Forget 'marriage material.' What about revolution material?

Myisha Battle, a feminist sex and dating coach, on looking for love while our systems fail us.

Myisha Battle, author of This Is Supposed to Be Fun.

I’m often writing here about the cultural ephemera of heteronormativity—from slut-shaming on Love Is Blind to the TikTok trend of decentering men to viral videos calling marriage a form of sex work. These passing phenomena offer ways to critique and understand what’s going on right now with straight sex and relationships.

But Myisha Battle is one of my favorite people to turn to for a more on-the-ground report.

As a sex and dating coach in San Francisco—with a client base primarily made up of women who date men—she is a confidante for those who are “in the trenches,” as a recent meme put it. She is also the host of the podcast How’s Your Sex Life?, where she fields listener questions, and the author of the book This Is Supposed to Be Fun: How to Find Joy in Hooking Up, Settling Down, and Everything in Between.

I got on the phone with Battle to talk about dating burnout, “low-effort men,” the overlaps of anti-capitalism and marriage skepticism, and dating in a time when “our systems are failing us.” Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You’re sometimes identified as a feminist sex and dating coach. What is a feminist sex and dating coach?

Yes, I ask myself that question every day. For me, a feminist sex and dating coach is one that takes into consideration unique gender dynamics within the context of relationships. A classic dating coach might say, “If you're a straight woman trying to get a man, here are all the classically feminine things that you can do.” My lens is like, “Let's disregard what we've been told to do as women and think more about authentic motivations for partnership and sexual pleasure, and center that.”

I try at every turn to look at how gender is functioning in the dynamic between two people, and that is not exclusively in heterosexual pairings, it's also within same-sex dynamics, and with my clients who are gender diverse. It's also an intersectional feminist framework where I'm looking at those dynamics of class, race, ability, age, orientation, and gender presentation as well.

I don't think of my role as someone who's giving these tips and tricks to get someone something that I ultimately don't believe in. What I try to do is have clients be really honest about what it is that they want. I'm there for people's growth and development, and to try to clear out some of the clutter that society puts in our way.

It’s clear that a lot of women are feeling burnt out on the punishing aspects of heteronormative dating, especially when it comes to swipe-based dating—that Bumble campaign telling women that joining a convent isn’t an answer feels like such a bizarre reflection of the current moment. What is actually helpful for young women who are burnt out on the punishing aspects of heteronormative dating?

Taking a break. I think that Bumble ad was horribly misguided and deeply offensive. There is something to taking the pressure off of yourself to look—looking takes effort, and, for a lot of people, they're really torn because the options seem so dire right now.

One thing I’m seeing clients grapple with are socio-economic concerns. We are living at a time when women—though we are not compensated equally to men—are more educated. As women have been told they can do anything and have it all, they've also been sold this idea that they can have a high-earning, high-status partner to match who they are—and that that's the ideal for partnership, that's the ideal for love.

I don't blame people for having an idea of a future where they can provide for their kids. I think we are trying to date in a time when our systems are failing us. And, you know, I wrote a piece about why maybe we shouldn't be thinking about “marriage material” as much as thinking about the qualities of people who would make good long-term partners. What about good long-term partners in the revolution? Those guys may not be the ones with the Masters and PhD.

What else are you seeing as typical complaints around hetero dating?

I am seeing men who have very little emotional support and very little understanding of what an egalitarian relationship looks like. I see what has been coined as “low-effort men.” When we think about who is responsible for managing relationships, it largely falls on women. A lot of the emotional labor that's going on I see being done by women, and they're exhausted by it.

I really encourage everybody to make the first move, regardless of gender, but once you make the first move, you really want to feel like there's a collaborative effort. I’m seeing this disappointment among women of, like, “Wow, you can't even choose a place to meet. You can’t figure out a time that works in your schedule.” Just in the last couple of months, I've heard about some really interesting client experiences where people show up for dates not feeling well. The communication skills and the effort are not there.

I do know that men experience their own challenges on dating apps. It's a lot quieter for men—they're not getting this high volume of “likes” and matches. You would think that the matches that they do get, they would have more energy for them, right? That's not the case and I think that comes down to socialization. It’s like, you know, “I don't want to seem too into this. Also, if I'm too aggressive, she's gonna think I'm creepy. I don't want to get accused of harassment.” There's a lot that's going on for men that's feeding into this dynamic.

There’s been an explosion of conversations around the role of sex in marriage. There have been viral debates over the idea of marriage as a form of sex work. In books and TV—from All Fours to Three Women—we see women in hetero marriages grappling with an excess of desire, a desire for something outside of domesticity. Do you see any of this reflected in your clientele or listeners, and what do you make of it?

I see all of it in my work. It's there and it's strong. Granted, people come to me when something is wrong, I talk to people about this for a living, so I'm biased. But I do think that we're in a unique moment that's the culmination of a lot of things.

We are living in this post-MeToo era. Also, people are deeply, deeply questioning capitalism. There’s a huge anti-capitalist sentiment, which correlates to me, very strongly, with critiques of marriage as an institution and something that has to be upheld by the state. There are alternative ways of thinking and living that people are experimenting with. I know I live in San Francisco, but, still, I rarely see signs that are like, “Join the Communist Party,” but I just did on Sunday and I was like, “Holy shit, with a fucking QR code and everything.”

I think people are thinking about systems of oppression and how they fit together. They’re thinking about the focus on productivity for profit, for the few. Then we think about that in terms of the home, where the means of production are really heavily landing on the shoulders of women. The benefits of the fruits of women's labor are being exploited by men, and the transactional nature of marriage and sex. There's long been socialist critiques of that. I think you know this, but I will say it to your readers, I love the book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.

We're thinking very critically about, “What is marriage? What is its function in our lives? What is this institution? Do we want it? Is it helpful? Is it really just reinforcing some older notions of what family is and living together is? And do I want that to be a part of who I am?”

These are existential-level questions about the very structure of our lives, right? Are your clients grappling with those questions with you?

More and more, I’m getting women clients who are saying, “I’ve had children and I’m not interested in being married again.” I see a lot of women who have done everything they thought they should do—they ticked all of the boxes that they were supposed to tick to get married and have kids. Now, post-divorce, they want nothing to do with that. They have gone through this deprogramming to such an extent that they’re like, “I was sold a lie and I don’t want to perpetuate the lie anymore.”

With younger women, that questioning is happening a bit sooner. I’m seeing women who are dating men and like, “I’m 100 percent not interested in having children and I don’t want to be married.” I also see this in my queer clients and it can happen at a younger age—queer people maybe have to find that out at a younger age than people who are sold the traditional lie of marriage as an intuition for happiness.

Everyone has this opportunity to look at these structures and say, “No thank you.”

What else are you seeing with your clients right now? What are their hopes and dreams?

Everybody's hope and dream is to find love that feels authentic for them and sex that makes them feel free. Across the board, regardless of where people are, they want love, they want acceptance, and they want to feel that authentic connection that sex can bring them, stripped of the expectations of society.

It's interesting that people are linking this hope of sex and freedom.

The people who experience more of a sense of freedom tend to be men and how they use that freedom is not always to the advantage of their partners. A lot of women feel caught in this trap of wanting sex and then very quickly snapping out of that and realizing the negotiations that you must do internally, first and then with a partner. And that's not being truly sexually free, if you have to constantly interrogate your desires and then consider the context under which you're operating.

It sounds like it's largely a wish to be able to freely express desire.

Yes, and to be met with care on the other side of that expression, because I do have clients who have really worked hard to be able to express their desires and to move more freely throughout their sex life, but then they're met with really toxic shit. That also is not being free, right? Because then it sets up this feeling of, “If I do this, there are consequences. I will be retaliated against for expressing my desires freely and openly.”

That's something that people who haven't done a lot of work interrogating their sex lives are also dealing with, just on a more subconscious level. They're doing the work, still, of contemplating what moves they can make safely, or relatively safely. But there's also that feeling that the closer you get to freedom, you’re still within a structure that's going to tell you whether or not your freedom is okay, and whether or not you're going to suffer any consequences or backlash.

There is plenty of hetero-pessimism right now. Do you see any glimmers of… optimism?

Yes, when I see my clients matching with really good guys who are thoughtful and aware. A lot of my clients are guarded because they’ve been burned, and so they are hetero-pessimistic, but then I see them meet a guy who is considerate in a way that helps progress vulnerability.

I also love the guys that I work with who are aware of some of the trappings of masculinity, they’re aware of how they could be perceived as creepy or inappropriate, and they’re really trying to figure out how to do things the right way.

Those are my notes of optimism.

---