It’s basic politics that propaganda doesn’t usually work through persuasive argument. Instead, you simply present your worldview as neutral with all the important ideas as assumptions taken for granted.
Magdalene Taylor’s new article in the New York Times is in that style. It presents itself as an evenhanded lament of “heteropessimism” and the gender wars, as if the author and her belief system had nothing to do with it. She’s an editor at Playboy. Of course it’s her fault.
Gender relations are tense to the point of hostility these days. Straight men and women are politically and culturally divided. We’re in a world of Andrew Tate and OnlyFans, trad wives and incels. Just over half of single men and women alike report feeling pessimistic about finding a partner they’ll be happy with. Our prospective other halves, women say of men, are at best clueless and emotionally immature and at worst actively toxic. Among men, women are often viewed as romantically spoiled, drowning in options we’re too self-absorbed to select from if we’re even worth their time at all. It’s no wonder we aren’t having much sex.
Remember that she’s fully aware men have said the problem is women’s sense of endless options created by their phones. That’s significant, because she goes on to praise “women’s choices” like any liberal feminist of the last 30 years. Choice, agency, consent. These are the shibboleths of the libfems.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say it: There has still never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue heterosexuality, if that is your thing, as it is mine. As straight Americans, we are in the midst of a period of all-but-unprecedented sexual, social and romantic liberty. We have greater freedom than ever before to become whom we want and to date whom we want. And with that should come an optimism strong enough to render the gender wars irrelevant.
Of course it’s always been true that we’re free in the existential sense, and our relationships are what we make them. That was the premise of the counterculture feminism used to be a part of. But this is hardly a reassuring response to “the women have let the sense of choice go to their heads and made them awful.”
Heteropessimism is, at bottom, little more than a bad mood about the state of being straight. It is the pervasive sense that heterosexuality is fundamentally flawed and unfulfilling — even structurally unsalvageable. Sometimes, heteropessimists argue that it’s not strictly heterosexuality that is unfulfilling but the opposite gender itself. As Mr. Seresin noted, heteropessimism tends to involve “a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem.” Heteropessimism is the depressing feeling that the relationships humans have been having for thousands of years are now in a state of total disrepair, and that we are only setting ourselves up for disappointment in attempting to buy in at all. The opposite sex is a trap best avoided.
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality is actually a great book. It’s written by a lesbian versed in second wave feminism feeling sorry for her straight friends because men haven’t figured out their madonna/whore complexes. Her lesbian relationships don’t suffer from the problem that it’s hard to like and fuck the same person. It’s a good point. It’s not just the cliche of being bitter Chad won’t settle down with you.
Introducing heteropessimism, Mr. Seresin wrote that it was more often performative than factual — a kind of social-media-fueled blowing off of steam more than an actual decoupling from coupling. Ultimately, it is a rationalization — a way of chalking up our romantic failures and fears as something embedded in the political structures. And of course, in many ways, they might be. Women are getting more and more liberal; men, increasingly conservative. That mismatch is indeed something broader than an awkward first date, a gap widening among the younger generation.
The key is that both the liberalism and the “heteropessimism” are insincere, and that’s an annoying turn-off. “Do something about the madonna/whore complex at scale” really is a difficult political problem, and it gets to the heart of the issue. It’s not a “cope” to observe that relationships are failing in the way that they’re failing.
This is almost like the beginning of accountability:
The performativity isn’t all gone, but in the past year or so, heteropessimism has become a different beast. Essay after essay has chronicled the “trouble with wanting men,” as Jean Garnett wrote last summer, and men’s “retreat” from intimacy, as Rachel Drucker wrote around the same time. Ms. Drucker wants men to “come back” — but how can we urge them to do so when women are so keen to frame a desire for men as “trouble” to begin with? Last October, Chanté Joseph wrote in Vogue about how having a boyfriend is socially “embarrassing.” It’s “fundamentally uncool to be a boyfriend-girl,” she wrote. Why would men want to be with women who don’t want them?
Women hating on men to flex for each other is a turn-off to men. Who would have thought?
Heteropessimism isn’t just for women. Men like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers — influencers who are accused of human trafficking and rape — also promote a form of heteropessimism. Their basic argument is that women are not worth the time or are something to dominate and discard, that there is something wrong with them and men are better off alone. These manosphere figures are far less thoughtful and far more hateful in their wording than feminist heteropessimists, but their argument is functionally equivalent. Both groups argue that the other half is just bad. Give up, they tell us. Both are willing to let the cycle of loneliness and atomization continue.
No, that is not their “basic argument.” As a divorced middle aged guy on the internet, the algorithms show me red pill stuff. It’s saying there’s something SPECIFIC wrong with women’s sexual choices, called hypergamy. It’s the fact that social media is essentially just dating apps and they’re all about receiving sexual attention from other men. Since that’s basically all women, we have the rise of MGTOW.
It’s a trend that men are fed up with women’s bullshit, and this is a collective response. “Hold the line, gents.” We can handle loneliness better than women so they’ll break first.
But even most young men — the demographic Mr. Fuentes and the Tates seek to appeal to — aren’t interested in what they’re selling. Young men continue to hold more positive views of gender equality than do men of other generations: A 2025 YouGov survey of men in Britain found that younger men were more likely to hold progressive gender attitudes than their older peers, and 71 percent of young men had a negative opinion of Mr. Tate. Just 6 percent of young men “have a negative opinion of women” — half as many as reported a negative opinion of men. Globally, per a recent Ipsos survey, more men than ever identify as feminists, with Gen Z taking the highest share.
Just give it time.
My stupid ass married a polyamorous Tumblrina in my 20s and I’m a sad, lonely husk of a person in my 40s, bitter about liberal feminism. Many such cases, as Taylor’s blog is titled.
One problem with heteropessimism is its tendency to closely link personal choices with politics. Rebecca L. Davis, a historian and the author of a history of sex in America, said the second-wave feminist slogan “the personal is political” had seeped too deeply into the public consciousness. The slogan, she told me, insists that many things once seen as personal failures should be viewed as results of structural problems. The feminism of the 1970s emphasized that the problem was not with “the male sex,” but rather that society as a whole was flawed. Heteropessimists take “the personal is political” as a literal, narrow axiom, returning responsibility to the individual, rather than focusing on social pressures.
In other words, “heteropessimists” are frivolous people who don’t understand their own slogans. Sounds about right.
For feminists like Andrea Dworkin, that meant viewing dating men as a failure of personal politics. It’s the same type of thinking that leads contemporary young women to ask, “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” Dr. Davis doesn’t think that framework is quite right. “Big, structural problems” might perpetuate inequalities, she explained, but seeing heterosexuality “as a problem,” and one that “dooms you to a certain kind of disappointment,” fails to address the root of the problem. It may, in fact, create new problems in itself.
In the Feminist Sex Wars, the libfems were the ones who wanted to keep masochistically fucking their Chad boyfriends. What Andrea Dworkin said was more like “men will never take us seriously if we’re hypocrites.” The manosphere is acctually butthurt that women are rejecting the social contract. They want traditional masculinity and they want to shit talk men to their friends. They want to be treated like wives with no concept of what obligations and responsibilities that might entail. God forbid giving up any of their freedom for a man!
We have made the usual consequences of consensual, recreational sex essentially optional.
This is wishful thinking. Men are like, “Wow, look at the dead eyes on that 304.” It’s obvious.
I am a hetero-optimist because I’m in love. But I also know that our relationship is the product of intention — of a confident commitment to each other — as much as it is a matter of luck. These feelings are available to anyone. I want other people to have what we do.
Um…no, those feelings are not available to anyone.
Forget the gender wars: Let’s go forth with the excitement and fun we deserve. Now is the time to be hetero-optimists.
Women: commonly considered eternal teenagers in manosphere comment sections. “I want excitement and fun” doesn’t actually sound like “expected to be a devoted wife and mother.” It sounds like someone who’s going to get bored and take half your shit after cheating on you and crushing your self-esteem to dust.
Men are increasingly over it. What these articles never admit is that “manosphere” content basically consists of damning shit women post about themselves to the internet.
Men being sad about what was lost: