She’s calling us all fags!

Really great book, as it improved my knowledge of myself and the world.

I’ve often wondered why I, a lifelong supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, enjoy calling my friends homosexual slurs and engaging in mocking gay play (much lighter than the examples in the book, see sailors injecting crisco and sewage into each others anuses in Chapter 5 😳). Though calling my friends fags gives me a warm feeling of friendship and belonging, I’ve always had an accompanying guilty feeling about belittling already marginalized people, many of whom are my friends, and with whom I talk differently in different social circumstances. While this book does not condone such hypocritical behavior, it does illustrate how normative it is among straight white males like myself, and how it factors into bonding and belonging. I remember a trans male wrestler on Tosh.0, and his somewhat sexist banter, which as illustrated in the book often accompanies homophobic banter, along with his wrestling with an at first comically naked Daniel Tosh, made me unquestionably categorize him a man, not because I knew that was what he wanted, but because my brain automatically thought of him that way. I categorized him as a man, belong to my gender, because he was engaging in the same hierarchical, heteromasculine banter that I use when I call my friends fags.

Norms. That is perhaps Ward‘s most interesting argument, that heterosexuality is at least partially an alignment with normativity and the social status quo, while homosexuality is a desire to subvert and rebel against the social status quo. "The subversion is where the romance is," she says when discussing her own personal experience. While this does not describe every experience, nor why people who wish they were straight still behave gay and people who wish they were gay still behave straight (I‘ve met both), there definitely some truth to it, especially in a society that is increasingly permissive of sexual and gender freedom.

In short, this book provides a simultaneously funny, methodological, sympathetic and critical analysis of heterosexuality, and extremely understudied subject. Highly recommend!

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