The Trouble With Hating Men: What The NYT Got Wrong

Of course, the desire to love and be loved is so innate that it persists throughout human history. It’s probably the most consistent throughline linking the modern human race to our earliest ancestors, even if they lacked the language to put it in such terms. The recent rom-com, Materialists, riffed on this, depicting ancient, cave-dwelling man engaging in the same sort of courtship rituals we see today.

Heterosexual problems are nothing new, per se. We’ve designated jokes and media depictions to represent the sort of garden-variety neurosis characteristic of being smitten, swooned, and disappointed by the opposite sex for what feels like forever. “I wish I could just be a lesbian” was a common tongue-in-cheek retort of the aughts, uttered by disaffected women stuck in the cat-and-mouse chase with an emotionally unavailable man. 

As for men, they had their own wisecracks that amounted to cynical comments about the ‘ole ball and chain. And yet, until very recently, I never got the sense that men and women were genuinely suffering from their normative sexuality: the one that keeps the human race alive. All that hoopla about living in a heteronormative society took for granted that heterosexuality was a position of privilege, so why do so many feel oppressed by their sexual orientation? 

The Reinforcing Online Feedback Loops of Heteropessimism 

Verbose, dread-inducing words like “heteropessimism” and “heterofatalism” have entered the lexicon, in what feels like a worrying love recession indicator. I’ve read the thinkpieces, laughed a little, empathized, and shook my head. It’s, of course, nothing but more ideological coping and self-sabotage, but it makes me wonder why people can’t see how far gone social media has rendered them. They can recognize TikTok-induced brain rot—the shortened attention span, dopamine addiction, inhibited focus, decision fatigue, the slow erosion of executive function. 

Yet, they believe themselves to be impervious to the psychological warfare of dating discourse, even as it leaves them growing more cynical by the day, more jaded, less charitable, and more sexist. Romantic disillusionment feels as ubiquitous as the common cold. Everyone has a scapegoat: dating apps, an upheaval of traditional gender roles without deprogramming ingrained gendered preferences, feminism, misogyny, even just deducing the dating pool is filled with a bunch of generationally inferior defects. Yet, they don’t present solutions to these problems beyond insisting the other has to change per their uncompromising preferences, usually involving ideological purity tests. 

Verbose, dread-inducing words like “heteropessimism” and “heterofatalism” have entered the lexicon, in what feels like a worrying love recession indicator.

People are less interested in discovering the inner worlds of the opposite sex, of engaging in the tension of the push and pull, and negotiating how they relate to one another. Instead, people want pre-programmed partners that don’t diverge from them in thoughts or opinions. In this sense, the sex robot problem is already here. But no one seems to want a solution. They want to romanticize their suffering. Suffering that’s baked in by virtue of the selection effects taking place here—chasing noncommittal men who make no secret of their avoidance from day one or whose adherence to particular mating rituals (like polyamory) is already dysfunctional. Men don’t go to strip clubs looking for love. If they do, they’ll be rightfully humbled or chalked up to going through a midlife crisis. 

It makes me wonder why women would rather coin new neologisms to throw their hands up in the air in the face of their dating discontents and declare themselves unambiguously not the problem. It’s not me, it’s men. It’s nature’s cruel sense of humor to make me desire that which hurts me, they tell themselves. I ought to commiserate with other delusionally unreflective women, develop a pseudointellectual theory of mind for men that is no more accurate than it is a projection. 

The Origins of Heteropessimism & Heterofatalism

Asa Seresin coined the term heteropessimism in 2019, defining it as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience." He characterized it as a viewpoint that tends to zero in on men as the root of the problem, even though there are male equivalent heteropessimist ideologies, like incels. By “performative,” he clarifies he doesn’t mean insincerity but an unwillingness to forfeit their heterosexuality, whether through political lesbianism or some comparable gender separatism movement emphasizing romantic abstinence from male sex and relationships, like South Korea’s 4B movement.

Seresin compares straight women who emphasize how ashamed they are of being straight to white people who make jokes about "stuff white people like.” This performative distancing of oneself from whiteness or heterosexuality in an attempt for redemption appears progressive, Seresin says, but sidesteps responsibility. “If heteropessimism’s purpose is personal absolution, it cannot be justice.” One of its major pitfalls, he argues, is that its adherents aren’t so much interested in “collectively changing the conditions of straight culture” as they are in commiserating with friends and then keeping on as usual. Internalizing the state of men as a personal issue rather than a collective one prohibits the opportunity for solidarity and real change. 

According to Seresin, heterosexual culture needs to be urgently revolutionized, because “tens of thousands of women” are dying of it every year (worldwide) in the form of domestic violence and murder. Seresin also cites social movements like #MeToo and South Africa’s #MenAreTrash protests against intimate partner violence (IPV) to establish that gender dynamics need urgent reform. “Heteropessimism might seem like a starting point of that revolution, but in reality, its anesthetizing force has had the ironic effect of stalling some of the momentum of these movements,” he claims. Essentially, the self-deprecation about straight relationships became more of a meme than anything affecting real change to “straight culture.”

It romanticizes suffering, improves nothing, and grooms you not only to expect, but seek out the worst in people.

He goes so far as to claim heterosexuality poses a fatal threat to anyone, of any gender, who exists in public spaces like movie theaters, schools, offices, or the mall, given that most mass shooters have histories of domestic violence. Who’d have guessed that violent, murderous psychopaths exhibit violent, psychopathic, murderous behavior? Because of greater male variability, men tend to be overrepresented at the extremes of the bell curve for most traits, including violence. 

That the worst among them commit atrocities says more about statistical outliers than it does about heterosexuality or the average man. I could easily cite the fact that men who have sex with other men are 23 times more likely to contract HIV as evidence that “homosexual culture” needs reform. Of course, it’s true that men pose a greater threat to women generally than women ever will to men, but this is more of a gendered propensity for harm (not necessarily aggression, as women often engage in more low-level physical aggression in relationships than men) rather than a tie to sexual orientation.

Though Seresin indulges in some nauseatingly utopian claims like the supposed inevitability of “universal queerness” and the “abolition of gender” as if that’s a good thing (and perhaps his sincerity is underscored by the fact that he was a woman when he originally wrote this thinkpiece and has since transitioned and changed his name) and dismisses male strains of heteropessimism as “neither ethically nor logically equivalent to those made by women,” he does land on one valid point. Conflating heterosexuality with misogyny obscures the real target: gendered violence, or what feminists might call “patriarchy,” and framing heterosexuality as irredeemable makes reform impossible.

While I reject the notion that it’s heterosexuality itself that needs redemption, Seresin pre-emptively rebuts the sort of handwringing “woe is me, I’m burdened with the desire of men” self-pity of the sort The New York Times just published in “The Trouble With Wanting Men.” Ironically, Jean Garnett writes a lengthy, pretentious manifesto that builds upon Seresin’s theory, despite Seresin explicitly condemning such pointless self-indulgent navel-gazing from the outset. 

The NYT’s Case Study in Self-Sabotage

To clarify, heterofatalism is the same as heteropessimism; Seresin merely updated the term to avoid confusion with parallels to afropessimism. It’s hard to know where to begin with Garnett’s rambling, incoherent essay about the horrors of dating men. To start with, she buries the lead of the story in a way that is so comically revealing and unapparent to her, it’s akin to a schizophrenic rambling about the men who live in the walls, revealing an astonishing lack of insight that is equal parts frustrating as it is sad. 

Garnett is fed up with men, or more specifically, the kind of men she selects for, which evidently consists of self-loathing men with commitment issues who will say anything to get into a woman’s pants. She goes on to describe in no less specific terms that her type is basically the meme of the performative male manipulator: "gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a ‘good guy.’” Girl, if you don’t run….

It gets worse. “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.” I know people are tired of the “imagine if the roles were reversed” retort, but I mean, seriously, if you’re going to write this drivel so unashamedly, how can you even look down on incels or misogynists who wax philosophic about the state of modern women? 

Reverse the gender roles and the absurdity is obvious. Everyone knows the self-loathing woman who never stops broadcasting how awful women are—how she’s “not like the other girls.” She isn’t just an insufferable pick-me; she’s a walking red flag. Her disconnection from her own femininity warps her psychology, breeding alienation from other women and producing all kinds of strange dynamics. So why would anyone expect better results from men with the same pathology, whether performative or, worse, sincere, who’ve divorced themselves from their masculinity? And then to blame the inevitable disappointments on systemic rather than personal pitfalls?

Here’s where we learn of Garnett’s backstory and what a catch she is: she’s a recent divorcee with a young child who fell for the gimmick of opening up her marriage at the suggestion of her husband. Luckily, he got his karma in the form of Garnett falling in love with one of her new sexual partners, which led her to decide she needed to end her marriage. She found it “intolerable, after a while, to care that much, in that way, for one person while being married to another.” She describes a rather conventional sexuality: “I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration,” things she admits she wanted with this new lover, but which he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) commit to.

Garnett is a walking advertisement for what your life could horrifyingly look like if you don’t take radical responsibility of your own love life.

He was clear with her from the beginning that he was commitment-phobic, but she seemingly thought she could fix him. Chasing after opportunistic f***boys and then crying about it is hardly feminist pedagogy, though. It’s no less illuminating than the redpillers who exclusively argue with women with OnlyFans and extrapolate that onto “muh fallen state of women.”

The opening anecdote of the article describes a man she had been seeing, whom she was eager to sleep with, who texted her, “I was really looking forward to seeing you again, but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.” While she claimed to understand, she admits she didn't. “A man should want me urgently or not at all," she confessed in writing. It should be obvious from these two examples alone that this woman is trapped in a feedback loop of chasing the very men that disappoint her, but she commiserates with friends who fill her head with delusional cope instead of intuiting these men don’t have “anxiety” stopping them from having sex with or committing to her. He’s just not that into you. 

Garnett even suggests bitching about her dating woes is a form of resistance and, in complaining that men are not wanting her badly enough, communicating with her clearly enough, or devoting themselves to her, decides it warrants an "ism," and concludes the problem cannot be her. “It must be men, right?" she asks rhetorically. "Men are what is rotten in the state of straightness, and why shouldn’t we have an all-inclusive byword for our various pessimisms about them?” she asks, citing unequal division of domestic labor, risk of IPV, and sexual grievances of men's inability to locate the clitoris. “And the petulantly proud masculinist subcultures that have arisen, at least in part, as reactions to these pessimisms keep coughing up new reasons to fear, rage against and complain about ‘men.’” Because this essay inspires so much amicability between the sexes...

However, those men are admittedly not even the ones she and her friends feel bleak about. “It's the sweet, good ones.” She describes men's widespread struggle to communicate in romantic relationships as so pervasive that it has earned the psychological designation "normative male alexithymia," meaning an inability to put words to emotions. She complains this leaves women to do the emotional labor of becoming relationship-maintenance experts. Even more taxing is “hermeneutic labor,” which is a form of gendered exploitation in intimate relationships, describing the work women do to interpret “mystifying male cues.” 

Imagine the raucous laughter we’d all work ourselves into if a socially awkward guy clearly lacking in looks and charisma, insisted the woman he keeps badgering’s constant evasiveness is giving off "mystifying cues" that he’s doing the "hermeneutic labor" of dissecting. Or worse, the articles about “mankeeping” I keep seeing, which find a way to bitch about the opposite male problem: actually confiding in their wives for emotional intimacy, which they regard as doing the unpaid emotional labor of a therapist. 

Per VICE and The Guardian, this is why women are done with dating. But I thought it was because they can’t communicate their emotions? How can you seriously ask men to be groveling, longhoused soyboys and complain that they’re, well, pussies? I’m a big advocate for personal preferences. If you want a stoic man who would rather die than be vulnerable, I think that’s valid. But you need to make peace with the tradeoffs that come with it. Same for the opposite disposition. If you’re baiting someone to be a sensitive, woke, male feminist, to turn around and say that their anxiety gives you the ick and that men need to "man up and f*** us" is borderline sociopathic.

You’re a mid-40s divorcee with a child who’s experimented with polyamory, emotionally cheated on her husband, is documenting her sexual flings in writing for The New York Times, and needs to turn to academia to rationalize why she’s disillusioned with the male feminist soyboy market in New York City. If you can’t at least logically understand why these are dating red flags for most self respecting young men, I can’t help you. Nor can I help you if you think non-monogamous sex pests who sermonize about the “spiritual necessity” of group sex are enlightened just because they say your discomfort is “totally valid.” 

She confesses that the "stand-up guy" she saw as evolved, transparent, and enlightened was someone she wished she could desire for his upfrontness, preoccupation with consensuality, and clear communication, but she didn’t. That was the biggest disappointment of all. This, she clearly perceived to be a failure: her lack of want for the “good guy.” This is annoying on two fronts: women like this give a name to the tired trope that women find sociopathic assholes most attractive while ignoring men of upstanding character, and she vastly overestimates how these shallow tactics of performative male feminism used to coax women into bed (rather explicitly) are not the proof of goodness she thinks it is. 

After entertaining a lot of pointless academic theories, she concludes with the idea that “the old way of mating is dead and the new one has yet to be born” but that its new form is mysterious and elusive. “Pessimism may help us feel knowing, but really, we don’t know.” I honestly don’t think reverse engineering traditional masculinity and conventional monogamy needs to be characterized as a way of mating that’s yet to be born. I think you’re just unwilling to be normal. This brings me to the astute observation made by Jenny Holland, author of the Substack Saving Culture, notes about this demographic: “being normal is worse than death.” 

The thought of being ordinary feels like spiritual suicide, so they force themselves into kinks, fetishes, and sexualities that are antithetical to their nature, convinced we must “deconstruct this” and “normalize that” while dismantling the conventional tethers of society. The result? “Ethical nonmonogamy,” trans kids, and women ideologically married to beliefs that make it impossible to find the kind of men they actually want.

We Don’t Need a New Way of Mating, We Need Hetero-Optimism

Heterofatalism is downstream of leftist theory. It’s over-intellectualization parading as insight. You know what they call that in therapy? A defense mechanism. A way to avoid confronting the simplest, most actionable truth: your dating life is the sum of your own choices. I genuinely believe almost all of these modern dating grievances could be significantly alleviated if everyone took full responsibility for their success or lack thereof in the dating market and stopped trying to pass the buck onto everyone else.

I don’t care if you think it is (or if it even is) the fault of society, of men, of women, of your financial status, of modernity. In what way would your life get worse if you committed to taking radical responsibility for your own love life? Garnett is a walking advertisement for what your life could horrifyingly look like if you don’t do this: an infinite suspension in willful blindness.

The problem with heteropessimism, heterofatalism, whatever other doomer ideologies people are subscribing to these days is that it romanticizes suffering, improves nothing, and grooms you not only to expect, but seek out the worst in people. It offers the false safety of cynicism, the illusion that if you expect disappointment, you can’t be hurt. But that “safety” is false. It isn’t protecting much more than your ego. It’s romantic learned helplessness. You’ll never have a shot at true love if your conception of straight men is a strawman you created in your head. 

Look where heterofatalism leads: trooning yourself out or crashing out about your failed love life in your 40s in The New York Times. Hetero-optimism, by contrast, starts from the premise that men and women are not natural enemies but natural partners. It’s the belief that you have agency in shaping the relationships you want.