Compulsory Heterosexuality: What Comphet Means

Adrienne Rich, a feminist poet and essayist, famously argued that heterosexuality is not so much “natural,” but a political institution many cultures and society impose onto women as a form of disempowerment. Rich, through this logic, coins the term “compulsory heterosexuality,” or comphet.

What does comphet mean? 

The term succinctly explains the role sexuality plays in a woman’s life: because heterosexual marriage has been socially required of women, and is tied so deeply to what womanhood even means, many gay women often trick themselves into believing they are attracted to men as a form of survival, and this form of repression can take years to dismantle. 

This is not to discount attraction to cis men or to tell women attracted to men that they are deluded, or even that all gay women cannot be attracted to men.

Rich coins 'comphet' simply as a way for heterosexual women to rethink how they imagine feminism, and to bring lesbianism into the discussion surrounding equal rights. 

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But, the term still illuminates a number of women who use compulsory heterosexuality to justify their attraction to men or use it to cling to normalcy defined by patriarchal standards. 

This has been said before, but all genders have, at one point, had to understand their sexuality in conjunction with cis men.

However, there is something insidious at how accepted this fact is: it is so obvious that in many ways we overlook how pervasive it is in every aspect of our society. 

Compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity (i.e. believing straight is the norm) are very similar to each other, except that compulsory heterosexuality looks more closely at how internalized misogyny affects our own relationships with our sexuality. 

Compulsory heterosexuality is another reason why lesbianism might seem scary to many women — because currently, our society frames it as the absence of men. By seeing attraction to men as an institution, it asks us to rethink a fundamental part of how our society functions.