NBC News published a piece today declaring that “heterosexuality is just not working” and that women are backing out of relationships with men because they are the “bedrock of their global oppression.”
Marcie Bianco of NBC News wrote [1], “Men need heterosexuality to maintain their societal dominance over women. Women, on the other hand, are increasingly realizing not only that they don’t need heterosexuality, but that it also is often the bedrock of their global oppression.”
Bianco argued that a sling of recent news stories, “from Jeffrey Epstein to the Dayton and El Paso mass shooters, to Miley Cyrus’s separation and Julianne Hough’s declaration that she’s ‘not straight,” have “together have laid bare the strictures of an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”
She concluded, “Heterosexuality is just not working,” and then described why women are choosing to live without them. “As a snapshot of 2019 America, these stories present a startling picture: Men continue to coerce, harass, rape and kill girls and women — and go to extreme lengths to avoid responsibility for their actions. On the other side of the issue, girls and women are challenging heterosexuality, and even absconding from it altogether.”
Bianco continued, “Patriarchy is at its most potent when oppression doesn’t feel like oppression, or when it is packaged in terms of biology, religion, or basic social needs like security comfort, acceptance and success. Heterosexuality offers women all these things as selling points to their consensual subjection.”
She added that “women have been conditioned to believe that heterosexuality is natural or innate, just as they have been conditioned to believe that their main purpose is to make babies — and if they fail to do so, they are condemned as not ‘real,’ or as bad, women.”
The piece argues that men are the root of most problems and inequalities experienced by women today.
“Where men seem to never to have to take responsibility for their actions, women always must take responsibility for not only their own actions but the actions of men,” Bianco wrote. “Absconding from responsibility is the quintessential strategy of the patriarchy; it’s how men stay in control and never lose their power.”
It has caught many people off guard to see an established outlet such as NBC News publish such a seemingly fringe argument. And one can infer that no established network, NBC included, would ever publish a piece proposing that women are somehow the root of any problems experienced by men.