anti_cishet_aktion

It's a good overview of the subject, but ofc she could go into more detail on some crucial bits. I think it would be helpful to get deeper into how strongly gender roles play into this. The reason that so many heterosexual relationships are rife with problems is, ultimately, how men behave in these relationships and that's not inherent to being a man, assuming otherwise would be gender essentialism (on a sidenote, it's not surprising that so many political lesbians later became massive terfs, it's hardly avoidable when you subscribe to gendered traits being innate and immutable fundamentals of a person's being).

Toxic masculinity is not the natural state of being a man, it is a product of a material need under capitalism, the logical outcome of a society that actively produces masculinity as a skillset for violence, competition and oppression and femininity as a skillset for economic, emotional and sexual servitude. Both of these skillsets are indispensible in a capitalist system, which will require both imperialist aggression to expand into new markets and a systematic devaluation of economically unproductive, but socially indispensable labor in reproduction, care and education. Patriarchy can only be fully overcome when capitalism dies. Anything else will only lead to girlboss feminism, and a thorough critique of patriarchy is only possible when it is an intrinsically anti-capitalist one. Ofc, that cannot mean we just have to wait until after the world revolution to fix this, we have to start today - once you understand that some form of patriarchy is required for capitalism to function, attacks on the patriarchy can become attacks on a central support beam of the capitalist machinery. So let's put a pin in the whole Marxist angle here and get back to discussing sexuality, gender and their relationship.

As Tara rightfully points out, the solution for straight women isn't to abandon heterosexuality, it's deconstruction. But i do not think it helps much to deconstruct the societal notions around heterosexuality, but the oppositional sexism that shapes so fundamentally how many heterosexual relationships play out in our society. When you view men and women as polar opposites and actively police and reinforce that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and that there cannot be anybody outside of these binarist categories, you end up with the majority of people being in a relationship with an alien who is deeply incapable of connecting to them. I feel that this is at the core of many of the conflicts that straight couples struggle with.