What can you do if you believe that what you desire is what might destroy you in the end?  

In a gum-stained and sweaty-walled bathroom in a pub in Manchester, a girl applies  flamingo-pink lipstick in the mirror and is telling me about some guy named Freddie. She gave me a cigarette outside fifteen minutes ago, which makes us best friends. He’s a dickhead, I half-agree. I’m focusing more on refreshing my phone to see if the guy I am “sort of” seeing has checked my Instagram story because he’s been online recently so why hasn’t he texted me back. “I hate men”, my new bestie says. Then, as if on cue, The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” begins to emanate through the door. We open it and initiate ourselves into the swab of bodies and music and booze that make up a messy night out. I spot her hours later dancing alone, her movements suggesting the shape of a man, maybe even Freddie, in how she drapes herself uneasily around the air. Meanwhile, my phone dies and I promise the bartender I’ll add him on Instagram if he lets me charge it behind the bar. 

I hate men. But I hate men like I hate the weather, in that sometimes I love it, too

We desire either sameness or symbiosis in heterosexual relationships: the former being political and the latter being romantic. It’s legally, socially, and culturally more hygienic to regard the sexes as exactly alike, but passionate to believe that we complete each other. Neither of these myths have served, and they still fail to serve us now. Privately, we reconcile the emotional experience of heterosexuality as being ultimately symmetrical but this also isn’t as neat as we’d hope. Why women like men isn’t the same as why men like women.

I hate men. But I hate men like I hate the weather, in that sometimes I love it, too. Sometimes it makes me late for work and sometimes it drives me crazy enough that I think about relocating countries and sometimes it can make my entire day. Regardless, I can’t escape it. It’s naive to think it’s possible to escape it. I often return to a 2019 essay by Ana Seresin, in which she coins the term “heteropessimism”, defined as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” Any brief conversation in any woman’s nightclub toilet across the country corroborates this: being attracted to men can be uncomfortable at best and humiliating at worst. But these disavowals of heterosexuality have the conviction of a boomer man who complains about his “ball and chain”. It’s the hopelessness, rather than regret or embarrassment, that has begun to pervade, and deserves more critical attention.

  Many women I know treat heterosexuality as a pathology in which they cannot be cured. I’ve heard female friends describe it almost akin to self-harm, or hear them adopt the language of addiction, outlining their relapses when they reply to a 2 AM text. They mourn the multiplicity of selves that could have been relinquished onto the world had they not spent years keeping the peace with a lazy live-in partner, or even driven themselves to dizzy pandemonium over a crush.

This isn’t silly: grief is something to be taken incredibly seriously. This pain takes on existential proportions, because it cannot be remedied. It is a biological destiny to be attracted to men, and it is a deeper human impulse to seek out love.

One of the biggest injustices of being born in a body is that we can’t consent to our own desires. Heteropessimism isn’t uniquely feminist as a concept, and echoes many philosophical forbearers. Rereading Schopenhauer, philosopher and misogynist-at-large, one may come to the conclusion that he, too, is a heteropessimist.  In “The Metaphysics of Love” he writes “it is the will to live presenting itself in the whole species, which so forcibly and exclusively attracts two individuals of different sex towards each other”. Indeed, forcibly and exclusively seem to be the key descriptors here. Lines in “The Metaphysics of Love” almost mirror verbatim lines from feminist terrorist Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto”: both texts bely a deep frustration or rather disappointment at the fact that heterosexuality seems so ultimately asymmetrical and thus unfulfilling whilst being ultimately physically and even spiritually necessary to life.

Online radfem spaces and Red Pill spaces paint a bleak but incredibly similar views of heterosexual “vibes”: they agree on the set of symptoms being culturally expressed but come to different diagnoses of the issue and subsequently treatments. Andrew Tateism is one way, and one of the others has been gaining traction in the news cycle recently. 

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, American women have started to give more credence to female separatist movements. The 4B Korean movement suggests women stop marrying, dating, having children with, and sleeping with men. There are certain patriarchal assumptions beneath this thinking — that women see sex as something to reward men with in exchange for resources and protection — and frustrating insistences that sex and labour can map on to each other in a tidy 1:1 manner, but the movement has still captivated public imagination. Separatist movements (including male-led ones, like Men Going Their Own Way) are always interesting to the public because of their infeasibility. The projects seemed doomed and comical alike. Ultimately, under heterosexuality, we all simply love the other too much. The other sex is the weather and we weather it to varying degrees of contentment throughout our lives.

But of course, for the 4Bs and other radical feminists, what can you do if you believe what you desire is what might destroy you in the end? The desire for symbiosis not only has historically led to women’s impoverishment of thought and identity, and fostered a dependency that can be dangerous — women’s ability to take agency over their self-realisation has been limited and still is in many countries —  but in some ways, the desire for sameness has a different set of dangers. One of the only contemporary ways of acknowledging the bare bones of heterosexuality — that someone is a man, and someone is a woman — is when it’s played out in the heightened variety show of BDSM. In these ways, couples often replicate biology through “power exchange” without acknowledging it such, and instead giving a slightly misplaced lip service to the thrill of the taboo. These kinky caricatures are often violent and affirm the worst of gender stereotypes in the world of the bedroom. While it’s tempting to blame this entirely on pornography and its “subject object verb” exhibition of desire, it’s condescending and untrue to say these trends have come entirely from men.

Sometimes I wonder if extreme acts like choking can represent a way for women to punish themselves for their own attraction or desire to men. Some of this violence is a manifestation of their own anger at the circumstance and inevitability of it. If a man complies, it confirms her fears were correct all along. In a moment like that, the myth of psychological symmetry in heterosexuality that we cling to is hard to justify. It makes it obvious that the pleasure is not the same.

We needn’t romanticise untenable conditions. And what love, or even tenderness, can be sprung from such resentment? There is nothing novel in suffering or moral for the sake of it. We needn’t accept purgatorial situationships as a hardship one exchanges for love.  

Falling in love, forming relationships, being vulnerable sexually, is terrifying

Perhaps a ray of hope can be found in wondering if these anxieties come down to something that supersedes sexual politics. Or that sexual politics can sometimes act as window dressing for a larger issue. Falling in love, forming relationships, being vulnerable sexually, is terrifying. These are high-stakes arenas, in which we find ourselves at the mercy completely of someone else. To be unable to totally understand how the other is feeling, what they are thinking, can drive someone mad.

Instead of defaulting to “hetero-optimism,” society should aim for “hetero-dynamism,” encouraging men and women to embrace both vulnerability and difference. Our relationships needn’t be procreative, but they should be “creative”, in that there’s mutual striving. Magnetism and attraction are inherently dynamic. Love doesn’t require emotional mirroring, but a willingness to engage with difference without a need to see that difference as a perfect puzzle piece to yours. The insistence on emotional similarity from which one may gleam reassurance breeds anxiety. What you desire, no matter the social or biological conditions, needn’t be inevitably destructive: it is not a pathology to love your boyfriend.