“Compulsory Heterosexuality” by Adrine Rich was not an extremely interesting article to me. I credit this to the fact that Rich deliberately forgets about males and I am a male. (In the biological sense that I have male genitals and a Y chromosome and in the societal sense that the mannerisms I unconsciously display identify me to the western world as a male.) The one part that I did find extremely interesting pertains to all pubescent teenagers, the male sex drive.
Rich builds most of her argument on the male sex drive from a quote taken from Kathleen Barry's “Female Sexual Slavery” This quote describes exactly how I realized I am gay and provides the exact reason why I realized when I did. The quote specifically deals with the growing of the female into male identification. I realized while my fellow male friends were flexing their sexual drive they were also unknowingly building the closet in which I would exist for the next five years.
I think my first realization of the closet my male friends had built came at a “party” late in my middle school years. Our “parties” consisted, among other things, of time spent looking at images from the pre-commercialized Internet. Viewing these images, specifically those of naked women, required more work that today, and a dash of technical expertise. Given my computer expertise I was the one to perform the downloading and decoding of this pornography. I did not particularly enjoy viewing naked females in the same way as my peers did. I enjoyed it for the fact that it was forbidden both by parental regulations and by laws, not for any sexual drive or purpose.
What I believe scared my friends the most about homosexuality is that they were the ones who were in a sense being hunted by men, which is a total dichotomy to what they have grown to expect. That being that they could be the ones to be hunted and courted. Knowing their own pursuits they fear their ability to maintain their masculinity when they are the pursued.
I take issue with Rich's attempts to redefine the term “Lesbian” through the phrases “lesbian existence” and “lesbian continuum.” The changing of the definitions of words first makes future understating of current works difficult, but it also leads to schisms among communities. A non-gendered example comes to mind. The obscene words for instance, many of them have direct sexual connotations. These connotations through are not intended by a majority of the speakers. Thus if I say “I'm fucked” it means I'm in a situation that is hard to get out of, not that I just engaged in intercourse. While this looseness of language is expected with obscenities, if a woman who was totally heterosexual insisted that she was both “straight” and a “lesbian” one would think she'd gone batty. Redefining language like this is dangerous to meanings and it is confusing. While I agree with Rich's efforts to unite heterosexual and homosexual females, I detest her blurring of language meanings to do it.