What is your personal experience with compulsory heterosexuality?

Information for those that enter.... Compulsory heterosexuality refers to the idea that heterosexuality can be adopted by people regardless of their personal sexual preferences. Heterosexuality is viewed as the natural inclination or obligation by both sexes. Consequently, anyone who differs from the normalcy of heterosexuality is deemed deviant or abhorrent. [via Wikipedia]

My personal stance is that sexuality is one's NATURAL inclination. That means it is not a choice.

Thus, you may choose to live as a heterosexual, but that doesn't make you heterosexual unless your natural inclinations are also heterosexual.

Same for being bisexual/pansexual/et al. You can choose to live as whatever you want, but your natural inclinations may not match and living as something you're not does not make you whatever you're pretending to be any more than a cat that acts like a dog can BE a dog.

 

No help here but would also be interested.

 

I did go through that, and still do! As a teenager I was always miserably trying to "fit in" by using makeup and dressing more feminine even though I was a definite tomboy, I had no crush on any boys at my school and would say random names when girls would ask me who I had a crush on, just to hide the fact that I wasn't interested in them. I actually had 2 boyfriends between the ages of 17 and 22, and I didn't like it! I thought that if all relationships were like that I preferred being single.

I came to the realisation only a couple of months ago that my issues with boys were only due to the fact that I'm gay! I was so deeply stuck in that compulsory heterosexuality that I was not noticing my feelings for girls, I was repressing them before I even knew I had them. In fact, since I was not attracted to boys and not looking at girls, I wasn't noticing anyone... Since I came out to myself and to a couple of people around me, I'm slowly starting to pay more attention to my feelings towards girls, but since my brain had never really been wired to notice them, I feel like a 10 years old, starting all over, discovering the feeling of attraction for the first time, and trying to get rid of my brains' habit of ignoring everyone I cross paths with. Habits forged for 23 years can't disappear instantly! It's a bit like my little lonely shell suddenly broke and I'm so exposed and out of my comfort zone that I tend to try to hide back in. Because that would be the "easy" solution, to keep on ignoring my feelings and spend the rest of my life alone without loving anybody, but that would be one hell of a sad existence! All of that, and I don't even live in a homophobic environment!

Sorry I didn't mean for that reply to be that long!

 

Ah, I see. In my case I was put under huge amounts of pressure to be hetero. My psyche is not particularly responsive to pressure, shaming, humiliation as a form of manipulation, etc.... thus it never influenced my decisions in that area. Instead, it lit a fire under me to get out from under those pressures asap.

 

In almost all cases it results in serious emotional damage to many people.

Homosexuality is real, it exists, it has always existed in every society, in every age and amongst many species. To compel someone to live contrary to their natural inclinations is ridiculous because it destroys lives and families. How is that good for society?

Suppressing our feelings and attempting to conform is rather like putting a lid on a volcano and praying that it holds. We know it never will.

 

When I was a kid all the way through my mid teens I went through what I would call my "complusive heterosexuality" phase. I knew I was gay from about age 6, but I figured out not long after that that girls are supposed to like boys. So I decided to like boys. I would pick random boys in my grade that I knew the other girls thought were attractive and I would claim I also had a crush on them. This lasted all the way up to about 9th grade. It was then that I decided I couldn't lie to myself about liking girls anymore, but I was still stuck on the notion that I must like boys. So I came out as bisexual. I thought that as long as I only dated boys and married a boy it would be fine to be bi. But I was still caught in the compulsive heterosexuality. A year or so later I came out as a lesbian, but I will never forget that not quite shame and desire to be straight. So much so that I was willing to be unhappy for the rest of my life.

On a side note I do believe that bi/pan people can be effected by compulsive heterosexuality because at the root of the problem it is caused by the desire to be something that you are not and to lie to yourself on either a conscious or subconscious level.

 

I never had a compulsory heterosexual experience as a child, I always knew I was gay since 4 or 5 years. I crushed big time on Matthew Perry when I watched friends growing up. I never had to pretend to like girls or date them because I never had any friends as a kid, I was sort of a loser and outcast so my peers probably thought I was going to die as a virgin and left it at that.

I had one "sexual experience" with a girl when I was really little maybe like 6 years old. I was playing with the girl who lived a few houses down from me, and she asked me if I knew what sex was, I said no and she showed me. We stripped naked and laid in her bed for 5 minutes not even touching, then we got dressed. After she told me I was her "husband" and we were "Married" for a few weeks until she left me for another boy. Kind of a funny silly story, but yeah I never really had a relationship, but sometimes I remember my "ex-wife" and laugh.

 

I feel this is the concept that kept me from realizing I was gay for so long. Just going with the flow. It was not done to me purposefully, it was just the example I was given, what life should be like. It created a profound dissonance that kept me on a hetero path even though I was very unhappy. I have always had a feeling that I didn’t belong, one I couldn’t put a name too until I had a relationship with a woman. For the first time in my life I felt like I was following my own real path. For the first time I felt like I was somewhere that I belonged.

So I wasn’t conscious of it at the time but I’d feel this was the inertia that kept me on the path not meant for me.