Episode 44 - Heteropessimism

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena-Guzman,

Ellie: 0:08

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday,

Ellie: 0:18

because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

David: 0:31

Ellie, do you ever wish that you weren't attracted to men?

Ellie: 0:39

For sure. I mean, what a woman who dates men hasn't, at some point, wished we weren't attracted to men.

David: 0:46

Touche, good point, good point.

Ellie: 0:48

I mean, dating men really does suck a lot of the time, like in banal yet pervasive ways. Like it really sucks.

David: 0:58

Well, I mean, excuse me, I date men also, but I assume by that you mean straight men, right?

Ellie: 1:04

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, okay. We can do, we can do like a not all men thing here. Well, we'll have lots to say about pervasiveness versus individuality in this episode, but my least favorite thing about dating straight men is when they act like they're logical and women are emotional. When actually like the way they're behaving is blatantly irrational, whereas like the woman's makes a lot of sense. I was looking at my college journals in prep for this episode because I thought, you know, there might be some relevant stuff. And indeed of course there was, and I found a printed out email exchange that that's like, the two thousands for you right there. And in this email exchange, I guess I was upset with my boyfriend at the time for not answering any of my calls or texts one night when we were supposed to hang out and he was just totally ghosting me. He had some like extremely bizarre story, which I later found out was a total lie about how his phone had died and his car had broken down and his family was going through all this stuff, blah, blah, blah. And he was just like, oh yeah, I just, you know, couldn't answer your calls, whatever. And my response to him was, yeah, you know, it's just, it's sometimes hard for me because you just have this logical approach to everything and I'm just so emotional about all of this stuff. I had like totally drunk the Kool-Aid. There was one person who was being more emotional than the other in this situation and it was definitely not me. Like my being upset around him not calling or texting me back when we were supposed to hang out was like pretty reasonably logical response. And then his like kind of emotional explosion: well, I had this and that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which was actually a lie to begin with. That was where the real emotion was coming from.

David: 2:50

Well, you know, every time I teach Freud, I tell my students that every single hysteric I have ever met has been a man. I've never met a woman hysteric, but I have met a lot of boy hysterics.

Ellie: 3:04

Yeah. Yeah. And not to pull rank here, but now many years later, one of us has a PhD in philosophy, a pretty logical discipline, whereas- actually he's doing pretty well. He owns a multimillion dollar mansion in LA and married a blonde woman named Ellen. I know, but let's just say the multimillion dollar mansion, it's not due to his own merit. It was, it was family connections, for sure. Yeah. I had terrible taste in college as you can tell, luckily, things have changed since then.

David: 3:33

I wonder if based on your experience of dating men who, you know, pull the women are emotional, men are logical, construct all these narratives to justify their behavior, whether you might be suffering from an undiagnosed case of heteropessimism.

Ellie: 3:51

David it's diagnosed. I mean, yeah, this term heteropessimism is super new. I've actually been working in feminist philosophy of love for a lot longer than this term has been around. It was only coined in 2019 in an article by Indiana Seresin in The New Inquiry, but it was one of those things that when I read it, I was like, oh yeah, this is a term for something that feminists have been describing for a long time. And unsurprisingly, since then, this term has received a lot of uptake in the media. And she basically describes it as this basic attitude of pessimism about heterosexual relationships, which is so common among women, it's practically become a meme at this point.

David: 4:30

And it's not just in the media. Now there are some academic articles in academic journals that have begun to use this term both in feminist theory and in queer theory, again, to name a particular attitude towards heterosexuality that seems to be either common or common and growing among heterosexuals. And in this piece in New Inquiry, Seresin says that heteropessimism consists of, and this is a quote from her article,

Ellie: 4:59

Get ready for the definition people.

David: 5:00

Definitions are always in vogue at Overthink. She says heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliation with heterosexuality usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment or hopelessness about straight experience.

Ellie: 5:19

Okay, let's repeat that one more time. Cause it can be hard to like keep all of the aspects of the definitions while listening.

David: 5:27

Fair enough. It's a bit of a mouthful, but let me go more slowly because I think there are two main parts to the definition. So the first one is that it consists performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality. In other words, it has to do with disavowing one's own identity as a heterosexual or one's own interest in heterosexual relationships.

So that's the first part: 5:51

performative disaffiliation with heterosexuality. The second part is that these disaffiliations are usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment or hopelessness about straight experience. In other words, it's expressed as negative feelings about being straight. Yeah. And one thing that comes up a lot in the article is that heteropessimism has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. Mm yes. Yes. Well, that is true, but she also says that there are men heteropessimists. And we'll talk about that a little bit later, but you are right that-

Ellie: 6:30

who think that women are the problem.

David: 6:32

who think that women are the problem, but when it's women who express this pessimistic view about men, it is usually a discontent with the way in which straight men relate to women in heterosexual relationships, like straight relationships are kind of shit, basically.

Ellie: 6:47

Yeah. And I do think it's safe to say that a lot of women who are attracted to men wish that they weren't right. It's like too much trouble, but it seems here that the key is expressing negative feelings about the desire for men. And maybe even wishing that one didn't have them.

David: 7:01

I think that's why the author calls it a performative disavowal because it's not just a feeling, but it's a feeling that gets expressed in language. It is when people verbalize that and say, I wish I wasn't straight, or I wish I wasn't attracted to straight men or women, depending on who is speaking as a way of having an out from heterosexuality as a social reality or as an institution.

Ellie: 7:25

Yeah. And for that reason, I actually think that the author means artificial or performed rather than performative, because as we've discussed in our episode on performativity, performative actually means something different from the way it gets bandied about in ordinary language. But you can check out our episode on that if you want. It's a kind of minor point here.

David: 7:43

But either way, what she's talking about is, again, an expressed feeling of shame or regret or hopelessness, and she gives an example of what she means by heteropessimism at the beginning of her piece. And she says that the writer Maggie Nelson in her book, The Argonauts, says that she is embarrassed by heterosexuality and at an online event, Seresin, the author of this piece on heteropessimism, asked Maggie Nelson what she meant by that. And Maggie Nelson responded that she's not really embarrassed by heterosexuality in the abstract or in its existence in general, but she is embarrassed of herself being attracted to heterosexual men. And Seresin points to that and raises a flag and says, this is what I mean by heteropessimism. This sense that I'm embarrassed about, I don't know, arguably being a feminist author who is openly attracted to men.

Ellie: 8:45

And I suspect that also saying things like, oh, it would be so much easier if I weren't straight would count in this vein as well.

David: 8:53

Oh my gosh. Yes. And as a queer person who has heard a lot of straight women say that, it sometimes makes my skin crawl when they say things like, oh my gosh, things would be so much better if I was queer or if I was a lesbian or another example, when women say, all the good men are either gay or taken, which I take to be just an expression of the hopelessness of trying to find a straight guy to date.

Ellie: 9:28

Today We're talking about heteropessimism.

David: 9:31

Rampant dissatisfaction with heterosexual, romantic relationships has people wondering, are straight people okay?

Ellie: 9:40

How can feminist theory shed light on why women in particular are so disillusioned?

David: 9:45

And is there any hope out there for the straights?, Ellie, what are the reasons that women are heteropessimists?

Ellie: 9:56

Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Um, this is my jam. And the data are pretty clear that relationships between women and men are on the whole less satisfying for women than for men, especially when men follow traditional gender norms. So masculinity is really at the root of the problem here. For one, you've got rampant intimate partner violence and gaslighting, but a lot of heterosexual dating dynamics are shitty in ways that people don't even notice. But once we think about it, become obviously unethical. So for instance, think about the emotional dynamics of heterosexual love and dating. Philosopher Lena Gunnarsson discusses a variety of studies showing that women are the primary carers in their relationships with men, which I don't think would surprise a lot of people.

David: 10:45

Yeah, it shouldn't.

Ellie: 10:46

Yeah, but the flip side of that is that women, meanwhile, often feel that their own emotional needs go unmet. So Gunnarsson says that there's this general pattern whereby men set the terms of the loving interaction such that the woman's needs are neglected unless they qualify as important in the eyes of the man. So women on the one hand are the primary caretakers of the relationship, which means that they're tasked with managing it. But then on the other hand, the person setting the terms, the ultimate boss, is the man. So women are stuck in a middle management position where they're doing all the work, but like the men are actually wielding the power and men often act as if women's emotional needs make them desperate or hysterical. And part of the problem there is that men often don't have much of an understanding that their own emotional needs are already being met by women. So they have this idea that they don't have emotional needs at all. And so that women shouldn't have emotional needs either. So women that are in this weird position where they take care of a man's emotional needs without him even realizing it. But then they also have to take care of their own emotional needs and, you know, think about the way that men are taught to be detached and non-committal, that's a really key part of masculinity. And so there's justification for their emotional detachment and their ambivalence and the critical theorist Mari Ruti uses the term cruel optimism to make sense of this in her book, Penis Envy, which I think is such an interesting account of heteropessimism. And Ruti borrows this term cruel optimism from the queer theorist Lauren Berlant.

David: 12:21

Yeah, I really like that term cruel optimism. It's very helpful because it shows the extent to which a positive feeling like optimism can in fact be the festering ground for pretty harmful social and interpersonal dynamics. So I would put it in the same category as something like toxic positivity and the cruelty of optimism is that optimism about a relationship that may be doomed or that is fundamentally broken because of the way in which men and women are both socialized can shackle you to something on the premise that it will be better. So I take it that this is the cruel optimism that is at work in heterosexual dynamics.

Ellie: 13:07

Yeah. I mean, the idea is basically that women are encouraged to think that by managing the relationship, they will develop some sort of equality or reciprocity that puts them on an equal level with the man that they're involved with. But then they get caught instead in this vicious cycle of managing the relationship, but the better they are at managing the relationship, the more the man kind of doesn't realize that that's happening to begin with and is able to persist in this illusion that it's a happy relationship where both people's emotional needs are being met.

David: 13:40

If all your emotional needs are being met for you by a third party, then it's very easy for you to delude yourself into thinking that you are not a needy partner. And that whenever your partner, who is in fact, holding up the relationship from an emotional perspective, expresses say, discontent or disillusionment, that they are crossing some kind of boundary that you've never had to do in the past, but that's because you don't begin emotionally on the same level playing field.

Ellie: 14:05

Yeah. And I think what you're describing David is a perfect example of the feminist idea that when you articulate a problem, you are seen as the problem, because for instance, research in social psychology suggests that the most common pattern of communication among heterosexual dating couples is what's called the female demand, male withdraw pattern.

David: 14:27

I've never heard that.

Ellie: 14:28

Yeah. So according to this pattern, the woman attempts to bring up a topic for discussion. But then the man withdraws by avoiding the topic or ending the conversation.

David: 14:38

So is the idea here that women have to not only do the emotional work of maintaining the relationship, but then they are punished through withdrawal by bringing up issues that need to be addressed in the relationship. So they are, uh, if we're pushing this metaphor of middle management, they are disliked both by the people that they manage and also by the people that manage them whenever they express a problem in the organization.

Ellie: 15:04

Yeah. I think that totally works because picture the following: a woman brings up a topic for discussion. And from her perspective, this has already been brewing for awhile. And maybe she's been trying to figure out how to bring it up without alienating the man. She's been ruminating about it, talking about it with friends, et cetera, but by the time she actually brings it up, from the man's perspective, it might appear as just not his problem. And it might be the first time that he's consciously thought about it.

David: 15:30

As if it came out of the blue.

Ellie: 15:31

Exactly, exactly. And so then his response is to be like you're overreacting, or I don't want to deal with this, or it's not the right time or, you know, a variety of different, different options. And so from his perspective, he just doesn't want to deal with it and it's not his problem. And so one form of withdrawal can be stonewalling, which is where the man simply blocks the woman's attempt to discuss the matter at hand by refusing to discuss it altogether. Or he might, you know, accuse her of being overly sensitive or nagging and thinking she just needs to let things go. And at worst, of course it might end up in gaslighting where he makes her feel stupid or crazy for thinking there's a problem to begin with.

David: 16:08

Yeah. And I'm thinking here that the partner who is in a position to exercise withdrawal is always going to have the upper hand, right? Because it means that that partner can simply refuse to engage, indicating already the asymmetry of power between the partners, right? Because he is the one that sets the law and he is also the one who can decide when the law gets applied or not applied. Uh, so I'm just here thinking- I'm going in a very different direction, but theories of sovereignty in which the sovereign is the one that can decide when to follow the law and when not to follow the law. But it seems like here, what we're talking about is having this sovereign capacity in a relationship to suspend normal interpersonal dynamics through withdrawal.

Ellie: 16:56

Yeah. I mean, it's wild that we just live in the society where we think that the genders are so much more equal than they are. But once you scratch the surface and you see through a variety of studies that there's precisely this pattern, uh, it becomes very clear that for most heterosexual relationships, men are still the ones that are holding power over the emotional dynamics even as the women are tasked with, with working them out constantly. And you know, I want to provide the caveat here that there might be plenty of individual situations where yeah, it's not the right time to bring up a problem or the problem is not that big of a deal. Um, so I think it's important for people to be able to let things go. And I grew up in a family where we talked about everything all the time. And one thing I've benefited from actually in dating men is learning that it's sometimes better to not raise an issue to begin with, just to let it go. Um, but I think what we're talking about here is a broader pattern that is disempowering to women and is rampant among straight couples. There's kind of no other way to read the, the abundance of evidence on this point.

David: 18:03

The difference here is between learning the value of letting things go and being put in a position where you are expected to let go of everything, right? I think that's the dynamic that should really worry us because that's where you enter into terrain that's very close to gaslighting, even if it doesn't take the classical form of gaslighting. And in my experience, there's another problem that makes me pessimistic about straight relationships that I'm not even in, which is the asymmetrical distribution of household chores. Um, every single straight relationship that I grew up watching just fell into this pattern. Women cook, women clean, women take care of the kids. And they also have on top of that to think about what men want to the point of having to anticipate the men's own awareness of their wants and needs. In other words, the woman has to know what the man wants and needs before the man becomes aware that he wants or needs anything.

Ellie: 19:09

Totally. Yeah. There's a, there's a way that the woman is always interpreting the man's emotions before he even has access to them, which I have a forthcoming publication about, um, on the topic of chores. Yeah, there was a study showing that women in relationships with men have the lowest satisfaction quality relative to other pairings of genders, um, and relative to the men that they're in relationships with and the article that reported on this, like the pop version of it was entitled something like how to make your marriage gayer, um, and there was like a weird link between couples where the wife does the bulk of routine chores, such as dishwashing, and the highest levels of discord in the relationship.

David: 19:52

Like make your relationship gayer, do the dishes? Fair enough. And you know, it sounds like a small detail, like doing the dishes or taking out the trash or cleaning the bathrooms, but when it becomes so systematic and unavoidable that it just goes one way, I think it can become a pretty significant psychological and emotional burden. And the hashtag metoo movement has of course drawn a lot of attention to things like harassment and assault in the workplace. And some of those insights women are now extending into their romantic and sexual relationships with men, even when they don't rise to the level of harassment and assault, um, but when they are these microaggressions that can definitely set the tone and the tonality for a relationship from the very beginning.

Ellie: 20:50

Absolutely. I read one article about heteropessimism talking about the role of the metoo movement here and encouraging us to think about the way that patriarchy persists in interpersonal relationships. And the author said something like, you know, now that we're thinking more about the workplace, we should also start thinking more about intimate relationships and I had a mixed response to that because on the one hand, I think that the author is totally right. And then on the other hand, I just want to, you know, stand over here yelling as a feminist philosopher that intimate relationship dynamics as pervasive areas of patriarchy are something that feminist thinkers have been attending to already for decades. So one of the actually cool things about heteropessimism is that we can use the resources that feminists have been developing, especially in the nineties, there was kind of a heyday of thinking about, uh, intimate relationships with men as, as sites of misogyny and go back and use those resources in the present.

David: 21:45

Yes. And I take it that one of the insights of feminism in the past hundred years, if not longer, is that one can be exploited without realizing it, especially in the context of a relationship that for all practical purposes, one has assented to from the get go.

Ellie: 22:05

And on that point, I love this quote from the feminist philosopher, Sandra Bartky who says we need to locate our subordination not only in the hidden recesses of the psyche, but in the duties we are happy to perform and in what we thought were the innocent pleasures of everyday life. You thought your relationship was good? Maybe you should think again. Hashtag cruel optimism. We've been talking about heteropessimism as if it's just this general pessimistic attitude that women have because of all of the really good reasons we have to believe that the structure of heterosexual dating tends to disempower them. But the author coined the term is actually pretty critical of expressions of heteropessimism and notes that women aren't the only heteropessimists. So Seresin notes that incels can be considered heteropessimistic as well.

David: 23:19

That's why I said earlier that it's not just an attitude that we find among straight women. It is also found among incels, AKA involuntarily celibates AKA delusional creep trolls. Um, but Seresin says that incels are a community that is overflowing with heteropessimism since they are typically resentful that they can't get women to sleep with them or to be in relationships with them. And they express this resentment by disavowing heterosexuality in the form of sex with women, right? So many of them make these displays of their choice to avoid women, to not interact with women, and most definitely not to have sex with women, um, because women won't have sex with them. But the point here being that according to Seresin this is a really unexpected place where feminist coffee meets incel bagel, where where feminism and incels kind of overlap in a, in a really weird way by both- minutes.

Ellie: 24:29

I'm sorry. I'm I'm still, I can't get over that.

David: 24:33

They're both upset about being attracted to members of the opposite sex.

Ellie: 24:39

I'm going to start a consciousness raising group where feminists and incels join and talk about-

David: 24:45

Oh God, I would not wish that upon any of my feminist friends.

Ellie: 24:51

But it's funny because the person who coined the term incel was actually a lesbian who was involuntarily celibate because other women didn't want to have sex with her, as far as I'm recalling, but then heteropessimistic dudes took over the- oh yeah, no, no.

David: 25:03

Yeah. So that woman had nothing to do with incels and then men took it over. I think she's from Toronto, if I'm not mistaken.

Ellie: 25:12

Key tidbit here.

David: 25:13

And then, um, and then Toronto became this point of congregation for incels. So a lot of incels there. Um, but to go back to Seresin's point, she argues that we ought to be very critical of performances of heteropessimism, because she believes that they are always, or almost always, disingenuous. For starters, most of the women who express heteropessimism and are like, ugh, all the good ones are either gay or taken, by and large are heterosexual women in heterosexual relationships with straight men who are often making this comment in front of their queer friends. So it's a very-

Ellie: 25:58

Literally me in this recording.

David: 25:59

Literally. Well, I think here, we need to invoke the difference between use and mention, you know, you haven't quite express the heteropessimist attitude in the way in which Seresin describes that. Um, thank you. But yes, you are hereby absolved by your gay friend. Um, but, but furthermore, cus there an additional point here. Seresin says most of the women who feel the need to make these performances of heteropessimism and say that they wish they weren't straight are ultimately positively unwilling to actually do anything about this putative desire to be otherwise than straight. So it's a performance in the sense that its performed in a very specific setting and because it never goes beyond that linguistic register. So the question that we have to ask is what is going on here? And Seresin says, well, what we have here is an ironic detachment from heterosexuality. Uh, detachment that is never fully serious cause it never leads to action and that amounts to very little more than just an empty performance of shame, like, oh, I'm so ashamed of being straight. And so it's an example of what in their book Sex, Or the Unbearable Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman call an anesthetic feeling from anesthesia, which is a feeling whose only function is to conceal just how intensely attached you are to something by performing a self distancing from that thing.

Ellie: 27:44

Hmm.

David: 27:45

Does that make sense?

Ellie: 27:48

Yeah, I don't think I agree though. And this is one way that I have issues with the article that coined the term heteropessimism, because I don't think that pessimism means that you are hypocritical. I think pessimism can be a very important first step towards consciousness raising. And I also don't think it needs to be anesthetic to pick up on your relating the article on heteropessimism to this idea of an anesthetic feeling. Because I think that so much of psychological life, especially in our times these days, happens with mixed feelings. So I think we can be ambivalent without necessarily being hypocritical.

David: 28:36

Well, her claim I don't think is necessarily that women are hypocrites for being heteropessimistic, but that there is something problematic about this ironic detachment that happens through the performance of shame because it's very clearly the case that women are not really ashamed of being straight, right. They might be angry with the men that they date for the imbalance of power in their relationships. They might be discontent with the present and historical disenfranchisement of women. Shame and embarrassment don't seem to be the right terms for the feeling in question, especially when it's expressed as being ashamed of being heterosexual. So I, I agree with you that forms of pessimism can catalyze action, but I have to say that I actually agree with the article that there is something troublesome about certain expressions of heteropessimism, the ones that the author talks about in her piece.

Ellie: 29:43

But the question might be then why is it troublesome? And I think you're right that even though the word hypocritical isn't used in the original articulation of heteropessimism, it's lurking, I would say it's lurking in the background. I would say that what is problematic or troublesome about heteropessimism is partly that women are not being consistent with their heteropessimism. They're saying, oh my God, I'm so ashamed of being straight, but then they're like still going out and dating men. And I, I think that there's more to it than that. For one, we have the complex nature of desire, right? So to say dating men sucks doesn't mean that suddenly I'm not attracted to men. Desire is a very complicated thing and it's not, right, up to the individual, um, at least on a conscious level that we can just sort of hone our desires at will. Certainly desire can be shaped over time in different ways, absolutely. It's not like a fixed, like I was born attracted to cisgender men and I will never- just like-

David: 30:49

I was born a a heteropessimist. I was attracted to men and born being pessimistic about this desire.

Ellie: 30:58

If I had been born a heteropessimist, I never would've dated that guy in college that I mentioned. Uh, but I think, you know, even that relationship I was, I was like, you know, 18 years old or whatever. I was ambivalent about the situation. I recognized that there was something weird going on, but I couldn't put my finger on it. And I've gotten a lot better about dating men since. I'm now in a relationship with somebody who I consider to be the best of all possible straight men and I- and a lot of the dynamics, like the demand, withdraw pattern, I don't experience. And a lot of the pervasive dimensions of what I think feminists diagnose I have avoided in recent years, but I think part of the reason that I've avoided those, some of it may be luck certainly, but also part of it is coming to feminist consciousness by reading so much literature on these dynamics, recognizing them in past relationships, seeing how some of my past relationships have mapped on to dynamics in ways that seemed just personal and about people's individual patterns at the time, but then later in retrospect struck me as extraordinarily gendered and then figuring out strategies for avoiding that in the future.

David: 32:04

Yeah. And so maybe one takeaway for me from this comment that you're making is that when thinking about heteropessimism, we have to think along the lines of different emotional expressions of heteropessimism, because when heteropessimism is expressed, for example, as anger, I really don't have much of a problem with it. When somebody is like, I'm really pissed that I am always doing the dishes and my marriage is not gay enough, you know, um, like totally a fair position from my perspective. But when I have been told, and like I said, it has happened in the past, I am ashamed of being straight, or wouldn't it be so much better if I was just a lesbian, it doesn't quite sit right with me because now we've moved from an emotional register of discontent to one of shame. And when it happens in that way, part of me feels like, how- are you really ashamed of being straight? I mean, queer theory has done a lot with the concept of shame, the way in which it distorts one's relationship to oneself. And I don't know that there is truly such a thing as straight shame, about being straight.

Ellie: 33:24

I think it's really interesting that the two emotions you're highlighting are anger and shame because I see those as the polar emotions that organize masculinity. Anger is the one emotion that traditional masculinity accepts and shame is the emotion that traditional masculinity most strongly disavows. I think that the desire for heteropessimists to be able to articulate their pessimism through anger, but the sense that they shouldn't be able to express that through shame is actually kind of an expression of expecting them to adhere to accepted masculine expressions of emotion.

David: 34:12

No, but I mean, I think I'm also approaching this from the standpoint of queer theory, because when I have, let's say a straight woman who says, oh my God, I'm so ashamed of being straight, and I think this is Seresin's point, this is the problem with this kind of expression of heteropessimism. What the hell do you want me to do with that statement? Do you want me to tell you, oh my God as a queer man who grew up with tons of shame around my sexuality, I understand your difficult position. Um, and also it's a really impotent, uh, feeling in the context of a straight relationship, because I mean, you know- thinking about it. Well, I said it, I said, I absolved myself, but I really do have a question about what I'm supposed to say. And one example that Seresin gives in the article, which I found really interesting, was the 2019 straight pride that happened in Boston.

Ellie: 35:14

Like, of course it happened in Boston. The only place that I would be less surprised by you saying would be Charlottesville, Virginia.

David: 35:25

But after that march went public, of course, it drew a lot of criticism. And a lot of heterosexual men and women felt the need to disaffiliate themselves by expressing shame. Like I'm so ashamed of being straight today. And I really think that the use of the term shame in this case is as Seresin says purely performative.

Ellie: 35:51

Yeah. Okay. So I think there are two main things we can pull out from this. One is the expression of shame in precisely the sort of artificial way that you're talking about David, especially to queer people. And I'm totally willing to go with you on the sense that, like, that leaves you in the position of being like, what the hell am I supposed to do? Do you want me to just like absolve you of being straight? So I think that that's kind of a bad faith expression of somebody's sexuality, but I do think the other aspect is the feeling of shame over being heterosexual. And I also would definitely agree with you, hope this goes without saying, that given the heteronormative structures of our society, that's never going to be equivalent to the experience of gay or queer shame. But I think if we take shame in it's basic basic form. I follow Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of shame. I've written about this in an article. Shame, according to Sartre, is literally just the feeling of being an object. Shame is the sense of being perceived as a certain way, as having a fixed identity from the outside. And I think that is actually an interesting and potentially generative form of heteropessimism is feeling like, okay, sure from the first person perspective, I desire this individual person and it feels like it just so happens that, that they're a man. When I take a step back, I start to recognize myself as a heterosexual woman within a given society that has patriarchal gender norms. And that makes me feel like I'm sort of reduceable to this identity as straight and that generates shame for me.

David: 37:29

This is where I might raise a worry about a false equivalence, because even if we take the Sartrean account of shame in terms of objectification by others, are straight people objectified as straight, right? Do we live in that kind of culture? It sounds a little bit like reverse racism, like, oh, there is shame around being queer. There is also shame about being straight. And I agree men and women and people who don't fall into that binary can be objectified according to Sartre. Any subject who is conscious of their environment, according to him, can be reduced to the status of an object by the gaze of another subject.

Ellie: 38:14

Yeah.

David: 38:15

But I don't know that that happens culturally along the lines of heterosexuality.

Ellie: 38:21

Yeah, no, I, I definitely, I think that there's not only a difference in degree, but I would also say a difference in kind between the shame that queer people experience in a heteronormative society and the shame that I just want to focus perhaps on women dating men here, uh, that women experience as heteropessimists, like the heteropessimistic shame that they're expressing is fundamentally different from the shame that queer people are expressing in part just because of the nature of privilege here, right. So, so yeah, definitely not an equivalency there, but I think there's a sense that the experience of women's heteropessimistic shame is an experience of recognizing that they may be colluding in their own subordination. And that they can't change that given the intractable nature, not biologically necessary nature, anything like that, but intractable on an unconscious, preconscious and who knows maybe even conscious level as well.

David: 39:22

Yeah. Okay. So if you frame it in that way, I'm much more open to it. And then it would seem like heteropessimism, as we're talking about, it gets maybe it restricted to the bitter feeling that one is attracted to that which one recognizes is bad for oneself. And so if it takes that form, I am definitely open to it because I recognize that I am tiptoeing around dangerous terrain here of, you know, saying these expressions. Yes, no of negating sentiments that, as we said before, are very much justified on women's part around the relationship to men, which tend to be very complex for all these reasons. So, yeah. So I might want to walk it back a little bit, but not entirely.

Ellie: 40:12

Yeah. And I think the critique of heteropessimism that I sometimes hear, you know, this idea that women are just sort of artificially performing this ironic distancing from their own heterosexuality, frankly, has a little bit of a whiff of misogyny to me and a whiff of neo-liberalism. It has a whip of misogyny to me because women, although the insight that the personal is political is an essential feminist slogan, it's often women more than men who are expected to be completely consistent between their personal and their political lives. And it has a whiff of neo-liberalism to me because the whole point of the society that we live in is to demand that we be consistent across all possible platforms. I am the same in my personal life, as I am in my social media life, as I am in my career life, as I am in my political life. And that I think is really dangerous. I think people should be allowed to be inconsistent recognizing that our selves are multiplicitous. And so I would just also want to say like, isn't being inconsistent fundamental to the human condition when we don't live in a utopia? Can't we have political principles that want something better for us while also recognizing that our personal lives don't and often can't match up to that.

David: 41:28

Yeah. I, I, I think you're putting a very well, except I might worry about where we might draw lines internal to that claim, right. Because of course people are in-

Ellie: 41:40

I don't want to defend the incels.

David: 41:42

Yes. Ellie, feminist philosopher for the incels.

Ellie: 41:47

No, but I don't want to defend the incels because I actually don't think they're- that their political views, uh, and philosophical principles are- Well. Their behavior is probably more consistent with their views. But I think that's a bad thing, in this case.

David: 42:05

Honestly, yes, I think the incels are more consistent because they're like, we don't like women, so we are going to stay away. And so it makes me think-

Ellie: 42:13

QED consistency is not a principle.

David: 42:16

Um, and it just makes me think that maybe the right solution here is for women to just vow not to have sex with men. Again, this is my proposal moving forward as the solution to heteropessimism, Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other listeners on Facebook and Instagram. What we have seen is that critiques of heterosexual relationships inevitably run up against the problem of desire, which raises the question of how one breaks out of heteropessimism. In a recent essay on the impossibility of feminism, the theorist Andrea Long Chu has argued that this problem of desire has been causing trouble in feminist circles throughout the 20th century, cause a lot of women who have been involved in the feminist struggle for women's liberation recognize that their attraction to men is a problem because heterosexual relationships tend to give the shorter end of the stick to women. And at the same time cannot break out of that attraction to men. And so there is this paradox at the heart of feminism where a lot of feminists want to disavow their affiliation or attraction to men, but ultimately cannot because of Ellie, what you called the complexity of desire.

Ellie: 44:02

Yeah. I mean, for all of the flack that feminists used to get, hopefully used to get, I know in some, some corners of the internet are still getting, of being man haters. This, I think gives the lie to that, right. Man lovers. Um, you know, for what it's worth, I think we can totally be man lovers and also haters of these dynamics because these dynamics end up really hurting people of all genders, but one option that sometimes gets floated seriously, and then a lot of times, not seriously, is a return to political lesbianism, which is the position of removing oneself from close relationships with men entirely because of the pervasive problems with them. So it's like not lesbianism out of desire for women, it's lesbianism out of a political commitment.

David: 44:52

Um, and I do really love the motto that informs a lot of political lesbianism, which is feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice. Yes. If you want to be a feminist, then you better be a lesbian, um, because otherwise you are complicit in your own oppression by entering into heterosexual relationships that are fundamentally patriarchal, but even though political lesbianism was a big thing, as you said, it had its heyday in the seventies, recently, there has been a revival of political lesbianism, especially in France. It got, it's gotten a lot of attention in the last couple of years because of the publication of a book, which in French is entitled Moi les hommes, je les deteste, which translates into I hate men. And this has struck a chord actually in contemporary French society about this fundamental question, which is wouldn't women be better if they began pursuing relationships with other women?

Ellie: 46:02

Yeah, there was a tweet from the comedian Solomon Georgio on the day of the straight pride parade, uh, that says today is a reminder that if homosexuality was a choice, there would be two, maybe three, straight women left after today.

David: 46:17

You see, I'm telling you heteropessimism is everywhere but so is hopefully political lesbianism because I do have a soft spot in my heart for political lesbianism, even though I think it oversimplifies the question of desire and it often gets caracatured.

Ellie: 46:32

Because one problem with political lesbianism is that historically it has been tied up with transphobia. So, you know, if you're, if you're a man hater, you're probably also going to hate trans women because you're gonna think they're men, and they're, you're going to think they're men that are masquerading as women, right. And then a lot of lesbians have taken issue with political lesbianism by making it seem like being lesbian is just a choice.

David: 46:57

Correct. And I think there is a way to do a little bit more justice to political lesbianism than these caricatures, which are the idea that, well, it shows that sexual orientation is just a choice that you make for political reasons or it is this assertion that men and trans women by extension are by definition the problem. And I do want to clarify that, although there is this TERFyness, like trans exclusive, um-

Ellie: 47:28

Trans exclusionary radical feminist.

David: 47:30

Like this TERFyness to some defenders of political lesbianism, that's not the case for all. So to my knowledge, the woman who published this book in France, her name is Pauline Hermange. I don't think she is associated with this transphobic TERF movement. So there is a way of being a politically motivated lesbian without falling into that trap. But I also think that political lesbianism needs to be understood, at least as a call for experimenting with the boundaries of what is possible and thinkable as objects of sexual desire. So I don't see it necessarily as a simple edict: be a lesbian, but reinvision what it-

Ellie: 48:18

Despite Ti-Grace Atkinson's slogan lesbianism is the practice of feminism.

David: 48:23

Yes, yes, yes. Um, and again, you know, for, for movements, you need a motto that will reduce things to its simplest elements. I don't disagree that a lot of people who identify as heterosexual have never given themselves the liberty to explore relationships, and I don't even mean sex or sexual relationships, just intimate relationships with people that fall outside of that classical script of straight man, straight woman. So that, that's where I want to position my political lesbianism.

Ellie: 49:01

And I think a less extreme version of this is what's known as hetero flexibility. And increasingly young people are identifying less as heterosexual and more as heteroflexible, there's a good deal of critique of this term among queer people that are like, oh, straight people suddenly think that queerness is cool. So they want to usurp our territory, but the queer theorist Jack Halberstam actually speaks really positively of hetero flexibility and says, I don't see it as some kind of fashionable selling out, but rather that real work is being done.

David: 49:34

Yeah, real work in terms of the reconfiguration of desire. And I think once we recognize that desire is not just complex, but fundamentally plastic, meaning that it can move in new directions in light of experience, even the boundaries of the heterosexual are open to contestation. Although I would like people to identify as heteroflexible more in public settings and with their families and not just-

Ellie: 50:05

Miley Cyrus said, she queered her straight marriage with Liam Hemsworth. She read the article how to make your marriage gayer.

David: 50:14

But there are also now people who call themselves homo flexible, uh, who identify as queer, but might be open to romantic or sexual relationships with people from the opposite sex without claiming bisexual as a category.

Ellie: 50:29

Okay. So political lesbianism and hetero flexibility, possible ways of coping with heteropessimism. But the way that we've been talking about those is mostly as personal lifestyle choices, right? And one of the crucial insights of feminist theory, I think, is that personal lifestyle choices are not going to solve social and political problems. So I think we also need to take a bigger picture on how some of the problems that women have in dating men can be resolved. And I read an article recently showing that women in France express less dissatisfaction with their marriages than American women. I don't really know how to square that with the moi les hommes, je les deteste, uh, quote that you said in the rise of-

David: 51:10

It's because they hate men, that's why they're happy.

Ellie: 51:13

Well this article pointed out that women in France are generally less dissatisfied with their marriages with men than American women are because of the childcare and housework distribution, given the strong social safety net that France has. Because France has much better policies around paternity leave, childcare compensation, there's actually less of an unequal distribution of housework, and that has lifted some of the pressure off of, uh, women in French society.

David: 51:43

How the state can queer your marriage for you providing some basic safety networks. But I think that's right. We talked earlier about the importance of the daily, of the everyday, of the routine and the ways in which those micro asymmetries very easily grow and balloon into really pernicious interpersonal dynamics. And I think in the case of straight relationships, the dynamic in the home is paramount. So state intervention into, let's say, mandating a fairer distribution of housework or mandating financial compensation for women who are stay at home mothers or stay at home wives. You know, I, I would very easily get behind that.

Ellie: 52:33

Yeah, I mean, me too. And I also think that for me, education is essential because part of the problem is that men tend to be ill-equipped to emotionally take care of both their own needs and those of a partner. And so if that's the case, then focusing more on social emotional learning among boys can be a really essential way of mitigating the dissatisfaction of heterosexual romantic relationships. And this is something that a variety of feminist thinkers, including bell hooks, and more recently, Liz Plank have talked about, dismantling masculinity by re-educating-

David: 53:09

From the inside out.

Ellie: 53:10

Yeah, yeah. Or educating differently.

David: 53:13

Yeah. And I think there are different ways in which that can happen. So it brings to mind all those efforts that have been done to, for example, teach especially boys, but not only boys, meditation practice in elementary and middle school, so that young boys learn to manage their emotions without letting them bubble up to the point that they feel like they're going to explode and then they do.

Ellie: 53:35

Well and even more important for me besides managing emotions is actually recognizing and being able to articulate emotions. Cause I think that's a huge part of the problem is the burden of interpretation.

David: 53:46

Yeah. And that requires the appropriate level of verbalization by men. So just as there were all these consciousness raising groups for women in the 1970s and eighties, maybe now we need emotion and language raising groups for men. What are you feeling? And what do we call it?

Ellie: 54:07

There actually are some, but they're mostly really cringe, Brooklyn hipster, really rich guys with man buns. But yeah there's a phenomenon that's been remarked upon in psychological literature on masculinity known as normative male alexithymia.

David: 54:26

Whoa, what?

Ellie: 54:27

So alexithymia is the condition of not being able to put your emotions into words.

David: 54:32

Okay.

Ellie: 54:32

And you find it among a variety of pathological conditions that folks have, but there's a psychologist Levant who in the nineties argued that in fact alexithymia is not pathological among men in American society-

David: 54:49

It's normal.

Ellie: 54:50

normative. It is.

David: 54:51

Not just normal, but normative in the sense that men are encouraged to be, what is the term, alexithymia?

Ellie: 54:58

Alexithymic. And he also said if he found it in studies, that it's not, that men don't have these feelings, it's that they do, but they're suppressing it, which suggests that there is an emotion there. It's just not one that they can put into words. So this idea that men are less emotional than women is a fallacy. It's just that men are less able to recognize and articulate their emotions than women are. And who bears the brunt of that? Obviously, you know, men do, it's, it's tough for them, but it also means that women in relationships are really bearing the brunt.

David: 55:26

Yeah. Makes me wonder whether then there might be a fundamental difference in how men and women experienced emotionality because men experience an intensity that they refuse to name and because they refuse to name, they are unable to parse it out into different kinds of emotions, right? So all emotions are just emotionality as such and therefore something to be repressed, whether that might be intense joy or intense fear, it's just felt as this surge of energy from below that cannot be looked at, and that can not be named.

Ellie: 56:02

Parents, including fathers, when they're reading to their daughters, use far more words to describe emotions and they'll ask their daughters like, oh, what do you think this bunny is feeling at this moment than they will with their sons. So from a young age, boys just are not taught to have words for emotions.

David: 56:23

Yeah. It's something that makes me genuinely pessimistic about men, because it, it, I mean, this is not even a joke because it suggests that it's so deeply ingrained that it begins from the very moment of language acquisition, because what is language acquisition if not, especially at a young age, learning to talk about the self, right?

Like that's the first object of language: 56:47

I and what I feel and what I want. And if that gets blocked from the very beginning, men's emotional lives are just going to go down a slope that ends in this, remind me of the term again.

Ellie: 57:06

Alexithymia.

David: 57:06

Alexithymia um, destiny.

Ellie: 57:11

And I'm really hoping here, maybe I want to end on a note of hetero optimism, but hopefully not cruel optimism. That this moment of heteropessimism can lead to some of these broader social changes, including educating boys in emotional efficacy and communicative efficacy around their emotions. What I hope doesn't happen is a backlash against this. I hope we don't move into a mainstreamification of the trad wives movement, which is the movement of women accepting traditional wife roles of being subordinate to their husbands.

David: 57:50

Here, here to not making the Handmaid's Tale a reality. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 58:11

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod.

David: 58:22

We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production assistant Sam Hernandez.

Ellie: 58:27

Samuel PK Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo and to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.