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Straight women are in the midst of a quiet crisis — because these days, there's nothing more embarrassing than falling in love with a (gagging noise) straight man. After all, social media is filled to the brim with rhetoric about the many shortcomings of almost, if not all of the potential male partners out there. An example of a recent doomscroll: one video shows a woman picking up after her sloppy partner. In another, a woman quizzes him on his pitiful contributions to the childcare. A third clip shows yet another woman befuddled by her partner's gaming addiction. Next, a serious woman stares into the camera and proselytises about the “red flags” that mean you should “leave him immediately.” “Men, am I right,” each woman seems to say with a despairing eye roll as Sabrina Carpenter's “Manchild” plays over top the clip.
It seems that a lot of straight women are coming to the realisation that while they might date them, love them, marry them and have kids with them, they don't always actually like straight men all that much. And, in turn, some women are beginning to perform their dissatisfaction and embarrassment at their own heterosexuality. We've all heard the phrases “being straight sucks” or “why do I have to like men” coming out of our straight friends' mouths. Then there are dating safety apps like Tea, which aims to warn straight women about toxic men before they date them. Some Facebook groups and sub-Reddits have also sprung up for women looking to vet their male partners — many are "are we dating the same guy” groups, a phenomenon that sees women sharing the profiles of the men they are dating to see if other women who may have dated them in the past can offer any sight. In 2019, Asa Seresin gave all of this a name: “heteropessimism.”
The subversion of this classic misogynistic trope is glorious to see.
A Londoner currently completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, Seresin described the concept in the New Inquiry. Heteropessimism is, he wrote, “a mode of feeling with a long history, and which is particularly palpable in the present.” It consists of “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment or hopelessness about straight experience," he went on.
According to Dr. Jilly Kay, a lecturer at Loughborough University who specialises in feminist media and cultural studies, heteropessimism is a state of “lamenting” one's own sexual preferences. “Many straight women will lament the fact that they are heterosexual, because dating men can be so unsatisfying, humiliating or even degrading,” she tells us. “But having identified the problems with heterosexual culture, there is no vision or ambition to transform or improve gender power relations. For the most part, women do continue dating men.”
This leaves many straight women feeling a sense of despair and a kind of doomed resignation. “Heteropessimism is a deeply fatalistic attitude, a kind of weary resignation that heterosexuality is fundamentally not working for women on a massive scale, but that there’s nothing that can really be done about it,” she says.
Of course, there are valid reasons for certain levels of dissatisfaction amongst straight woman who likes straight men. After all, each of the eye roll-inducing videos I described above pinpoints very real, very common dynamics that have been normalised in many heterosexual relationships. As Kay puts it, “[There are] real problems [women] are responding to.”
Subtle, but insidious inequalities are baked into the foundations of many straight male-female relationships. The gender pay gap remains a real source of inequality for women — on average, working women take home £631 less than men each month – that’s around £7,572 over the year. Not only are women making less money for the same amount of work, in heterosexual relationships, they are usually saddled with the majority of the housework, childcare and even mental load. More often than not, the woman finds herself taking on jobs like cooking, laundry, tidying, while she's also ends up being the one remembering when to book everyone's doctor's appointments, what time that delivery is coming tomorrow, to send his mother a birthday card, and so on.
As a modern, empowered woman, putting up with all of this feels, well, embarrassing. And the fact that so many straight women are putting up with it is only amplified by social media.
“Heteropessimism a very helpful way of capturing a widespread mood,” Kay explains. "Digital culture has changed dating for women, which now operates increasingly like a capitalist marketplace, in which people see themselves as consumers who are looking for the best deal, but are never satisfied.
“Digital culture allows women to share their negative experiences of dating,” she goes on. “This means that these problems become visible and women realise that their experiences are not isolated – this gives rise to a collective feeling of pessimism and despair.”
In other words, when you see the gendered issues you may experience in your own relationship reflected back on a large scale online, you might naturally jump to the assumption that all heterosexual relationships are inherently doomed.
Then there's the fact that an increasing number of men are, effectively, doubling down. Rather than reflecting on their own shortcomings as partners and trying to find more equality in their heterosexual relationships, some men are turning to the dangerous rhetoric of the “manosphere” to explain their own dissatisfaction with heterosexual dating.
“Arguably digital culture has taken all the worst aspects of heterosexual dating – the objectification of women, their being treated as disposable objects, and so on – and intensified them," says Kay. "The logics and practices of the manosphere – gaslighting, negging – have become mainstreamed.”
“The prevalence of manosphere logics and practices in everyday life means that it is difficult to advise women to always go into heterosexual relationships without some degree of caution,” Kay says.
But while heteropessimism may often be justified by practical realities that do need to be addressed, it can do more harm than good. Proudly stating that you “wish you weren't straight” or that you “are done with all men” is not really all that helpful.
“The problem is that it leads to a fatalist way of thinking,” Kay says. “It can also lead to very reductive and essentialistic ideas about men – that they are all bad, or that men are hardwired to behave in a certain way.”
From emotional abuse to ‘alpha male’ worship, this year’s villa bros are toxic and terrifyingly relatable.
Though the rhetoric of the manosphere and straight women's version of heteropessimism may look very different, below the surface, they both serve one ultimate purpose: to make our approach to romance more transactional and more fearful than ever. “It can make women increasingly wary of men, and to try and suppress their romantic feelings towards them, as a way to protect themselves,” Kay says. “We see this everywhere in digital culture, where we are encouraged not to ‘catch feelings’ because this will weaken our hand when it comes to the game of heterosexuality. Relationships therefore become more transactional. There is increasingly a sense of ‘what can I get out of this?’”
So, what is the solution? Unfortunately, it requires collective action rather than individual pessimism. “In my view, this isn’t a problem that women can solve as individuals," Kay concludes. "Historically, feminism has been about collectively organising to change the conditions that oppress and disadvantage women. Rather than fatalistically accepting that heterosexuality will always be awful for women, we need to have a collective vision of a better society."
