heteropessimism

soooo 2025 is almost over and i still have not written a single blog post. nice. to feel less bad about it, i decided to recover an old draft i had sitting on a notebook since the end of this summer. here it goes.

have you ever read a sentence that made you say "wow" out loud? Jean Garnett's article "The Trouble With Wanting Men" had that effect on me, multiple times. to understand why, please take a look at this:

"Privately, jokes aside, I am quite susceptible to penis — like, I worry that in some Hobbesian state of nature I might just automatically kneel to the prettiest one — but lately I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want, and this bawdy, diminishing humor soothed me, made me feel more powerful, more in control."

or this:

We turned eventually to the subject of erotic temperament. He was interested in the possibilities that arise between people when any eventuality of marriage, procreation or fidelity was, so to speak, taken off the bed. What might then happen in that bed? In that community? In that world? Watching his clean-cut boyish form and listening to him speak with the eloquent enthusiasm of a connoisseur, the phrase that occurred to me was “sex nerd.” Many dabblers in nonmonogamy were not really, he noted with a laugh, quoting the rapper Pusha T, “’bout dat life.” He was.

i highly recommend you listen to the audio version by Kirsten Potter here. the narration is simply amazing. if you prefer reading -- or don't have a New York Times subscription -- you can read it here instead.

anyway, the piece talks about "heteropessimism", a feeling many straight women share. common heteropessimistic expressions include: "ughh, i really hope i was a lesbian", "why do men suck so hard?", and variants such as “I wish I could just be gay with you” (said by one disappointed woman to another).

the essay is sprinkled with real stories from Garnett's life. the first one mentions a man by the name of "J.". Garnett explains J. and her had been talking for a few weeks. he texted her about how eager he was to see her blah blah blah... but, in the end, on the day they were supposed to meet, J. tells her: "I was really looking forward to seeing you again, but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low : ("

then Garnett and her friends proceed to mock him, calling him a "baby" and "fraidy-cat". she adds:

We were four women at a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan; we knew what show we were in, and we couldn’t help but wonder, in a smug, chauvinistic way: Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?

to be fair, the article is far more nuanced than that. the author even includes a male perspective from her "lover-slash-friend-slash-male-sensitivity-reader" towards the end.

but as a non-binary person mostly seen by others as a man, and who struggles with relationships, this feels personal. too personal. in fact, when i first heard that section, i thought "shit, that sounds like something i could do". here goes another very relatable section:

I haven’t been dating long [...] but long enough to discover that I have a type. He is gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a “good guy.” He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of “men,” and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.

(yes, i'd like to be excluded from the tainted category of men, thank you so much)

i'd like to disclose that 95% of my friends are women. so, even if i didn't know it had a name, i was familiar with the concept of heteropessimism. i've heard my fair share of heteropessimistic comments. i truly understand why they feel like that, and generally agree with them. yes, most men DO suck at expressing their feelings. there's even a fancy name for it! "normative male alexithymia", or "the inability to express, describe, or distinguish among one’s emotions, found in boys and men reared to conform to traditional masculine norms".

even though i understand my friends' complaints, hearing them makes me feel as if being a "good partner" is literally impossible. you can't be too nice or soft: “a good man is hard to want”, the saying goes. you can't be indecisive, but you definitely shouldn't be too decisive. you have to learn to "communicate", but do it too often and you become annoying.

some women who rightfully hate being stereotyped often say stuff like "men only want sex", "all men suck", etc. i really want to emphasize that here i really do mean some women, not "most women", and certainly not "all women". it's just very frustrating how, when faced with behaviors or relationship dynamics we don't agree with, we only respond by throwing even more hurtful stereotypes at the problem. i don't think it's very productive or fair. i agree with the author on this front:

I would like to believe there is something purposeful, resistant, even radical in the heterofatalist mode, but the more I voice it, the more I am inclined to agree with Seresin that it can produce nothing but more of itself. “Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem,” he writes. “It doesn’t make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution.” It isn’t that my friend needs to find “some other way to live”; it’s that we all do.