But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer__he romantic__sserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin__ __he Awakening_) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is __ormal,_ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women.
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The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer__he romantic__sserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin__ __he Awakening_) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is __ormal,_ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women.
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