The Tragedy of Heterosexuality with Jane Ward

In this episode of Wine, Women, and Revolution, Heather interviews Jane Ward about her book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. Jane describes herself as an ally of heterosexual women. You could call her book a self help book that hates self help books. In her book, Ms Ward attempts to tackle the underlying causes of pain in heterosexual relationships which she refers to as the heterosexuality paradox. If straight men claim to love women so much, then why do so many of their actions seem to center hating women instead of loving them? She draws inspiration from the lesbian feminist writings of the 70s and 80s and offers a brand new prescription for straightness. In short, the answer is to take a page from lesbians and to honor "the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.” Transcript Auto Generated Jane Ward 0:00One of the things that became really clear, especially as I was, you know, getting older moving into my 40s was that straight women seemed really miserable in their marriages. They spent a lot of their time complaining about their husbands, there was a lot of divorce happening that was initiated by women. And so I guess I want to reconcile this long standing narrative about how being queer makes for such a difficult life with what seemed to be the reality which is that most queer people I know really love the queer parts of our lives. Heather Warburton 0:46This is Wine, Women and Revolution, with your host, Heather Warburton. Hi, and welcome to Wine, Women and Revolution. I'm your host Heather Warburton coming at you here on Create Your Future Productions. You can find us online at www.yourfuturecreator.com Follow us on all the social medias and get us wherever you get your podcasts from. I've been really excited about this interview ever since I booked it. And I booked it kind of a while ago. This is another author that I'm bringing to you guys today. And she had a really interesting concept for a book and I was so excited to talk to her. The book is called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. And the author is Jane Ward. Welcome to the show, Jane. Jane Ward 1:28Thank you so much for having me. Heather Warburton 1:31So I guess my first question, as I was reading the book, I wanted to ask Who were you writing this book for? Who is your audience you had in mind? Jane Ward 1:41Oh, gosh, that's such a good question. I mean, I, this is my third book. And I am a professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. And so you know, when you have an academic job, you who you're supposed to be writing for is other scholars. However, one of the beautiful things about being at the later stage of your career having tenure, and all of that is that you can decide, you know, I don't just want to write for other scholars, I want to write for a popular audience, I want more people to have access to my ideas. So this book is published with NYU press. And I have a great editor who was very happy for me to try to write in an accessible way that everyone would be able to understand. And so my hope is that this is a book for people. Anybody who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship, any queer person who wants some affirmation about the beauty of queerness, so pretty much everybody. Heather Warburton 2:44Again, I thought you I thought it was interesting that you actually call yourself an ally, to heterosexual people, like you're kind of flipping that script of Usually, people say they're an ally to the LGBTQIA. community. So you're kind of flipping that around in this book. Jane Ward 3:00Yes. So that was that was one of the original ideas or like an epiphany that I had. And when I say epiphany, I mean, really just kind of about my own life experience that motivated me to write this book. So you know, on the one hand, we have this story about how it's really difficult to be a member of the LGBT communi