Heteropessimism for the Thinking Lesbian

Being a cynic about men... or not.

We’ve all seen this movie before: The straight woman hates men, hates being attracted to men. Men, am I right? We’ll still date them, but we hate them. The trope shows up in a hundred shows, television shows, et cetera.

In 2019, Asa Seresin coined the term heteropessimism: Straight women performing embarrassment and hopelessness about their lives with men, but still go back to straight relationships in the end:

Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience… 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.

Heteropessimism is not really about wanting to be queer. It’s about protection from getting too invested. Seresin quotes Lee Edelman, arguing that heteropessimism is an “anesthetic feeling”:

…a feeling that aims to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment.

By anesthesizing their own feelings, women dissociate from their own intense feelings — the same thing that Seresin argues heterosexual culture wants us to be ashamed of.

Interestingly, complaints about heterosexuality, or the prison of being attracted to men, are not most frequently voiced by lesbians: They’re voiced by straight women. How often have you heard your straight or bisexual friends bemoan the issues of men? Lesbians (and bi women who primarily date women) may have bad experiences with misogyny, but we don’t have to date men — and I wonder if that provides us, in an odd way, a level of protection. Seresin mentions:

Like most lesbians, I have found myself on the receiving end of approximately 100,000 drunk straight women bemoaning their orientation and insisting that it would be “so much easier” to be gay. Sure, it probably would be! That “men are trash” is not something I am personally invested in disputing. Yet in announcing her wish to be gay, the speaker carelessly glosses over the fact that she has chosen to stay attached to heterosexuality—to remain among the (slightly more than 2 or 3) women who are, despite everything, still straight.

But that is not to say lesbians aren’t also deeply affected by patriarchy. Indeed, one of the major ties between women, regardless of sexuality, is our unity in the horror of patriarchy. Talia Bhatt writes in Trans/Rad/Fem that our unity comes in our collective punishment at the hands of patriarchy.

…women outside of the private sphere are not free of patriarchy and are also victims of patriarchal violence, just a different kind. Analyses of heterosexuality as an institution sought to cultivate unity between lesbian and heterofeminism, to make women aware of how we are all compelled into relationships with men and how our societies make the same heterosexist demands of all women. Whether we accept or refuse the patriarchal bargain, we are punished, and a feminism that is truly for everyone has to recognize the common roots of our oppression.

In the last few years, as sociologist Jane Ward points out (as quoted in a Jessica Bennett The Cut piece) in her course on critical heterosexuality, a cultural backlash to queerness has led to a resurgence of strict cultural masculinity and femininity:

Idealized masculinity has become more aggressive, more jacked up, and also more high maintenance — have you heard of mewing? — while femininity gets ever “softer,” more nurturing and domestic, and somehow still more sexy.

Women may hate men. But they still accept the role of the soft feminine, accept the state of constant heterosexuality.

The ultimate modern heteropessimist, dare I say, may be Sabrina Carpenter.

When the discourse over her album cover was its peak, Tracy Clark-Flory argued that Carpenter’s invocation of the woman-on-her-knees trope is not a poorly-used prop, but a deliberate allusion to exactly what her music already touches on:

What are you gonna do? One answer is to not only cheekily romanticize but also eroticize oppression. You could call it “sexy heterofatalism,” an adaptive strategy for loving men in patriarchy… Kink often involves fantasies of debasement; loving straight men in patriarchy often involves actual debasement. The key difference being the presence of consent and negotiation. Heteronormativity doesn’t negotiate; it demands and extracts. Carpenter is turning straight women’s impossibly fraught feelings into playful theater.

We live in a power imbalance that is difficult to acknowledge, but harder still to break from, and a culture where to satirize and to sexualize are often hand in hand. Of course satirizing is a method of critique. Here, Carpenter is purposefully using the woman on her knees to parody what being a straight woman often entails: Debasing yourself, or permitting debasement, to allow for intimacy.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

But what if we didn’t need to just accept that prison, as people like Carpenter — much as I love her — often do?

Going back to Jane Ward’s work, I find most interesting Ward’s note that heterosexuality is “erotically uninspired” because, as any self-respecting queer woman who has listened in horror to details of their friends’ own sex lives will tell you, it is — particularly when a rigid set of gender roles are applied. The paths are trodden; the lines (dominant man, submissive woman; man penetrating, woman taking) are drawn years before each encounter. Queer women aren’t all having great relationships or great sex, but perhaps it’s easier for us to do so, sans the stress of a past model.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for anyone to exit that past model. The real enemy here isn’t heterosexuality itself, but the rigid models it sets forth. As Ward argues:

Women who continue to be with men should consider taking a cue from queer people and consciously build new rules and rituals… Ward’s version of the concept is called “deep heterosexuality.” For straight women who want to begin down this road, the first step, she says, is having to answer the same questions that gay people have been forcibly confronted with for so long: What propels them toward the opposite sex, despite all the difficulty? And what does being straight do for them?

A few weeks back, Cosmopolitan wrote about the pressures put on women by compulsory heterosexuality and how we can ‘decenter’ men in a world so dedicated to our worship of men. (Hilariously, this article quotes Melissa A. Fabello, PhD, who the chronically online may remember from this infamous tweet.)

For some women, of course, decentering men may indeed involve forgoing romantic or sexual relationships with them. Because at its core, decentering men is about interrogating the societal conditioning that encourages women to prioritize romantic commitment to men and the heteropatriarchal structures with which it intersects. For some women, this may include “asking themselves where they learned to chase concepts like marriage and nuclear family and whether or not that desire is authentic,” says Fabello. “It could look like valuing and enjoying being single, putting friends back at the center of one’s life.”

As Sherese (Charlie) Taylor argues in her book Decentering Men, which helps guide women to prioritize themselves, the point isn’t rejecting love, but:

…rejecting the patriarchal conditioning that tells us we must suffer for it, earn it, or mold ourselves to be worthy of it.

The point here isn’t to reject heterosexuality, or at least it’s not only to reject heterosexuality. It’s to reject the model that has been built for it, to intentionally craft a new model: One where both parties are seen as not just equal, but without inherent difference.