Men and women are drifting apart. Marriage rates are declining. People are having fewer children. This is dangerous for society. That’s obvious. But that raises the question of why so much of our online discourse pits the sexes against each other, and why we’re becoming so pessimistic about partnering up — what’s come to be known as “heterofatalism.”
I’ve spent much of my career writing about religion and politics, not sex and dating. But I think the two aren’t as separate as they appear. Religion, at its core, is about how we order our desires.
Magdalene Taylor, a senior editor at Playboy, writes about sex the way I try to write about religion — as something too important to be left to the ideologues on either side. She’s become one of the sharpest chroniclers and critics of heterofatalism. In her writing, she argues for a kind of return to normalcy, in which dating, desiring others and marriage are proof that we’re fully alive.
Taylor is more skeptical than I am about prescribing how people “should” live. I think there’s no getting around the fact that some ways of living are better than others, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say so. Still, in a recent conversation, we kept circling back to the same worry: that a certain digital antagonism has convinced men and women that their happiness comes at each other’s expense, when it actually doesn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t.
What follows is a discussion about blame, marriage, desire and the strange fact that pickup artists — much maligned — got one thing right: Wanting someone enough to risk rejection is not, in itself, a sin.
Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity.
Shadi Hamid: You’ve written that heterosexuality is in a state of unrest and that it’s our fault. Now, I know we shouldn’t oversimplify things, but who do you think is more to blame — men or women?
Magdalene Taylor: I know you would probably really like me to pick one, but I can’t, and I won’t. And I don’t think it would be helpful in solving this bigger problem. I do think that misogyny is looming very heavily in the current moment, where the reality is that a lot of men hate women in both overt and more subtle ways. Much of the dislike of men that women express is a result of the history of misogyny. Whether they’re actually experiencing that misogyny in their day-to-day is a different thing.
Let’s talk about the manosphere. These are men who resent women, and their ranks may be growing. Some of this is tied to the fact that men are falling behind on various social metrics and therefore lack confidence. Instead of looking inward, they’re projecting their disappointment onto the opposite sex.
Men’s educational attainment is indeed declining, and their frustrations are entirely warranted. People in the manosphere want to blame feminism for those problems. Of course, it is the result of feminism that women now have the same educational opportunities and have surpassed men in a lot of ways. Is that some kind of sinister plot of feminism to put men in a secondary position? Of course not.
Is the “crisis” as bad as people think? It seems to me that some of it may be a product of the negativity bias in our online discourse. Men and women meeting each other and getting along is boring; a bad date, by contrast, is more interesting and something we can relate to more viscerally. On average, straight people are still interested in being with the opposite sex.
Most of us are not, on a day-to-day basis, encountering vocal misogyny or misandry in real life. However, if you look on TikTok, if you look on X, there’s such an abundance of that content that it would lead you to think that’s what everybody around you is thinking. That’s one of my broader arguments — that we’re allowing our personal, intimate decisions to be dictated by what we see on the internet rather than by our own desires.
Let’s assume, whether it’s exaggerated or not, that there is some kind of problem that’s unique to our current moment. Why should we care? If some men don’t like women and some women don’t like men, maybe they’re just exercising their freedom of choice. Some elite female writers talk a big game about “heterofatalism,” but the truth is that highly educated women are still partnered or married at high rates — it’s actually the marriage rates of their working-class counterparts that have suffered most. What are the ultimate stakes here?
With the marriage stuff, I have a complicated relationship to it. I’m getting married, and I very much support the idea of people getting married, but it’s not necessarily the end-all of how we navigate relationships.
For me it’s a question of what kind of world you want to live in. If you’re happily married with children, it would stand to reason that you’d hope for that kind of happiness for others. What we’re seeing, though, at least through this very digital sphere, is that the world around us is becoming far more antagonistic. That’s not the kind of world I’d like to live in. I think that’s also true for the male loneliness crisis — a lot of women feel they have no reason to care that men are lonely and miserable. It isn’t to say it’s any particular woman’s responsibility to address the loneliness epidemic. But the question is: Do you want to live in a world surrounded by miserable, lonely men?
And what you brought up — that declining marriage rates are actually a much bigger problem for working-class people than for the educated writers writing about heterofatalism — that’s such a crucial point, because what I’m very suspicious of is that it’s become the politically popular, feminist-coded position to support heterofatalism, to support separation from men. We’ve intellectualized this problem and made it the progressive thing to feel, when I think it’s not actually more liberating or helpful to many of the women who will bear the brunt of these issues.
You said you have a complicated relationship with marriage.
I’m getting married, so obviously I support the institution. While I think marriage is good, and I love the idea of people getting married, I wouldn’t want to tell women that marriage is specifically the thing they have to aspire to in order to get to a healthier place in gender relations.
Do you think it’s more difficult to be happy without being married?
There’s data to suggest that’s the case — that people are actually happier partnered. That’s also one of the cultural myths in our current expectations: I very often hear it repeated that single, childless women are the happiest — happier than married women with children.
Do you still hear that? That’s fascinating to me because I feel the evidence against it is overwhelming.
Yes. I hear it from women around me all the time — that single, childless women are the happiest. People believe that’s true.
I want to talk to you about desire. You wrote in one of your pieces, “The reason I have made any of this my crusade from the start is because desire is a societal good. It is a marker of cultural vitality. Young straight men with any interest in ‘masculinity’ should be horny for women.” From a religious standpoint, desire is fine and natural, but it’s also something to be constrained, because it can too easily turn into lust.
A lot of the current desire that exists in our culture is indeed lustfully informed. We’re in a position right now where a lot of people are struggling to tell the difference between a healthy desire for another human being and a lust-driven impulse.
For me personally, lust carries so many implications. A lot of this conversation is that we’re struggling to identify what’s sexy versus sexual, erotic versus sexual versus pornographic. A lot of this current gender antagonism is encouraging us to step away from real human desire for one another. We should see ourselves as people with desires. That’s sort of what heterofatalism bemoans — the reality that we’re people with desires — and it suggests we can separate ourselves from those desires. But desire is a cultural good for society. I think it’s productive, and it’s something we should be conscious about connecting to.
I really liked your piece in defense of the pickup artist. The pickup artist went out of fashion because it seemed wrong to hit on women just for the purpose of having sex with them. You’ve argued for a more nostalgic view — that pickup artists might have been misogynists, but at least they actually seemed to like women and like being with them.
A lot of people interpret the pickup artist thing as men who weren’t just manipulating women into sex but were tricking them into it — which surely was the reality for some of them. However, I think we can pull one optimistic kernel of truth from pickup artistry: Desire is a negotiation between two people, and desire can be cultivated. The useful idea for men is that you may not be very successful with women right now, but it’s something you can work on.
A lot of manosphere/incel culture wants to suggest there’s some internal aura to a man that dictates his sexual and romantic future. I don’t think that’s true. There’s something very old-school about liking women enough to go up to them and being brave enough to talk to a stranger.
There are still certain practices even women can pull from that ethos — meeting people, having conversations be a kind of negotiation. This isn’t all set in stone; to reject the heterofatalist attitude is to say we’re not dead in the water here. We can all improve, work on ourselves and achieve what we really want.
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