Speaking of hegemonic heterosexuality, as I have been lately, there’s a certain narrative that’s part of it. It’s one of those pervasive cultural narratives, one of the ones that’s in the subtext of so many different things that it’s hard to argue against; it’s just one of those things everything vaguely knows.
The domestication narrative is the idea that men are intrinsically wild, anarchic, uncivilized creatures, and women are intrinsically nurturing, organized, settled beings, and the nature of heterosexual relationships is for women to “civilize” men through marriage, a process that men resist but eventually surrender to, which is a sign that they’ve “grown up”.
When you state it baldly like that, it sounds a bit stupid, but there’s evidently a lot of people who don’t fear looking foolish in the public sphere. People who expect to be taken seriously will state this narrative as bald fact and look startled when you call them on it. Hell, I’ve heard academics cite this narrative as the intrinsic underlying conceptual structure of Westerns, and while, okay, it’s a decent fit on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that doesn’t make it objectively true.
That’s the thing about narratives. Our minds are hardwired to make sense of the world through stories, so the stories we tell about the world become the way we understand it. If we think we’re the hero of a story about a person who makes everyone laugh, we become funny. If we think we’re hero of a story about a person who does the right thing against widespread opposition, we become self-righteous. If we think we’re the hero of a Neil Gaiman story, we become a bit of a wanker.
Narratives like this are the stories we tell ourselves as a culture, the stories that make up and support that culture. None of them are exactly true in any literal sense, but some are more toxic than others. “The United States rebelled against an oppressive monarchy to replace it with a democracy, which is totally better” is, yeah, not actually true per se, but it’s a basically healthy narrative. “American culture used to be racist until we fixed it in the early 60s and now there’s no more racism” is another popular narrative, but one that’s a lot more harmful.
The domestication narrative is one of those ones so deeply encoded that people often don’t even see it. It’s just one of those things people take for granted. Guys are wild and troublesome and live like pigs until they get married and settle down, everyone just kind of knows that. Otherwise all those jokes and magazine articles and movie plotlines wouldn’t make any sense. Since they make sense, the domestication narrative must be true. Don’t laugh: that’s literally how human minds rationalize the world.
You can see the pervasiveness of this narrative every day; even putting aside the direct references, there’s all the concepts and advice that, like the jokes, simply don’t make sense if one doesn’t assume the validity of the domestication narrative. All the constructions about guys who “sow their wild oats” before “settling down”. All the movies about men choosing between a life of hijinks and adventures or a life of stable domesticity, with the moral being that the latter is the “mature” choice. Kay Hymowitz’s ugly, misandrist stereotypes of “rooms decorated with Star Wars posters and crushed beer cans”, these rooms belonging to unmarried men, and her explicit prescription for fixing them being marriage.
Further proof: recently there’ve been a few movies and TV shows about female characters who drink, sleep around, party, and cuss. I know there have been such things because I’ve seen half a dozen articles absolutely pissing their pants with amazement at this bold new frontier in comedy, the idea that some women might be as “immature” and raunchy as all men are assumed to be! Holy fucking shit, some gals are neither housewives nor housewives-in-training, doesn’t that blow your freakin’ mind? Seriously, Ozy’s Law has more predictive value than betting against the Washington Generals.
And yes, let’s take a moment to look at how this despicable narrative harms women. Ladies: you are apparently against fun. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. By virtue of having a uterus, you are opposed to video games, sexual promiscuity, wild parties, and basically anything that you want to do but some old white man in a tie once said you’re not supposed to do. What you’re into is neatness, blandness, and predictability. Please disregard any observed females who like beer or random party hookups, or who have giant piles of junk all over their room. They are statistical outliers and may be safely eliminated from the dataset.
This is a manifestation of hegemonic heterosexuality, of course, because it implies, as do all such assumptions, that heterosexual relationships are necessarily antagonistic. Men all, by definition, want to wallow in lint-encrusted bacon grease, orgies, and Batman. Women all, by definition, want to force men against their will to be Ward Cleaver. Endless comedic hijinks ensue! Non-heterosexual people don’t exist!
I’m sure that there are couples out there for whom this narrative is a great fit. That’s great, and I wish them all the best. There are also couples out there whose sex life is based around DPing a plush wolf with two masturbation sleeves sewn into it, and you know what? I wish them all the best too. In fact, I kind of like the second couple better, because at least their weird-ass dynamic isn’t sold to me a hundred times a day as an ideal to which I should aspire. I’m sure if I’d had to sit through ten years of sitcom jokes about “Oh my god, you used MY end of Wolfy? It’s like I don’t even know you any more!” then I’d be equally sick of them.
What’s odd is that most people’s real lives don’t actually resemble the domestication narrative, especially if you correct for folks who are trying to live up to it because they think they’re supposed to. Men are frequently low-libido, women are frequently slobs, everyone can like video games, Star Wars, and whatever else is supposed to be immature this week. What we need to do is generalize the non-generalizability of our experiences. To remind ourselves that not only do we not fit this convenient cultural storyline, but neither does (almost) anyone else. We may be women who actively prefer internet porn to a physical boyfriend, we may be couples who fuck around with open consent, we may be single men who hope to find a woman as organized as we are, we may even, goodness gracious, not be cis het people at all. And we need to stand up and say that this is our culture too, and stop thinking it’s just us who aren’t Doing It Right.
Because seriously, men as unhappy children and women as unhappy nannies? Let me be clear here: fuck that noise.
@guest: That’s almost what the blogging world feels like, tbh. You hit the nail on the head lol. At this point, I almost want to say talking about and trying to dissect the narrative as Noah has been doing lately is pointless, and that bloggers should just start telling people to worry about being happy, not reinforcing the idea of these two narratives that are supposedly constantly butting heads with the implicit condemnation of one and praise of the other. As a monogamous, low-libido weirdsexual, I notice that support for the “type A”, I guess you could say, counter-narrative creeps… Read more »
@Ginkgo:
It works for dogs. =p
guest, wow. Good descriptions. L, I learned this thing in AA: Ask yourself, what can I do to please this person? If there IS an answer to that question, are you willing to do that? If not, stop trying to please this person, since this is the only thing that will. If there is NO answer to that question, then you can’t please this person no matter what you do, so stop trying. Really helpful, esp w/my 2nd mother in law, who was simply impossible. I’d ordinarily say, may her soul rest in peace, but I am fairly certain it… Read more »
“How he can be simultaneously anti-feminist AND second-wave, or pro-hegemonic heterosexuality AND against it is something I can’t wrap my head around at all, and I wonder how he does….” simple. He is trying to hurt you. So whatever he says, or does, is designed to hurt you. Whatever you just said, what comes to his mind is whatever “scripted narrative” serves to devalue you. You’re getting married? You’re too young, you’re too stupid, he’s a loser, he’ll never be a good husband, what a wrong choice you (and he!) are both making. You’re not getting married? Slut slut slutty… Read more »
This is how the Ents lost the Entwives, actually. The Entwives were totally into orchards and organization and cultivation, and the Ent dudes like wild, natural forests. They refused to be domesticated, and the consequence was losing the ladies and thus their ability to reproduce as a species.
@Dan, Ginkgo: Yeah, it was really hard, and yeah I’d known for years he was an emotionally abusive shit, but I still let it get to me. My mom has done similar in my formative years, but hindsight is usually 20/20, so I’ve been able to forgive her now that I better understand those situations. Though really, yes– I haven’t noticed much difference at all between them when they’ve gotten this way, except that my mom was more prone to it during violent outbursts, and my dad would let it calmly trickle out in almost every conversation. What I find… Read more »
L, that double-bind bullshit is classic controlling behavior. Tara Palmatierv is a clinical psychologist who works with men in relationships with women who do that, but about a thrid of her commenters are women who have been in the same situation with men who do that and it is amazing how exactly the behaviors match – it’s like there is no gendering at all when it comes to effective controlling behaviors. @Daisy “Best line: “I knew. I knew the way you know a good melon.” WTF? By sniffing the smelly end? “I’m sure that there are couples out there for… Read more »
That sounds unpleasant, L.
I’m really sorry you had to go through that. I would find hearing those contradictory messages especially hard coming from a family member.
There’s really no way at all that you can win against the female hegemonic narrative. I got both contradictory messages from the same fucking person over the period of a few months of pre- and post-engagement: my own goddamn father. While I was still dating, we were seen as irresponsible because he hadn’t yet “made a commitment” to me, whatever the fuck that even means, and that I would be happiest when I inevitably became a housewife and mother (my dad apparently can’t relate to adults who’ve never had children even though he was a shit parent himself); the only… Read more »
“And yes, let’s take a moment to look at how this despicable narrative harms women. Ladies: you are apparently against fun.” That’s one way this harms women, and it’s a big one. Slander is slander and this is a buig one. There’s another way this domestication narrative harms women. It is gender role enforcement. it frame domesticity as normatively female and by contrast frames being wild as unfeminine. In plain terms it polices aginst tomboys and women who want to enjoy a whoel range of wild behavior, starting with hiking in the mountains and not fussing with their hair at… Read more »
Park, in “When Harry Met Sally”–a montage of old people are shown talking about how they fell in love. One couple in particular is very cute and they talk in tandem. (below at about 2:03–me and Mr Daisy sometimes do this, and we’ve always had a good laugh over it.) This is obviously what Harry and Sally want for themselves when they age, and it is presented as their goal…almost a form of riches. I still remember it, years later. Its rather alarming I can’t think of any other positive examples of long-term monogamy though! (One thing that is instantly… Read more »
“@Park ….. Dexter (of Dexter fame) was happily married to for a while (unfortunatly this is the only additional example I can come up with)” The Dexter from the TV show? Because, his wife’s over-the-top nagging about Dexter doing stuff for their infant…while she was a SAHM herself…was weird as heck. Not because I’m against Dexter doing stuff for their infant, but because she was with the infant at the very moment when she asked. And well, it caused Dexter to scrap his van, no? I mean Dexter was already overexerted. And Dexter saw marriage and “family life” as a… Read more »
I apoligize for the snark in my last post. I guess it just goes to show that it’s almost impossible to talk about things like this without falling into the same trap.
Thanks for misgendering your own co-mod, me and several other users, with and without wombs. Womanhood is not defined by the presence of a uterus.
Well, talking about hegemonic… Ladies: you are apparently against fun. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. By virtue of having a uterus, you are opposed to video games, sexual promiscuity, wild parties, and basically anything that you want to do but some old white man in a tie once said you’re not supposed to do. That really comes down to what your personal definition of “fun” is, doesn’t it? And, I’m a bit surprised that none picked up on this one yet If we think we’re hero of a story about a person who does the right thing against… Read more »
This post is a shining beacon of Truth. Personally, I had a moment in life where I was 23 and slowly entering the “will we” portion of some will we / won’t we type of flirtatious friendship with a guy who was totally hot and fascinating and also kind of a troubled person. As in, major cocaine habit, intelligent but just not getting his shit together at the moment, needed someone to drag him home and tuck him in after drinking too much, kinda troubled. I slid very comfortably into this caretaking role where I would get his sloppy drunk… Read more »
@Noah Brand You know, that’s a fair point. I’m sorry about that; the phrasing could certainly be taken that way, and it’s not what I intended to imply. No offense meant. And I didn’t mean to imply that you consciously included the implication I pointed out. It’s a bit ironic that in a comment where I was pointing out a most likely unintentionally implied bit of information, I did exactly the same thing by not making explicit that I did, in fact, see it as unintentional. C’est la vie, I suppose. Thank you for taking the criticism sans clarification in… Read more »
@Park
….. Dexter (of Dexter fame) was happily married to for a while (unfortunatly this is the only additional example I can come up with)
Ladies: you are apparently against fun. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. By virtue of having a uterus, you are opposed to video games, sexual promiscuity, wild parties, and basically anything that you want to do but some old white man in a tie once said you’re not supposed to do. One minor quibble I have is how, by including sexual promiscuity as a fun activity that women are stereotypically against, this (to my mind) frames monogamy as the not fun polar opposite. Monogamy may be the dominant cultural narrative, but as a heavily monogamous person I don’t feel… Read more »
One minor quibble I have is how, by including sexual promiscuity as a fun activity that women are stereotypically against, this (to my mind) frames monogamy as the not fun polar opposite.
You know, that’s a fair point. I’m sorry about that; the phrasing could certainly be taken that way, and it’s not what I intended to imply. No offense meant.
re Neil Gaiman: may I point everyone to the Sandman, which features wankers as lead characters aplenty. May I also suggest American Gods, which I stopped reading when one of the characters suggested, “Just call me the Man Who Was Thursday,” when nothing else in the story indicated the Gaiman had read that book — or indeed anything else by G.K.Chesterton– past the title. Gaiman drives me up a wall, and I love fantasy fiction.
(That said, let me praise Good Omens, although I expect most of that was actually written by Terry Pratchett.)
BTW how is the cat?
I died laughing at the wolfy part. NGL.
Noah, I’m really enjoying this series of posts from you. Spot-on. Keep it up. 🙂
To be fair, the stuff I read/heard about Bridesmaids et al was less “Golly gosh, there are women like this – who knew?” or “Jokes about slobby women = REVOLUTION IN FUNNY!” than “Women like this are starting to show up in pop culture – that’s a kinda neat development.”
@Xauri’EL – I didn’t take it as a poke at Neil so much as a characterisation of some of his lead characters. That said, I’m racking my brain trying to think of which specific lead characters are meant here…
These “narratives” could more appropriately be called fairytales, or pacifiers, or sitcoms–ya think?
You know what, I love your writing and I totally agree, but you just about lost me when you decided to randomly take a deuce on Neil Gaiman.