The thing is, straight men actually love astrology. There are a ton of straight, white men who practice and teach astrology. In fact, most teachers of astrology with visibility have been and remain straight, white men.
And, yet, when you engage with contemporary astrology on the internet, straight men seem to be the antithesis to astrology. There’s memes such as “astrology gf and stock market bf” as if gf can’t possibly figure out what money is while bf can’t possibly know the difference between a house system and what he had for dinner. There’s sometimes cooing when someone’s boyfriend sits with them to learn the ins and outs of their sign because the reverse is so often taken for granted.
Straight men love astrology. They love financial astrology and maps and calendars. They like systems. They love ancient Rome, where a lot of western astrology aesthetics come from. They love having technical information, which astrology is full of. However, so many of them seem to absolutely despise it when people they date talk about astrology.
A lot of straight men talk about how they hate astrology because it is a method of exercising stereotypes. They hate it when people assume things about them due to things that they cannot control, like their birth date. They don’t like astrology memes either.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve dated a straight man but I remember doing so. I remember the unpredictability, the lack of accountability, and also the feeling that you don’t quite know this person in quite the right ways. I remember googling aspects of our sun signs because I was so desperate to figure out just why this person was acting the way that he was.
There are many different types of astrology. There are feminist forms of astrology and queer forms of astrology. There are western feminist and western queer forms of astrology. There are astrologers practicing radical relationship building and astrologers who engage with archetypes in the same ways that the BDSM community engages in gender stereotypes—as a means of performance, pleasure, and catharsis.
It’s not that straight men don’t like astrology—they do like astrology when it’s on their terms. They tend to check out of astrology when it’s used for enriching the experience of love and for savoring eros. This is because straight men are taught to see things such as love and pleasure as trivial. They’re trained to see practices as institutions and not as languages that twitch with new life everytime someone uses it to write a poem, a song, or a horoscope. They don't like astrology when it is too woo-woo.
I sometimes talk to straight men of color who despise the popular use of western astrology because it is remembered and appears as a western institution. Sometimes, these straight men are into non-western astrologies but only when they reinforce their own ideologies. There is something chauvinist about this—something shortsighted. These men are often the same men who believe that the “queer agenda” is imperialist and that anti-imperialism means owning all of the natural resources, women included, in a nation-state. They don’t see how queers literally take languages that are made to erase us and shape it into something that keeps us alive. They don’t see that the practice of astrology, to build care and to build pleasure, is something that keeps people alive.
Simply put, I think that straight men don’t like astrology simply because it is too fun, too caring, and too queer. I also think that straight men are often exposed to astrology through the straight and queer women they date and, in those experiences, they sometimes flinch away from someone who desperately wants to know them because they do not know how to be known. I think that straight men find it much easier to compartmentalize language as ideology because it becomes much easier to answer questions of right and wrong when you do this. Straight men have a harder time being multiple selves, to have triple consciousnesses, and to make room for warps. Straight men are straight.
To be honest, and this may be my own lack of exposure speaking, but I don’t believe that straight men actually exist. I’ve never met a single straight man who didn’t have queer inclinations. Straightness is an ideology and the reason why straight men find it easier to engage in astrology purely as ideology is because pointing a finger at the wrong story towards the outside means that you don’t have to think about the warped stories within. Straight men have to find astrology wrong, whether that is because astrology is too pseudo-scientific or because it is too western or because it is too erotic, because they must do the everyday task of convincing themselves that they are straight. Their straightness is a performance and this performance includes the act of resisting astrology.
