The year of hetero discontent
From sex strikes to divorce memoirs, a review of straight culture in 2024.
In all my time of brainstorming year-end pieces, I don’t think I’ve ever arrived quite so quickly at an obvious frame. Going back through everything that I’ve written across the past year, there is a clear cultural story of hetero discontent—one that spans sex, love, dating, marriage, and motherhood.
These kinds of year-end pieces can be an easy, low-lift content ploy—I’m sure you’re being inundated with gift guides right about now—but I actually find this to be a useful exercise for considering where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Saying no to men
Of course, toward the start of the year, the South Korean 4B movement went viral on TikTok. Some different but overlapping trends took off, like going “boy sober” and “decentering men.” And, while hetero dating fatigue is not new, especially in the swipe-based age, this was the year it became so pronounced that Bumble ran an ad campaign mocking the hyperbolic cliche of a woman quitting the dating scene and running off to join a convent.
Some have suggested that “casual misandry” is in the air, and that it is tragically uncool to like men now. But, as I argued, I think the truth is that straight women like men too much. “That is the problem: liking and loving men in patriarchy,” I wrote. “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.”
Post-election, interest in 4B has gone through the roof, but so has criticism of the movement, especially its transphobia and individualistic aspects. Right now, I find myself drawn to conversations about, as Sophie Lewis put it, the kind of “utopian, trans-inclusive, liberatory projects that want to liberate all people, communize care, and abolish the family.” (Says I, a woman who just hung up a classic nuclear-family drawing that her kid did. I love my family. Let’s talk about it. Let’s get into it.)
Going forward, I’m keeping a skeptical eye on the current backlash against sexual refusal as necessarily conservative, as well as sentiments of the can’t-we-all-just-get-along variety (and I’m not alone). I’m personally bracing for a renewed moment of reactive and depoliticized sex-positivity.
Breaking out of domesticity
It was the year of the divorce book—from Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife to Leslie Jamison’s Splinters to Sarah Manguso’s Liars. More generally, it was the year of stories about women fleeing domesticity and going a little (or a lot) feral—from
’s All Fours to the film and TV adaptations of Nightbitch and Three Women. I also think it’s worth noting men’s fantasies about women’s feral desire (see: Poor Things), the charitable interpretation being that we all want to escape these suffocating constraints.Why this outpouring right now? As I wrote in March, the interest in these “narratives isn’t surprising given the cultural and political turmoil of the last several years—#MeToo, the pandemic, and the overturn of Roe v. Wade.” These events “not only underscored the depths of [women’s] anger, outrage, and unhappiness, but also the inequities and structural forces that control their lives,” I argued. “It pushed them to turn a critical eye toward their most intimate roles and relationships, especially within the context of heterosexual marriage.”
As Myisha Battle put it, a lot of women have simply arrived at a point in their lives, after marriage and having kids, where they’re thinking, “I was sold a lie and I don’t want to perpetuate the lie anymore.”
Leaving the marital bed
Of course, sex and desire are laced through these stories of escape and abandon. So much pop cultural ephemera right now is pointing toward the tension between eroticism and domesticity, which is of a piece with this larger questioning of the structure of our lives.
Polyamory has exploded as a buzzy topic in the mainstream, but it’s happened in a curiously conservative fashion, where “secondary partners” are “often praised for making the primary marriage better, like a sort of human-shaped marital aid,” as Anna Merlan argued. In Molly Roden Winter’s memoir, More, polyamory is partly her way of escaping the unequal division of labor in her household, while remaining married to a man who doesn’t do his fair share. I find myself returning to Jennifer Wilson’s piece on how polyamory is increasingly being coopted to support, rather than challenge, the economic engine and scarcity machine of marriage and the nuclear family.
Relatedly, it’s been a year of articles questioning whether a sexless marriage can be a happy one and viral arguments about whether “marriage is sex work.” As
said back in September, “I think we're just very overdue for a reckoning with the questions of ‘What is hetero-monogamous sex?’ and ‘How did the idea of sexual duty transform and what does it look like today?’” I think that questioning will continue into 2025, and against the backdrop of a presidency driven by racist and sexist fantasies about the white patriarchal nuclear family, and sexual and reproductive control.I’ll be looking out for how our ideas about sex, pleasure, and power are influenced by this regressive political climate. What nuance will be lost? Where can reactive politics force us into arguments we don't actually want to make? It’ll be an interesting ride, and I’m grateful to be sharing it with you all.
You can pattern keep like a motherfucker. Love this.
Brilliant! It seems like neoliberalism (aka late-stage capitalism on steroids and crack) can co-opt literally anything and everything these days. It's enough to make cynics of everyone on Earth. But that doesn't mean that we (people of all genders and all walks of life) cannot reclaim back what they have co-opted. Retreatism is defeatism, as I like to say.