what about love?

the value & limits of heteropessimism

“We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love.”- Silvia Federici

In a video I have watched several times in the past week, a Palestinian man who had been imprisoned by Israel for years, returns home to his family. His wife runs to him, and his two small children, more tentatively, do too. The man looks stunned, as if he is seeing ghosts. Israeli soldiers, as a form of torture, told this man that his wife and children had been killed. “You have nothing to return to,” the man said he was told. His shock is palpable and his relief is too. He holds his wife so tight. He kisses his children’ s faces. The sadistic lie waged against this man’s psyche was that if his family was gone, he would “have nothing.” ‘Family’ here, I can’t help but conclude, is just a synecdoche for love.

–—

“Do men even deserve our attention?” writer and influencer Sommer Tothill asks, explaining a foundational question of the “decentering men” trend. This is just one example of a cultural shift that’s often referred to as “heteropessimism,” a revival based loosely on a substantive theory proposed by Asa Seresin in 2019. Other examples of the “heteropessimist turn” include the 4B movement, the divorce lit boom, and many, many thinkpieces about exhaustion with Men.

You might guess from the inclusion of the opening story that I have some problems with this concept, and you would be correct, but it’s important for me to make clear what is and isn’t the object of my criticism. My aim here is to interrogate a feminist phenomenon without being anti-feminist. I think it is both possible and important to do so.

Tracy Clark-Flory and Amanda Montei are excellent writers on topics related to hetero culture, and both of them have generatively unpacked anti-heteropessimist sentiments. First, as Montei notes, “this widespread grumbling about women’s attitudes—often in exchange for a ‘what about the men’ mentality—also seems to be a symptom of the current backlash against feminism. After all, what does a feminist backlash look like, if not judging women’s delivery more harshly than the content of their complaints?” Incredibly necessary point, and to be very clear, my resistance to this isn’t about women complaining.

Clark-Flory argues against those who suggest that heteropessimism is evidence that “women don’t like men,” and says, “I think the reality is that straight women like men too much. That is the problem: liking and loving men in patriarchy.”

I agree with so much of what these essays are getting at: women have every right to be upset about how they are treated by men, especially in ~times such as these~ with men (and, uh, also women) in power doing things to strip women of basic autonomy. It also sounds like dating is mostly miserable now, women still disproportionately carry more of the parenting load, and of course, it is still true that at least 1 in 5 women is a victim of sexual violence.

So before I go any further, let me repeat, I support women complaining about men! What I’m currently more interested in is that piece about the problem of loving under patriarchy. Clark-Flory ends that essay with this note, but I want to begin there. This is not ‘what about the men?’ This is,‘what about the women who still love them?’ This is, ‘why might some of us still choose to do so?’

–—

There are some pieces of my backstory that might have muddied my ability to really embrace heteropessimism. I share them in the spirit of transparency, so you can take my argument with whatever grain of salt you need:

First off, I am not straight, and I recognize that maybe this discourse is ultimately not for me, but I am bisexual (and not reluctantly—I have so much desire for men!), and I have had plenty of relationships with cis men, including my current partner. But perhaps it is because my longest relationship was with a queer trans man that I simply can’t wrap my head around the perils of heterosexuality? Certainly L was manly in all the best ways (he proudly kept the “butch” label after transitioning), but I suppose it’s true that he was socialized to be responsive to other people’s needs in ways that most boys are not. So maybe I just had it too good.

Additionally, I have been resistant to marriage since my late teens. I think sometimes this is part of the problem too: I have been radical, it seems, for a lot longer than many of my feminist contemporaries. I was never tricked into thinking marriage was a purely good thing, or even something to aspire to. Relatedly, I simply do not entertain the possibility of getting involved with people who are not aligned with me politically, which is often cited as just cause for the misandry that seems so salient now. Partners being very Left¹ has been a top priority for me since I was 18.

Or perhaps it’s less that I am so evolved politically² and more that I came from a “broken home.” Anyone who has read my book knows at least two things: my mom is the love of my life and did an incredible job raising me with very few resources, and also the majority of adult men in my life were decidedly harmful or absent. I did not have “healthy relationship models” outside of my grandparents who were both on their second marriages by the time I was born.

Despite this, I have been in three long-term serious partnerships (maybe a fourth if you count things at age 23), and they all involved some discussion of desired permanence. One included an old-fashioned engagement with the understanding that we’d have no state involved in our ceremony (which never came to be), and the others involved more informal declarations of a shared wish for longevity. But I have always met marriage with skepticism or indifference. A party and a pretty off-white dress?³ Sure. Validation from the state? No thank you. I have also been the one to leave nearly all of the relationships I’ve been in. I don’t say this proudly, though it seems like sometimes that is what is celebrated most in certain circles these days (the leaving), but it’s not been in a blaze of Angela Bassett glory.

And perhaps this is another reason I have been less able to connect to heteropessimism: because I am the one who has behaved badly in those first two instances. I had unhealed trauma that led to discomfort with care, I had some version of commitmentphobia, I cheated. I have not “Dumped Him,” I have broken my heart and another person’s, in tears and sometimes-regret and anguish. I have endured an absolute undoing (let’s face it). These men (cis and trans) have not been trash to rid myself of, they’ve been humans I’ve loved, deeply.

So, I have never been married, my past long-term partners were not assholes, and I’m not a mom.⁴ Maybe she doesn’t get it, you might be thinking.

Never fear: I have also had many experiences with the exact kind of stereotypes that create the fodder for this understandable wave of cultural misandry. I am a sex worker after all! And though the vast majority of my clients have been overwhelmingly lovely, I have met a lot of different kinds of men from a lot of different walks of life, and it is sometimes astounding how terrible they can be. I have also been sexually assaulted by dates I thought I could trust, have been led on by married men who discarded me without remorse, have been cheated on and gaslit and manipulated. I have certainly been annoyed by perceived household chore inequity. In nearly every relationship I’ve been in, I do more “personal development” work (self-help books, podcasts, therapy), often explicitly in the service of tending to the union. I feel recognition in the (again, completely understandable and justified) complaints that women share about these truths: that men do less relational tending, that women do a lot of the holding-together, that (some types of) men, without question, are the biggest perpetrators of harm in our world.

(I also grew up poor and am currently hanging on to the lower rungs of the middle class like that kitten in a tree poster. I think this is relevant, which I will expand on shortly.)

But none of these truths have changed the reality that I have still fallen in love with men, and that many of us will continue to do so. None of this changes that love, somehow, simultaneous to all the distress, is often one of the most transformative and miraculous phenomenons of our lives.

—

The project that has been consuming me for roughly three years is my forthcoming book on the Feminist Sex Wars.⁵ I am looking back on the in-fighting in the feminist movement to make sense of some of the same debates we are still having today. I am trying to learn from and with history, I am trying to get us out of stale hamster wheels. Most of the Sex Wars focused on porn, sex work, and kink, but relationships to men more broadly was also a point of contention.

Sometimes when I read different takes on what we call heteropessimism today, I am reminded of the conversations that were happening in the 80s. A lot of the ‘movements’—like decentering men and 4B—evoke the separatism and narratives of inevitable violence that were perpetuated by people like Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin, like many current voices, promoted ultimately essentialist narratives about men. “For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when,” she insists in her virulently anti-sex work book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. In this determinist worldview, there is no escape for men from the location of oppressor, and no escape for women from that of victim.

Importantly, as Montei points out, many of the current iterations of “heteropessimism” are actually about rejecting victimhood through women refusing heterosexual relationships. To that I say, hooray! If that’s what feels best for these women, I am genuinely glad! It is unequivocally good for women to leave things that are harming them, and we desperately need models for new ways of being outside of the nuclear family. But the fact remains that many of us will still exist in these units, and I worry when I notice the haunting of Dworkin determinism in how heterosexual relationships are reified by these cultural scripts. The only hope to escape victimhood, according to these logics, is to escape men.

There was a decidedly different perspective that was being voiced by feminists in opposition to Dworkin. They were, I think unsurprisingly, a more diverse group than the anti-porn feminists, who were mostly white and middle-class. It was queer women, working class women, and women of color who had a different take: is our biggest enemy really the person we love and share a home with? For most of them, the answer was ‘no.’

In her 1984 book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks makes an appeal to the predominantly white feminist movement to understand their gaps in lived experience:

“...a virulent anti-male stance reflected the race and class background of participants. Bourgeois white women, especially radical feminists, were envious and angry at privileged white men for denying them an equal share in class privilege. In part, feminism provided them with a public forum for the expression of their anger as well as a political platform they could use to call attention to issues of social equality, demand change, and promote specific reforms. They were not eager to call attention to the fact that men do not share a common social status; that patriarchy does not negate the existence of class and race privilege or exploitation; that all men do not benefit equally from sexism. They did not want to acknowledge that bourgeois white women, though often vic­timized by sexism, have more power and privilege, are less likely to be exploited or oppressed, than poor, uneducated, non­ white males.”

She goes on later to say: “While there are white women activists who may experience family primarily as an oppressive institution, (it may be the social structure wherein they have experienced grave abuse and exploitation) many black women find the family the least oppressive institution. Despite sexism in the context of family, we may experience dignity, self-worth, and a humanization that is not experienced in the outside world wherein we con­front all forms of oppression.”

Similarly, the socialist, Black lesbian Combahee River Collective stated:

“Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.”

Though I know there are some women of color who participate in decentering men and take on other heteropessimist-labeled dispositions (and 4B was started by women in Korea), I can’t help but notice that there is today an egregious absence of this kind of intersectional analysis.

Queer women were also skeptical of separatism and (what we’d call today) heteropessimist sentiments. And it’s not because they didn’t ‘get it.’ These women grew up with fathers, worked with men, had ex-husbands, and so on. Mainly they were sad for their straight friends who seemed to be completely foreclosing any possibility of sexual pleasure. In one of my favorite conversations, Gayle Rubin, Deirdre English, and Amber Hollibaugh humorously muse on this (the first speaker here is Deirdre):

Decades later, Asa Seresin describes the same phenomenon: “...heteropessimism has worked to silence articulations of women’s desire.”

As a queer, poor-raised woman, these are the feminists with whom I feel the most alliance. Yes men have hurt me, yes some of the worst people on the planet are men, and yes patriarchy is a system that needs abolishing—but men have also been my comrades, my lovers, my friends, and sex and love have been great balms to me in a life that has been persistently undergirded by economic hardship.

— - -

By opening this piece with the story of a prisoner of genocide, I am not trying to be manipulative. The truth is, that video was the impetus for me finally sitting down to write on this topic. But I could have opened with any number of stories like this, of women and men who love each other, especially those from marginalized communities, whose last enemy is one another.

I want to repeat: I am grateful that women are finding paths outside of heteronormative relational structures, leaving men who are harmful, and expressing all of their necessary and righteous complaints. This is not a piece trying to shut anyone up. And as a queer person I am thrilled that people are finding paths outside of normativity more generally. And still, some of us will keep falling in romantic love, keep desiring sex with men, keep “pair bonding.” Some of us would be tortured, genuinely, by the threat of never getting to see our beloved again.

I suppose all of this is just me trying add a bit of a complexity to the important choir of discontent. I want to say that I, all at once, hope to see the end of patriarchy and the compulsory nuclear family, and still also want to indulge the absolute joys and pleasures of being in a romantic relationship with a man I love so dearly. I guess I want to say that though it is absolutely radical and legitimate for women to refuse marriage, that there are other ways to live radical values too, and they are urgent: to build community with your neighbors regardless of relationship status, to participate in mutual aid, to learn conflict resolution skills (in relationships of all kinds, but especially romantic ones where so much harm can occur), to report ICE trucks, to share and learn survival skills (from mending to growing to stopping the bleed).⁶

My favorite book of 2025 was Dean Spade’s Love in a Fucked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together. Dean holds the nuance of sexual and romantic love so beautifully: he emphatically rejects both the “romance myth” that suggests one person should meet our every need and that we all ought to aspire to the “relationship escalator,” but he also recognizes that great possibility for transformation that can occur in these bonds. He writes:

“My sister once told me that caramel is the most dangerous thing in the kitchen. It gets so hot, it’s incredibly easy to get horrible burns. Sexual and romantic relationships, similarly, are wildly sweet, and risky. So many risky things are worth it: changing your gender, leaving your abusive family or religious community, defending your friends from cops, blocking coal trains and oil pipelines, squatting, taking over your campus, breaking rules, making art.”

He goes on:

“This book is pro-risk, pro-sex, pro-love of all kinds, but it also asks you to take an unflinching look at how our behavior in sexual and romantic relationships often hurt us, hurts others, and impacts our social movement efforts.” And still, he concludes: “I hope what’s here helps you find ways to have all of the liberated pleasure you want.”⁷

This is what I hope for all of us, of every gender. Liberated pleasure. Love in many forms. And a magnificent crumbling of all the structures that stand in the way of it.

1. Which is NOT to say that Leftist/radical men can’t be shitty, because whewwww doggy can they be! Like, the fuckin’ worst! But much of the divorce lit boom seemed to be fueled by women who had been married to Trumpers, and I am sorry, I simply could never relate.!

2. I am poking fun at myself here, I know “I was radical before you”-people are annoying, but I cannot help that I was politicized when I was 17! It doesn’t make me better, it just means I potentially avoided some traps? But also, maybe I’m just traumatized! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3. This has nothing to do with a performance of virginity (ha!), I just think off-white suits me. :)

4. Would if I could have been! I had a miscarriage and we didn’t then, and still don’t now, make enough money to support a child. This is a class issue that makes me very sad.

5. I wish this were a pre-order link, alas, I am still in final edits and making negative dollars on the hour. Please consider upgrading your subscription to paid so at least *some* of the writing I do is compensated? (This footnote coming to you days after finding out I didn’t get a grant I was desperately hoping to get to help me through the unpaid-labor-book-editing finish line.)

6. And of course men should be doing this too. I am lucky to know many who do.

7. You should really, really read this book.