Oh heteronormativity. Your many syllables cannot contain your venom, capture your broad frame, and define your versatility. You envelop capitalism in your witchy, antiquated arms because you are marketable. You fly off the shelves, comforting those who wish to be dragged back to the time when “men were men, women were women, dogs had yet to be domesticated, and Ronald Regan was lucid.” You are everywhere and in everything because “it’s what people are willing to buy.” While there is some truth in that, there is an unsung majority who bought into your malicious scheme, but was certainly unwilling: lesbians who get dragged to movies by straight girls.
It goes without saying that I will make no progress stereotyping lesbians or straight girls who held them captive. No, I cannot speak for my legions of sisters who preceded me, nor the ones surely to follow. I can only speak from my own experience. I did not see Twilight of my own volition. I had no interest in seeing Twilight. And yet, I had to buy my own ticket to this twitchfest of lame and peaceable vampires. Why was this, you ask? I was nothing short of obligated to attend. My straight female friends had been sucked into the berry-scented vacuum of heteronormativity. How could these naïve, pubescent girls resist the luster of a showcase of two lovestruck teenagers (one of them seventeen, the other one hundred and seventeen) of two entirely different species, able to maintain their romanticized gender roles in spite of their extremely one-dimensional challenges? Well, they could resist quite easily, but they had been so convinced that this was the most ingeniously devised dramatic piece since Les Miserables. It was you, heteronormativity, that bewitched them, manipulating these otherwise fine young women in your bony, arthritic hands like clay.
Did they actually like Twilight in the first place? Did they actually find such shallow drivel appealing? It runs on a case by case basis, and even then we may never really know or understand. What we do know for sure is this: I did not enjoy one damn minute of it. Yes, I was irritated severely by Kristen Stewart’s constant twitching and Robert Pattinson’s constant inactivity. With lines like “You know, your mood swings are kinda giving me whiplash,” the writing certainly didn’t treat me like a paying customer. But all of those things lay atop the surface. It was the matter within the membrane I found most troubling.
I’ve seen the damsel-in-distress stories a million times before, but for the first time in my young life, I was in an environment in which I was not free to snark. The teenaged girls I accompanied were too entranced by Edward Cullen’s creepy, hamster-like physique. Were I to open my sarcastic (and concerned) mouth about the bad acting or the obsolete conventions that set feminism back to the 1920s, I would get a lecture about how rude I was to ruin this for them with my bitterness. But I wasn’t bitter—I just wasn’t a stereotypical teenage girl.
This is just one of many examples of straight girls dragging me to movies. There was another incident where I was dragged to Letters to Juliet when they promised we were just getting ice cream, but I’ll spare you the details of that as Letters to Juliet could quite possibly be an evil Aryan plot that could be used for another strongly worded letter. Hopefully, all of this will end soon. No longer will we roll our eyes in silence, dying to utter the awesome joke we just thought of, keeping our robotic Edward Cullen impersonations locked behind the cages of our lips. No longer shall we describe ourselves as “much displeased.” This ends now. I’ll tell you how.
THE THREE STEPS TO SLAYING HETERONORMATIVITY
Step 1: Include token homosexuals. Any variant will do. We’re taking baby steps, here. Throw in the gay guy best friend and lesbian sister for the one-dimensional bride in a formulaic romantic comedy. Has it been done before? Yes. Is it cartoonishly stereotypical? Absolutely. It wouldn’t be my first choice in solving this problem. But think of it this way: If you don’t leave a business card, no one is gonna call.
Step 2: Break gender roles. It’s only step 2, and already it’s getting trickier. Maybe the leading lady doesn’t have her purse taken by the mugger, but rather roundhouse kicks him in the face. Maybe the leading man doesn’t have to slash his wife’s tires because he wants to control her, but rather leaves her tires unscathed and ends up being a successful watercolor painter. It doesn’t always have to be dainty women and macho men. It’s trite and doesn’t have kicking or watercolors involved.
Step 3: Eliminate stereotypes. Step 2 has opened the threshold for this, but now our token characters from step 1 have morphed into something more 3-dimensional. The homosexuals are no longer eternally single supportive characters, but (gasp) characters all their own. Just like the straight people. Now they can kick and paint. Maybe do other things.
Step 4: Stop being so attached to commercialism and archaic ideas. As mentioned in the beginning of this strongly worded letter, heteronormativity sells. It’s what people are comfortable with, so it’s what corporations will pander to. If we as a society choose not to buy what they’re selling, you will never see another sparkly vampire as long as you live. Nor will you see Amanda Seyfried and other blond people falling in love. (IT’S AN ARYAN PLOT, I TELLS YA!) Gender roles are furiously out-dated in the 21st century. So what’s the point in buying into them? This is my promise unto you, my children. Buy as you would have faceless industries sell unto you.
Step 5: Cut off all of Michael Bay’s funds. I was going to argue about the Transformers franchise being sexist, but the point of the matter is that this man cannot make a decent movie to save his grandmother from a volcano eruption. And yet someone keeps funding him. He is the embodiment of all that is excessive and has no artistic merit. Please stop giving him money, for the sake of humanity. Think of the children.
In closing, heteronormativity has haunted me all of my life, like the needy ghost who lives in the house we rent that freaks out if you don’t instant message him right away. In all hopefulness, heteronormativity will haunt me no longer. Straight girls will be able to drag me to movies without hearing me whine about it. The sexist will be scoffed and the homophobic will be history. And, best of all, I will never hear a woman in Cajun accent shriek, “Halp me! Halp me!” because I will probably be in Canada by then.
Good bye to you, heteronormativity. Return to your pitch black, bear-infested cave, because you sure are a bitch to type out 300 times.
Sincerely,
Hell on Hoverskates
