I Chose to be a Lesbian

Misogyny, compulsory heterosexuality, and choice

Clyties of the Mist, 1912; Herbert James Draper

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Do you know the term compulsory heterosexuality?

It’s an idea that Adrienne Rich coined and shared through her essay, Compulsory Heterosexual and Lesbian Existence. That society pushes heterosexuality onto us, because it is assumed as the norm, and it is further enforced through patriarchal norms. Norms around masculinity for men, gender performance and compliance for trans people, and through misogyny and demands for subordination for lesbians. As women, we’re taught that being a woman is to be a heterosexual woman, to be subordinate to men. Refuse to comply, and the consequences are severe. This is why lesbians are mocked as being unfeminine, ugly, and/or less woman — almost as warnings for young girls to stay heterosexual.

The ugly feminist, the aged, lonely spinster surrounded by feline companions, the man-hating dyke—all are figures summoned over campfires, expected to scare girls straight.

— Talia Bhatt

In the essay, Adrienne described how lesbians in particular (she was a lesbian) face stigma, eg., how difficult it becomes to retain access to your children through the legal system in coming out after a heterosexual marriage. The essay was written in 1980. In her 2018 and 2020 autofiction novels Playboy and Love Me Tender, Constance Debré described her struggles with the same, as her soon-to-be ex-husband dragged his ex-lawyer wife through the court system, stalking her Facebook for the slightest signs of her abnormal sexual deviation, as if to punish her for refusal to comply to her earlier agreement to submit to his demands and placate his ego.

Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman a specific social relation to a man, which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation…a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual¹

Things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to believe they have. As gender roles and gender expectations slide backwards to trad wives and antifeminists, and heterosexual marriages reach their highest point since the equally conservative 1980s, lesbians are fiery symbols of refusal. Expectations of subordination and submission: lesbians deny and defy them all. We’re outcasts, our mere existence is rebellion incarnate.

When I was young, I’d never had the little crushes on boys, pop stars, or movie stars that most girls have. I dreamed about women, I found girls attractive, and I knew what I found attractive in girls (of my age). I didn’t want to carry a purse, generally disliked most symbols of womanhood…hated that feeling of vulnerability that came with wearing a dress or skirt. As a teenager, I once cried because my parents wanted me to wear something more proper and feminine, when I wanted to wear an loose-fitted button down. Early on, I tried to starve myself to get rid of having an overtly feminine body, hating having breasts and feeling more comfortable when they were at least not visible. I didn’t know what that meant, though, because the default was that women married men, and had babies with them. I grew up in a conservative, religious family, where dating was not allowed, and any alternative to the most modest, conventional gender expression and sexuality were firmly shut down.

At that age, all I knew was that I was miserable, deeply depressed, and deeply felt something was missing.

My family may have been more a more extreme version, but women, of course, have been taught to be demure and passive in our sexuality. Perhaps that explains why gay men make up 36% of all LGBT+ people, but lesbians are only 19% — nearly half of the population. Compare those totals to the numbers for people between 18 - 29, gen Z, the youngest adults, the ones who grew up in a world where queerness was more accepted — there are 10% more lesbians than gay men.

Like Constance Debré and Adrienne Rich, I met my male ex when I was in college. Like Adrienne, it was in part because that was expected of me, and in other part because I wanted to get away from my first family (family of birth). When we lived together, as with many women in heterosexual relationships, I did most of the household labor. At the time, I was both a student and I worked full time. I still made dinner and did our laundry, waiting it for the cycles to finish while I studied at our dining table. Women without children in heterosexual marriages do 2.4x as much household labor as their male counterparts; and women with children do 2.1x. According to a recent study, women average 2.8 hours per day, whereas men average 2.1. I adapted to sleeping about 4, max 5 hours per night.

About a year ago, I met a sex worker — a friend of a friend — who said that through her work, she found that most women who lose interest in sex with their male partners do so because they’re exhausted from the extra burden of doing that work. Her theory was also that put women in a position where they were parenting their male partners, which left them feeling far from sexy feelings. They seek out her services to add sex back into their lives as it disappears, missing that the problems go deeper, way back through centuries of patriarchal norms.

I’ve skipped over a lot of feminist think pieces on inequality of household labor. That is the main crux of one popular Substack; it’s something that’s been thoroughly addressed. Despite all the think pieces, a lot of women stay, or stay for many years. What’s in it for women? Why stay, despite the inherent inequality and casual sexism built into too many heterosexual relationships?

Two of the reasons women stay are for safety: both financial and sexual/physical. We live in a world built by misogyny. As Silvia Federici explained in her Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, as we shifted to a world in which workers were paid a wage…women were often left doing labor in which their wages were either held by their male head of household (father, husband, son), or not paid wages at all (domestic labor). While we’re often told women have equal rights, we still have to catch up in terms of wages.

Secondarily, men offer physical and sexual safety. I’ve said this before, dozens of times: men will respect a woman if he sees her as another man’s property before he respects that woman’s no. It’s why so many of us say “I have a boyfriend (or husband)” when a man persistently, aggressively asks us for a date/sex.

In Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin tells us why conservative women agree to this role. The answer is so simple that it’s one that many of the survivors I’ve spoken to over the years independently have come to the same conclusion: that giving yourself over to one man will protect you from the violence of other men, though you may be subjected to the violence of the chosen man.

From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority to gain some protection from male violence.²

That model of male protection offers to women a silent vision of male violence as unpredictable and uncontrollable. Since women live in a world they have by in large not built, we’re told it’s better to allow someone else to handle them for you. Allowing that someone else gives the world definition, it reigns in the chaos and confusion, it gives ignorance a shape, and it insulates against the violence. When men offer these women love, that love symbolizes order, stability, mutual accountability. Love from a man is earned through her obedience, sexual submission, and childbearing. Now, whether or not a man upholds his end of that bargain is not guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that he himself will not be abusive.

You see the bargain in the smallest gestures: the way straight men hold doors open for women, but they’ll stop doing that if you’re not feminine enough (but my gay male friends and neighbors do). The way a woman will gently lean into the man she belongs with, while he stands straighter and taller. Masculinity. Protector. Provider. Chivalrous. Men spend 8.2 hours in the office for every 7.9 that their feminine counterparts do. Men have been taught their roles, too, taught each other those roles over centuries.

But of course, I haven’t address the fact that the majority of women enjoy their femininity, and feel attraction to men. Still, attraction doesn’t necessarily mean a relationship — though attraction combined with a desire for romantic love combined with the desire for the conventional nuclear family model taught along with safety seemingly makes a heterosexual relationship worthwhile to many women.

To be a lesbian or in a heterosexual marriage goes beyond attraction. It’s one thing to feel attraction, and it’s another to act upon it and live with the realities of it. It means we’ve consciously chosen that the stigma of lesbianism.

And it means we’ve consciously chosen to forego male protection. During my first month of college, I was sexually assaulted. It was an assault in which I managed to fight back, and which — thank god and how strange, 95 lbs and five-one of me against three men — because it would have been gang rape if I hadn’t. In our dying days, my male ex threw out that I had sought safety in him, and to escape my birth family. My later friends said the same. Shortly after that relationship ended, I was assaulted again. The price to pay for being a woman alone in the world is steep, in no small part because some men are absolutely pieces of shit.

The upside of not having male protection is that you are freed of expectations and conformity; there’s an inherent defiance in it. There’s the sexual freedom: to pursue with and have sex with as many or few women as you desire, without the labels of prudish or promiscuity that too often get flung at heteronormative women. There’s practically no risk of unwanted or accidental pregnancy, far lower risk of sexually transmitted infections, dramatically reduced fears around date rape. It allows you to be a broke lesbian writer, if you chose that. You’re not asked to sacrifice or make your career secondary, in the way society all too frequently asks of women in relationships with ambitious men. It makes you an outcast, but being an outcast frees you from the shackles of expectation of feminine submissiveness. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which was asked in the Declaration of Independence and granted to men is more readily available to lesbians. That means you might fail, of course, but you’re free to fail. All of this allows you to look at the women in the world, and know what could be. It’s not that it’s all wonderful, but above all, you are free. (quote my own)

I’ve read the butch lesbian classic, Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg.

I knew this wasn’t making love; this was more like making hate.³

And at first, I wondered why Jess, the main character, keeps going back to the lesbian club despite all the risks and abuse-by-cop. Then I realized I had made the same choice — that I’d chosen never chose to seek safety through a man. It’s the same reason that Constance Debré did not yield to the ex-husband determined to punish her. It’s whatever it is about lesbians that makes us accept the consequences and still make our choice to live this life we believe to be our truth.

Arguments of how much of sexual attraction is innate, choice, a combination, or under our control do not interest me. What does interest me is that whatever sexuality and gender expression — straight, lesbian/gay, bisexual, trans, and/or non-binary — you chose to live with it. You chose it, over and over again, rather than simply helplessly submitting to it, or allowing it to control you. And know, no matter what you chose, there are consequences with that choice, both good and bad, and joy and sorrow to be found with it, too.

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feminism for all is subscriber-supported platform, but I can’t do this alone. Unfunded, independent writing & research such as mine are up against algorithms that promote outrage & controversy, and demote voices that challenge the status quo.

If you feel moved or that you’ve learned from my work, please consider paying for a subscription. Your investment will allow me to spend more time on research, writing, and advocacy, as well as covering costs, eg., for books and materials, and to allow me expand my advocacy work.

I have a Ko-Fi if you’re uncomfortable with Substack paid subscriptions.

I also host a series of (free and paid) workshops and webinars to empower you to ending sexual violence. These are built on years of experiences in the trenches of anti-rape work.

1. Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). p 19.

2. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p 4.

3. Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. p 57.

Leslie uploaded it to be read online for free: https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Stone-Butch-Blues-by-Leslie-Feinberg.pdf