Viva Heterosexuality

Get matching and hatching

Three cheers for heterosexuality! Straightness has been taking a hell of a beating over the last few years. It’s time to get it out again and shout it from the rooftops.

Now while I don’t necessarily hold completely with the somewhat reductive message of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders’ 1964 smash ‘The Game Of Love’ - ‘the purpose of a man is to love a woman and the purpose of a woman is to love a man’ - I think Mr Fontana was on to something. Sixty years later and we’re in a baby bust that very few seem to have noticed and even fewer seem to be worrying about. But running out of new people is a terrible problem, particularly when you have a welfare state that’s predicated on the young providing for the old. As former MP Miriam Cates tweeted recently, ‘The problem is the modern framing of children as a private luxury. They’re not a luxury - children are essential for the future of society & the economy. We have socialised the cost of old age yet privatised the costs of children, removing the economic benefits of having kids.’

How could we get heterosexuals back in the procreational saddle, so to speak? First off, we need to remove the stigma and awkwardness around straight people. The relentless problematising of heterosexual relationships - tongue-tied men and nervous women walking through the minefield of gender, ‘power relations’, fraught with hesitation about the rules of engagement - needs to stop.

‘When will there be a Straight Pride?’ is a supposedly ‘cringe’ reply to ‘LGBTQ+’ Pride parades and festivities. But joking aside, it is heterosexuality that needs a boost. The celebration of any kind of widespread characteristic is very dull, but if anybody actually needs it, it’s the straights. Not the kinky or glamorously/sordidly recreational or commercial ‘sex work’ side of heterosexuality, but the plain bread and butter shack-up-and-spawn kind.

The irony is that ‘LGBTQ+ Pride’ is already Straight Pride. As many have observed, everything represented after the first three letters is mostly ‘spicy’ straights. I’m not sure I didn’t prefer it when we homosexuals were ignored or vilified by heterosexuals, to these days when they cosplay as us for social status.

Still. The economist Liza Minnelli was wrong - it is not money but heterosexuality that makes the world go round. I say this as a concerned human being rather than, in that grim phrase ‘as a gay man’. But if we absolutely have to stay in our narrow lanes of identity, a world where heterosexuality is going bust is no use for homosexual people either. We need a thriving, fecund majority of heterosexuals doing their one job as much as everybody else.

Though I’ve never been a partaker, I love heterosexuality. It’s so dramatic. It’s easy to see why it was, until very recently in the West, always a sacred thing, its rites and stages linked to God. An outsider can get idealistic and dewy-eyed about this, but there’s a reason why fiction about straight romance is extra-gripping - because it is about more than just two people getting together. It has higher stakes, the creation of something of sacralised worth.

Now I don’t want to hold heterosexuals to the high aesthetic standard of Peter O’Toole/Audrey Hepburn or Kevin Costner/Whitney Houston - I just want them to get out there and do it.

Monogamy and child rearing are important things - a wider responsibility, where homosexuality is, comparatively, all beer and skittles. We now have a situation where same sex couples are adopting, stepping up to the plate in heterosexuality’s hour of need.

The lack of physical congregation and social contact for young people in the modern world is a disaster for everybody, but it’s a nightmare for heterosexuality, where people need to learn the ropes in large groups in their teens.

I’m not being entirely flippant when I say that this is a vital issue that needs governmental attention. Marriages and marriage brokers were a big thing in many societies, and maybe they should be again. But then again, the prospect of Lisa Nandy or Ed Miliband being in charge of matching and hatching for the nation is not a happy thought, if richly comic, so maybe not.

It’s time to make heterosexuality great again. Jamborees should be arranged, medals struck, and economic barriers - as Miriam Cates says - removed. Straights of Britain, go forth and multiply!