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If you’d rather watch me read this:
Being, shall we say, quite familiar with both heterosexuality and pessimism, I of course had to click on “On Heteropessimism.”
Often, when I’m reading someone go on and on about something or another I think, consciously or subconsciously, why? Why are you so obsessed with this?
I think the fact that I’m writing so much about men and masculinity is because I’m not, at heart, all that pessimistic about them.
“Particularly for women, radically transforming heterosexuality might begin with honest accounts of which elements of heterosexuality are actually appealing. why do i like men is a half joke—you can hear the smirk in Walker’s voice as she delivers the question at the beginning of each episode—but it is also a sincere inquiry. In asking and reasking the podcast’s eponymous question, Walker pushes through heteropessimist anesthesia and reawakens her own vulnerability.”
Ultimately, I’m a gender abolitionist. I predict, and look forward to, a world in which gender is as mutable and consequential as hair color.
Is it contradictory to say that at the same time, I love men? It’s certainly vulnerable.
Maybe “man” wouldn’t be a relevant category in my utopia. But it’s relevant now, and fascinating. Maybe it’s because I grew up without any men in the house, my dad lived 30 minutes away and I had no brothers or even male cousins. Maybe it’s because as a young girl I wanted to be a boy, fighting and adventuring relatively unencumbered. Boy Scouts activities always seemed more fun and interesting than Girl Scouts. Maybe it’s because I was always so horny, and wouldn’t allow myself to admit any attraction to women until I was in my 30s.
Whatever the reasons, men fascinate me as only problems I can’t fully grok do.
Pick Me, Not Like Other Girls notes flavored my early fascination with men. Perhaps if I’d known I was acting out tropes common enough to have acronyms I might have spent less time there. I think part of the fun for me now is to try to genuinely care about men without actively vying for their approval or trying to prove how different from or better than other women I am. It’s a hard needle to thread. Any attempt to empathize with men inevitably leads to accusations of Pick Me or NLOG behavior. Luckily, someone’s already picked me. And I have no problem being like other girls anymore, at least consciously.
“Collectively changing the conditions of straight culture is not the purview of heteropessimism,” Asa Seresin writes. “To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better.” If there’s anything my writing is about, it’s changing conditions for wide swaths of the population. Not everyone, necessarily. Sex-negativity seems to work just fine for a lot of people. Or, at least it seems likely that the costs of a change in perspective would outweigh the benefits for many people, if not most. I write for the people who are like me. I write for people who have been fucked over enough by sex-negativity that it’s possible, if not likely, that a change in perspective would be an on-net good. I write so that more people have access to a competing perspective sooner in life than I did.
I think it’s useful to talk about how heterosexuality could be better for everyone involved.
Another thing I often wonder when I see someone go on and on about something is: “What do you think you’re adding to the discussion?”
I think one thing I’m trying to add to the discussion about what’s wrong with men is a corrective to the strange conservatism from the left when it comes to groups they see as having disproportionate power.
Over the course of my life I’ve shifted decidedly leftward in several areas, including individualism. For example, I’ve shifted from thinking primarily about what individuals can and should do towards systems that influence individual thought and behavior.
“Get a job” might be good advice. But if you have any influence whatsoever, you’ll get further, faster by convincing people in power to streamline the barriers to employment. Basically, I’m writing for the job I want.
It’s interesting to me to watch the left be really good about thinking about how systems make it difficult for marginalized people to succeed and at the same time seem to be often much worse at thinking about how systems make it difficult for less-marginalized people to succeed.
There’s a lot more discussion about the ways sexism hurts women than men. Perhaps that makes sense, since it’s fairly easy to measure they ways sexism hurts women. We can look at women’s representation in positions of power in every major institution, including government, industry, education, mass media, and non-profits. We can look at the ways the state infringes on women’s bodily autonomy, particularly in terms of access to reproductive healthcare. Women have lower average incomes and labor force participation rates than men, which leaves us more economically dependent and disempowered.
But going afield of that, the picture looks murkier. Men are more likely than women to be victims of crime. Looking at crimes that are understood to be highly gendered further complicates the narrative. For instance, men are even less likely than women to go to the police to make a report after being raped. And some estimates suggest that men are raped more often than women.
Looking at intimate partner violence, a third of men in the U.S. experience contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime, according to one estimate. Another source says 1/4 men and 1/3 women have experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. If intimate partner violence is similarly underreported by men, it may be that men are as likely, or even more likely, to experience it than women.
Men are more likely to be injured on the job than women. Women are more likely to receive public assistance than men, given the same circumstances.
Some feminists will point to the fact that women are much less likely than men to commit crimes or the fact that many of these men are raped by other men to place men as the victimizers and men and women as their victims. But I just don’t think that’s a super helpful framing.
Ultimately, I find conversations about sexism aimed at deciding which gender is the perpetrator and which is the victim mostly counterproductive.
I also think it’s unhelpful to try to increase women’s representation in positions of power just or mainly for the sake of equal or majority female representation. Having a more balanced gender representation in positions of power is certainly useful. Power reproduces itself. I certainly don’t believe it makes sense to actively keep women out of positions of power. At the same time, I don’t believe getting more women into positions of power necessarily increases the quality of leadership. It might, especially at first. There’s decent evidence that the women who are able to overcome the barriers to female leadership are likely even more competent than the men they’re replacing.
And it might be useful to have men and women in positions of leadership just to balance out each gender’s tendencies towards different strengths and weaknesses. But I don’t believe there’s much that’s inherent to women that makes us better leaders than men. To believe that merely being male or female necessarily endows someone with more or less leadership ability is a fundamentally gender essentialist, and therefore sexist, idea.
In my view, heteropessimism is fundamentally gender essentialist and sexist. It seems to hold that men are like this, women are like that, and never the twain shall fuck in a healthy, life-affirming way. I just don’t buy any of that. Certainly in some ways men and women are fundamentally, immutably different from each other. But other gender differences are attribution errors. There was a time and a place where most people believed that a woman’s uterus would fall out if she exercised too vigorously.
I think there’s a lot of hope for heterosexuality. Maybe it’s because I love men so much. Maybe it’s because I’m a macro-optimist generally, and obsessed with sex, gender, and men in particular. I think if we can shift the conversation away from men vs women and towards everyone vs sexism, it’s going to help everyone.
If the gender abolitionists win, I guess heterosexuality goes away too. I’m fine with that. But in the meantime, it seems like the move is to find a way to make gender less of a drag. Which means reducing the potency and ubiquity of sexism. Which can mean, among other things, talking about the ways sexism hurts men.
What I want to bring to the conversation is an alternative to the exhortation for men to stop being toxic and a recognition of all the ways in which our culture demands that men remain toxic. Let’s stop trying to teach men to fish nearly empty lakes and start restocking the pond. Let’s take what we’ve learned about systems and incentives and apply it to everyone. Because in the end, fighting each other in broken systems doesn’t really work, and results in more broken people. What works better is working together to fix the systems we live under.
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