The Enforcement Test
If heterosexuality were natural, it wouldn’t need enforcing.
That’s the core of Adrienne Rich‘s 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, and it’s a more radical move than it sounds. Rich didn’t ask the standard question — why some women are lesbians. She inverted it: given the sheer institutional machinery maintaining heterosexuality, why does anyone assume it’s simply how people are?
She catalogued the machinery. Custody laws that stripped children from lesbian mothers. Psychiatric diagnoses that pathologised deviation — lesbianism remained in the DSM until 1973. Workplace harassment that kept women economically tethered to husbands. Cultural erasure so thorough that most women never encountered the possibility of an alternative. Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Gough‘s cross-cultural research, Rich identified eight distinct enforcement mechanisms, from controlling women’s labour to confining their physical movement.
The volume of enforcement is itself the evidence. You don’t need laws, economic coercion, medical pathology, and systematic cultural silence to maintain something people would choose freely.
The framework travels beyond sexuality. Anywhere heavy enforcement props up a supposed default — social pressure, legal penalty, cultural erasure working in concert — you’re looking at something less natural than it claims. Rich’s implicit test is simple: stop enforcing it and see what survives.