It was a long, hot summer of heteropessimism. Recovering incels as Sally Rooney protagonists, love triangles narrated via influencer-on-influencer reel warfare, ‘Lysistrata’ turned into a verb on X, bad breakups, worse husbands, divorce books. Fall came and it didn’t get colder or better: 4B, abortion bans, ‘natalism for the left,’ alternately terrifying and pathetic masculinity influencers. Speaking of Lysistrata, feminists have been debating the virtues, vices, violence, and vanishing horizons of heterosexuality for generations. Hope is liberating, integral, even when it feels naive. In 1977, the radical feminist Ellen Willis, who often interrogated the claustrophobia and comfort of heterosexual relationships in her essays, wrote that her “deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary as it is intellectually suspect.” The following conversation was recorded on November 1, 2024. In 2025, Willis’ stance feels ever more like a foothold on a cliff face. For this issue of THR, I was lucky enough to talk about the future of heterosexual love with four incisive, ingenious women. Below, Jamie Hood, Rayne Fisher-Quann, Zoe Hu, and Julia Hava weigh in on radical romance, Gone Girl, tradwives, fantasy, narrative, boredom, abjection, desire, and more. 

Emmeline Clein
The term ‘heteropessimism’ was coined all the way back in 2019, before anyone had even quarantined with a man. I’ll refresh our memories with the definition, per Asa Seresin: ‘Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality.’ So, I was curious if the term felt useful to you all back in that moment, and how your thoughts on it have changed over the past few years.

Rayne Fisher Quann
I think the main criticism that Seresin made was that heteropessimism establishes the indignities of heterosexuality as fundamental and inherent. And is not interested in changing them or thinking about a better way to be. 

Julia Hava
It felt connected to the ‘men are trash’ moment online; I was totally in that stage when I first started making content on Instagram. It was all ‘I hate men, men treat women like trash, but I can't wait to enter into this relationship and just be absolutely decimated.’ I had this whole series centered on ‘dumb shit men say,’ where people would submit really stupid things that men had said to them––and it was fun in that 2016-17 era and then it got stale. At first, you felt like you were getting back at the patriarchy and then it became: well, we're all still here attempting to date men, so what now?

EC
So the heteropessimistic stance might have briefly offered a rhetorical escape from that double bind. Zoe, I was just re-reading your essay on the Little Women movie, and I apologize in advance to all of you for quoting you to yourselves over the next hour, but you wrote, “Little Women proffers both traditional femininity and its subversion, refusing to make the viewer choose. This is the utopian ideal of have-it-all-feminism interpreted to an unbearably literal extent. In simultaneously invoking romantic tropes and deriding them, the movie somehow patronizes and indulges its viewers at once.” I feel like the heteropessimism moment involved a lot of that: indulging our fantasies, allowing us to both decry and romanticize the oppression and abjection inherent in a lot of heterosexual romantic dynamics, but also often taking a strangely patronizing stance towards ourselves. 

Zoe Hu
The word fantasy is really helpful for me, because I think heteropessimism is negatively registering the loss of certain fantasies, or registering certain fantasies coming to disappointment— one fantasy being of a love that is secure and reciprocal. I think most people also have this fantasy that their private lives don't have to be political, that their private lives can almost be a refuge from the world of politics and conflict and contestation. When fantasy doesn't come true, I think heteropessimism gives people this register to flag that or remark on it without quite articulating what the actual fantasy is for them. Because it might not just be a fantasy of this pure domestic space, but maybe even a different, more feminist kind of fantasy, a fantasy of egalitarian love taking place on revolutionized terms. But you don't actually talk about what you're losing. You don't talk about the fantasy that you're losing with heteropessimism. You're just registering that the current reality sucks.

Jamie Hood
I think that's what Seresin was getting at, that heteropessimism only has a negative charge, and it doesn't allow people to imagine other sorts of political futures. 

EC
Right, and that doesn’t discount the fact that the term offers a useful framing device. Rayne, you’ve said that declaring yourself a feminist online and doing feminism in practice are not only no longer necessarily aligned, but often diametrically opposed. That tension feels related to me to the heteropessimistic stance of declaring heterosexuality oppressive and even doomed while engaging in it with a shrug and a wink, a stance Seresin’s original essay connected to Lee Edelman’s idea of ‘anesthetic feelings,’ those that numb us out to protect against over intensity of feeling and create attachments that can survive detachment. 

RFQ
Both are functioning as this kind of soothing balm in a weird way. Maybe this is a total detour, but when I see examples of heteropessimism on the internet it reminds me of a couple years ago, and even still now, of this wave of anti-rich art––all these movies coming out that were satires about the lives of the hyper-wealthy. The criticism that I had of that wave––Parasite, The Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, White Lotus and so on and so forth was that it felt like these films were using irony or a facade of criticism to indulge in an obvious fetish, an obvious obsession with wealth, the desire and envy for wealth that obviously everybody has. These films were just so interested in the beauty of the luxury, of class privilege, and wanted to look at that but also wanted to distance themselves morally from the consequences of being obsessed with wealth and privilege, which they attempted through ironic detachment. I would always describe it as ‘rolling your eyes so you can keep looking.’ That's how I feel about heteropessimism too sometimes––there's this obsession with men and with heterosexuality. I mean, I'm obsessed with men, I'm obsessed with heterosexuality. Those relationships feel for better or for worse like a defining force in my life and in my development and there's something to me that feels cheap about trying to have your cake and eat it too, trying to look at this thing all the time and give It all of your attention, but also distance yourself from the moral consequences of that through irony. 

JA H
Also, I’m thinking about how you opened by talking about the way that heteropessimism emerged as a frame before COVID, right? Well, what is the historical moment it came out of? I feel it's inextricable from or a product of the #MeToo era, and thinking, too, about how Me Too just sort of deflated, how it became defanged by being rendered in a purely confessional mode. I think that's why so many people, in literary criticism, for example, have a problem with heteropessimism, which becomes emblematic of complaint without activism. It operates in testimonial, and that's sort of what #MeToo was as well. We didn't enact political change at least outside of these very glamorous cases or very horrible cases.

EC
The question becomes where do we go from here? If the big critique is that heteropessimistic framings foster resignation and imply that oppressive forms of heterosexuality are immutable, what do you do if you're a woman that wants to love men laterally, in the present tense? And is the answer changing our conceptions of how we tell ourselves stories about love within the narratives of our lives? In the past few days, I was thinking a lot about the essay you wrote recently, Rayne, called ‘Against Narrative,’ about resisting the allure of the various storylines you felt were available to you in the wake of a breakup. The piece felt in conversation to me with the way you've written, Jamie, about the different types of temporalities a woman might need to think through if she wants to create art, and how those are or are not compatible with the timelines along which we are familiar with plotting romantic relationships with men. 

RFQ
My constant disclaimer is that I'm 23 and haven't had that many relationships, but this is sort of my relationship with heteropessimism as well. The essay came out when I was 17, I think, and I read it when I was 18. I read it before I had had any serious romantic relationships with men. It was really interesting to engage so much with the theory around that sort of thing before I had experienced the practice, and then very soon after I read it, I had a very, very serious long-term relationship with a man that I lived with, and that totally changed the course of my life. I read your famous ‘Fucking like a Housewife’ essay at this time Jamie, and I had a year where I was obsessed with being a domestic, at 19 or something. I thought all I wanted to do was make him dinner and live in his house. And I could feel myself leaning into that, and then that didn't work for a variety of reasons, and I felt myself ping-ponging the other way, and returned to the heteropessimism, so I felt myself engaging in heteropessimism and extreme heterooptimism, and I feel like I'm still in a place where I'm ping ponging back and forth all the time. But something that really strikes me about heterosexuality, particularly in relation to the types of sex and the types of love that I've had with women is that heterosexuality lends itself to narrative. It's the story at the beginning and the end of the world. I think that that is what feels different and what sometimes feels so comforting, at least in my experience, about heterosexual love and sex is that it feels like there's a story that is pre-written for you that you can slide into, both a story about love and a story about the type of woman that you are in relation to a man. And that can feel stifling, but also immensely comforting. There's a script for what sex is supposed to look like, and there's a script for what dating is supposed to look like, and there's a script for how long you wait before you text him back. And when I've been with women, it feels a little bit more like you're building it from the ground up every time. And again, that is something that can be beautiful, but also super hard and difficult and strange. And I think I've really experienced the allure of heterosexuality and the narrative of heterosexuality as a real balm. It's the appeal of, ‘you don't have to think anymore.’

JU H
Yes, and we are raised from such a young age to envision life through those narrative lenses. I was thinking the other day about the game of Life––the literal board game––and how you get to the stage where you get married and then you have kids. I always thought about that progression, because what do you do after you get to that stage of life? There's no stage in the game of life other than getting married, having kids, and dying. I was also thinking about what you were saying about heteropessimism following the #MeToo era. Do you remember that ‘She Rates Dogs’ account from around that time, which was flooding the world with the attitude of, ‘look at the things men are saying. Can you believe that men are saying these things? Look at the dating app messages I'm getting.’ And it flooded the world with so much pessimism that I think was really cathartic, but I honestly think was directly related to the revival of the trad wife aesthetic. Because when you realize that this permeates so many relationships that appeared equal, so many of us have gotten messages like this, seen dating app profiles like this, you want to turn to a less depressing narrative. You might want to turn to the narrative that actually maybe men aren't bad and we should serve them. 

EC
Or it's so depressing that it leads to the bimbo-tok, lobotomy core road, which is kind of an ethos of ‘if I refuse to think, I can enjoy the lifestyle perks of fitting myself into misogynistic, self-minimizing tropes without feeling guilty for abandoning my politics.’ Rayne, on that note, I was so interested in the part of your essay about the various archetypal roles you saw open to you in a moment when you wanted to understand a relationship that had ended. You wrote, “I could feel around me the construction of endless competing narratives. I was either a blighted, woeful woman victim for whom comfortable life had just come to an end, or a triumphant autonomous heroine freed from the shackles of heterosexual monogamy, or an endlessly generous and long-suffering martyr, or a flight risk, cruel and self-interested and never satisfied. None of these felt true, or at least none felt complete, but each had a powerful gravitational pull. They offered a balm of simplicity, a promise of meaning." 

RFQ
Vivian Gornick is my favorite writer ever, and I've always found her writing about love to be really interesting because she often makes this argument that is just completely against prioritizing romantic love at all, despite it being a story she was raised on, one with a strong gravitational pull. And she has this really beautiful line in Fierce Attachments that maybe I'm going to misquote, but it's about the books about her and her mother. I'm sure some of you guys have read it, and her mother was obsessed with love and obsessed with her father, and had a kind of beautiful, extreme romantic attachment to her father, and never recovered after her husband died, and would always wax poetic about the importance of love and the centrality of love and the meaning that it brought her. And at the end of the book, Gornik has this line where she's like ‘mama worships at the altar of love but that lifelong boredom of hers is a dead giveaway,’ and I think about that every single day of my entire life and will probably for the rest of my life and I sort of forget what the original question was, but I think that that is something. 

EC
Well that's perfect as we're against narrative here. 

RFQ
Yeah, we're against linear time. *Laughs* Something I think about a lot is that even if I think there's a version of politically productive heterooptimism, where people say, you can have a man who treats you well, and who does domestic labor, and who takes care of you, but not in a way where he owns you, and you take care of him as well. This is an image that we should build. And then sometimes I think about that and I wonder, would I still be happy? Does that even fix the problem inherently? Is there something wrong with worshipping at the shrine of love, of romantic love above everything else in general? 

JA H
I’m curious, do you think that that kind of equity would defang the desire?

RFQ
I think there are two worries that I have. And the one is, yes, would it defang the desire if I were to have a perfectly equitable heterosexual relationship? And I think there's this other worry I have where I have this picture of myself in a happy, equitable, reasonably sexually satisfying relationship where I'm not treated badly and everything is fine and I'm still not happy or there is still something inherently dampening to my autonomy and my personhood about dedicating myself to love, to one singular experience of romantic love.

ELC
Right, that reminds me of an essay of yours Jamie, where you wondered whether there is some inherent lack of autonomy that comes with being a creative person in a heterosexual romantic relationship, a lack that does not come from inequity in the relationship necessarily or the relationship being ‘bad,’ although I'll obviously believe women if you tell me it was horrible.

JA H
*Laughs* No, no, no. It was not horrible. But it's funny because I was reviewing a Rachel Cusk novel and, I realized in hindsight, writing that piece was the thing that worked me up to the breakup.

ELC
I want to say on the record that I’m obsessed with the ending of that review, when you're at the Francesca Woodman show, and you overhear these two other women talking about how tragic it is that the artist killed herself after a breakup in her early 20s because if she would have just gotten a little older it wouldn't have felt as apocalyptic as love feels at that age, which I do think is interesting in the context of the kinds of timelines and narratives we’ve been discussing. 

JA H
The thing about my last relationship is that it was my first that wasn't devotional and abject. It was incredibly equitable. We did live together in a real partnership until I sold my second book and got a huge book deal. There was something that was never really addressed. [My success] was the monolith at the center of our relationship, it threw the door off the hinges. That was when I began to wonder: I can have this great relationship, but can I also have a successful career? Is equity only okay so long as I don't blossom in this other arena of my life?

ZH
Right, I don't know––and on the point of narrative, I was thinking about that comment about the game of life and how the heterosexual marriage is actually the entire game of life.

JU H
It's the end of the movie, too. You always want the movie to end there, on a wedding.

ZH
While we were talking about this, I was thinking, are there any other forces in my life or ongoing projects or events that provide the same level of narrative as romance? I really couldn't think of any. I think that is partially a product of economic precarity, the disappearance of traditional career trajectories or a sense of upward mobility in terms of my social or economic life. I think in the times that we're living in, heterosexual romance just does feel like the one most accessible narrative––Lauren Berlant wrote about this in their book, The Female Complaint; they talk about narrative and convention as giving pleasure because it sets up an expectation and then rewards the reader or viewer for having that expectation. You know what's going to happen next in the story, and then when it does happen you feel a sense of pleasure. But I also think in addition to being pleasurable, playing into a narrative is just way less work than not having a narrative. Even thinking about friendship, where there isn't the same kind of clear arc or series of steps, and there often aren't clear endings—that means the work of a friendship has to be done on a daily basis. You have to actively sustain it because there aren't narrative guardrails. And it just feels like way more work, and it can feel really difficult as opposed to a romantic relationship where you on some level know what is going to happen next, and if it doesn't, it's over.

ELC
I was thinking about that exact problem, though I don’t know if problem is even quite the right word, when I was reading Sally Rooney’s whole oeuvre this summer. Her characters are often very affectively heteropessimistic in the sarcastic, wry, ‘I'm such a smart girl who knows this dynamic is fucked and I'm behaving abjectly but ultimately heterosexual monogamy is the most stabilizing force in my life so let me get into it’ mode. To me, what Rooney stories often seem to imply is that if late capitalism requires a slog through endless economic precarity, wherein you barely even have time to have a friend and if you do have a friend, you're constantly getting in the series of highly avoidable misunderstandings that are mainstays of Rooney relationships both romantic and social, and religion no longer offers the balm it once did––and Rooney has said ‘If you’re feeling existentially sad towards your suffering, or you want some kind of moral guidance, it doesn’t always help to read Karl Marx…There’s some sort of void between political theory and personal life.’ What she sees as the refuge from the void is the heterosexual contract. Like if society is this terrifying capitalist, religion-less, almost Hobbes-ian wilderness, but you are a smart, feminist woman, you might come to the conclusion that, yes, like the tweets say, heterosexuality is a prison, but perhaps a prison is somewhere to live?

JA H
I really liked what you were saying about the reassurance of a conventional narrative against the abyss. Because, for example, when I wrote that housewife essay, that was the inquiry. When I was growing up, there was no narrative for trans women. The only trans women I saw until I moved to New York were the dead ones on SVU episodes, you know? I had no idea what a life would be like if I survived long enough to have a life. I really resonated with what you were saying about how heterosexuality and its conventional temporal trajectory felt like the paradise I had to get to in order to not be a dead woman at the beginning of an SVU episode. 

JU H
Alongside that, I don't think there's any pop cultural narrative that I can think of that promises the same kind of salvation, especially when you’re young. 

RFQ
I think that a narrative is obviously something that is inherently constraining, but constraints can also feel like freedom, or maybe it’s that safety can feel like freedom. Like the dog on the street can do whatever it wants but the dog in the house gets fed and is warm, and there's a different kind of constraint and a different kind of unfreedom in constantly feeling like you have to fight for survival. And there of course is something so beautiful, I think even outside of patriarchal conditioning, about the idea of you and another person taking care of each other forever.
But I think that also takes us to a trad wife conversation. And I loved your piece about trad wives Zoe. And not to be the first person to bring up my mother, but––

ELC
Well, don't worry, I'm bravely going to say the word children later. So buckle in.

RFQ
I've never even really talked about this before, so I might not be super articulate. But I've always had such an interesting relationship to the trad wife fantasies I see online that we're all familiar with, and obviously have to do with this critique of work and labor that ennobles the tradwife. She offers this fantasy of escaping the daily grind of capitalism through the care of a man and so on and so forth. And there are so many things that are seductive about that fantasy, but I've always engaged with it in, I think, an interesting way because my mom, for my whole life, didn't work. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she has been extremely sick and extremely disabled for my whole life. We had a conversation literally last week, where she was talking about a homeless person she's friends with in our neighborhood, and how she realized that if my father hadn't loved her, and this is completely true––she said, if your father hadn't loved me, I would be dead or I would be homeless because I needed somebody to take care of me. So her presence in the home embodied a lot of parts of this trad wife fantasy, but on the other hand she wasn't even able to do domestic labor. But one of the saddest parts of all of that was that like every few years she would try desperately to go back to work, it was all she wanted, but she was unable to because of the physical constraints of her body. And I think in many ways, so many people aren't lucky enough to have somebody truly take care of them. But I think it was always very interesting for me to see that even what I think many people would consider to be the true fantasy of being completely taken care of and provided for out of an all-consuming love was so sad for her in so many ways, and was not so beautiful, not so fulfilling when all she wanted was to be able to provide for herself and go back to work. I think a lot of women also have a fantasy of being sick, and are in love with this idea of being a sad, broken thing that someone has to take care of because they love you so much.

ELC
Right, that fantasy of the injured and ever-injurable woman, who is also narratively ennobled by this inability to work, is another alluring narrative we are often raised reading about or seeing on screens. Zoe, your tradwife essay incisively noted the way tradwife influencers are simultaneously anti-work and overworked, and often profiting via lying about the amount of labor they’re doing. We've seen the same phenomenon with the Mormon Wives reality show––which is actually interesting in the context of that Gornick quote you mentioned Rayne, because the show got made after one of the Mormon wife influencers revealed that she and her fellow wife influencers had secretly been swinging, so there's a ‘dead giveaway re lifelong boredom’ moment––but the show is especially fascinating because you get to see the way all their men are living off the tradwife influencers’ money, so these women who are making content about the fruits of domestic labor are actually engaging in highly contemporary girlbossified tech labor. 

JU H
Part of the work of Mormon women is to promote the idea of being a housewife, and social media gives them this vehicle to promote being a housewife. Take Ballerina Farm, who according to her interview is not allowed to have a nanny. So she is taking care of the kids and cooking the meals and also editing the videos and creating the branding for her farm. What are you getting from being the domestic laborer and also being the breadwinner, but then pretending like you're not? 

ELC
What you're getting is the artifice and the theater and the narrative, right? And the comforting thought at night that there's a script for the next decades of your life. 

RFQ
Yeah, and this is an obvious thing to say, but it feels almost too on the nose that these influencers become an exacerbated microcosm of the history of all women's labor, which is that the project of womanhood in so many ways is to put in an endless amount of work to seem like you're not doing any work. Part of the work itself is the work of appearing effortless. 

ELC
It reminds me of a line from your review of Woman Running in the Mountains Jamie, which taught me that the term ‘make ends meet’ is rooted in the history of dressmaking, that it literally comes from women’s time and money-saving attempts to make a garment from the smallest amount of fabric, but a garment that does not appear to be designed around its material limitations. But to the question of what women are expected to make, if you will, I am curious about how we think about motherhood fitting into these questions of heterosexuality. There’s been a lot of talk lately about that natalism book that came out recently, which Moira Donegan took down in Bookforum. Her essay reminded me of this Ellen Willis quote I am addicted to, which is from an essay she wrote about the failures of 60s radicalism and the pro-family backlash in the 70s––she’s feeling kind of bereft because she is divorced, she isn’t remarrying yet, and her leftist friends did just go ahead and get married and she’s explicitly wondering where's my storyline? She understands that the left needed to offer the same level of storylines that the right was offering people through which to envision their lives, but is disappointed basically in our lack of imagination. So she’s talking about the left’s pro-nuclear family pivot, and she says ‘Compliments to the emperor's tailor, everyone wants a family now.’ And that’s what this ‘natalism for the left’ moment feels like to me. Donegan’s argument is that this new book claims to be offering women an answer to the question ‘what are children for,’ but what it’s really asking is what are women for, implying it’s having children, and attempting to debunk every ‘reason’ a woman might come up with for not having children, from economic precarity to climate change. But the basic conceit of wanting a life without a child, for ‘no reason,’ as a woman, is not really reckoned with.

JA H
Earlier we were talking about the fact that we imagine our private lives and our romantic and erotic lives as refuges from politics, but I actually think we pretend we imagine them that way when really we're in a moment where everything is saturated by politics and ideology. You can't say ‘I'm going to not have kids’ without saying ‘I'm going to not have kids because of climate change.’ Every utterance in public has to be couched in some sort of political imperative. 

JU H
Yes, otherwise you get called selfish. It's like, well what's your political reason for not having kids? You have to give us your justifiable reason. But you also have to defend having kids, over and against the political imperative not to. 

JA H
Well, bringing heteropessimism back to the #MeToo thing, that feels like the moment in which, if you loved men, you had to disaffiliate from them because everyone was coming out to say, hey, look how fucking awful men are and all the horrible things they do. So if you're continuing to love them, you felt an impulse to perform a political sort of posturing in relation to your desire for men.

ELC
Right, and then that feels related to the rise of the anti-woke girl thing, which you also addressed so insightfully Jamie, when you wrote that we should “recognize the girlboss and the anti-woke cool girl as Janus faces of the same coin.” I feel like part of the allure of those storylines are actually their hetero-optimism, that those are both figures that embrace the heterosexual contract and refuse to apologize for it, the cool girl through the sort of horseshoe effect of overall self-aware pessimism and nihilism, and the girlboss through her alliance with power. 

RFQ
Something that I always feel is worth saying around heteropessimism, and, I'm not quite sure how to articulate this, feel free to push back anyone, but I feel like heteropessimism was accepted so readily when it was presented, and part of that was because it's a great frame––I love that essay, it changed my life, but I also think that there's been a bastardization of the idea. It feels like it was re-framed as reductive during a backlash against women who criticize the genuine, extreme harm that men in heterosexual relationships have caused them and continue to cause them. And it's sort of like, ok, women are called heteropessimists now when they're like, dating men is difficult for me, they sexually assault me. 

ELC
Right, it's definitely being manipulated now to basically accuse a woman of oversimplifying a complicated dynamic when she notices misogyny occurring in her personal life. I do think it's related to our cultural repugnance towards the confessional mode. 

JA H
Yeah, accusing them of not operating on a high enough intellectual level. 

ELC
Right, you’re supposed to be a smart woman, why can’t you think yourself out of that one?

RFQ
It even feels like a classic Paglia argument about how women need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, exercise more autonomy or something. I even see people on Twitter all the time saying, oh are straight women okay? Like people arguing that when straight women say they hate men, it's the exact same thing as male comedians doing the, I hate my wife, ball and chain bit. But It's actually not the same thing. They're obviously two opposite sides of the patriarchal model. 

ELC
It's actually such an interesting choice that people use the male comedians example in that argument, because, to use comedy’s own terms, a heteropessimistic joke is punching up, vs a misogynistic joke is punching down, they are just inherently different rhetorical modes.

RFQ
Right, I think the trouble with calling a text heteropessimist, or not the trouble, but just the condition associated with it, is that it is often used now to imply that a critique is under-developed. 

JA H
Yeah, and something I think is a little dangerous is the buzzwordification of heteropessimism in the discourse is the risk of oversimplifying, especially in relation to how we talk about female agency. It's like–to the woman expressing a complaint: “you're not being autonomous, you're not liberated enough. Because you said this guy treated you like shit,” and the idea is always, “Why didn't you just choose a guy who wasn't abusive?” The specter of female autonomy has been, in my experience, used almost exclusively to criminalize and incriminate women. To hold us responsible for being abused or being hurt. 

ZH
Yes, and I do wonder if what's taken to be heteropessimism is in fact actually pessimistic, in that it's making a statement about the future. If I'm saying ‘men suck, men are trash, I hate dating,’ that to me feels more like a critique or rather a criticism than a pessimistic projection. It's not necessarily me saying that's how it's going to be forever, and I think sometimes there is this assumption that when women dare to complain about the current state of things they're making some grand pronouncement about how they will always feel. 

ELC
Yes, and that is an audience choosing to read a woman's statement that way, with that forward-looking linear attachment that allows the culture to stay stable where it is, right? Instead of understanding a pessimistic statement as actually implying I would like it to be different. *Laughter* That's why I'm bringing it up. Because I wish it hadn't happened and perhaps it doesn’t have to happen to the next girl? 

JU H
It reminds me of the moment on Twitter, post ‘not all men,’ when the masculinity influencers started being like, well then, like, why would we ever want to date you? Like, how are we ever supposed to make relationships better? And so some women felt like, oh, we're being too mean to men, we’re not respecting men. We can't express our frustration about the current moment, without doing what men do to us, which is obviously not what was being done. But you see other women saying that. Like, how do you ever expect to have a good relationship with a man when you treat men the way that you're claiming men treat women?

The specter of female autonomy has been, in my experience, used almost exclusively to criminalize and incriminate women.

JA H
It's funny. There’s this idea that you're collapsing the complaint and the behavior––if you say something about a man that's negative you're also treating him badly, not just describing his behavior. 

RFQ
So much writing comes out of a small bubble of people in the same small neighborhoods and wealthy cities. So much writing comes from a certain type of person, a certain demographic, and I think sometimes it can feel like people are forgetting, first of all, how recent the past is. We actually are not so far away from before no-fault divorce existed, when women's bodies were just completely up for sale. Yet people seem to feel that the pendulum has swung too far. I remember when all those divorce memoirs came out, and I was seeing all of these women, a lot of New York writer type literary women, saying, ‘well, let's not forget that marriage can be good. Or let men be masculine.’

ELC
And there’s the simultaneous posturing when someone writes about a man say, not doing housework, where the supposedly feminist women are getting on Twitter to say ‘well my man does the dishes,’ in this sort of condescending, to your early Paglia point Jamie, if you’re a fabulous enough woman you can just bootstrap yourself into finding the real feminist men, and if you haven’t you’re just whiny and not ‘agentative’ enough. 

RFQ
And I also just think, probably the vast majority of women in the United States who are in heterosexual partnerships are not being treated equitably, to say the least. I mean, such an overwhelming amount of women in heterosexual partnerships are subject to physical violence on a regular basis. I just don't think any criticism of marriage as an institution is worse than an endorsement of marriage as an institution. It's just still one of the fundamental building blocks of violence against women. So I kind of don't know what we're doing when we're saying, well, ‘let's not be too harsh on marriage’ –– it's still pretty bad!

JU H
It reminds me of that video that was going viral on Twitter, indicating that women are often scared to vote for somebody other than their husbands’ candidate, and then all these people were saying, ‘why are you being so condescending to women, and acting like these women can't make their own decisions.’ Well a lot of women are in a situation where it might not be safe to do that. 

ELC
Well, this goes back to what we were saying about the obsession with female agency, and people imagining it existing in a complete vacuum. As opposed to understanding agency as always compromised, and existing in the context of a woman's life and the situation that she finds herself in. Anyway, I was going to do this at the beginning, but we got amazingly diverted. But I am curious––I feel like when the essay came out and people were writing responses, people were positing different urtexts of heteropessimism and some people thought it was A Marriage Story and others thought it was Midsommar and I was wondering what you all might think are the urtexts? For me, it is going to go ahead and be Gone Girl. She really did something heteropessimistic there––in this very gamified, this is a story a scheme and a role, a storyline she was taught to play her whole life, and then once she’s in suburbia, in her prison-house having her Gornick boredom moment in which she also learns her man is cheating on her with Em Rata, she flees the house only so she can stumble back into it drenched in blood and create a narrative loop so hermetically sealed the man can never escape it. 

JA H
What immediately comes to mind are the divorce books people were talking about this summer. That, to me, felt like a tipping point where suddenly, now, everyone is against this. “Do not write about your bad marriage anymore,” was the message. But the writing was very much about the accumulative wounds that permeate a marriage, the dailiness. It’s related to what we were talking about earlier, about how with friendships you have to constantly build, you have to attend to them every day. That's true in a marriage, too. And the way that these inequities are so unnoticeable. Actually, when I came out of my relationship, everyone was convinced I had to have been beaten or cheated on to have left. It's like we need to imagine these things in frameworks of abuse. And so I thought the incrementalism and the attention to seemingly minor details of married life in these books was brilliant.

ELC
That impulse to assume someone had to be beaten up or cheated on is related to the deeply intense gravitational pull of this heterosexual romance narrative. Everyone's like, so you're telling me that as a woman, you just wanted to break up with someone because you wanted to do something else with your life in the way that men do every single day. Whereas when a woman does it, it's assumed that something literally horrific had to happen? 

RFQ
One of my favorite conversations that we've had is when we were talking about this, just the two of us a long time ago, and you were like, yeah, it's a prison, but it also makes sense that many of us are of banging on the doors of the prison saying, please let me in, at one time or another. There's a good reason to be pessimistic, of course, because there are just so many women all the time, everywhere, who are experiencing horrible violence, either physical violence or just a regular emotional wounding as a result of their heterosexual partnership. And you were like, yes, and it's important to this analysis to remember that those women often are choosing to be in those relationships still. Like there are so many women who have decided that the participation in this project is worth the wounding. And again, whether that be because of  patriarchal conditioning and a series of coercive structures, it is true that the prison is an alluring thing. And there are a lot of women, me included sometimes, who have actively sought out harmful painful relationships because it feels better than being alone or feels safer than being alone. 

ELC
Well, I think a lot of it comes back to this fantasy of pure feminine agency that we seem to have constructed in order to demonize pretty much any choice a woman makes––because we refuse to admit that she's making that choice while living in a society with only so many options available. 

JA H
It is funny too, especially thinking about this as a continuing conversation post-pandemic––you know, we had this very revolutionary moment and feeling in 2020, with COVID and the protests, but actually what has happened is a reconsolidation of the same horrible structures. Rather than imagining a different world beyond capitalism, now we just say, well, that's it, but you can choose to be a trad wife.

ELC
It’s very ‘compliments to the Emperor's tailor.’ I feel like what we're trying to do here, and what I try to do whenever I'm talking to any of my friends about this, is ask what is happening in the space between those two poles? Because I don't want to misogynistically demonize the trad wife or the person who wants to stay in a partnership that might not be making them happy, and I understand that all of our agency is compromised, but on the other hand I don't want to be like well these are just the set array of storylines I can choose from–– I still want us to be trying to write new ones. 

ZH
With the heterosexual narrative, you have these big moments or milestones, like getting into a relationship, getting married, eventually having children, but in between you do have the dailiness of a life of constant work. And I remember in Moira Donegan's review of that pro-motherhood book, she talks about how that book, which is so intensely anxious about why millennials aren't having children, pushes back against all the reasons women might give for not having children. But what's interesting is the book tries to dispute those reasons while neglecting to talk about the experience of having children, of trying to raise kids in a world where child care is so expensive and its responsibilities are so privatized. It's almost kind of similar to what we were saying about the narrative closure of a rom-com: you get the marriage at the end and then you don't see what the daily makeup of the marriage is, which is work. 

JU H
Very intentionally. 

ZH
Because it is in the dailiness where the politics comes through. It's in the dailiness of trying to raise a kid and realizing, I am paying way too much money for child care, or someone has to stay home. Or being in a marriage, and realizing my husband literally doesn't know where the mop in our house is because he never cleans. Those kinds of small accretions, on that incremental scale is where the politics come up. I know we’ve been talking about what kind of other narratives are there, what are ways to exist without narrative, and I think just paying attention to that daily experience might be a way.