There’s something embarrassing, shameful, about enormous desire: cuntstruck, dick-drunk, dickmatized, down bad. So much work goes into pretending to be more upright, less addicted, than we really are. When I…
Contemporaries Essays
The Rom-Com is Dead, Long Live the Rom-Com
About twenty-five minutes into Joachim Trier’s 2021 film The Worst Person in the World, protagonist Julie is leaving a party where her boyfriend was being annoying. She is enjoying a…
New Men, Same Story: Ted Lasso‘s Heteroformalism
Men are good now — haven’t you heard? Nice guys are having a cultural moment: every online platform has lists of “unproblematic faves,” men like Keanu Reeves, Fred Rogers, or…
The Lover’s Complaint Concerning His Working Conditions
Heteropessimism is often understood as a female complaint. The idea that heterosexuality’s inequities and disappointments are borne disproportionately by women is so axiomatic that Jane Ward could reasonably dedicate The…
Compulsory Heterosexuality, Past and Present: Adrienne Rich and the Lesbian Masterdoc
I started using TikTok in late 2020. Not long after joining, the app began feeding me videos by queer women who enthusiastically praised something called the “Lesbian Masterdoc,” describing it…
Hetero Ever After? Romance Novels, Race, and the Limits of Social Dreaming
Heteropessimism is everywhere, it seems, from our newsfeeds to our brunch conversations — and now, also, in our book clubs. This gender malaise plays out in contemporary literary fiction with…
Domestic Heteropessimism
Last summer people on Twitter were angrily discussing an Instagram account that was new to me, run by an artist, Mary Catherine Starr, who posts as @momlife_comics. Presented as sincerely…
Sally Rooney’s Love Plot as Gimmick
The novel is, by definition, formally heteropessimist: gesturing towards queerness at the levels of narrative, style, and perspective while resolving upon heterosexual coupledom in the end. This, at least, is…
The Performativity of Heteropessimism as Feminist Complaint
“Females, however, and effeminate men enjoy having people to wail with them” — Aristotle1 Around the time I turned thirty, I was dating the most magnetic man I’d ever met….
Introduction
In season 5, episode 2 of Sex and the City, Carrie meets with publishers who want to turn her eponymous column about sex and relationships into a book. All she…