By rehearsing the view that ‘men are the worst’ while continuing to pursue romantic and sexual attachments with them, we perform an othering gesture that shores up the purity or innocence of our own identities. We may love men, we declare, but we barely enjoy it, okay?; we are embarrassed; we are not contaminated by them; we are not they. In other words, we get to continue to be ‘women’. Perhaps, semi-unconsciously, we had worried that the very category of ‘women’ had become untenable. If we can only continue to reproduce the category ‘men’ loudly enough, then, we wager, the category ‘women’ might stay safe. (Note, while a majority of heterofatalist misandrists online today seem to think they are trans-affirming, their position not only requires erasing trans men altogether, but also all trace of trans women’s lived experiences as men, regardless of those women’s own self-understanding. Indeed, misandry, as I see it, can never reliably be prevented from collapsing into transphobia.)
People love to use the term heterofatalism/heteropessimism & engage in discourse about it without even mentioning that it was coined by Asa Seresin, a queer trans man. It's a shame how often trans people's extremely valuable contributions to gender & sexuality theory get erased.
Heterosexuality scholar Asa Seresin – the author of a certain viral 2019 essay that acted as the big bang for heterofatalist online discours
Sharing an article from my creative passion project Spinster Speaks (a FREE, digital magazine accessible HERE). Next issue will drop during late April- sign up HERE to be added to my mailing list if you’re interested and haven’t already :) 💜 IG @diaryofablackspinster
ARTICLE COMMENTARY: IS ST8 CULTURE OK?
“On Heteropessimism” by Asa Serensin gives way to a very relevant reflection and analysis of the increasingly hostile culture of heterosexuality. I find this topic really interesting as a both a feminist and queer person who has primarily engaged with straight culture first hand, and knew I wanted to dig into this topic since I find it relatable.
What I appreciate most from this piece is that each section flows well together to form a comprehensive analysis that is clearly understood and cohesive, and supported by some interesting references. It’s an excellent and succinct read, and one that you can tell the author is passionate about discussing.
A SPINSTER’S TAKE
Though the attitudes associated with heteropessimism, such as embarrassment or irony, are not new (consider rhetoric equating marriage to a woman as holding men down with a ‘ball and chain’, or the death of a man’s personal freedoms), this topic of gender studies is arguably under developed, because the efforts of gender studies often operate on the basis that heterosexuality is largely seen as the normative default and should therefore be explored secondarily to lesser known queer cultures. Though it is not the primary intention of this article, it does a great job of proving the need for the modern analysis of heterosexuality.
Heteropessimism is understood as “…a performative disaffiliation with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about the straight experience. ” It often has heavy focus on men as the root of the problem, leaving women dissatisfied with the experience of romantic or sexual encounters with men. The strongest point of this article, in my opinion, is that it calls out the lack of accountability many women have in this argument, as straight women who reflect this pessimism are often performative (though not always disingenuous) and unwilling to acknowledge their active participation in the pitfalls of the very straight culture which they condemn.
Asa mentions that social media has become a playground for a performative, disidentification where pessimism thrives, and I couldn’t agree more. You may have seen women express “heterosexuality is a prison”, or they “wish they were lesbians” while venting their frustrations with dating in straight culture, but these complaints point to an internally produced, untapped shame. This “performative distancing” is often a shrugging of responsibility. It’s very easy to say “men are trash” (because many can be) but what does it say about yourself, if you as a woman are constantly chasing after the metaphorical garbage truck?
Radical shifts of culture do not occur without internal examination and change. So while it may seem like the disavowal of heterosexuality is a bold feminist action, toeing the lines between queer theory and cultural analysis, it’s more akin to an “emotional anaesthesia” that allows women to air their grievances and distance themselves from the problem without having to actually abandon it or address conflicting feelings of desire and vulnerability in spaces or relationships that are defined by misogyny.
Like many internet subcultures, this sense of pessimism also contradicts the business market of relationships, which I found very interesting. “Often framed as an anti-capitalist position, heteropessimism could be read as the refusal of the ‘good life’ of marital consumption and property ownership that capitalism wants mandated.” Through the lens of capitalism, the primary consumer, whom products and lifestyles are meant to be advertised to, has historically been centralized around the idea of a unit or couple.
More recently, the unit been steadily replaced by the individual, their phone, and opportunity for an individualized consumer experience. For example, it is profitable for dating apps and services to keep people single and dissatisfied so they return for more opportunities to be satiated. It is more profitable today for beauty and lifestyle brands to appeal to a woman’s need to treat herself to something nice, for her sake instead of a man’s, than it is to advertise a product as something a woman can use to attain male levels of validation. With this viewpoint women shift from being told they are in competition with each other to attain men, to reconciling with heterosexuality as a personal issue to fix through consumerism; both of which shy away from solidarity amongst women in straight culture. While it seems like heteropessimism would bolster movements such as #MeToo and highlight the need for a revolutionized culture, it more likely sends the message that heterosexuality is synonymous with misogyny, having no hope for reform, so the natural conclusion is participation with a silent dissatisfaction. And thus the shared understanding of this dissatisfaction becomes the unity among us. A notable critique of this pessimism is that this framing discourages the engagement of critical thought, reform, and personal responsibility.
The third and final element of this article that stood out to me, was it’s commentary on the male perspective of this pessimism, which is easily observed on social media through anti-feminist movements (incels and red-pill communities). As mentioned earlier, you’re probably very familiar with heteropessimism even if the term is not one you’ve heard before. People don’t batt an eyelash when men make comments about the aforementioned “ball and chain“ or lament about hating their spouses. Male participation in this pessimism is not new.
While the pessimism from straight men is neither ethically nor logically more relevant to the woman’s perspective due to- you guessed it- the power dynamics of misogyny, they point to the growing number of anti-feminist movements that view heteropessimism as evidence of female domination or conspiracy. They act as a disfigured funhouse mirror of valid feminist complaints. For example, where women argue that dating is not psychologically or physically safe, men in these spaces argue that dating is no longer safe for men. The reason being that men no longer feel comfortable approaching women with actions that often foster a silent rape culture, such as being overly persistent when a woman is not interested or automatically assuming a woman’s friend standing between them is an oblivious “cock-block” instead of an intentional protector. Which has led some to the persistent idea that women are generally aiming to be parasitic in their romantic or sexual pursuits, and that men have been wronged as their “right” to have access to women by any means has been taken from them by this pessimistic attitude.
Overall, this piece rebukes the idea that heterosexuality is either unchangeable, or the sole responsibility of one party in a dynamic of two opposite sexes. While Serensin does not have a magic answer to transform the shortcomings of heterosexuality, her insistence that this pessimism closes off the conversation from deeper socio-political analysis is spot on.
I think if you are a straight person or someone who often engages in opposite sex and/or gender relations, it is certainly worth looking at how (if at all) you perpetuate pessimism, and what you do to promote a healthy culture of heterosexuality in your own relationships or life. Stop chasing the garbage truck.
A new New York Times piece posits that the trouble with wanting men, is … men. Like, all of them.
By: Rikki Schlott
Published: Jul 24, 2025
Dating is hard, but blaming all men for your horrible choices is easy.
A new New York Times piece, “The Trouble With Wanting Men,” by Jean Garnett, posits that the trouble with wanting men is … men.
Like, all of them.
It’s part of a genre of man-hating thought pieces that turn hetero love and dating into an all-out gender war — and totally absolve women of any agency or responsibility in their relationships.
[ An article in the New York Times, titled “The Trouble With Wanting Men,” has gone viral. ]
There’s no accountability or introspection, just the big diagnosis that men are the problem, from a woman who has decided to pursue open relationships, casual sex and situationships into middle age.
It’s a sad, sickly post-millennial take on “Sex and the City” that’s further evidence of just how bleak the modern romantic outlook really is.
The piece, which is mostly autobiographical sexual navel-gazing, argues that many women are experiencing “heterofatalism,” a term Garnett borrowed from UPenn academic Asa Seresin, which describes the way straight women are “fed up with the mating behavior of men.”
It’s a word that reeks of misandry. Garnett’s own heterofatalism manifests in lamenting with a female friend that they can’t just be gay with one another and declaring that “men are what is rotten in the state of straightness.”
It also rears its ugly head when she walks past a couple holding each other close outside a subway and audibly gags.
What has left this woman so hurt, so bitter, so … heterofatalistic?
Well, her dating past is colorful, to put it kindly.
Garnett reveals that her open marriage fell apart because she “fell in love with another man” — in fact, “toppled the whole structure of [her] life for a man” — who told her from the outset “that he did not know how to ‘do’ relationships.” Ah, yes, the classic.
Later, she reveals she sometimes brings her daughter along on dates with this man, who won’t commit to anything more than a sexual relationship.
She also recounts getting a text from an actual adult male with whom she went on a date, reading, “I was really looking forward to seeing you again but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.”
Apparently, among her friend group, this is a common experience, and they laugh over brunch about “men’s inability to ‘man up and [expletive] us.’” Garnett asks, “Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?”
[ Garnett compares her friends to the characters of “Sex and the City,” chatting about sex over a meal. ]
She alludes to being a character in “Sex and the City” — but what about “He’s Just Not That Into You”?
Who are these men she speaks of? For all the complaints I’ve fielded from friends about their dating lives, men failing to show up for sex is not one.
Heterofatalism is just one of many academic terms Garnett cites. We also learn about complementary twoness, normative male alexithymia and emotional labor, among others.
The fancy words and citations allow her to hide behind an academic facade — and avoid analyzing whether her own choices are actually what’s making her so miserable.
In a rare glimpse of self-awareness, she writes: “I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose.”
But this is the problem. We’re not living out a gender war through our love lives.
What Garnett has figured out, consciously or not, is that framing the problem as an us-versus-them situation allows her to remove the “I” from the equation.
But guess what, lady: A lot of your problems would probably subside if you stopped — by your own admission — throwing yourself at men in the first 30 minutes of knowing them. And pursuing ones who give you yellow lights. And indulging in the romantic deathtrap that is non-monogamy.
Stop blaming everyone else, straighten out your own life, and get a little agency.
There are a lot of troubles with modern dating — from hookup culture to situationships, dating apps to ghosting. Women’s struggles should be given a platform.
But outlets like the Times seem hellbent on amplifying the voices of the most bitter and dysfunctional individuals who bring their misery upon themselves and distract from the actual issues at hand.
Pieces like these bring us no closer to solving the issues that plague modern love. And they make readers want to shake the writer and say, “Get a grip.”
Is the problem all men? Or is the problem the way that some women choose to navigate relationships with men?
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"I've consistently made shockingly terrible decisions in all of my relationships and yet I'm still alone – why are men like this?!"
By being unhappily straight, those of us who are not men are off the hook for our complicities with men. We are off the hook for the many women who become men, the men who become women, and the many people more who are simply neither or both; for the fact that, to quote Sophia Giovannitti’s essay in the online journal Majuscule, ‘gender is never fixed; gender is always broken’. Worse, we are off the hook for creating deep care and nourishment for ourselves and others within the world as we find it. We are collectively turned off, in my assessment, and part of us does not want this to change because, were it to change, we wouldn’t get to be women anymore in the classic sense of wishing collectively we were turned on. To radically transform heterosexuality, in contrast, might begin, as Seresin says, ‘with honest accounts of which elements of heterosexuality are actually appealing.’ Giovannitti’s essay, titled ‘In Defense of Men’, invokes one such account, within a critical response to the heterofatalism thesis.
This stern realism and grim anti-utopianism about what sex with men is and, implicitly, always will be, is nothing if not understandable. The discursive ultra-misandry that was so popular on social media circa 2014 (remember #KillAllMen?) is happily out of fashion, but the anger at men underlying it – which, by the way, was never ironic – has had no material reason to dissipate. With men like Trump and Brett Kavanaugh in the highest offices of the United States government and judiciary, women of all classes right now are righteously filled with rage, disappointment, betrayal and disgust. Nevertheless – as Rooney captures well – the reason that sharing life with men feels like slow violence is ultimately not the men themselves (not in many cases, at least) but, rather, the hierarchies that, flowing through us all, elevate them and suffocate us. The repudiation of ‘sleeping with the enemy’ enacted by some feminists in the 1970s was and remains widely and rightly derided. Rarely, however, do contemporary feminists acknowledge that a lot of sex is experienced as making a gift of oneself to one’s oppressor, despite how nice and love-worthy the guy in question is or isn’t. Rarely do we talk about ‘political lesbianism’ as a poor strategy founded on a factual albeit ‘dramatic’ assessment of heterosex under patriarchy (as perilous for women’s spiritual health). Even more rarely do we seem to grasp that the opposite position – the position of Vance and the women’s movement’s sexual liberationists – shared that same assessment … only, the utopian horizon of post-gender pleasure, in their eyes, made the perils of having sex in the present worth confronting. Thus there are, as Lauren Berlant commented at the 2019 Duke Feminist Theory Workshop, ‘many new sex-negative feminists’ cropping up in our present moment; people who, she suggests, are ‘incompetent about even their own desire’. Whether we are feminist or anti-feminist, most of us are so exhausted, coerced and alienated by capitalism’s work / enjoyment culture that we don’t know how to have really good sex – be it with men or plants or ourselves or the topside of a washing machine.
"Before her death Barbara Deming was among those rare outspoken feminist thinkers who wanted to create a space for women to talk openly about our feelings about men. Articulating her concern that the wellspring of female fury at men was making it impossible for women to express any other feelings than their sense that “men are hopeless,” she stated: “It scares me that more and more women are coming to feel this way, to feel that men as an entire gender are hopeless.” Deming did not feel that men were incapable of change, of moving away from male domination, but she did feel that it was necessary for women to speak the truth about how we think about men: “I believe that the only way we can get where we have to go is by never refusing to face the truth of our feelings as they rise up in us— even when we wish it were not the truth. So we have to admit to the truth that we sometimes wish our own fathers, sons, brothers, lovers were not there. But, this truth exists alongside another truth: the truth that this wish causes us anguish.” While some women active in the feminist movement felt anguished about our collective inability to convert masses of men to feminist thinking, many women simply felt that feminism gave them permission to be indifferent to men, to turn away from male needs.
When contemporary feminism was at its most intense, many women insisted that they were weary of giving energy to men, that they wanted to place women at the center of all feminist discussions. Feminist thinkers, like myself, who wanted to include men in the discussion were usually labeled male-identified and dismissed. We were “sleeping with the enemy.” We were the feminists who could not be trusted because we cared about the fate of men. We were the feminists who did not believe in female superiority any more than we believed in male superiority. As the feminist movement progressed, the fact became evident that sexism and sexist exploitation and oppression would not change unless men were also deeply engaged in feminist resistance, yet most women were still expressing no genuine interest in highlighting discussions of maleness."
— The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks (2004)
