Backwards Blog
Core Capitalist Values - Their Impact So Far
How Archetypes and Caricatures Make Us Lonely — and Rob Us of Ourselves
I want to begin with a quote by Emmanuel Levinas — because this post is about being unseen. Or more precisely: it’s about being reduced to something you’re not. When you hear it, remember, for me, YOU are that other. For you, I am.
“The Other, that is, the other person, escapes all totality; they are infinite, exterior to any system, irreducible to the Same.”
— Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961), introduction
So, now you know why Levinas is famous for being dense, but here’s the important bit:
Other people — and we ourselves — can never be fully known, never completely captured by the categories we try to stuff them into. We’re more than our job titles, our roles, our physical bits, or our bios.
That irreducibility is key to true connection. It is our irreducability that invites curiosity, and that curiosity invites communication. It invites a desire to see someone – which is how intimacy comes about. In the last post, intimacy was described as seeing into one another, and not about sex. It is, instead, the antidote to loneliness.
Some of you will guess already, we can’t have an antidote to loneliness kicking around that doesn’t cost anything. So, a whole bunch of stuff exists to screw up that irreducability. To render it another bleeding casualty of capitalism. This post is about just that - how our complexity gets stripped away by the logic of western values. And cos there are SO many ways that capitalism does this, we are going to zoom in on one of the biggest mechanisms of caricaturisation in everyday life — the most immediate, automatic way we’re grabbed by the genitals and denied full personhood. You’d think we might feeling that kind of grip too, but we often don’t – believe it or not. And yet, that particular personal depth buster is also the most crucial in terms of generating profit – and that includes the self-help and spiritual but not religeous markets. It is a mechanism called heteronormativity, which I will explain in a minute.
The issue behind it is this – in capitalist societies, we’re not necessarily unseen, as such. More often, we’re pre-packaged; flattened, rendered into consumable stereotypes. Stereotypes – like the good father, the femme fatal, to name just a few, offer us a sort of just-add-water identity. An identity that does profess to make knowing ourselves and one another easier – only it substitutes the curiosity required for intimacy for a smug belief that we don’t have to TRY to see into one another, cos we know what the other is about, in advance. It also pushes us to stay within the boundaries of those archetypes. To cut off those behaviours and preferences that don’t fit – transforming our complexity into a betrayal of who we ‘really’ are. You can see how that spirals into ever fewer chances to BE who you are.
This post is therefore dedicated to all of you who’ve felt that sense of being cut off, of being unseen, misunderstood, and alone — even while interacting with someone — because that someone seemed completely uninterested in getting to know you as a real, whole human being. Maybe you sensed they were talking past you — or talking to that pre-packaged idea of who they thought you were. If you’ve ever felt reduced to your usefulness, your desirability, or your social capital, rather than seen in your full, messy, contradictory humanity — this is for you. And if you’ve ever been written off or judged before you even had the chance to speak, this is for you too.
A Thought Experiment
Now, before I define this obscure word, heteronormativity, I want to do a bit of a thought experiment with you. It doesn’t hinge on heteronormativy though. It hinges on another way in which we TELL PEOPLE WHO THEY ARE. A very famous, crappy and obvious way that we do this.
Imagine you are a doctor. You are brilliantly clever — in fact, you’re so intelligent that you have a sideline in philosophy that, later on, earns you a permanent place in the history of Western thought.
You — this outrageously clever person — have started to get invited to fancy parties with the more well known and important personalities. A few people know your name, but less than a handful have met you in person yet. Now, this could be a good opportunity to meet some likeinded souls but the following keeps happening. When you try to mingle with people who are talking about the kinds of things you dig talking about you are met with a mix of bewilderment – beweliderment that seems to be tinged with suspicion and a bit of fear, somehow. You are a man of confidence, so you manage to mingle and chat to all these other important people. Thing is, even though you are a philosopher and a doctor, the party-goers seem to assume you are a bit stupid – and even end up explainging basic stuff to you, as if you have no clue – like who Immanuel Kant is, and how to fold your tie.
You double down on showing what is, in fact, your deep deep knowledge of phenomenology, among other things. A few people say things like “wow! I am very surprised you would know something like that!!” but it’s a little, you know, patronising. Still others react to your displays of obvious intellect met with blank stares – and then just carry on with the conversation like you didn’t say a thing. And, you know, a more stpidly optimistic person might call this a plus side, but you don’t see it that way – everyone assumes you are really good runner. Like, even though you are pretty shit at it. Also, quite unnervingly, the only topic of conversation where they DO bow to your knowledge IS about running. And you happen to NOT know much about it. Thing is though, there are a lot of famous runners who have the same skin colour as you. And this party is full of white people.
Your name is Frantz Fannon, and even though this depiction is not taken directly from it, your book “Black skin, white masks” talks directly about this kind of experience – These moments of misrecognition — being seen through someone else’s lens and trapped in it — rob you of who you are. They don’t even ALLOW you to show who you are, or counter who others are TELLING you you are.
Now even though this is an example of one of THE worst kinds of how we are prevented from being seen – I am not equating heteronormativity with racism. Each kind of ism – sexism, racisim, fat-ism, all have their own particular weight and their particular kind of violence. I am using racism, here because it offers an irrefutable example of the fact that we DO tell people who they are, before they even have a chance to say anything. In other words, he fact of racism, shows us that this flatteneing of others characters into a caricaTUR happens, and not only allows us to jump to wrong conclusions, but THAT this assumpton of who others are is deeply unjust.
I’m using Fanon in particular because
1. his work laid the foundatoin for showing just that – how this flattening, and reduction occurs on many levels: how the frames we’re told to look through distort and limit the other. And how sometimes, that conditioning is so strong, we are not even capable of seeing them at all.
2. because racism is something we KNOW exists. It works on a bunch of false assumptions, and it is clearly really really bad. If that is NOT a no-brainer, please skip to the end, or better yet, to the universal heat death where all that is hideous in society truly WILL no longer matter.
Heteronormativity is different from more open and obvious “isms” in that it’s harder to see. I mean, for a lot of poeple, being told that they are a certin way because of their sexual organs seems fine. Some even think it is logical. They fail to even see the limitations of it. The other thing is that heteronormativity is a lot more even-handed in it’s ability to render you unseen. Male or female, you wont escape. If you identitify as neither, you are rendered invisible and essentially incomprehensible – more on how that occurs later.
This means YOU, dear reader, ragardless of your sex or gender WILL be told who you are because of it. Others, encourntering you, will think they know a thing or two about your character, just by looking at your physicality, and before you open your mouth. And this has to do with loneliness because that habit — the structural act of “Let Me Tell You Who You Are” — breaks connection before it can begin. When I meet you, I can assume there’s nothing interesting to see here, and cos I think I already know who you are, I am not going to ask you any questions. I am not going to be curious. Instead, I will assume, and if a I am a real ass, I might even get a kick making assertions about your character that other people wth the same blinders on as me might assume are correct.
Hello, man. You must be shit at reflecting on your inner world, so let me complain about that to non-men and have a chuckle about your emotional ineptitude, instead of me trying to engage with you. Hey woman. I know you aren’t likely to follow the logic of my argument that well, so I will just wander off and talk to non-women.
Pretty fuckin’ antisocial, right? Also, definitely not very facilitative of me forming connections – or you getting to have one.
Finally a definintion:
So, what is Heteronormativity already? One of its features is it’s almost invisibility, despite its’ being deeply woven into everyday life. Heteronormativity describes the assumption that everyone is straight, that there are only two genders, and that these genders are naturally, inherently different, and naturally, inherently drawn to each other in fixed ways. Like whiteness, it functions as a quiet default — a cultural script so deeply embedded that it often goes unnamed. If I am femme-presenting, straightness is presumed. If I talk about love or longing, that longing is assumed to be for a man. Heteronormativity tells me not just who I am, but who I’m supposed to want. And when I don’t fit, it’s not the system that’s questioned — it’s me who’s made to feel wrong.
Let Me Tell You Who You Are
Our culture, capitalism, along with colonialism and patriarchy, have an obsession with categorising people in order to make judgements about them. Every system that benefits from your being easy to label, restrict, control, and market to loves categories.
Fanon laid the foundations for looking at how this “let me tell you who you are” dynamic plays out over other axis – like gender. He laid bare what happens when your character is assumed before you even open your mouth. Assumed not based on your values, your actions, or your voice — but on how you look.
Surprise surprise! — capitalism, especially as shaped by Western colonial histories, is deeply obsessed with appearances! It trains us to read bodies like barcodes — quickly, reductively, and for its own convenience. If I see you are a dude, I conclude certain things about your character. If I see you are a person of colour, I conclude certain things about your character. If I see you are fat, I conclude things about your character. God, if I see your HAIR COLOUR I conclude certain things about your character. The list goes on and on, and you haven’t even opened your mouth yet for me to actually know a damn thing. But I WILL get a kick out of thinking I do.
Fanon describes how others ‘script’ a role for you — based not on your words or actions, but on your ethnicity, gender, body, accent. Once that script is imposed on you, everything you say or do is interpreted solely through that lens. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he explores what it means to live as a man of colour: to be seen not as a person, but as a construction — a projection, a symbol stitched together from other people’s fears, fantasies, and ideologies.
This logic that reduces a person to a pre-scripted role — that demands the body signify something simple and sortable — is also at the heart of how patriarchy and heteronormativity function. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Sara Ahmed all extend this insight, showing how Black women, queer people, trans folks, fat and disabled people are constantly being made legible in ways that erase or distort their selfhood. And remember, heteronormativity does not just caricaturise women, it caricaturises men too – it is far more even handed and generally hatey to leave anyone unharmed.
Under heteronormativity, which we will finally define fully in a minute, your body scripts your identity just as ruthlessly: your genitals become a stand-in for your character, your emotional range, your ambitions, your sexuality, your fashion choices. The barcode gets scanned, the identity assigned, and deviation from it is treated as malfunction — or worse, as betrayal.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes a moment of painful clarity:
“Look! A Negro.”
In that moment, he is reduced to “a body surrounded by white eyes.” He becomes a “fact of Blackness” — not a person, but a category. And any attempt to express individuality is either dismissed, exoticized, or twisted to fit the pre-written story.
Replace Blackness with Womanhood, with Queerness, with Transness — and the pattern repeats. You are not allowed to simply be. A lesbian is read as angry. A femme gay man as frivolous. A trans woman as deceptive. When you speak, people don’t hear you — they hear the caricature they already had in their heads. Even attempts to correct or nuance the image just feed back into it: “Oh, she’s not like other women,” “Wow! He’s such a sensitive guy,” as if these were remarkable exceptions to an otherwise fixed rule.
And I’ve seriously heard people say, “That’s the exception that proves the rule.” I kid you not. It has become an everyday saying, wielded by anyone who wants to blindly defend a black-and-white worldview. But science — actual science — teaches us that when the data contradict the hypothesis, we throw the hypothesis out. That’s the entire point. And yet, such people, if they’ve just been bought up to believe that all cats are Siamese, and a tabby shows up, will explain it away as the non-siamese cat that proves all cats are siamese. It’s not just unscientific. It’s a flatline braindead, refusal to reflect on the validity of our ideas.
But back to the point: Fanon talks about the violence of having to be in constant negotiation with the image others impose on you. He can’t just exist. He’s always being read, always defending, correcting, proving.
It’s not just tiring. It’s dehumanizing. It’s also absurd. Like being that tabby cat, and everyone just ignoring the fact you’re not Siamese — waiting for you to do Siamese-cat things and only acknowledging your existence when you finally do, at which point they shout in unison, “See! I told you they are siamese!!”
It fits here to mention that Fanon uses the word overdetermined to describe the condition of Black subjectivity. You're not just MISunderstood — you're PRE-understood: already categorized before you’ve even had a chance to speak. And this is done through colonial histories, racist science, media, beauty standards — all the structures that tell stories about people instead of with them. In short, you are not seen as. You are seen through a stereotype. And any non-fit or resistance is explained away – BY those who authored the caricature.
This same effect is echoed — though shaped differently — in the epistemic and existential closure produced by patriarchy and heteronormativity. These systems do not allow for complexity. They require roles, caricatures, legible symbols. And they punish ambiguity.
The Infinity of Our Being
Let’s go back to Levinas. His work is based on the idea that another person – so YOU for me, and ME for you - is never to be entirely comprehended. The Other is irreducible, and beyond our grasp. That no matter how much we try to understand or categorize someone else, their full being cannot be captured by our ideas, or frameworks. I would say this is why getting to know others is interesting. If I really COULD know your entirety just by looking at you and having a few conversations, well, I’m an easily bored person and I wouldn’t waste my time. Maybe that is WHY we don’t bother, when we think we know it all about, men, women, bigger bodied people, and so on. Seriously, if I truly believed I had the choice between talking to an emotionally illiterate car fetishist, or a fashion-crazed feelings shitstorm, I would not speak to anyone at all. How is THAT meant to bring us together?
Levinas illuminates the violence Fanon describes too, saying, that to reduce the Other to an idea, a role, a symbolic figure is to deny them their alterity — their infinite difference, their mystery, their face.
So when heteronormativity imposes intelligibility criteria — “Are you a man or a woman?” or “Men are like this and women are like that” — it commits a totalizing violence. It refuses to let the Other appear as Other.
In short: Fanon shows us what happens when the Other is overdefined. Levinas shows us why that is violent.
Things to Know About Heteronormatity.
Unlike racism or sexism, which have an “in” group loaded with positive ideas, and an “out” group who are labelled less than, inferior and so on, heteronormativity harms everyone within the in group too. It doesn’t just dictate what a “real” man or woman is — it divides out what character traits, hobbies, or emotional expressions are “appropriate” for your caricature. Want to be a real man? For gods sake don’t write love poetry with, you know, feelings and weakness and ew – we all know what THAT does to intimacy.. yeah, actually, probably helps... My first long term relationship was with a man who wrote me love poems. Yet today, somehow, the man archetype has shrunk so much that sending love poems is seen as really creepy. So yeah. Wanna be a rel man, not in the 90s, don’t write love poems. Want to be a real woman? Well, you need to show softness, be accomodating and supportive of others needs. Just, like, don’t walk past a a toxic or manipulative person… they will literally suck you too a husk by making you compliant in denying yourself any need at all. Including air.
The real issue is not a refusal to write love poems or being a pushover though. The real issue is disallowing things that might actually be legitimate parts of you, just cos it has been arbitrarily decided that that thing is a trait of a gender you are not. That kind of social conditioning also dissuades us from even TRYING to find out whe we are in terms of exploring what we might like, if it isn’t in the pink list we’ve been assigned. It can become a self-fullfillng prophecy that way. All that flattens us into half-beings. Well, some of us don’t even end up half beings, we end up ghosts instead. Other genders are erased under heteronormativity. They are rendered what Butler calls “incomprehsible.”
(sigh) BUT cos I do try to talk about the advantages of any capitalist value we end up clinging to — here it is. According to psychology, this kind of stuff — racism, sexism, heteronormativity, fat phobia, ageism — can be seen as schemas.
I Already Know All About You
Schemas are mental shortcuts: we use them to save time and cognitive energy, and to feel a bit more in control of our wildly complex world. They also help us feel a little more superior about our ability to function in it. Psychology also shows us that schemas are very often wrong. And because of our built-in confirmation bias, we tend to toss out anything that challenges them. So yeah, they are unscientific too.
Sociology and philosophy back this up — especially when it comes to gender. The gender schemas we carry are socially constructed, and we’re trained from early on to fit into them. I could do a whole podcast on just that — and maybe I will — but it’s not today’s focus.
My focus is how these reductions operate – by making us compliant in our own erasure – and their price – which is to rob us of ourselves, and of each other.
And before we continue into why Heteronormativity is so strong in our culture, this needs to be said. Heteronormativity isn’t the fault of any individual — nor should we fall into the trap of blaming one gender. These restrictive (and frankly unimaginative) ways of understanding gender don’t originate from us personally; we’re born into a world where these ideas are everywhere. We’re socialized into them, taught to repeat and mimic how they say things should work, and to accept them as truth — regardless of how poorly they fit us, how much they limit our selfhood, or how much harm they cause — simply because everyone else does the same. The question to be answered is WHY – and I mean going beyond the simplistic explanations of psychology, which places the locus of explanation, blame and control in the individual, always. As usual, I want to look at the WHY on a societal and cultural level – and at who profits from it.
So Why Do We Do This Shit?
Part of the reason is that this system is so deeply ingrained that most people do not stop to question where these stereotypes come from – or whether or not they actually serve us, or something more sinister. Instead, the quesitons have been left for philosophers and us queer folk to discuss amongst ourselves. The options – that is, what to do with it all – has been left to marketers.
I am going to start with one of my favorite philosophers, Judith Butler, who talks about Identity as a Performed Norm. SO this is about how heteronormativity impacts the ways you will rob yourself OF yourself by ACTING out a role in order to connect.
In Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), Judith Butler famously argues that gender is not a stable identity, but something repeated, enforced, and regulated. Gender norms are not chosen freely, but rather:
“Compelled by social sanction and taboo.”
Butler too talks about scripts, and they arise from what she straighforwardly terms stereotypes.
Stereotypes, such as “Black man as danger,” “woman are for fucking,” “queer people are deviant,” to name but a few, become a normative script that must be performed in order to be recognizable within the social order. The idea is a bit like that cat analogy. If we really think all cats are siamese, those tabby cats are going to have to ACT siamese, or they will be ignored and go unfed, because no one wants to see something that contradicts their running theory. If we already see men of colour as dangerous, we will refuse to notice that they are, in fact, acting like a philospher at a bourgeois party. When they suddenly DO conform to our preconceptions – like if Fanon had started sprinting laps around the cocktail room - we see them immediately, and point, and cry out with joy at how all of our pre-judgements are confirmed. I like to call this “seeing only what makes us feel smug”.
What butler is getting at though is, in order to be seen at all, we perform, even when that performance makes us look like a total cliché. I can speak to the example from the “women are for fucking” performance too. As a non binary person, who does still occasionally want to connect with those in male bodies, I am aware that as soon as I wear the cliched, tight red dress, I am suddenly SEEN as a woman, and then, and only then, as potentially for fucking. I get to be SEEN, which I would not in my androgynous clothes and no makeup, but I am seen as a thing I don’t really want to be seen as – it’s just kinda necessary to “connect”… and yeah. I’m fuckng single, cos connecting through that performance does NOT lead to real connection.
Yet it kind of explains why we will take on such performative roles, even when they suck. Because to deviating from that script is to risk illegibility, pathologization, or exclusion from public life altogether.
Butler draws attention to the fact that the very terms we use to define ourselves are not ours — they are given in advance, and we are forced to negotiate within them. In Butler’s terms, heteronormativity is a regulatory ideal — it structures how bodies are supposed to behave, love, desire, and move. If you don’t fit this mold (straight, cis, monogamous, reproductive), you are:
• Not recognized as a "real" man/woman/person.
• Interpreted through deviant scripts (e.g. “confused,” “damaged,” “attention-seeking”).
• Or even erased entirely.
This links back to Fanon/Levinas and goes further: the imposed script is not just an external projection but becomes an internalized necessity for survival. You are made to perform your own reduction.
So before we turn to the sadism involved in forcing people to buy one of two colours they hate, let’s remember: reductionist ideas about gender don’t just flatten us — they turn connection into performance. We end up acting out roles to be seen, instead of being ourselves to be loved. It’s like casting two people in a play they didn’t audition for, then blaming them when the show falls apart.
But Really, Why Do We Do This Shit!
Now I want to move to reasons that are more clearly capitalist, and that more clearly illustrate the point of this podcast - that the self-help and western spiritualist communities have the very same toxins embedded in them as bog-average, openly soulless consumerism.
The idea of gender has been commodified — packaged and sold back to us through things like baby gear that comes only in blue or pink, with nothing in between. In things like dating courses where those with tits are told to “get into their feminine” to “allow” a man to “access his masculine” and partner up. Now here, we see two things. One, newspeak. By that, I mean changing words around a bit so it doesn’t look as offensive as it really is. “getting into your feminine” is just wishey-washey western spiritualist speak for “act like a woman is meant to act.” The other noticable thing follows on from this logically – each of the socialy accpeted genders are rendered half people. If I, as someonw with a vagina, act like a “receptive” (read, passive) “soft” (read, spineless) individual, the guy is kinda forced into “manning up” (read, be pushy) and get his power-drill-like purpose in line with divine masculine energy (read, act like some protective hero who can lift 60 kg and fly). Neither is encouraged to just talk to each other like humans. Or even to BE human. Instead, they are told to act like some poorly scripted hero film (no surprise) with your standard beefcake and fuck-puppet pairing. No wonder the advice industry keeps cashing in — it’s profiting from the disconnection it manufactures.
The latter is a goldmine, because, as mentioned in the episode on control, most of us have been SO conditioned to assume we have done something wrong that we are totally up for beleiving we have done something WRONG, all our lives, that means we havent attracted a mate…. We are quite prepared to beleive that putting on a show, and under no circomstances being ourselves, mght help us. We have been thoroughly decoupled from the idea that being open and honest was what lead to intimacy.
Even though it is, and is the ONLY thing that is.
And you know, as a single, queer old person, I am probably the last person to give you any advice about something as fleabrained as “getting into your feminine” but, for once, I am going to. I do have woman bits, after all, and when I want to get deep into that feminine aspect of myself, I just use a vibrator. It gets DEEP into my feminine, so I don’t fucking have to.
Gender as Commodity and Role Performance
It boils down to this, with the whole gender as commodity. We are being told to be a certain way – a way that those selling us these books or courses can teach us. Like society hasnt already done enough of a number on us already.
We are, yet again, being told to blame ourselves, shame ourselves, and ACT in certain ways, that are not us, in order to be worthy of connection. We are, in fact, being told we are unworthy of connection if we are just ourselves.
Now, Levinas calls it violence when we do not recognise anothers depth and infinitude. What level of violence does it become when we are PUNISHED for that depth and infinitude?
We are being sold the idea that in order to find connection and intimacy, we need to do a performance. That performance is cutting off the parts of ourselves that do not match our sex, in order to attract someone who is cutting off the parts of themselves that we are ALLOWED to embody. Two people are rendered half-people, so that they can come together in some crippled way, and not actually be whole, because they are still both half people, but so that the parts they have been told to hide in themselves can be acted out by the other.
The Cultural Programming
I am expecting a lot of annoyance following this post, and the podcast episode based on it. I expect there are people who will tell me that men and women ARE inherently diferent.
If I can be assed, I will dutifully point out several things – such as the fact that sex and gender are two different things, and yes, my pink bits are female pink bits that are different from male pink bits, but that does not stop me from liking power drills and knives. What stops me from liking those things is the idea that I SHOULDNT.
Here I want to mention John Searle too. He talks about there being two kinds of fact. brute facts are facts that exist independently of human institutions or interpretations—like mountains or gravity—whereas institutional facts exist only within systems of human agreement, such as money, marriages, or governments. Institutional facts depend on collective recognition and are upheld by shared rules and social practices.
In Searle’s framework, sex could be understood as a brute fact—it refers to biological attributes like chromosomes or reproductive organs that exist independently of social systems. In contrast, gender is an institutional fact—it relies on collective beliefs, cultural norms, and social roles, such as what it means to be a “man” or “woman” in a given society. These roles only function because people collectively accept and perform them according to shared rules and meanings.
So gender is not sex. Gender is the part we learn, and god to some learn it well. They learn it so well, that just like a German who has memorised all the rules on where you dog is allowed to piss, they will vehemently repeat said rules at anyone who doesn’t look likely to obey them.
And to anticipate the ususal spurious evolutionary-biology arguments – I have no idea why, but using those seems to have become part of the indocrtination ritual for one particular gender, not all cultures buy into this rigid binary idea of gender at all.
Take the Bugis people of Indonesia — they recognize five genders. Yep, five. You’ve got the men and women, sure, but also calabai, calalai, and bissu — genders that don’t fit into Western male/female boxes at all.
If you think biology is dictating a neat binary division of labor, ask yourself — what do these five genders do? Are they all shoehorned into “men’s work” and “women’s work”? Nope. The Bugis, like many cultures with non-binary genders, distribute tasks and roles much more fluidly.
This isn’t just a cute cultural footnote. It’s a direct challenge to the idea that biology forces us into rigid gender roles. Because if it did, wouldn’t every culture look the same? Spoiler: they don’t.
And even within so-called ‘binary’ cultures, biological differences like strength or childbearing don’t magically translate into social rules. These differences are interpreted through culture — what counts as ‘men’s work’ or ‘women’s work’ changes all the time.
It Starts Young and Never Lets Up
It starts young. Like, really young. By now you can walk into a shop that sells baby stuff and be chastised for chosing blue diapers for a baby that is female, when the only colours even available were pink or blue.
I mean, I’ve seen goths and metallers coming out of those stores reduced to tears and desperately googling “motorhead t-shirts for kids”. This commercialization reinforces and profits from keeping these rigid gender boundaries firmly in place even before a child has a chance to demonstrate preferences of any kind.
And it wont let up from there. I walked past a store at NAMM when I was doing loop machine demos, and that store had guitars in the shape of FLOWERS. The clerk called me over saying “this is something for you” and launched into a tirade about this line of guitars that were specifically for women.
When I asked if we were meant to play them with out tits, cos that would perhaps justify their being so specific to women, he thought I was being rude, but it was a fair question, given that any gender may or may not like flowers.
But this goes beyond your arverage capitalist product range, spilling out into spiritual and dating spheres where narratives around “being in your masculine or feminine” to attract a partner abound.
Heteronormativity as Marketing Strategy
So it becomes obvious that Heteronormativity doesn’t just shape what we’re told to desire, or how to behave — it’s become part of a marketing strategy. Part of a gambit to accessorise your life in terms of the team you were assigned to, even before saying our first words. So, this is’nt about blaming anyone for believing or ‘buying into’ ideas like ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus.’ Instead, it’s about critically examining why these ideas are perpetuated, despite any spurious biological or evolutionary arguments for their origins having become irrelevant. This is about how such narratives function to divide us, and whether they help or harm us — as individuals and as a society.
Why Heteronormativity Makes Us Lonely
This should make it obvious why heteronormativity makes us lonely -
• we are pushed to perform in ways that mean we are not being ourselves.
• we are EXCUSED and even ENCOURAGED to consider one of the traditional genders as emotionally unintelligent, or emotionally TOO MUCH, In other words, dooming them before they start. ie. we do to them what fannon had done to him. And, WE hav this done to us without us knowing it.
• this only reenforces the idea that men and women are a. the only genders and that b. they cannot talk to each other cos they are so different.
Bringing it all Together
So, to sum up: we looked at how heteronormativity works like a social barcode — something that scans your body and slaps on a prefab identity before you’ve even opened your mouth. We explored how that strips away complexity, reducing people to marketable archetypes instead of seeing them as whole. We talked about misrecognition — drawing from Fanon, Levinas, and Butler — and how being seen through someone else’s lens instead of as yourself is a kind of violence. It disconnects us from each other, from intimacy, and from our own sense of being.
We also dug into how capitalism and western spiritualism cash in on this. Not just by reinforcing the roles, but by convincing us that we need them — that our failure to connect is proof that we’re broken, and that playing these roles is how we “earn” love. So we buy into performances: “get into your feminine,” “own your masculine,” suppress your needs, dial up your desirability. It’s sold as empowerment, but what it actually does is rob us of ourselves — piece by piece — until all that’s left are two people performing at each other, like badly rehearsed actors in a play they never agreed to be in. Connection becomes a performance. And because the roles were written by someone else, no one gets seen — let alone loved.
The whole point of this is to call bullshit on that. To say no, you’re not the problem — the system is. That intimacy doesn’t come from acting the part — it comes from not acting. From refusing to play roles that flatten us, and instead insisting on being seen as the messy, layered, irreducible beings that we are. That’s where connection lives. And yeah, it’s harder — it takes risk, and rejection, and awkward pauses — but it’s also the only thing that’s real.