In July, a piece came out in the New York Times called, “The Trouble With Wanting Men”, and the piece itself was mediocre, I skimmed it, and found the narrator annoying and the men she wrote about even more so. However, this piece made a lot of people really angry, including and arguably especially other straight women, who rhetorically took this woman and any other heterofatalists to task. Here are some examples of pieces that were written in the wake of this one: “Gender Relations Have Made Dating a Hostile Act”, “‘Nobody is Doing "Heterofatalism', But Also, It's Good1”, “Women’s latest dating trend couldn’t be more sexist”, not to mention, a whole lot of posts and articles and TikToks that I didn’t bother seeking out again because I’m trying to protect my peace.
The first time I saw these, I was like “I don’t agree but to each their own”. But after I kept on seeing them, over and over, with people endorsing them wholeheartedly, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’m the crazy outlier for finding these posts at best, totally unrelatable and kind of embarrassing, and at worst, a blaring alarm that we’re sociopolitically regressing and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
I just don’t really get why ostensibly liberal women are publicly taking other women to task for disliking men, and going to bat for men as a collective as well as the women who like them. I was under the impression that we all collectively accepted in like 2015 that men, including marginalized men, benefit from the patriarchy2 and that’s bad. Like what do you MEAN you like men? Do you like all people of your race? Your religion? Your hometown? Your high school graduating class? I know you don’t, so why are you declaring that you like men? Do you really think that liking men will protect you from the patriarchy? Because by seven, it’s marginal right?
Look, I was sentient during the 2016 election, I saw the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I witnessed the rise of Andrew Tate, I watched the now Vice President of the United States rant about childless cat ladies and his approvals increase by 20 points thereafter, I heard grown women simper about being “just a girl”, I scrolled through screeds by pro-natalists that were thinly veiled pleas to kick women out of the paid workforce3, and in the wake of the 2024 election, I read about boys chanting at their female peers, “Your body, my choice” and then, a seemingly endless collection of essays and posts and sanctimonious rants about how women being mean to men4 is how we got into this predicament.
Okay.
The term “heteropessimism” was coined by Asa Seresin5 in 2019, who defined it as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” In the linked essay, Seresin goes on to explain that these “performative disaffiliations” are rarely accompanied by genuinely abandoning heterosexuality or any real reckoning with the privileges that heterosexuality brings. He writes, “In this light, heteropessimism reveals something about the way we can remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken.” In other words, heteropessimists are unwilling to give up the privileges they get from being heterosexual but also want to virtue signal that they’re above it.
The way I conceptualize the difference between heteropessimism and heterofatalism is that heterofatalists are angry and frustrated by heterosexuality and at being attracted to men, while heteropessimists are disappointed and embarrassed at themselves for being heterosexual, and hopeless about it working out for them. It’s a small difference, but gun to head, I probably identify more with heterofatalism, (although maybe that’s an indictment of my own flaws, anger and pride).
Here’s the thing: I completely agree that straight women performatively declaring they dislike men is annoying and hypocritical given the majority of these women don’t actually dislike men and will not abstain from dating and marrying men. But aside from the fact it’s impossible to choose our sexuality like it’s a pair of shoes and heterosexual women don’t have a choice except to date and marry men unless they want to be single their whole lives, I think the derision of heteropessimism and heterofatalism, both in Seresin’s original piece and the subsequent ones that followed, misses the forest for the trees.
Most women do not respond to their fathers leaving or their boyfriends cheating or their husbands doing zero housework by actively disliking and mistreating men. They do not have affairs with underage boys, they don’t abandon their children, they do not go all Elliot Rodger on attractive men who they’ve never spoken to. If they do so, that is unequivocally wrong, but when identifying a societal problem, a piece of evidence can’t be a coincidence, a one-off, it has to be part of a larger pattern. Over 95% of mass shooters are male, which is why gun violence is considered an epidemic of male violence even though 5% of mass shooters are female. So, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that, as a friend wrote about child-free spaces, when it comes to the sinister phenomenon of women disliking men, “People are grabbing their torches and pitchforks over a world that largely does not exist.”
Also like, nobody, not straight women, not straight men, has to like people as individuals let alone as a class in order to have sex with them or even marry them. Men have been doing it since the dawn of time, and still do it all the time. The vast majority of misogynists aren’t incels who don’t get laid and complain about height discrimination online; they’re married men, men who have sex regularly, men with children, with daughters, men that still fundamentally don’t like or respect women and girls.
People don’t do endless moral panics about the dangerous rise of men disliking women because there’s no real market demand for that; it’s not remotely an aberration to dislike women, not nationally and definitely not globally. The mundane doesn’t drive engagement, and performatively subverting expectations, like being a liberal woman who always makes the conservative choice while also knee-jerk sympathizing with men6, does.
Personally though, I’ve always (half-jokingly) identified as a misandrist. I don’t hate individual men, my dad and I are best friends, and my husband is wonderful, as are my male friends. But, if I ever declare that I like men without caveats, just assume I’ve been kidnapped and send out a rescue party. And quite frankly, the more I see women rhapsodizing about how great men are, I feel more like a failure of womanhood, because I’ve never once experienced that sentiment.
In the 8th grade, when we were learning about the 1960s, my social studies teacher “married” us off to other students in the class for an interactive workshop of sorts. We were basically given a list of statements that we had to negotiate with our “spouses” and come to agreement, and on that list was stuff like “Women should not work outside the home after having children” and “Women should take their husband’s last names.” My “husband”7 and I were the only ones who got divorced in the class because I wouldn’t back down on any my stances, and 18 years later, I haven’t changed my mind on a single thing.
I just feel profoundly alienated by how male-partnered women talk about their lives online. Every time I see how other women, including women that vote the same way as me, talk about marriage and motherhood, I think I must be some sort of alien instead of a human woman. I find so much joy in being married, and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of my life with my husband and our cat, Esther, and our future children, but I just wonder if something in my inner machinery is broken because the idea of being a wife and mother before I’m an individual makes me (metaphorically and also sometimes literally) break out in hives.
Like, I'm irreligious and professionally hyper-ambitious (*Amy Dunne voice* I love tests), I want to make a lot of money, I want to be celebrated for my intelligence and competence and career achievements, and would also rather stick pins in my eyes than take my husband's last name8. Even if women like me exist offline (my mother is one!), they're few and far between on the Internet, although admittedly, that could because it’s still socially unacceptable for women to take pride in themselves, and not solely how their labor benefit others.
I’m sorry to navel gaze though, but I guess that’s why all this “I like men” stuff drives me crazy. It’s a mentality that makes me feel like not only a failed woman but also a failed wife, a failed daugher, and in a few years, I’m terrified I’ll fail as a mother.
That said, I promise I’m not actually the female Andrew Tate, and here are pictures of me with men that I love to prove it.9
For the record this is my actual stance
In order to genuinely think that sexism hurts men just as much as it hurts women, you have to believe the half dozen (very annoying) women who over-share about their miserable personal lives in legacy media and on Substack are representative of reality, and charitably, nobody is that stupid. But, I know that the United States is a nation of idiots that vote on negative polarization, and melt down when women don’t constantly simp for men, which is unfortunate and more than a little pathetic.
We obviously still have to work for free
Unfortunately, women saying mean things to men is a bigger problem than men doing mean things to women (even if that’s super unfair) because they get reactionary and start doing violence
Seresin is male, in case that surprises you (it shouldn’t)
We need to bring back calling women pick-mes, there really isn’t another term for it, and it’s a necessary one
Shoutout to my old friend Henry, who I’ll always wish the best for despite our 8th grade divorce. Senior year of high school, I was in a permanent state of the Mean Reds, and it became a matter of public spectacle. Henry had a lot of sway in our extended social circle, and he single handedly shut the gossip train down; he didn’t have to do that, but he did, and I’ll forever be grateful for that.
It’s fascinating just how mad liberal women got when I pointed out taking your husband’s last name is regressive. Like, if it’s not regressive and my criticism is totally unfounded, why are you defending yourself? When feminists say that Brazilian waxes are regressive, I don’t cry and scream and throw up about how mean they are, I just accept that Brazilian waxes are regressive, and get them anyways when I want to. Everybody, including conservative women, wants to be perceived as strong and independent, but is unwilling to follow through on it and acknowledge it when they fall short.
This is a joke because even evil has loved ones. But I digress.