Quotes & Sayings About Heterosexuality

I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality. — Judith Butler

Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual women's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices ... Those definitions ... are about the oppression and exploitation of women by men. — Marilyn Frye

This utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs, a sexuality beyond "sex", failed to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a "liberated" sexuality for women even within the terms of a "liberated" heterosexuality or lesbianism. — Judith Butler

All this overt heterosexuality amused me. If only they knew. — Rita Mae Brown

Heterosexuality is not a thing. — Lauren Berlant

Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. — Catharine MacKinnon

I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not. — Zadie Smith

How do we define "normal?" Quite literally it comes from the Latin norma meaning "carpenter's square." Straight. And "abnormal?" That's from the Greek anomalos, and the Latin abnormis meaning "monstrosity. — Matt Fraction

I wish you would notice that you are heterosexual. — Marilyn Frye

It is propaganda that people, who had lived a full life of heterosexuality, were married and had children, were denying their real sexuality all that time. There is historic evidence that entire populations can convert to homosexuality under certain conditions. — Ali Sina

Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a privateone. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality; engagement a BA; marriage an MA; and children a Ph.D. — Thomas Szasz

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave. — Rebecca Solnit

It would have been convenient to be gay. Just because of the grooming, the narcissism, stuff like that. But I have this kind of roaring heterosexuality. Traditional, uncomplicated heterosexuality, an almost cliched Robin Askwith thing. — Russell Brand

I have decided to give up heterosexuality. I have decided that, while the project of altering the balance of power within heterosexual relationships is still a valid one, it is no longer one I can espouse
so to speak. There is no revolutionary hope for the heterosexual, and I have therefore decided to love myself and become a lesbian. — Michelene Wandor

War, I thought, was the most negative aspect of male heterosexuality. If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men. — Morrissey

Straight people don't have to come out, as heterosexuality is assumed. [ ... ] Young straight people are less likely to question the choices that their families and societies are attempting to make for them. [ ... ]A lot of straight people move through life following a script that others wrote for them. — Dan Savage

Make no mistake, hiding one's true self away in a closet and creating a facade of heterosexuality is not without its consequences. It may appear to have a degree of safety but from my experience they are very unhealthy places and do all kinds of terrible things to individuals psychologically, emotionally and behaviourally ... to say nothing of projection. The damage of the fear, shame, guilt and self-loathing that exist inside a closet are often reflected unknowingly in the external life of the individual. In or out of the closet; there is a price to pay. Each individual must weigh up the consequences of honesty, openness, secrecy and deception for themselves. Coming out, for most of us, is like an exorcism that releases us of the darkness we have lived in for years and caused us to believe awful things about ourselves. On the other side of the looking glass are freedom, light and life. — Anthony Venn-Brown

God had conceived humans' heterosexuals; until they start making initiatives. — M.F. Moonzajer

I would rather be a womaniser than a sodomiser. — Habeeb Akande

There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals. — Michel Foucault

Whether it's men, women - it doesn't really matter. The human race is filled with passion and lust. And to coin terms like heterosexuality, homosexuality or even bisexuality makes no sense to me. You are human. You love who you love. You fuck who you fuck. That should be enough - no labels. No stigmas. Nothing. Just be to be.
But life isn't that kind. People will always find things to hate. — Krista Ritchie

Most of us made a rather extensive study of heterosexuality before leaving it behind. -Pat Califia — Carol Queen

The historical record demonstrates that, on the contrary, many homosexuals chose heterosexuality and failed to maintain it because choice is less powerful than destiny. — Rictor Norton

I think change is possible, but only for individuals who were never truly gay in the first place and who have a strong personal motivation to recover their heterosexuality. — Marilyn Vos Savant

The most pernicious message relayed by pornography is that women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually "normal," while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is "queer," "sick," and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage. Pornography does not simply create a climate in which sex
and violence are interchangeable; it widens the range of behavior considered
acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse-behavior which reiteratively
strips women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potential, including the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity. — Adrienne Rich

Am saying that lesbianism, homosexuality, and heterosexuality are valid expressions of man's bisexual nature.
I am also stressing the fact that love and sexuality are not necessarily the same thing. Sex is love's expression, but it is only one of love's expressions. — Seth

[W]hether it is debates over men sharing housework and child-rearing, the 'crisis' of marriage and behind that the broader crisis of male-female relationships in adjusting to social change, or the increased sympathy for (or at least tolerance of) lesbian and gay demands for equal legal rights, all these developments in heterosexuality are usually approached and conceptualised in piecemeal form and rarely provoke any debate about the changing nature of heterosexuality itself. — Richard Dunphy

Heterosexuality is the enjoyment with fear, the pleasure with responsibility and the lust with concerns. — M.F. Moonzajer

Compulsory heterosexuality produces not the homosexual but differences, conflicts and hierarchies among homosexualities at the level of identity, culture, and politics. — Steven Seidman

I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions. — Neal Stephenson

People are going to say, "I was a lesbian back in the 90s" just like people say, "I was a hippie in the 60s". I see them struggling. Rich girls struggling with their heterosexuality. — John Waters

Heterosexuality is the traditional way of expressing love and romance; the act of enjoyment between opposite sexes. It is not only for the purpose of enjoyment and pleasure, but also the human general survival. Whilst homosexuality is the freedom of enjoyment and pleasure from any means and ends. — M.F. Moonzajer

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance. — Vito Russo

Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire. — Marguerite Duras

What the homosexual wants, and here he is neither willing to compromise nor morally required to compromise - is acceptance of homosexuality as a way of life fully on a par with heterosexuality. — Barbara Gittings

My tact is that you don't change the definition of marriage for one group, homosexuals, because you have to change it for all the groups. So you don't do it, particularly if people in California vote on it, don't want it, they think that the heterosexuality is a societal stabilizer. — Bill O'Reilly

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference ... — Audre Lorde

In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation. — Simone De Beauvoir

I think the Russian government is right to be concerned with propaganda on teenagers who are at the age of struggling through sexual identity issue and we should help to channel these urges in productive behavior. Heterosexuality is God's design. Policies that encourage young people to think this are good ideas. — Bryan Fischer

I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance. — Kate Zambreno

You're into what you're into, I'm into what I'm into. We don't have to be into the same shit, and if you're safe, sane, and happy, then go on and get you some. — Matt Fraction

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be. — Jeanette Winterson

Some might have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his master out of defiance, boredom, fear and a lingering taste for heterosexuality. — Terry Pratchett

I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable ... — Audre Lorde

The heterosexuality or homosexuality of many individuals is not an all-or-none proposition. — Alfred Kinsey

The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality
whatever the current version of that concept happens to be
is unremarkable because it is the standard by which everything else is measured. That is heterosexual privilege. — Hanne Blank

When the Lord entered my world, I experienced that gospel-ignited "expulsive power of a new affection" (to quote the title of Thomas Chalmers's famous sermon). That new affection was not heterosexuality, but Jesus, my Jesus, my friend and Savior. I was not converted out of homosexuality. I was converted out of unbelief. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

No one ever asks what causes heterosexuality because no one is interested in stopping it — Vito Russo

There is abundant scholarship which establishes that the delegitimation of homosexual desire and the production of the naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens, with the women respectably desexualized, is a process that is central to nation formation all over the globe. — Nivedita Menon

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. — Adrienne Rich

I wish you would grow to the understanding that you choose heterosexuality. — Marilyn Frye

There is so much pressure on women to be heterosexual, and this pressure is both so pervasive and so completely denied, that I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy ... I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality. — Marilyn Frye

I have known many people who were seduced as children by same-sex partners and then spent their teen years being gay, and then found their way back to heterosexuality as adults. — Nell Zink

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality. — Bruce Jackson

Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen ... [Lesbianism is] an ideological, political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny ... — Cheryl Clarke

The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. — Adrienne Rich

People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it's a gay film ... I think that's really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be? — Todd Haynes

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself ... what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity ... gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it 'knows' it's own possibility of becoming undone — Judith Butler

I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is - but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems. — Edward Gorey

Heterosexual Questionnaire:
- What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
- Is it possible your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
- To whom have you disclosed your heterosexuality?
- How did they react? — Martin Rochlin

Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality. — Angela Carter

Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality. — Wendy Kaminer

When he overheard the boys whispering that he was a queer, he said he regarded that as a compliment since so many of the world's great men had been homosexual. Alas, I've been sentenced to a life mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope that a few of you will be more fortunate. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I've given up my living room, guest room, job, career, heterosexuality and my stance on no pets in the house, but I'm not giving up my room. I'm drawing a line. — Dani Alexander

The dogged effort to "denaturalize" gender in this text emerges, I think, from a strong desire both to counter the normative violence implied by ideal morphologies of sex and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality that are informed by ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality. The writing of this denaturalization was not done simply out of a desire to play with language or prescribe theatrical antics in the place of "real" politics, as some critics have conjectured (as if theatre and politics are always distinct). It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such. — Judith Butler

Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses — Bruce LaBruce

Heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure. — Joe Haldeman

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer - the romantic - asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening') it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is 'normal,' that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. — Adrienne Rich

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa. — Sigmund Freud

Women are no longer required to be chaste or modest, to restrict their sphere of activity to the home, or even to realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity. Normative femininity [that is, the rules for being a good woman] is coming more and more to be centered on women's body - not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance. . . . The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling
fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate
of Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience
to patriarchy. — Rosemarie Tong

You can't go wrong in choosing anything, and I love people who dodge all the gender-imperative rubbish that society torments us all with. I love the fact that he didn't think heterosexuality resolved anything at all, meaning, I assume, that he didn't think it was enough just to be heterosexual. You read him and you are immediately convinced that the rest of the world is suffering a mass mental illness. I love writers like that. — Morrissey

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. — Jeanette Winterson

I think rigid heterosexuality is a perversion of nature. — Margaret Mead

Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel "normal," and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings - and our sensuality - have not been tamed
or contained within it. — Adrienne Rich

I want to ask heterosexual academic feminists to do some hard analytical and reflective work. To begin, I want to say to them: — Marilyn Frye

How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it? — Didier Eribon

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty. — Adrienne Rich

Maybe [Sodom and Gomorrah] isn't really about homosexuality, but about rape. If the angels had been female, and the men of Sodom said they wanted to 'know' them against their will, would people claim that the story shows heterosexuality is a sin? — Alex Sanchez

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago ... — Audre Lorde

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common. — Dorothy Parker

I believe that the fact and the reality of homosexuality and heterosexuality and of opposite and same-gender unions should be taught in our public schools without a value judgement system also being offered. — Ed Case

Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in, affairs of the heart from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other. — Edward Carpenter

We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act. — Gore Vidal

I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexual and that you choose to be heterosexual - that you are and choose to be a member of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not to notice. — Marilyn Frye

[O]nce we give up on the idea that only heterosexuality is normal and that all human bodies are clearly either male or female, more and more kinds of bodies and desires will come into view. Perhaps also, one body may, in one lifetime, move through many identities and desires. The use of,queer' then, is a deliberate political move, which underscores the fluidity (potential and actual) of sexual identity and sexual desire. The term suggests that all kinds of sexual desire and identifications are possible, and all these have socio-cultural and historical co-ordinates. — Nivedita Menon

Adrien treated heterosexuality like an urban legend. — Jay Bell

You did not invent marriage. God did. — Ken Ham

If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality? — Judith Butler

Bobbi doubted there was ever much future for a couple who had nothing in common except heterosexuality. — Donald E. Westlake

The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse. — Lorna Sage

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of 'normality'. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud's own views on 'normality' are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud's work showed, scandalously, just how 'plastic' and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual 'norm'; but this is in no sense given by Nature. — Terry Eagleton