Get Your Smart On
Take your place along the lesbian continuum in this introduction to Adrienne Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.
Imagine you are sitting in a hotel conference room and all of a sudden the lights go out. You feel a lot of movement around you, maybe someone brushes past you quickly with a whoosh. When the lights come back up, you see that a group of attendees have taken over the front of the room, all wearing the same provocative t-shirts. This is exactly what happened at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970, and the t-shirts they were wearing said “Lavender Menace.” You would have known that phrase because it had caused a lot of drama when it was used by Betty Friedan, then the president of NOW (the National Organization for Women) to try and distance the feminist movement from lesbians, fearing they would damage the movement’s respectability. It was bad enough that gay men didn’t want lesbians in their spaces, but to have other women also disavow lesbians… unbearable. This is why iconic Radicalesbians like Rita Mae Brown (of Ruby Fruit Jungle fame, if you know you know, if not, go read it) and Karla Jay took over the meeting and handed out their manifesto, the now-iconic “The Woman-Identified-Woman,” authored by the Radicalesbians collective. In this manifesto, they argued that lesbianism is not just a sexual orientation, but a political alignment expressing loyalty among women.
“A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”** —Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified-Woman”**
Ten years later, Adrienne Rich built on the political ground broken by the Lavender Menace action with her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Her ideas similarly lit up academic feminism by challenging fundamental assumptions. She confronts the idea — would have been common-sense at that time — that heterosexuality is just a natural preference: that most men are sexually attracted to women, and most women are naturally attracted to men. But heterosexuality is a political institution, Rich argues, something that is constructed and enforced through all kinds of carrots and sticks. Which is not to say that opposite sexes do not attract, but that on top of this attraction we mount an ideology by which heterosexuality becomes compulsory.
For heterosexuality to appear as inevitable and compulsory, lesbians need to be made invisible, and the invisibility of the lesbian cuts all the way down to the bone of women’s existence. The reason why there were no laws prohibiting lesbian sex, in the way there were laws prohibiting gay male sex qua sodomy, is because it was widely believed that women couldn’t have sex with each other — it was literally thought to be impossible. There are very very few cases where women were tried for the crime of sodomy, and then it would have involved a dildo and other mitigating circumstances (like a husband’s unfortunate death by murder). But I digress…
Lesbians do not exist, in as far as patriarchy is concerned. That is the point. Rich sets out to challenge the sheer invisibility of lesbian existence, arguing that this erasure fundamentally undermines feminist goals. She wanted women, especially heterosexual women, to really examine how the ideology instituted as heterosexuality works to systematically disempower all women, and she does this by highlighting the deep historical reality of women-to-women connections. This is where feminist historians contribute by documenting women’s intimate friendships, as I wrote about in “The Radical Future of Women's Friendships.”
Rich wanted to activate the political awareness of women and lesbians of their own history, and it’s importance to the feminist movement for women’s rights. At the time, it would not have been all that obvious that all of women’s fates are tied together under patriarchy. I think we now know that even if you are no longer of child-bearing age, or are not planning to have children or even to sleep with men, the attack on reproductive health services and abortion rights is an attack on all women. It was the Reagan era of the early eighties, a time when there was a resurgence of societal conservatism very similar to the moment we are in now. It is no mistake that radical feminist writers (Andrea Dworkin, Katherine McKinnon, Adrienne Rich, among others) are resurgent. She too was pushing back on the (racialized) nuclear family ideal being shoved down our collective throats through legislation, religion, and the media.
By bringing recognition to the coercion and compulsion through which a very particular (reproductive, holy) ideal of heterosexuality is upheld, Rich hoped to bring attention to the power of women to resist, as they have done throughout history. It goes to reason that, if the mere existence of lesbians is threatening to patriarchy and the heterosexuality it wishes to institute, a heterosexual family through which it reproduces itself, then the figure of the lesbian is one of the most powerful figures for resistance. The lesbian is living proof against the idea that women are naturally and inevitably oriented towards men, the linchpin of heterosexuality. And not just because they are bitter towards men — the idea of the man-hating lesbian is produced here — but because they are capable of devotion and love to other women.
As an institution, heterosexuality isn’t one thing, but a pervasive cluster of forces that together keep women oriented towards the men in their lives. These range from subtle forms of control over women’s consciousness to extreme physical violence, up to and including murder. Rich sets out to show the many active measures that are taken to keep women in a space defined by male access and control, including:
The direct control of women’s sexuality, an extreme version of which are clitorectimies, and pushing laws against women’s bodily autonomy.
The enforcement of male sexuality as control of women, to rape and marital rape, and the legalization of child marriages.
The constant cultural idealization of heterosexual romance. As the feminist re-tellings of fairytales show us, you don’t have to scratch very far to find misogyny underlying much of this cultural hype.
The control of women’s economic lives and their labor, both domestically and in public professional realms.
Once you start looking, you realize just how much of women’s lives is controlled by men, men’s needs, expectations, and world views. Rich also talks about the use of women as objects in male transactions — women as gifts in bride price exchanges, pimping, or even using women's bodies and presence as sort of entertainment to facilitate male business deals. This treats women as currency and crucially disables women's creativity in intellectual lives. The list is longer, I have condensed it here.
A lot of work goes into what Rich calls “the great silence,” the systematic erasure of women’s history and lesbian existence from culture and historical records. Subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination against women in professions where knowledge is actually created and shared, like academia or the arts, and I would here add tech and the sciences. We know that these are not just isolated bad things happening to individual women by chance or any lack on their part, but are interconnected forces, that previously mentioned pervasive cluster of forces, all working together to maintain a seeming inevitability of heterosexuality as the “natural” domination of woman by man. Here, Rich draws on Katherine McKinnon’s work to call out pornography in particular, because it relentlessly promotes the message that women are natural sexual prey to men, normalizing what she calls sadistic heterosexuality that defines force as a natural part of relations between females and males. Heterosexual sexuality isn’t just about intimacy or sex, but it is about power, control, and economics too.
At the same time, lesbian intimacy is demonized as sick or perverse. Not because men fear having women’s desires similarly imposed on them (the reversal of their patriarchal power), but the deeper fear that women could be indifferent to them altogether. This is the fear that the lesbian figures in their psyche. According to Rich and her interpretation of Kathleen Berry’s work on female sexuality, the fear is that men might only have access to women on women’s terms unless they can be coerced by compulsory heterosexuality. Compulsory heterosexuality simplifies the task, peddled as a romantic ideology that fetishizes women’s vulnerability, leading them to accept abuse under the guise of love or romance: “He’s only jealous and controlling because he loves me so much.”
To understand what it would mean to be a woman-identified woman, we first need to examine the concept of male identification. Rich describes this as women internalizing the colonizer's values, essentially placing men above women in terms of credibility, status, and importance. Women rely heavily on female support networks for actual survival and emotional sustenance, yet are simultaneously indoctrinated to believe that male validation and connection are the primary sources of worth and status. When you look at the sheer extent of the measures designed to keep women within this male sexual perimeter, Rich says it becomes inescapable to question the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as fundamentally a mechanism for assuring male access and control. Understanding this whole system is just crucial. If you wanna even begin thinking about building a truly women-centered life, you have to know what you're pushing against.
“Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women.” —Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Against the ideology of heterosexuality, Rich introduces her two really key concepts: lesbian existence, and the lesbian continuum. Lesbian existence is about the historical reality, the actual presence of women who loved women, who created meaning outside of heterosexual norms. Rich sees it as fundamental to reclaim this history. The lesbian continuum is meant to capture the vast range of women-identified experiences, including who you sleep with of course, but not limited to this. It encompasses a primary intensity between and among women, women bonding against male tyranny, providing practical and political support for each other, actively resisting marriage and male-centered definition of their lives, and even qualities that have been historically pathologized in women, like being intractable, willful, or selfishly promiscuous. It's a framework for recognizing the entire spectrum of deep, significant connections women have always had with each other, connections that aren't defined by, or dependent on, male validation.
Finally, echoing Audre Lorde’s work on the erotic, she suggests the erotic itself can be understood differently, in empowering female terms, as an energy that is unconfined to any single part of the body or even to the body itself, present in shared joy, shared work, and intellectual connection. It's an energy she says that makes us less willing to accept powerlessness.
The point is not to condemn individual heterosexual relationships or women’s choices within them, but to show up heterosexuality as an institution that imposes an absence of possibilities for women, a lack that also curbs women’s collective power. Understanding this whole system of compulsion alongside the history of resistance through the lesbian continuum, she says, reveals a long history of female strength and agency that has been fragmented, mislabeled, and systematically erased.
“Women have always been convinced that marriage and sexual orientation toward men are inevitable—even if unsatisfying or oppressive.” —Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
What could it mean to build a women-centered life? It insists that we see heterosexuality not just as a personal orientation, but as a powerful political institution actively maintained by this whole range of forces. When we consider building a women-centered life, Rich's work suggests it begins with recognizing and actively challenging these pervasive compulsory forces. It means consciously valuing woman identified relationships, connections, and energies in all their diverse forms. Seeing the relationships between women not as secondary or deviant, or “just” friendship, but as potentially central and foundational to women's survival, agency, and collective power. And what is feminism about, if not that.
🔥 Join us for a discussion of Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” details HERE.
Rich’s model of the lesbian continuum, and the concept of compulsory heterosexuality, let us shatter the silences around women’s relationships and reconsider how women’s power, resistance, and genuine connections. Here are some ten suggestions for things you can do to create a woman-centered life, also known as political lesbianism.
🔥 Again, Join us for a discussion of Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” details HERE.
REFERENCES
Berry, Kathleen. Female Sexual Slavery. London: Virago, 1979.
Berry, Kathleen. The Prostitution of Sexuality. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
Brown, Rita Mae. Rubyfruit Jungle. Bantam Books, 1973.
Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984.
Radicalesbians. The Woman-Identified Woman. New York, 1970.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs, vol. 5, no. 4, 1980, pp. 631–660. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3173834.
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