If you were looking for a single example of just how strange things were getting between men and women this election cycle, one political ad seemed to capture the mood perfectly. Narrated by Julia Roberts, it featured a woman who was accompanied by her husband to the polls but alone in the voting booth. As she considers her options, she catches another woman’s knowing eye before privately filling in the Harris-Walz bubble. He’ll never know, their subtle nod to each other seems to say, and he’ll never understand.
“Did you make the right choice?” the woman’s husband asks when she emerges. “Sure did, honey,” she replies.
The sly implication was that women were at odds with men, that men were clueless and that heterosexual attachments required some negotiation and cunning to survive. That those ideas could be so easily understood in a 30-second spot suggests just how much they have gotten into the bloodstream.
In the last year alone there has been an explosion of young women who say they are deleting dating apps, whose market value has plummeted; female celebrities (among others) who have taken vows of celibacy or identify as “self-partnered”; divorce memoirs by older millennial and Gen X women expressing profound disillusionment with heterosexual marriage; and trends like “boysober,” which preaches the virtues of “decentering men” to focus on self-improvement and platonic relationships.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s decisive election victory last week seemed to turbocharge these feelings of unrest, at least among those who didn’t vote for him, leading to a surge in interest in South Korea’s 4B movement, which encourages women to reject dating, marrying, having sex with and having children with men. The speech swirling on social media platforms over the last few days is noticeably spikier than the “male tears” mugs of the 2010s or the almost cheerful hyperbole of the 2019 book title “How to Date Men When You Hate Men.” Online, women are exhorting one another to abandon men as a form of self-protection — buying a vibrator, or even a gun, might not be a bad idea either, a few suggested.
It is just one reaction among many from left-leaning women, who are far from united in what to do or how to think about a second Trump presidency. Disappointed by the defeat of another female nominee, some feel numb resignation, while others — particularly young women online — are channeling their disappointment into anger toward men as a whole.
They say it’s a response that suits the political situation they’re observing. Though ballot measures to enshrine abortion rights passed in a handful of states in this election, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade remains on the books, making abortion inaccessible and pregnancy far riskier in large swaths of the country. As Mr. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, campaigned for the White House, they were helped along by figures such as Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, whose once seemingly marginal manosphere culture now looks like a dominant one. Peering into the vast gulf between the political views of men and women, the latter group isn’t so sure it has much in common with the first.
Cultural and political flash points over the decades have long had liberal women assessing what role men have in their lives. That questioning seems to have crystallized into cynicism and despair, as some look around and feel deeply uncertain about how to reconcile their heterosexual existence with a world they view as irredeemably misogynistic.
“Say you’re being faced with young men who are telling you ‘your body, my choice,’” said Shantel Buggs, an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Florida State University, referring to a recent post by Mr. Fuentes that was shared widely. “I understand wanting to wash your hands of that.”
The Heteropessimist Mood
It was 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, and new, horrific allegations about men’s abuse of women continued to surface at an alarming clip. Mr. Trump had just appointed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and for a week that fall he was on television every day, giving more than 39 hours of testimony disputing accusations that he had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school. Though #MeToo had already resulted in professional consequences for many powerful men, Mr. Kavanaugh’s appointment seemed like a test of the movement’s potency.
Because of the obvious historical analog with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, it also posed a question almost impossible to ignore: Would anything different happen this time?
In the wake of Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the gender and sexuality scholar Asa Seresin picked up on a feeling in the air and put a name to it: “heteropessimism.” Writing for The New Inquiry in 2019, Mr. Seresin argued that heteropessimism was defined by “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.”
By “performative,” Mr. Seresin meant that though many women freely admitted that being attracted to men was at best a bummer and at worst a form of masochism, few acted on their beliefs. While expressing a sincere hopelessness, women’s disavowals seemed to be mostly gestural, like a sardonic Etsy mug.
Indeed, social media — where women seem especially eager to proclaim their heteropessimism — has always had a performative streak. TikTok in particular has become a venue for young women to find millions of viewers by posting front-facing-camera war stories from the front lines of straight dating. (Perhaps even more theatrical and widespread: the “trad wife” videos in which women dress as 1950s-era homemakers to play out fantasies about heterosexual coupledom and domesticity.)
Well aware that internet virality doesn’t always equal influence, even those who have gained followings with some of these ideas are somewhat skeptical that they’ll be put into practice.
“This 4B movement has gained so much traction because of the perceived popularity online,” said Hope Woodard, the comedian who originated the term “boysober” and last October set off on a yearlong break from sex and dating. “I see a video with 100,000 likes about 4B, but I’m curious — who’s liking that? Are people acting on it?”
Sex Wars, the Reboot?
The conversation about heteropessimism today echoes some of the fiercest debates between the leading feminists of the last century. During the movement’s second wave, which unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s, some women concluded that heterosexual romance and sex were among the great enemies of feminism and decided that the only viable path forward was one that left men in the dust.
These women drew on the theories of figures like Ti-Grace Atkinson, who viewed abstaining from sex with men as necessary for practicing feminist politics, and Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist who argued not that all sex was rape — often mistakenly attributed to her — but that heterosexual sex violates women’s privacy, freedom and self-determination and “expresses the power men have over women.”
Ms. Dworkin applied these ideas most vigorously to her crusade against pornography in the 1980s, which divided many feminists into two factions: “pro-sex” and “anti-sex,” with pro-sex feminists often accusing their opponents of having a bit too much in common with the Reaganite conservatives of the era.
Among the most vocal of these pro-sex feminists was the writer Ellen Willis, who viewed the anti-sex position as far too cynical. If relationships with men offered “nothing but violence and exploitation,” she wrote in a 1981 review of Ms. Dworkin’s book “Pornography,” then women’s attraction to them must mean either that men’s power is immutable or that women have lost the will to fight against it: “Where in this scenario is the possibility of struggle?” she wondered.
Still, Ms. Willis was worried that she and her comrades in Redstockings, the feminist group she had founded with Shulamith Firestone, had alienated the women who had adopted sexual separatism as a personal choice. In that same critical pan of Ms. Dworkin’s work, Ms. Willis allowed that “a feminism that does not take heterosexuality seriously can neither comprehend the average woman’s life nor spark a movement that might change it.”
Today, it seems clear that Ms. Willis’s view prevailed, with popular feminist movements taking up female sexual pleasure as a major cause in the decades that followed.
But it’s also possible to see glimmers of Ms. Dworkin’s thinking among today’s young women, even though most have probably never read her. Over the last few years, some have become more skeptical of the notion that sexual liberation can bring about any other sort of liberation, and find sex to be a source of disappointment. Sex positivity, one young person told BuzzFeed News in 2021, seemed “corny and naïve” for our time.
“Two years ago I had a huge breakup with my ex, and it totally derailed my life,” said NaDeara Caldwell, a 24-year-old social media manager from Philadelphia who said she had since been “willingly” single. “The fear of losing my independence has led me to stay away from that. Men have too much power to totally throw your life off, and I don’t want that for myself anymore.”
Disaffected Young Women
As some may wonder now “are women swearing off men?” I think of the similarly piquant question thrown down by Maureen Dowd, a columnist for this paper, in the title of her 2005 book “Are Men Necessary?” or the memorable title of Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men” in 2012.
The reader was intended to accept Ms. Rosin’s claim on its face as she reflected on how women had pulled ahead of men “by almost every measure.” Since the publication of her book, however, circumstances required her to backtrack: “The optimism! The smugness! The tragic naïveté!” she wrote in an essay for the Cut in 2021.
It can feel foolish to keep announcing that men’s power is waning and that women are about to run away with it (or already have) when reality seems intent on proving otherwise. But like Ms. Dowd’s and Ms. Rosin’s bold declarations, heteropessimism is a provocation that can crack open a space of feminist debate, even if heteropessimism itself isn’t particularly feminist.
“It’s probably beneficial to think about what’s happening online right now as part of a larger but still underdeveloped critique of heterosexuality and gender relations,” said Amanda Montei, the author of “Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control.” “And as part of a broader culture shift among women exploring what sort of agency they have over their sexual and reproductive lives, and what agency they have over their lives in general.”
It has never been terribly difficult to find a young woman disillusioned with hetero-coupling or romance. But as Ms. Montei suggests, the heteropessimistic spirit of the moment isn’t just about sex or dating. As anti-Trump women confront the stubborn persistence of patriarchy, they are also wrestling with a fear that perhaps little could ever change it.
Some of the women I spoke with framed their turn toward manless existences as partly a product of their disillusionment with the response to sexism and misogyny from the last time Mr. Trump won the presidency. Women had been too tame, they said, and large-scale efforts like the Women’s March and #MeToo, while promising at first, had not made the strides they had hoped.
“In 2016, it was all about the pink hats and storming to D.C.,” said Emily Lugo, 28, a bar manager at a brewery in the Hudson Valley who said she was distancing herself from men to explore dating women. “Now it’s like, we’ve tried all that, we’ve asked nicely, we’ve done the peaceful protests, and now I think we need to step it up a notch.”
Ms. Caldwell said that as a high schooler observing the #MeToo movement, it had given her hope. “I thought it would be the start of violence against women being taken more seriously and misogyny decreasing,” she said. “But unfortunately, we’re still dealing with sexual violence, and it’s still not taken seriously.”
Sentiments like these have made some worry that heteropessimism is not only a form of pessimism about heterosexuality but about feminism, too. That would line up with other signs of resignation around activism in the wake of Mr. Trump’s latest victory, as some anti-Trump voters said they feared the dangers of protesting or saw no use in it. It would also track with the longtime fears of many feminists that young women — perhaps adopting a warped understanding of the maxim “the personal is political” — are embracing individual lifestyle choices over collective struggle.
“I think it’s easier for people to think about their individual response to the inequality that Trump’s election may bring,” said Ms. Buggs, the Florida State University professor. “It’s a lot easier to have control over — well, I’m just not going to sleep with these kinds of people.”
But if heteropessimism doesn’t contain the seeds of feminist action, if most women continue to couple with men, does all of this agitation lead anywhere?
In his original essay, Mr. Seresin, too, argues that heteropessimism — perhaps still more meme than ideology — will do little to transform heterosexuality. He suggests the primary use of this outlook is “anaesthetic,” a way of numbing oneself against the stinging blows of heterosexual culture. Not merely against ghosting or love-bombing or learning, the hard way, that he’s “just not that into you,” but against the realization that the male power women may experience in their relationships reigns supreme on an even larger stage.
As politicians and pundits try to understand the source of young men’s disaffection, which they seem to have expressed in part by tuning into podcasts like Mr. Rogan’s and casting ballots for Mr. Trump’s masculine view of the world — it is worth considering that heteropessimism may be the defining ethos for a group of disaffected young women.
These two forms of disaffection may not be at odds with each other but mutually reinforcing: Each is fatalistic about the relationship between men and women, imagining it as subject to iron laws.
At the end of the political ad voiced by Ms. Roberts, the two women who shared the flicker of mutual recognition in their voting booths walk off screen together, suggesting sisterhood and comradeship. But if the viewer plays out the ad just a few moments into the future, one can imagine the wife who duped her husband at the polls getting into the car with him and returning to their home together, perhaps never to see the other woman again.
Heteropessimism, a closer reading of the ad suggests, is a fragile form of solidarity.
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