Proud to Perpetuate the Patriarchal Kinship System

One of the many pleasures of teaching at Mount Holyoke is hearing from students about the sorts of things being taught in other classes around campus. Today's amusing tale comes from the required reading for a class:

"Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive of an individual woman's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal who happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices defined and regulated by patriarchal kinship systems, by both civil and religious law, and by strenuously enforced mores and deeply entrenched values and taboos. Those definitions, regulations, values, and taboos are about male fraternity and the oppression and exploitation of women. They are not about love, human warmth, solace, fun, pleasure, or deep knowledge between people."

Now if you didn't laugh out loud when you read that, then you just weren't paying attention. I suppose we should all be thankful for that evil male fraternity, though, because if it weren't for that artificially created female heterosexuality, then we would be....what's the word?...Oh, yes....extinct.

If only women hadn't been so oppressed and they had been able to avoid the curse of female heterosexuality, then we wouldn't be here to complain about it, and think how nice the world would be if we weren't here to think about how nice the world would be.

But wait, there is more:

"Female heterosexuality joins females in racial and/or class solidarity to dominating males and offers for their compliance the bribe of a share of the benefits their men extort from other groups. Female heterosexuality, whether literally sexual or not, is profoundly implicated in the racism of white women in our present time and place."

Ah, yes. Of course. To be a female heterosexual is to be complicit in racism. I suppose I must concede the point--if females would just stop being heterosexual, within a generation, there would be no more racists.

By the way, the student who passed along those quotations to me also noted that the Mount Holyoke library had not managed to purchase a copy of John Paul II's Theology of the Body--we wouldn't want the writings of such an insignificant person as the Pope to clutter up the shelves full of the more enlightened reading like that assigned in classes here at Mount Holyoke.