I’m not the only person to respond to Magdalene Taylor’s “heteropessimism” article in the New York Times.
Sarah Jones at NY Mag had a different take: “Yes, straight women are in trouble.” Perhaps, but she’s an unreliable narrator.
Heterosexual women are not okay. Probably they never have been. At least, that’s the story I keep reading online, where the worst of the worst tend to mingle. Boyfriends are embarrassing and dating is harder than ever because men won’t commit and do chores. If a woman does marry, her husband might end up hating her, based on the stories that flood Reddit each Mother’s Day. He might try an alpine divorce and leave her to die on a mountaintop. My friends are exhausted by the apps, and for many, the mere act of dating men can still feel like a risk, if only an emotional one.
That’s an accurate summary of recent trend pieces on this topic. But the last sentence is already a confession that she’s not ready for adult relationships. She’s married, but we’ll get to that.
The CONCEPT of a relationship is that you can have intimacy in exchange for vulnerability. If you have a problem with simple POSSIBILITY that your boyfriend can hurt your feelings, you’re engaged in some kind of bad faith and not a relationship. Feminists used to understand this. Andrea Dworkin wrote about it beautifully:
It is a fear based on the recognition of life’s impermanence; fear of being known, being seen and known in all one’s awful trouble and shabby dignity, having a witness to what one is and why, then to lose that astonishing grace. Life does not tolerate stasis; and there is no way of protecting love. In fucking, the deepest emotions one has about life as a whole are expressed, even with a stranger, however random or impersonal the encounter. Rage, hatred, bitterness, joy, tenderness, even mercy, all have their home in this passion, in this act; and to accept truly another person within those bounds requires that one must live with, if not conquer, the fear of being abandoned, thrown back alone…
REQUIRES being the key word. Sarah Jones is a little girl who hasn’t come to terms with this.
After summarizing Taylor’s original article, she writes:
But Taylor’s perspective is limited. We shouldn’t give up on romance, whether we are heterosexual or not, but we can only love in the world as it is, not the world as it could be. We’re human beings, and we’ll never free ourselves from politics or rhetoric. Nor should we try.
Resigning ourselves to the world as it is, the battle cry of liberal feminism. That was the exact schism that set us on the current path. The radical feminist second wavers were pondering what sex should look like in utopia, with the idea to start demanding that in reality. The liberal feminist third wave was literally a bunch of women who were like, “But I’m horny NOW and it’s kinda hot when my boyfriend dominates me.” So the radfems allied themselves with the branch of the patriarchy that wants madonnas, and the libfems allied themselves with the branch of the patriarchy that wants whores. These alliances continue in the TERF/SWERF debates. This was crudely put but historically accurate.
Libfems at Playboy don’t want to revolutionize society. News at 11. Of course, there’s a rhetorical gesture in the direction of change:
The problems facing heterosexuals aren’t so different from the problems facing everyone else. We’re navigating a society — and a political economy — that overworks and underpays so many of us that we become alienated from each other as well as ourselves. When we experience a flash of desire, sometimes it can feel like a fantasy, always out of reach. We make choices, but we do so within certain constraints. The point is to change the constraints and the politics and the rhetoric until it is easier to love, to want, and to live.
But that itself isn’t a political program.
Although it’s true that women can evade the worst of heterosexuality more easily than ever before, there are plenty of threats to consider. The manosphere is a noisy minority, but it’s hard to ignore the influence and political connections of misogynists like Andrew Tate. Most men don’t aspire to biblical patriarchy, with a helpmeet and brood of children, but men who do are in the White House.
“Andrew Tate” is always the generic conversation-stopper. The problem is that libfems aren’t sincere about wanting to change society, so they hypocritically demand traditional things of men despite their stated egalitarian beliefs. Men would be fine with that, except the libfems are rejecting the traditional social contract to go with it.
I’m not with those guys trying to take birth control away, but I should be able to observe that making sex inconsequential has had social consequences. The libfem ideal of “sleep with everyone until right before you want a baby, then find a schmuck” is very unpopular with men, for obvious reasons. The actual political crisis is that men are now starting to say, “Wow, women have had freedom for long enough that we can see the consequences, and maybe The Patriarchs were right that letting them loose will hurt civilization.” What I just wrote has much wider appeal than Andrew Tate the individual. By failing to address this kind of stuff, Jones et al. are just confirming the manosphere talking point that “women are allergic to accountability.” In debate terms, if you don’t address an argument, you’ve conceded it.
Even if pessimism has a “material origin,” it is only a performance. We can “eschew it” for “optimism.” But what does that look like? For Taylor, it’s the dogged pursuit of love. She will soon marry a man she’s known for years, who supports her and washes the dishes. I share her enthusiasm, if not her optimism. When I married a man five years ago, I knew I was making a choice, but I also knew I wasn’t entirely free. My decisions are shaped by a conservative upbringing, which forced me to hide my bisexuality for years and altered the course of my life. Today, the same pressure oozes from the highest levels of power. Like all American women, I am subject to laws and policies and structures that restrict my choices — in love, in childbearing, in work. Although I am glad I got married, it’s not an easy time for romance.
Needing therapy after the retardation of marrying someone like this is how I found out I’m autistic, so at least there’s that. She’s publicly writing about how she resents being a wife, so I don’t think their marriage is much longer for this world. It’s crimping her style. Being straight married is lame for queers.
The right isn’t pushing heterosexual romance to spread joy, but to make marriage a trap again. In fact, marriage is already a trap for a lot of people, mainly women. Though Taylor writes, blithely, that “women are no longer economically or legally bound to men,” she’s not telling the full truth. A stay-at-home mom can divorce her husband, but if she has no money or work history, she’s hardly free to do whatever she wants. “We have made the usual consequences of consensual, recreational sex essentially optional,” she adds, but that’s not true in America, where women die under abortion bans.
“Women have better sex under socialism” is indeed an interesting point. It’s even understood by right-wing men, who consider it theft that the state takes taxes away from their family to subsidize single moms. But libfems aren’t ACTUALLY communists, just accused of such by the manosphere. That’s why their answer to economic precarity is to celebrate OnlyFans instead of universal basic income.
The incoherence of her conclusion stands out:
Marriage to a man can of course be a healthy and beautiful thing. But true love isn’t necessarily a sign of progress for heterosexuals or anyone else. If hetero-optimism is modeled on an illusion, it is useless; like heteropessimism, it is a distraction from the colossal work ahead. In A Woman’s Liberation, the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of Rakam, who is born into slavery on a world far from Earth. Rakam wins her freedom, step by painful step, and becomes a historian and freedom fighter. By the end of the novella her struggle is not over, but she has found love, against her expectations. “What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species?” Rakam wonders. “A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens.”
So it can be healthy, begrudgingly, but it’s not a sign of progress. However, it’s also the gateway to…progress. She doesn’t write like she has heartfelt romantic notions of her OWN marriage.
The biggest thing women don’t seem to understand about the manosphere is that MEN SEE THE SHIT WOMEN ARE SAYING TO EACH OTHER, AND WE’RE TURNED OFF. Why get married if it’s just going to be someone like this complaining on the internet you didn’t do enough chores, just to impress her girlfriends she really cares about? That’s not the same thing as “misogyny.”
Yes, Andrew Tate fans talking about “misandry” is annoying. But it’s true: the women have contempt for men. This lady doesn’t respect her husband. He’s guilty for being straight and wanting her, because she’s childish.