Jane Ward

Get out there.

Go eat some .

In fact, the title comes actually from a line on Parks and Recreation where, you know, two of the main characters are taken as a lesbian couple, and they say, no, tragically, we're both heterosexual.

So it was already out there in the cultural environment with people recognizing this.

But I think the part that wasn't maybe so transparent to a lot of people, especially not straight people, was that queer people also really love being queer and love our lives and often feel a lot of gratitude and relief that we're not straight.

The book kind of centers on an argument that I make about the misogyny contradiction, which is that modern heterosexual identity, starting in the early 20th century, starts to require something new of...

married men and women, which is that they're supposed to kind of like each other.

And that wasn't actually important to marriage for centuries, you know.

And men in particular are supposed to kind of care about women, care about what their women partners, how they feel, their general well-being.

There's supposed to be some degree of mutual respect.

And this is called companionate marriage.

And it comes to define how we think about being straight.

And yet, at the same time that people are confronted with this new norm, which is that you're supposed to actually like and love your spouse, these same people are still raised in a misogynistic culture, one that normalizes boys and men, hatred of girls and women.

We have not undone the centuries of patriarchy and misogyny that are pretty foundational to the human experience.

And so the book kind of opens with this historical development and then looks at what I call the heterosexual repair industry, which is all of these ways that mainstream culture tries to resolve this problem through self-help, you know, all these online cultures, and mostly fails.

Exactly.

It's the norm.

And it's the—maybe it would be more accurate to say it's the aspiration—

And yet we're not actually producing those relationships.

And so it's very disappointing for both women and men.