Women like men too much

It's why they casually 'hate' them. The problem is loving men in patriarchy. It's the 'tragedy of heterosexuality.'

My FYP right now.

In an essay last week, the writer Magdalene J. Taylor argued that women don’t seem to like men very much anymore, and that it “isn’t doing us any good.” She points to “casual misandry” on social media as evidence. “It’s become deeply uncool as women to acknowledge any sort of affinity or appreciation for men,” she writes. “In order to be pro-women, one must now be vocally anti-men.”

I often enjoy Taylor’s newsletter and I empathize, to an extent, with her sense of it not being cool to like men anymore. It can be a real bummer, for those of us who believe in the potentials of love and sex, to fully register the current moment of negativity—toward men, sex, and hetero relationships. It would be nice to be living in more effortlessly loving and sex-positive times. I would be thrilled to be having more conversations about the transformative possibilities of desire, intimacy, pleasure, fantasy, and sexual discovery—including within hetero relationships.

That would be great.

But that is a wish for things to be other than they are. It denies the reality of things—in the same way that neoliberal appropriations of sex positivity, by way of hookup culture, denied the reality of things. It expects women to perform sexual empowerment—the illusion of a finished revolution.

There is an overflowing well of pain and unhappiness among women who date and have sex with men. It is real and valid, and it isn’t new. It’s just being talked about in new and more visible ways.

Taylor notes rates of abuse and sexual violence, as well as the fact that, “for much of history, women broadly liking men was itself irrelevant.” I would add to that an emphatic mention of our current political landscape, which includes everything from forced pregnancy to marriage boosterism. I don’t think we can meaningfully talk about women not liking men without acknowledging the “racist right-wing pro-natalist effort to coerce women into traditional patriarchal marriage and motherhood, and trap them there by ending no-fault divorce,” as I put it recently.

Also: domestic inequality, the orgasm gap, scary sex, the pay gap, emotional gold-digging, “low-effort men”—I could go on.

Taylor argues that abuse and violence are only part of the reason for casual man-hating. Women “also, however, do not like men because we have promoted a culture in which this is normalized,” she says, arguing that “young women are being embittered toward men by dating creators on TikTok, by magazine articles, by a broader culture that has encouraged this disdain and made it profitable.”

To whatever degree young women are jumping on the bandwagon of viral TikTok trends, it’s because they have found a new frame for their pre-existing discontent. Women don’t need TikTok dating advice and magazine articles to become embittered toward men. The reality of heteronormative love and sex—and the behavior of individual men—is embittering enough.

That isn’t to say women aren’t being exploited by opportunistic creators and journalists—I believe they are, but not in the way Taylor suggests. Their anger and resentment is already there. If anything, they are being sold ways to fix that anger and resentment—to become masters of it. In many cases, women are having their pain depoliticized and personalized (consider: Female Dating Strategy and some, though not all, advice around decentering men).

They are being directed away from feminism toward an ethos of individual control and empowerment. They are being sold self-surveillance. They are being given tips and tricks that are ineffective, punishing, and victim-blaming.

Now, on the sex front, I actually see some glimmers of… hope, I think? There is Loretta’s Substack cataloging her post-divorce sexual exploration and celebrating the pleasure of having sex with men outside the suffocating context of domestic inequality. Melissa Febos’ forthcoming celibacy memoir, The Dry Season, promises to unpack the erotic as Audre Lorde wrote of it.

In Carvell Wallace’s memoir, Another Word for Love, he writes beautifully about having sex with a stranger:

Sex is weird and disgusting and ridiculous and quite often abused and weaponized and traumatic. But I like it. I like what it can be and sometimes what it is. Sometimes I think it might hold the secrets to almost everything. … Sometimes it’s just nice to hold someone while they cum, kissing their earlobe and whispering to them yes.

Sometimes. Sometimes.

I’m reminded, too, of a snippet of audio from

lyz

’s appearance on

Rebecca Woolf

’s new podcast, where she says, “I’m also having this full-throated embrace of humanity while also being a mother, and people… don’t like you being a mom who fucks.” (Sidenote: I will never turn down an opportunity to link to Joan Nestle’s My Mother Liked to Fuck.) There is shaming and prohibition here, but what stands out is the hopefulness of her full-throated embrace.

These top-of-mind glimmers are notably queer and coming from women who have exited heteronormative marriages.

Women’s discontent isn’t a trend; it is a political reality. As

BDM

wrote, ironic misandry is “a way of coping with stuff you can’t change.” There is gallows humor and catharsis in this kind of joking, and it has been going on for a long time. It is also incomparable to the violence of misogyny, which is all-pervasive, empowered, and institutionalized, which is something Taylor acknowledges.

I’ll admit, I’ve found myself sometimes taking issue with “casual misandry” when it becomes a naturalizing *shrug* “men are this way.” Of course, there are actual stats showing that a large percentage of hetero men are that way, on so many fronts. But the shrug of it all can make everything from domestic inequality to the orgasm gap feel innate, inevitable, and inescapable, as opposed to the result of being socialized in patriarchy. It lets men off the hook.

Men should not be let off the hook. But also? It’s not women’s responsibility to mommy them into a vision of their own full, capacious humanity.

Casual or ironic “misandry” is a survival strategy within “the tragedy of heterosexuality,” as Jane Ward puts it. She writes of “straight women’s endless and ineffective efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight women’s optimism and disappointment.” She compares straight women’s predicament to Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.” Ward writes, “People persist in these attachments… because the fantasy object provides a ‘sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.’”

This is of a piece with the phenomenon of heteropessimism, which Asa Seresin defines as “performatively detaching oneself from heterosexuality,” while rarely actually abandoning it.

Taylor writes that the trend of women pursuing celibacy “is never branded as a radical pursuit but rather a natural consequence of our current cultural dynamics,” and she sees this as a sign of women disliking men. What if it is both radical and natural? What if the understanding directed at women’s celibacy arises not from a hatred of men, but rather a recognition of the awful behavior that patriarchy has normalized?

My friend

Amanda Montei

, author of Touched Out, tells me that, though the online discourse that Taylor references is often depoliticized, a lot of it “engages an entire history of feminist thought around compulsory heterosexuality and separatism.” Some of it, on the other hand, is representative of the invisibility of lesbian experience, as Adrienne Rich characterized it. “As in, there’s decentering men and then there’s opting out of heterosexuality or heterosociality altogether,” says Montei. “Today, we so often fail to see desire—and heterosexuality specifically—as political, or to understand just how it is so, and if it is, what to do with that.”

She thinks we should seriously consider “the political and personal fantasies” these online movements reveal. “Clearly, those fantasies include a world without the pain that men are causing women everyday,” she says. “I think we ought to take these seriously, rather than wish away or dismiss or police women's feelings. Or worse, claim that women are somehow making themselves less happy by expressing their unhappiness.”

As much as my TikTok FYP is filled with talk of celibacy and decentering men, it’s also overflowing with videos of men sensually throwing pottery and edits of Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal. It is celebratory. Currently, straight women are losing their minds over Brian Jordan Alvarez ripping off his shirt and doing his now-viral “I love your daughter” dance. (I hope he never stops.) The joke of these videos is that he’s auditioning for the approval of a woman’s father in a goofy, hot, cringe, adorable, and try-hard way.

Women love it. They are charmed by it. And they are very disappointed to learn that Alvarez is gay.

I think the reality is that straight women like men too much. That is the problem: liking and loving men in patriarchy. It’s the reason for the gallows humor. It’s why the hatred is ironic. Women are decentering men because they have centered them for so much of their lives—only to be sorely disappointed, and much worse. I leave you with a quote from Ward: “If we held straight couples to basic standards of good friendship—mutual respect and affection and a sense of comfort and bondedness based on shared experience—many straight relationships would fail the test.”