieve
their imagined birthright (access to sex with hot women), normalizing
men’s sexual failures by explaining the evolutionary and sociocultural
causes of sexual rejection using what they call “dating science,” and
teaching men to perform new styles of self-made masculinity aimed at
making straight women feel safe, seen, and humanized.
I hope to reveal that this development of a “woke” masculinity, a mas-
culinity that empathizes with straight women and recognizes their need
to protect themselves against the hordes of manipulative and aggressive
men, is a troubling and complex maneuver, one that reflects the prolif-
eration of instrumental feminisms aimed at men’s self-protection (legal
liability), profit (the co-optation and commodification of social justice
messages), good public relations, and in this case, sex. I show that for se-
duction coaches, “seeing the world through women’s eyes” is a pragmatic
strategy designed to bridge the gap between men’s desire for sex with
young, hot women and women’s desire for humanization.
Next we take a step back from the heterosexual-repair industry,
examining the misogyny paradox through a different lens: the lens of
queer people’s sympathies and frustrations with straights. Drawing on
queer subcultural materials and interviews with queer people about
straight culture, here I make the case that it is time to spill the tea—to
32 • LET’S CaLL IT WHaT IT IS

reveal what queer people say about straight people behind closed doors
so that we may help save straight people from themselves. Taking love
and empathy as core elements of my methodology, here I explore the
profound potential of reversing the “ally relationship” such that queer
people offer feminist intervention and queer guidance to straight people
suffering under the weight of the misogyny paradox.
I conclude the book with a meditation on the possibilities and prom-
ises of deep heterosexuality. Drawing on the diagnoses of heterosexual
culture offered by the queer commons in chapter 4, here we honor
the basic impulse of heterosexuality—that is, opposite-sex love and
attraction—but imagine how this impulse might be taken to its most
humane and fulfilling, and least violent and disappointing, conclusion.
Calling on the wisdom of the dyke experience—wherein lust, objectifi-
cation, humanization, and friendship live in complementary relation-
ship to one another—here we remind straight men about the human
capacity to desire, to fuck, and to show respect at the same time.
It is possible for straight men to like women so much, so deeply, that
they actually really like women. Straight men could be so unstoppably
heterosexual that they crave hearing women’s voices, thirst for women’s
leadership, ache to know women’s full humanity, and thrill at women’s
freedom. This is how lesbian feminists lust for women. I do not despair
about the tragedy of heterosexuality, because another way is possible.
 2
HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU
The Misogyny Paradox

On a recent vacation with my partner, Kat, and

our nine-year-old son, we strolled by the storefront of a touristy T-shirt
shop. There were hundreds of T-shirts for sale inside the store, but a few,
presumably some of the shop’s most popular, were displayed in the front
window. One of the T-shirts hanging in the window depicted an image
of a stick-figure straight couple on their wedding day; she is smiling,
and he is frowning. The text below them reads, “Game Over.” A T-shirt
just next to this one showed another stick-figure straight couple holding
hands while the woman figure’s mouth is open, with speech lines indi-
cating that she is talking. Next to this image, the same couple is depicted
again, except the male figure has hit or pushed the woman, and she is
falling down, head first. The text below reads, “Problem Solved.” I was
walking, holding my son’s hand, when I noticed the T-shirts. I instinc-
tively walked a little faster, hoping he wouldn’t see them. I was not ready
for him to know—and for me to explain—that many people think it is
funny when men dislike or hurt their wives and girlfriends.
How did we get here? Today, we generally agree that straight people
are those who “like” the other sex. This attraction is often understood
to include mutual desire for intimate, romantic, love-based connection.
These are such basic, defining features of contemporary heterosexuality
that it can be tempting to imagine mutual desire and likability as the
long-standing forces that have driven most heterosexual coupling. But
historical evidence dispels us of this fantasy and helps us to understand
why it is easy to find examples, on T-shirts and elsewhere, of men’s si-
multaneous desire for and hatred of women—all wrapped together into

33
34 • HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU

Figures 2.1. T-shirts sold by Crazy Shirts depicting straight men’s heterosexual misery.
(From CrazyShirts.com)

one dysfunctional sexual orientation. Across time and place, most forms
of heterosexual coupling have been organized around men’s ownership
of women (their bodies, their work, their children) rather than their at-
traction to, or interest in, women. Women were men’s property, slaves,
and laborers, and women produced heirs to whom men could pass on
their lineage and possessions.1 Women were the people with whom men
had procreative sex, and women of privilege (wealthy women, white
women, women of high status) were sometimes perceived as delicate
and virtuous, in need of men’s protection and seduction (as in medieval
and Victorian traditions of courtly and chivalrous love). But in none of
these arrangements was “liking” women, or regarding them as men’s
most logical and beloved companions, a requirement in the way that
contemporary straight culture now presumes—or at least strives. Liking
women was hardly understood to be a fixed or defining feature of one’s
identity or “sexual orientation.”
In the United States, the notion of mutual likability between women
and men did not gain traction among American sexologists and social
reformers until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just
as the new concept of “the heterosexual” began to appear in medical
textbooks. It took decades for both concepts—the idea that men and
 HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU • 35

women should feel sexually and emotionally drawn to each other and
that doing so meant that one was a heterosexual—to circulate widely
enough that most Americans would have internalized them.2 But by
the late twentieth century, they converged to create a new relationship
ideal, modern straightness, which represented a dramatic rupture in the
way that men had related to women for centuries. This campaign for
love-based heterosexual relationships was undoubtedly a positive de-
velopment, as it created tension between men’s violence against women,
on the one hand, and the image of happy heterosexuality, on the other.
But this transition from woman-as-degraded-subordinate to woman-as-
worthy-of-deep-love was hardly smooth, nor is it complete. This unfin-
ished transition, and its central role in the tragedy of heterosexuality, is
where we will begin.

Struggling for Straightness

The cultural expectation that men should like women, even as they
are socialized into a culture that normalizes men’s hatred of women,
constitutes what I call straight culture’s misogyny paradox. I first began
thinking about the misogyny paradox when I read the extraordinary
book Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and
Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, written by the feminist historian
Afsaneh Najmabadi. Though Najmabadi’s focus is on nineteenth-
century Iran, her book is a case study with global and contemporary
significance as it highlights the intersections between misogyny, hetero-
sexuality, and imperialism. In a nutshell, Najmabadi argues that as the
new concept of heterosexuality began to circulate in the nineteenth cen-
tury,3 Iranians resisted one of its defining principles—that men should
feel love for, and desire companionship with, women. This idea was
a “hard sell,” Najmabadi explains, not only because it conflicted with
long-standing beliefs about women’s subordination and degraded status
(how could men love their inferiors?) but also because most Iranians
had lived in gender-segregated and homosocial (if not homoerotic)
36 • HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU

environments in which intimacy was reserved for people of the same

sex.4 Najmabadi further explains that even heterosexual lust was looked
upon with suspicion by some Iranian commentators, because it stood to
threaten men’s patriarchal power: “if a woman can satisfy a man’s desire,
he may become enamored of her, develop an affection bordering on
love, and consequently, become subordinate to her.”5 And yet, under the
imperialist influence of Europe, where new ideas about the superiority
of heterosexual romantic love and the pathology of homosociality were
rapidly taking hold, the Iranian state launched a cultural campaign to
encourage men and women to direct their affections toward each other.
This represented a dramatic shift in the way that men’s relationships
with women were conceptualized, and it presented something of a para-
dox: “falling in love was what a man did with other men . . . [and] falling
in love with women more often than not was unmanly,” but modern
heterosexuality compelled men to engage in precisely this unmanly act.6
Najmabadi’s book drew my attention to two seemingly obvious but
rarely acknowledged points: (1) modern notions of heterosexuality re-
quire men to feel love and affection for women, the very population they
have dominated and dehumanized for centuries, and (2) this has caused
many problems for straight people, who are struggling to transition
from the trauma and legacy of misogyny to something more authen-
tically “straight”—if by straightness, we mean authentic and noncoer-
cive heterosexual love. While Najmabadi’s focus was on Iran, there is
evidence across the globe of men’s resistance to loving their wives and
other women sexual partners and of the historically and culturally var-
ied manifestations of women’s horrific subjugation by men in marriage.7
The feminist scholar Gayle Rubin, for instance, famously offered a sum-
mary in her essay “The Traffic in Women,” in which she details how
economic and kinship systems around the world have relied on women
being “given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as
tribute, traded, bought, and sold” among husbands and male family
members.8 Some evidence of the misogyny paradox goes back centu-
ries, such as scholarship on ancient Greece that documents that Athe-
 HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU • 37

nian wives were regarded with contempt by their husbands and treated
as servants within the family, while sexual relationships between adult
men and boys were, in many cases, characterized by genuine affection
and treated by Greek male society as a valuable method of preserving
patriarchal power and strengthening male bonds.9 Other evidence of
the misogyny paradox comes from the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, the same historical period of concern to Najmabadi. For instance,
the historian Hanne Blank offers a telling account of heterosexuality in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and colonial America, cit-
ing the American preacher John Cotton’s concern that so many men
“despise and decry [wives] and call them a necessary Evil” and noting
that, for several centuries, men who loved women were perceived as “ef-
feminate” or “cunt-struck.”10
The idea that men’s romantic or even sexual interest in women is
threatening to patriarchy, or “unmanly,” may strike us as quite incon-
sistent with current understandings of heteromasculinity, yet there is
ample evidence of the persistence of this view. Indeed, my own earlier
research looked closely at the links between white heteromasculinity
and expressions of disgust or resentment for the object of one’s sexual
desire—especially in the US military, in US fraternities, and in other
male-dominated institutions in the United States.11 In some of these
institutions, girls and women are so degraded that for straight men to
express enthusiastic interest in them, as desirable humans rather than
as bitches, whores, and abject receptacles for penetration, is to subvert
their own masculinity (now sometimes called being “henpecked” or
“pussy-whipped”).
Following the model set forth by Najmabadi and others, we now turn
to the twentieth-century struggle for modern straightness in the United
States and the concomitant emergence of a heterosexual-repair indus-
try that capitalized on the difficulty of this project. Marriage experts
recognized men’s disinterest and violence toward women, and women’s
resentment and fear of men, as fundamental obstacles for straight re-
lationships, and, consequently, they produced an industry designed to
38 • HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU

train men and women to like each other. But they were also commit-
ted to doing so without undermining men’s authority or challenging the
basic logic of the gender binary. These rehabilitative projects constitute
the modern heterosexual-repair industry, an industry that capitalized
on the difficult and unfinished transition from heterosexual coupling as
a patriarchal contract to straightness as a relationship, and an identity,
anchored in opposite-sex desire.
I focus on popular texts, accessible to lay women and men, that at-
tempted to define healthy or normal heterosexual relationships and that
also offered advice to readers about how to address conflicts in these
relationships.12 As our investigation of these texts will show, the emer-
gence of straightness in the United States was not only entangled with
misogyny and its effect on men’s capacity to love women but also bound
up with American racial projects. Eugenicist campaigns for white mari-
tal harmony profoundly shaped American heterosexuality through the
twentieth century and into the present. Romantic marriage—and the
forging of bonds between white men and women—was offered to white
couples as a white-supremacist strategy during the early Jim Crow era
and later offered to African Americans as a central pathway to member-
ship in American “normality.”13 As we tour through American self-help
and marriage education texts from the early twentieth century to the
present, we will see how various experts—eugenicists, physicians, sex-
ologists, social reformers (both Black and white), and psychologists—
aggressively marketed heterosexual love to Americans, campaigned to
make it appear more appealing than homosocial intimacies, and devel-
oped myriad techniques to both normalize and unravel the misogyny
paradox. As they did this, they built both an industry and a culture out
of the contradictions of straightness.
 HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU • 39

Heterosexual Repulsion in the Early

Twentieth Century

Investigating the writing of prominent early twentieth-century social

reformers interested in sex and marriage uncovers two striking points
about the development of modern heterosexuality. First, the earliest
“self-help” books about modern marriage were almost exclusively writ-
ten by proponents of the eugenics movement, a violent and ostensibly
scientific project aimed at encouraging reproduction among people of
good genetic stock and discouraging or preventing population growth
among undesired populations.14 The modern eugenics movement
began in the United Kingdom in the early 1900s and subsequently
traveled to the United States, where it was used to provide a justifica-
tion for Jim Crow segregation, antimiscegenation laws, and the forced
sterilization of Black and immigrant women. But the eugenics move-
ment also had an agenda for white Americans, which was to address
any obstacles, including men’s violence against women, that might pre-
vent the flourishing of white families. Eugenicist writers, often with
the support of the Eugenics Publishing Company, produced several
books designed to educate white readers about the benefits of friendly
and harmonious marriage, thereby laying the foundation for a new
heterosexual ideal.
A second point that we can glean from the content of these books is
that making white marriages “happy” was an uphill battle. Eugenicists
such as Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, William Robinson, and Harland
Long made perfectly clear what they understood to be the marital sta-
tus quo of the time: men and women commonly wished harm on each
other, found each other disgusting, and were made utterly miserable by
marriage. They made no pretense of their understanding that men’s sex-
ual orientation toward women was characterized, in part, by a desire to
cause women pain. Writing in 1903, the British sexologist and eugenicist
Havelock Ellis described men’s “latent cruelty in courtship” and women’s
receptivity to pain and domination as core heterosexual impulses:
40 • HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU

A certain pleasure in manifesting his power over a woman by inflicting

pain upon her is an outcome and survival of the primitive process of
courtship, and an almost or quite normal constituent of the sexual im-
pulse in man. . . . In the normal well-balanced and well-conditioned man
this constituent of the sexual impulse, when present, is always held in
check. When the normal man inflicts, or feels the impulse to inflict, some
degree of physical pain on the woman he loves he can scarcely be said to
be moved by cruelty. He feels . . . that the pain he inflicts, or desires to in-
flict, is really part of his love, and . . . is not really resented by the woman
on whom it is exercised. . . . The feminine line delights in submitting to
that force, and even finds pleasure in a slight amount of pain. . . . We see,
also, that these two groups of feelings are complementary. . . . What men
are impelled to give, women love to receive.15

Men, in the eyes of the early sexologists like Ellis, were violent, driven
by instinct, and largely uninterested in women’s sexual pleasure. Ellis
optimistically speculated that women were receptive to these qualities,
as long as men’s primitive impulses were sufficiently contained.
But other marriage experts were more worried. Many viewed men’s
violence against women as a structural conflict for heterosexuality be-
cause what women most needed, in order to experience marriage as a
site of “love” rather than rape, was for men to gently guide them into a
state of sexual receptivity. Taking this conflict (i.e., women’s desire for
sexual pleasure and men’s lack of interest in providing it) as a starting
point, the most popular sexology texts on love and marriage written in
the early 1900s focused on “the scandal of female sexual ignorance, the
dangers of wedding night trauma, and the necessity of [men’s] prelimi-
nary wooing [of women].”16 These were the principal concerns put for-
ward in the incredibly influential and best-selling 1918 sex and marriage
manual Married Love, for instance, written by Marie Stopes, a British
botanist and proponent of eugenics and white women’s rights. Popular
in part due to its intensely romantic and hopeful approach to “love’s
mysteries,” the book also pulls no punches about the tragic state of het-
 HE’S JUST NOT THaT INTO YOU • 41

erosexual marriage for many women, including new brides shocked and
repelled by the revelation of their husbands’ naked bodies or “driven
to suicide and insanity” by “the horror of the first night of marriage.”17
Rape and trauma, Stopes implied, constituted many women’s introduc-
tion to marriage. Such texts make evident that in the early twentieth-
century imagination of (what we now call) heterosexuality, women were
hardly expected to feel an easy or instinctive attraction to men or their
bodies, nor were men expected to concern themselves with women’s
emotional or physical experiences of sex. Married couples, as these texts
proclaimed, needed to achieve mutual attraction and affection through
proper education about anatomy and natural sex differences, an educa-
tion that could be provided by sexologists and physicians.
A distinctive and common feature of early twentieth-century mar-
riage self-help texts is their concern with the problem of mutual physical
repulsion by wives and husbands. Sexologists and physicians by their
own accounts were very busy teaching women and men how to make
their bodies, and heterosexual sex itself, less repellent. Stopes was wor-
ried about the “mental revolt and loathing” that wives may feel in re-
action to their husbands’ sexual violence;18 Ellis warned of the “stage
of apparent repulsion and passivity” that seemed to be a normal part
of women’s experience of sex with their husbands (a stage he believed
would eventually give way to “active participation”);19 William Rob-
inson, another early twentieth-century sexologist and author whom I
discuss in more detail shortly, hoped that his marriage-advice manuals
would address the “disgust,” “deep hatred,” and “desire for injury and
revenge” that heterosexual couples felt for each other.20
If heterosexual, reproductive, married intercourse was a core orga-
nizing principle of American life in the twentieth century, how could
it also be so disgusting and rage inducing? On women’s end, the most
obvious answer comes from sexologists’ own accounts: marriage was a
site of repeated rape and dehumanization of women by their husbands,
a situation that women struggled to endure and survive. But even be-
yond the well-documented patriarchal violence of marriage were other
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And the ice of Lulhea
Flows down its dark tide.
Thy stream, O Lulhea!
Flows freely away;
And the snowdrop unfolds
Its pale leaves to the day.

II

Far off thy keen terrors,

O winter! retire;
And the north's dancing streamers
Relinquish their fire.
The sun's warm rays
Swell the buds on the tree;
And Enna chants forth
Her wild warblings with glee.

III

Our reindeer unharness'd

In freedom shall play,
And safely by Odin's
Steep precipice stray.
The wolf to the forest's
Recesses shall fly,
And howl to the moon
 As she glides through the sky:

IV

Then haste my fair Luah"——

She paused, and gradually a blush deepened on her cheek, for with
all her graceful coquetry and gaiety, there was at times a dash of
charming timidity in her manner; so, suddenly becoming abashed, she
raised her mild eyes to those of the Earl, and immediately cast them
down again, for his cheek had flushed in turn, increasing the manly
beauty of his dark features, which the shadow of his blue velvet
bonnet, and the graceful droop of his white ostrich feather, enhanced;
and she knew that his eyes were beaming upon her with the
sentiment her performance and her presence had inspired.
She had read it all in his burning glance, and at the moment she
cast down her eyes, a new sensation of joy and triumph filled her
heart. The experienced Earl was aware that the fair citadel was
tottering to its fall.
"Gentle Anna," said he, in his softest and most dulcet French, "for
my unseasonable interruption I crave pardon, and beg that you will
continue, for every chord of my heart is stirred when you sing."
"There is but one verse more," replied Anna, as she bent her
head with a graceful inclination, and shaking back her long fair
tresses, continued—

IV
 "Then haste my fear Luah,
O haste to the grove!
To pass the sweet season
Of summer in love.
In youth let our bosoms
With ecstasy glow;
For the winter of life
Ne'er a transport can know."

"Sadly true it is, fair Anna," said the amorous Earl, as he leaned
against the gothic parapet, and very nonchalantly played with his
fingers among her flowing ringlets; "youth is indeed the only season
for love and joy—for due susceptibility of the blooming and the
beautiful."
"And for futile wishes and dreamy fancies," replied the young
lady with a sad smile.
"Dost thou moralize?" laughed the Earl; "why, gentle one, I who
am ten years thy senior have never once dreamt of morality yet—
moralizing I would say—ha! ha! that will suit when my years number
sixty or so, if some unlucky lance or sword-thrust does not, ere that
time, spoil me for being a doting old monk; for, as the white-haired
Earl Douglas said, when he in old age assumed the cowl, 'One who
may no better be, must be a monk.' (By the mass I would make a
rare friar!) To me there is something very droll in hearing a pretty
woman moralize. And so thou considerest youth the season for
dreams and fancies?"
"O yes! for now I am ever full of them."
 "'Tis well," replied Bothwell, glancing at the rugged castle, and its
still more rugged scenery; "for there are times when the realities of
life are not very pleasant. But hath not old age its fancies too, and its
dreams?"
"True, my Lord, but dreams of the past."
"Nay, of the present. Faith! I remember me when I was but a boy
at Paris, old Anne, Madame la Duchesse d'Estampes, who might have
been my grandmother, fell in love with my slender limbs and
beardless chin, and wellnigh brought me to death's door with her
villanous love philtres. From those days upward, my own mind has
been full of its fancies, fair Anna, and I have had my daydreams of
power and ambition, of love and grandeur, and wakened but to find
them dreams indeed!"
"Those of love, too," murmured Anna.
"Yes—yes," said the Earl, whose face was crossed by a sudden
shade, which Anna's anxious eye soon perceived; "why should I
conceal that, like other boys, I have had my vision of that land of light
and roses—visions that faded away, even as the sunlight is now fading
on yonder mountain tops—and the hour came when I wondered how
such wild hopes had ever been cherished—how such dreams had ever
dawned—and I could look back upon my boyish folly with a smile of
mingled sadness and of scorn."
"'Tis a bitter reflection that a time may come when one may
marvel that one ever loved, my lord."
"And hoped and feared, and made one's-self alternately the
victim of misery or of joy—raised to heaven by one glance, and sunk
into despair by another. Yet, dear as a first love is while it lasts—at
least so say minstrel and romancer—there are thousands who live to
thank Heaven that they were not wedded to that first loved one."
 "Dost thou really think so?" colouring with something of pique at
the tenor of this conversation, which made her think of Konrad.
"The experience of my friends in a thousand instances hath
taught me so," said the politic Earl, who began to feel that the topic
was unfortunately chosen; "but," he added adroitly, as sinking his
voice he took her hand in his, "dear Anna, never will the day come
when I shall thank Heaven that I was not wedded to thee."
Again the quick blush rushed to Anna's neck and temples; she
bent over her harp, and said in a low but laughing voice—
"Fie! Lord Bothwell, surely I am not your first love?"
"Thou art, indeed, dear Anna!"
"Go, go! I will never believe it."
"My first, my last, my only one!" said the Earl, encircling her
gently with his arms, and pressing her forehead against his cheek;
and, though this assertion was not strictly true, in the ardour of the
moment he almost believed it so. "Until the moment we parted at
Frederick's palace gate—parted as I thought to meet no more—I
knew not how deep was my unavowed love for thee. Hear me, Anna,
dear Anna! I love thee with my heart of hearts—my whole soul! My
name, my coronet, all I possess, are at thy feet; say, dear one, canst
thou love me?"
Borne away by the ardour of his passion, he brought out this
avowal all at a breath—"for," sayeth the Magister Absalom, "he had
repeated it, on similar occasions, twenty times"—and, pressing her to
his heart, slipped upon her finger a very valuable ring.
"Canst thou love me, Anna," he continued in a broken voice, "as I
love thee—as my bride, my wife? and"——Anna replied an inaudible
something, as she hung half-fainting with confusion on his breast.
 Bothwell had almost paused as he spoke, half scared by his own
impetuosity, and feeling, even in that moment of transport, a pang, as
the thoughts of ambition and the world arose before him.
And the ring!
By the false Earl, the fond giver of that little emblem of love was
forgotten. On the inside was engraved—

"The gift and the giver,

Are thine for-ever."

It was the pledge of betrothal from Jane Gordon of Huntly, and now it
sparkled on the hand of her rival!
"As this circlet is without end, so without end will be my love for
thee, Anna," said the impassioned noble, forgetting that with these
very words, for that ring he had given another, before the prelate of
Dunblane. Anna trembled violently; she felt his heart beating against
her own, and a new, rapid, and consuming sensation thrilled like
lightning through every vein and fibre. She became giddy, faint; and,
like a rose surcharged with dew, reclined her head upon the shoulder
of the handsome Earl.
"And thou art mine, Anna—mine, for ever!"
"O, yes—for ever!" she whispered; and passionately and
repeatedly Bothwell's dark and well mustached mouth was pressed on
her dewy lip.
Footsteps approached!
He started, and hurriedly led her to a seat; placed her harp close
by, raised her hands to his lips with an air in which love and
tenderness were exquisitely blended with courtesy and respect, and
then hurried away.
 Overcome, and trembling with the excitement of this brief
interview, Anna bent with closed eyes over her harp for a moment;
but becoming suddenly aware that some one stood near her, she
started, and the pallor of death and guilt overspread her flushed face
when her eyes met those of—Konrad.

CHAPTER VII.
KONRAD.

To lose thee! O, to lose thee! To live on

To see the sun—not thee! Will the sun shine,
Will the birds sing, flowers bloom, when thou art
gone?
Desolate—desolate! Thy right hand in mine.
King Arthur.

Konrad's dark blue eyes were regarding her with a peculiar

expression, such as she had never before seen them wear. There was
an intense sadness in it, mingled with pity and scorn. It was searching
and reproachful, too; and, though Anna felt all that single glance
conveyed, she never quailed beneath it; but the blood came and went
in her changing cheek as she surveyed her indignant lover.
The appearance and bearing of young Konrad were very
prepossessing.
 During the whole of that day he had been out hunting, and was
now returned laden with the spoil of forest and fiord. A doublet of
white cloth, trimmed with black fur, slashed with scarlet sarcenet at
the breast and sleeves, and adorned with a profusion of silver knobs,
fitted tightly to his handsome figure; his trunk hose were fashioned of
the same materials, and he wore rough leather boots, and a smart
velvet cap adorned by an eagle feather, under which his long hair
descended in fair locks upon his shoulders. He was equipped with a
crossbow, hunting-knife, and bugle-horn, and a sheaf of short arrows
bristled in his baldrick. An immense cock-of-the-wood and a bag of
golden plover were slung over one shoulder, balanced on the other by
a pouch of seabirds' eggs, taken from their eyries in those impending
cliffs that overhang the bay, where, clinging as a fly clings to a wall,
he had scrambled and swung fearlessly above the surf; and, chief
spoil of the day, he bore upon his shoulder a black fox, which he had
slain by a single bolt from his crossbow.
His natural colour had been increased by exercise; and he looked
so handsome and gallant as he sprang up the terrace steps with his
unwound arblast in his hand, that Christina Slingbunder sighed as he
kissed her dimpled hand a moment before, when enquiring for her
mistress; but now the mind of that fickle mistress was too full of
Bothwell's image to think much, if at all, on her former lover.
Unwilling to admit to her those bitter suspicions and jealousies
that were harrowing up his heart, Konrad addressed her as usual, and
with an air of affected gaiety laid the spoil of his bow and spear at her
feet. She bowed in silence, and regarded them dreamily.
"See how beautiful is the fur of this fox! Will not its blackness
contrast well with your snowy skin, dear Anna?"
 "Tush!" said she, a little pettishly; "flatter not thyself, good
Konrad, I will make me trimmings of an odious fox-skin; away with it!"
Konrad was piqued by this unusual reply, but he still continued—
"Then behold this great woodcock; see how broad, how dark and
beautiful are its pinions!"
"Truly, good Konrad, thou teazest me," replied Anna, stroking
them with her white hands, but thinking the while how much its
plumage resembled Bothwell's black locks.
"And where thinkest thou I winged him, Anna, with a single bolt
from my arblast?"
"I know not," she replied vacantly.
"Thou wilt never guess," continued Konrad, resuming something
of his tender and playful manner, despite the palsy in his heart. "In
the Wood Demon's oak."
"Then this bird may cost thee dear, for the demon will avenge it
some day!"
"Already he is avenged!" said Konrad, with sudden bitterness.
Anna smiled, for she knew his meaning well.
"Oh, Anna!" said the young man, laying his hand earnestly on
hers; "how changed thou art! what have I done to offend thee?"
"Nothing!"
"Then, by some accursed magic this ring hath bewitched thee!"
"Ring!" she reiterated, changing colour.
Konrad dashed his crossbow on the earth.
"And is it so?" he exclaimed; "O Anna! Anna! like Zernebok, the
spirit of darkness and of evil, this Scottish Earl hath crossed my path.
I saw him salute thy cheek again and again, yet thou didst not
reprove him. Even wert thou to love me again as of old, the charm
would be broken; and O, my God! there is nothing left me but to wish
we had never met!"
Anna leaned upon the parapet, and averted her face a little. The
accents of Konrad's voice—that voice she had once loved so well—
sank deep in her heart; but Bothwell's kiss, still glowed upon her
cheek, and her heart was steeled against remorse.
"Anna," continued her lover, in a tone of sadness, "so completely
was my life identified with thine, that we seemed to have but one
being—one existence: the love of thee was a part of myself. I have
often thought if thou wert to die, I could never live without thee; but
I have lost thee now by a separation more bitter than death. Thou
knowest, Anna Rosenkrantz, how long, how well I loved thee, ere
thou went to Frederick's court; and in truth I had many a bitter doubt
if, at thy return, I would find thee the same artless and confiding girl
that left me."
"And when I did return?" asked Anna, with a smile.
"Thou hadst forgotten to love me," replied Konrad clasping his
hands.
"'Tis the way of the world," laughed Anna.
"The cruel and selfish world only."
"Be it so."
"Then thou lovest me no more?"
Anna played for a moment with the fringe of her stomacher, and
then replied "No!"
The young man turned away with an unsteady step, and pressed
his hand upon his forehead, as if he would crush some overpowering
emotion. Anna lifted her little harp, and was about to retire. Konrad
took her hand, but she abruptly withdrew it; a pang shot through his
heart, and something of remorse ran through her own at the
unkindness of the action.
He caught her skirt, and besought her to listen to him for the last
time.
"Anna, dearest Anna!" he said in a breathless voice; "oh, never
was there a love more pure or more devoted than mine! Long, long
ago, I endeavoured to crush this passion as it grew in my breast, for I
knew the gulf that lay between us—thou, the daughter of Svend of
Bergenhuis, the wealthy and ennobled merchant, famous alike for his
treasures and his conquests over the Burghers of Lubeck and the
Dukes of Holstein—I, the representative of a race that have decayed
and fallen with the pride of old Norway, even as their old dwelling on
yonder hill," and he pointed to the ruined tower on the distant
Saltzberg; "even as it has fallen almost to its foundations. As these
convictions came home to my heart, I strove to crush the expanding
flower—to shun thee—to avoid thy presence, as thou mayest
remember; but still thine image came ever before me with all its
witchery, and a thousand chances threw us ever together. Ah! why
wert thou so affable, so winning, when, knowing the secret that
preyed on my heart, thou mightest so much more kindly have
repulsed me? why encourage me to hope—to love—when thou wert
to treat me thus?"
"Enough of this," faltered Anna; "permit me to pass—I can hear
no more."
"How cruel—how cold—how calculating! It is very wicked to trifle
thus with the best affections of a poor human heart. O Anna! in all
the time I have loved you so truly and so well, it was long ere I had
even the courage to kiss your hand."
"Because thou wert ever so timid," said Anna, with a half smile.
 "Timid only because my love was a deep and a sincere one. But
what were my sensations," and he grasped his dagger as he spoke;
"what agony I endured, on seeing this accursed stranger kiss your
cheek?"
Anna's colour deepened, and again she endeavoured to retire.
"Oh, tarry one moment, Anna!" continued the poor lover in a
touching voice, and kneeling down while his eyes filled alternately
with the languor of love and the fire of anger. "In memory of those
pleasant hours that are gone for ever, permit me once again to kiss
this hand—and never more will I address you. Refuse me not, Anna!"
"Thou tirest me!" she replied, stretching out her hand, but
averting her face; for the beautiful coquette had "a smile on her lip
and a tear in her eye"—a smile, for she could not repress her triumph
in exciting so much love—and a tear, for she could not stifle her pity.
Konrad kissed her hand with the utmost tenderness. It lingered a
moment in his, but was suddenly withdrawn. The light left his eyes; a
curtain seemed to have fallen between him and the world—and he
was alone.
On the terrace which had been the scene of this sad interview, he
lingered long, with his heart crushed beneath a load of conflicting
emotions. The love he had so long borne Anna now began to struggle
with emotions of wounded self-esteem and anger at her cold
desertion. Jealousy prompted him to seek some deadly vengeance,
and from time to time he cast furtive glances at his steel arblast, with
its sheaf of winged bolts, that lay among the spoil he had brought
from the forest. Had the Earl of Bothwell appeared within bowshot
while these evil thoughts floated through the brain of Konrad, our
history had ended, perhaps, with the present chapter; but, luckily, he
was at that moment engaged at the old game of Troy with Sir Erick in
the hall.
"I could not slay him!" thought the young man, generously, as
other emotions rose within him; "no, not even if he smote me with his
clenched hand. She seems to love him so much, that his death would
be alike a source of misery to her and deep remorse to me. Dear
Anna! thy happiness will still be as much my aim as if I had wedded
thee; but I pray God thou mayest not be deceived, and endure—what
I am now enduring!"
These generous thoughts soothed not his agony; and bitter was
the sense of loneliness, of misery, and desolation, that closed over his
heart in unison with the shadows of evening that were then setting
over the wide landscape below.
"And she coldly saw me weep!" he exclaimed.
He felt that he must leave Bergen and the presence of Anna—but
for whence? Whether for the desolate settlements of the half-
barbarian Lapps, or the wars of the Lubeckers and Holsteiners, he
could not decide. His love of the chase inclined him to the first; his
weariness of life, to the last.
Such were his thoughts; but at two-and-twenty one seldom tires
of existence, whatever its disappointments and bitterness may have
been.
The sun had set on the distant sea, and the long line of saffron
light it shed across the dark blue water died away; the gloomy
shadows of the rocks and keep of Bergen faded from the bosom of
the harbour, and red lights began to twinkle one by one, in the little
windows of the wooden fisher-huts, that nestled on the shelving rocks
far down below, among a wilderness of nets, and boats, and anchors.
 From the terrace of the castle, miles beyond miles of rocky
mountains were seen stretching afar off in blue perspective towards
the surf-beaten Isles of Lofoden; and, tipped by the last red light of
the sun that had set, their splintered and rifted peaks shot up in
fantastic cones from those endless forests, so deep, and dark, and
solemn—so voiceless, and so still. Konrad's melancholy meditations
were uninterrupted by a sound; no living thing seemed near, save a
red-eyed hawk that sat on a fragment of rock.
He could hear his own heart beating.
Though his mind was a prey to bitterness the most intense, he
watched the sunset, and the changing features of the landscape, with
all the attention that trifles often receive, even in moments of the
deepest anguish.
Gradually the shadows crept upward from the low places to the
mountain tops. Each long promontory that jutted into the far
perspective of the narrow fiord, was a steep mountain that towered
from its glassy bosom in waveworn precipices; between these lay the
smaller inlets, long and narrow valleys full of deep and dark blue
water, that reflected the solemn pines by day, and the diamond stars
by night. Some were dark and sunless, but others glittered still in
purple, gold, and green, where the eider-duck floated in the last light
of the west; and all was still as death along the margin of that
beautiful bay, save the roar of a distant cataract, where a river poured
over the chasmed rock, and sought the ocean in a column of foam.
Night drew on; the bleating of the home-driven kids, the flap of
the owlet's wing, and faint howl of a wandering wolf, broke the
stillness of the balmy northern eve; while the wiry foliage of the vast
pine-forests, that flourished almost to the castle gates, vibrated in the
rising wind, and seemed to fill the dewy air with the hum of a
thousand fairy harps.
Konrad, who, with his face buried in his hands, had long reclined
against the rampart of the terrace, was startled to find close beside
him a tall dark man, whose proportions, when looming in the twilight,
seemed almost herculean, intently examining the great wood-cock, in
the bosom of which a cross-bow bolt was firmly barbed.
Filled with that inborn superstition which is still common to all
Scandinavia, his first thought was of the terrible Wood Demon, in
whose venerated oak he had so heedlessly and daringly shot the bird.
Animated by terror, such as he had never known before, a prickly
sensation spread over his whole frame, and even Anna was partially
forgotten in the sudden horror that thrilled through him, as, with an
invocation to God, he sprang upon the battlement of the terrace.
The dark stranger uttered a shout, and sprang forward. Konrad's
terror was completed.
He toppled over, made one palsied and fruitless effort to clutch
the grass that grew in the clefts of the ancient wall, and failing,
launched out into the air; down, down, he went, disappearing
headlong into that dark abyss, at the bottom of which rolled the
ocean.
"Cock and pie!" muttered Black Hob, with astonishment; (for it
was no other than he,) as he peered over the rampart, "was it a
madman or a bogle that vanished over the wall like the blink of a
sunbeam?"
He stretched over, cast down one hasty glance, and instinctively
drew back; for far down at the base of the beetling crags, he saw the
ocean boiling, white and frothy, through the obscurity below.
A wild and unearthly cry ascended to his ear.
 "By the blessed mass, a water-kelpie!" muttered Ormiston, as he
hurried away in great disorder.
Konrad escaped a death on the rocks, but, falling into the ocean,
arose to the surface at some distance from the shore. Breathless and
faint by his descent from such a height, he could scarcely (though an
excellent swimmer) make one stroke to save his life. A strong current
running seaward round the promontory, drove a piece of drift-wood—
a pine log—past him. He clutched it with all the despair of the
drowning, and, twining himself among its branches, was thus swiftly,
by the currents of the fiord, borne out into the wide waste of the
Skager Rack.

CHAPTER VIII
THE COCK-OF-THE-WOODS.

In woman thou'rt deceived; but that we

Had mothers, I could say how women are,
In their own natures, models of mere change;
Of change from what is nought, to what is worse.
The Lady's Trial.

In Norway there existed (and exists even unto this day) a certain
malicious spirit, who is ever on the alert to poke a finger in every
body's affairs, and to put every thing wrong that ought to be right. He
hides whatever is missing, and brings about every mischance that
happens to man, woman, or child—to horse and to dog—to the
huntsman in the woods—to the fisher on the fiord. The blame of
every ill is laid on the shoulders of this unfortunate and omnipresent
sprite—NIPPEN; who, though secretly blamed, cursed, and feared,
must outwardly be spoken of with reverence and respect, or his
unremitting vengeance and malevolence are certain and sure.
Always after nightfall, to obtain his good-will, a can of spiced ale
is deposited in a certain nook of every household for the especial
behoof of the thirsty imp; who, if he cannot find time to empty all the
cans so liberally bestowed, generally permits some of the wandering
Lapps, the houseless dogs or questing foxes, that are ever wandering
after nightfall, to have that pleasure; so that next morning Nippen's
ale-can is usually found empty in its place.
In the castle of Bergen it was the morning occupation of Anna to
spice a cup of ale until it was exquisitely flavoured, and then, in
accordance with the still existing superstition, Christina Slingbunder
placed it in a solitary nook of the terrace, for the prowling spirit of
mischief, who nightly found it there; but Sueno Throndson frequently
and somewhat suspiciously averred, that Nippen came in the shape of
a Danish crossbowman to drink it.
On the evening mentioned in the preceding chapter, Ormiston,
chancing to pass that way, observed the bright flagon standing in its
sequestered niche, and drew it forth. He surveyed it with great
interest in various ways—and then tasted it. The flavour was delicious,
and he drained it to the bottom.
The spiced liquor mounting at once to the brain of Hob, threw a
sudden cloud over all his faculties, which were never very bright at
any time; and thus next morning he had no remembrance of his
adventure with Konrad on the terrace, on the preceding evening. At
the same hour, however, he failed not to examine the same place; and
finding there another mug of that divinely flavoured beverage, without
hesitation transferred the contents to his stomach, much to the
disappointment of a certain Danish soldier, who, finding himself
anticipated a second and third time, began with some terror to
imagine that Nippen was at last beginning to look after his property in
person.
The fumes mounted to the Knight of Ormiston's brain; and
carolling the merry old ditty of "The Frog that came to the Mill Door,"
he danced round the terrace, kicking before him the cock-of-the-
woods, that was still lying where Konrad had left it. As he was about
to descend, Bothwell, gaily attired, with his eyes and countenance
radiant with pleasure, sprang up the stair, taking three steps at a
time.
"Good-morrow, noble Bothwell!" said Ormiston, balancing himself
on each leg alternately.
"What the devil art thou following now, eh?" asked the Earl.
"My nose, for lack of something better!"
"Thou seemest very drunk! Surely the ale at dinner to-day was
not over strong for thee. But, harkee, I have triumphed!"
"Indeed! but the fact is, I am too drunk at the present moment to
see exactly how!"
"Guzzler! thou understandest me very well!"
"A notable triumph for one who, if rumour sayeth true, broke
many a sconce and many a spear at the Tournelles for the love of a
French princess!"
Bothwell coloured deeply; a dark frown gathered on his broad
brow, and his dark, expressive eyes filled with light; but the
expression and the momentary emotion passed away together.
 "I value thy gibes not a rush. To me all the world is now
concentrated in this rude Norwegian castle!"
"What a difference between a man who is in love like thee, and
one who is not, like me!"
"My stout Hob, thou knowest more of foraying by Cheviot side,
and harrying the beeves of Westmoreland, than of making love!"
"Heaven be praised, for I have known this same love turn many a
bearded man into a puling boy."
"It can exalt the heart of a coward into that of a hero. It can
expand the bosom of the austere hermit into that of a jovial
toper"——
"And endow Bothwell, the hellicate rake, with all the virtues of
Bothan, the saint and confessor."
"I wish all the imps in hell had thee!" said the Earl, turning away.
"I thank thee for thy good wishes," replied his friend, reeling a
little; "and so thou hast really and irrevocably given thy heart to this
grey-eyed Norwegian."
"Grey-eyed, thou blind mole! Her eyes are of the brightest and
purest blue."
"I say grey, by all the furies! and I protest, that I love neither
grey-eyes nor the name of Anna."
"Wherefore, most sapient Hob?"
"Because I never knew an Anne that was not cold-hearted, or a
grey-eyed woman that was not cunning as a red tod."
"Marry! a proper squire to judge of beauty," said the Earl
laughing; but, nevertheless, feeling very much provoked. "But thou
wilt know how to shape thy discourse, when I say that I am about to
ask her hand of Erick Rosenkrantz."
 "By St. Christopher the giant, thou art mad!" said Ormiston, with
a gravity that shewed the assertion had sobered him; "be wary, be
prudent. Should the Lord Huntly"——
"My malediction on Huntly! He shall never see my face again; so
it matters not. He may bestow his pale sister, the Lady Jane, on some
ruffling minion of the bastard Moray, the crafty Morton, the craftier
Maitland, or of the thundering Knox, who now have all the sway in
that court, where the outlawed Bothwell shall never more be seen."
And with one hand twisting his mustaches, and the other playing with
the pommel of his dagger, the Earl strode away, and left his friend and
vassal to his own confused reflections.
Bothwell, who had ever been the creature of impulse, without
delay sought old Sir Erick of Welsöö, whom he found seated in a nook
of the ramparts, basking in the long lingering sunshine, and sheltered
from the evening wind by the angle of the turret. His long sword
rested against one arm of his chair, a pewter mug of dricka was
placed on the other, and before him stood Sueno, cap in hand,
receiving certain orders with all due reverence.
"What the devil is this Van Dribbel tells me?" he was saying as
Bothwell approached. "All the beer soured by the thunder-storm! I
marvel that it hath not soured my temper too, for there never was a
man so crossed, I tell thee, Sueno. It was my wish that Konrad should
have undertaken the capture of this necromancer, and seen him
hanged in one of his own devilish cords; and now Konrad is nowhere
to be found. How dares he leave the precincts of Bergen without my
permission?"
"His Danish archers have searched every where," said Sueno,
"even to the base of the Silverbergen, sounding their horns through
the forest, along the shores of the fiord, and the margin of the bay;
and I would venture my better hand to a boar's claw, that the Captain
Konrad is not within the province of Aggerhuis."
"Sayest thou so!" exclaimed the Knight Rosenkrantz, who,
between the attention required by his offices of castellan and
governor,—the machinations of a water-sprite who dwelt in the
harbour of Bergen, where he daily wrought all manner of evil to the
fishermen,—Nippen, who made himself so busy in the affairs of all
honest people on the land,—the gnomes of the Silverbergen, who
stole his poultry,—and the cantrips of a certain mischievous demon
inhabiting the adjacent wood, and had thrice turned three fair flocks
of Sir Erick's sheep into field mice, in which shape he had seen them
vanishing into mole-tracks in the turf, where a moment before they
had been browsing,—the old governor, we say, who, with all these
things to divert his attention, never found time hang heavy on his
hands, made a gesture of anger and impatience, and he swore a
Norse oath, which the Magister Absalom Beyer has written so
hurriedly that our powers of translation fail us; but he added—
"My mind misgiveth me that something is wrong. Away, Sueno,
take a band of archers, and once more beat the woods with shout
and bugle, and if Konrad appears not by sunrise to-morrow, by the
holy Hansdag I will—not know what to think."
The threat evaporated; for honest Rosenkrantz loved the youth
as if he had been his own son.
Though Bothwell had a grace, effrontery, or assurance (which
you will) that usually carried him well through almost every thing he
undertook, and which won every one to his purpose, he could not
have chosen a more unfortunate crisis for the startling proposal,
which he made with admirable deliberation and nonchalance to the
portly Rosenkrantz; who no sooner heard the conclusion, than he said
with a hauteur, to which Bothwell, at all times proud and fiery, was
totally unaccustomed, and which he did not think this plain
unvarnished Nordlander could assume—
"Excuse me, I pray thee, my Lord Earl of Bothwell. Though I
venerate your rank and mission, as ambassador from the Queen of
the Scots (here the Earl's cheek glowed crimson), I cannot give my
niece to you, even were I willing to bestow her. She is the first and
only love of my young friend, Konrad of Saltzberg, as gallant a heart
as Norway owns; he to whose daring you and your friends owed
preservation on the night of the storm. From childhood they have
known and loved each other, yea, since they were no higher than
that," holding his hand about six inches from the ground; "growing
up, as it were, like two little birds in the same nest, twining into each
other like two tendrils from the same tree; and a foul stain it would be
on me to part them now, even though King Frederick came in person
to sue for the hand of Anna."
"Hear me, Lord Erick," began Bothwell, alike astonished and
offended at the rejection of a suit, which he secretly thought was
somewhat degrading to himself.
"I know all thou wouldst urge," said Erick, shaking his hand; "but
this may not, cannot be; for thou art a man too gay and gallant to
mate with one of our timid Norwegian maidens."
The inexplicable smile that spread over the Earl's face, shewed
there was more in his mind than the honest Norseman could read. He
was about to speak, when Sueno approached bearing in his hand a
dead bird, and having great alarm powerfully depicted in his usually
unmeaning face.
"Oh, Sir Erick—Sir Erick—what think you? last night Konrad of
Saltzburg shot this cock in the Wood Demon's oak!"
 "Now, heaven forefend!" exclaimed the Castellan, sinking back in
grief and alarm. "Then, Sueno, thou needst search no more. God save
thee, poor Konrad!"
"How—how, wherefore?" asked Bothwell; "what has happened?"
"We shall never behold him more. He hath assuredly been
spirited away," replied Rosenkrantz in great tribulation; for in the
existence of all those elementary beings incident to Norse
superstition, he believed devoutly as in the gospel; "he hath been
spirited away, and enclosed Heaven alone knoweth where—perhaps in
a rock or tree close beside us here—perhaps in an iceberg at the
pole"——
"Amen!" thought Bothwell, who would have laughed had he
dared; "I would that the Captain of Bergen were keeping him
company!"
"O Sueno! thou rememberest how it fared with thy brother Rolf,
when he stole acorns from that very tree?"
"Yes—yes—as he crossed the Fiord in the moonlight, a great
hand arose from the water, and drew down his boat to the bottom—
and so he perished. Poor Rolf!"
"And with the father of Hans Knuber, who left his axe resting
against it one evening, in the summer of 1540?"
"An invisible hand hurled it after him, and broke both his legs."
"And Gustaf Slingbunder, who pursued a fox into its branches,
was bewitched by the demon in such wise, that he ran in a circle
round the tree for six days and nights, till his bones dropped asunder."
"Saint Olaus be with us!"
Erick Rosenkrantz and Sueno continued to gaze at each other in
great consternation, while Bothwell looked at them alternately with
astonishment, till the blast of a horn at the gate arrested their
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