What if women 'getting angry on the internet' *is* hetero-optimism?On Alex Cooper's pregnancy enraging conservatives, that New York Times 'Being Straight Is Great' essay, and why complaints can be utopian.
There are two things that I’ve been ranting to myself about this week: 1.) Conservatives are mad that Alex Cooper is married and pregnant. Why? Because the wildly successful podcaster once embraced hookup culture. So now they’re worried that Cooper’s young women fans will think that they, too, can prioritize sex and a career without it dooming them to the kind of cartoonish visions of sad spinsterhood that conservatives have long used to scare women into marriage. 2.) A New York Times op-ed that was originally headlined “Being Straight Is Great, Actually” before it was changed to “There’s Nothing Wrong with Wanting Men.” Magdalene Taylor declares that there has “never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue heterosexuality.” She argues that “as straight Americans, we are in the midst of a period of all-but-unprecedented sexual, social and romantic liberty… and with that should come an optimism strong enough to render the gender wars irrelevant.” Lol. The piece ends with the “why” of Taylor’s optimism: her own impending nuptials to a man she loves. He “does the dishes” and supports her ambitions “both in career and in family.” From one angle, these are very different news items to get upset about. Conservatives are mad because they want women to prioritize marriage and motherhood over sex and career. Meanwhile, Taylor says she really just wants women to not waste their freedoms, however they choose to exercise them, just so long as they have a positive attitude about it:
She refers to this as “hetero-optimism.” In the interest of keeping this dispatch brief, I’ll set aside the piece’s many issues, which have already been handily picked apart on social media—from its wild minimization of the political realities of this authoritarian post-Roe moment to the way it turns structural problems into a mindset problem to its false conflation of women’s heteropessimism with the beliefs of white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Here, instead, I want to look at the link between these two things that pissed me off. Both treat an individual tale of a woman landing happily in marriage and/or motherhood as being of great consequence—politically, culturally, or philosophically. Conservatives believe that Cooper gives young women a false optimism about their own ability to happily land in marriage and motherhood after a journey of exploration and self-discovery. As Sarah Jones summarizes at New York Magazine:
To be clear: it isn’t just that they believe that woman face consequences for sex; they want women to face consequences for sex—whether it’s through unintended pregnancies, forced birth, or being trapped within marriage. Taylor wants no such thing. She is a senior editor at Playboy and previously wrote a New York Times op-ed titled, “Have More Sex, Please!” There is nevertheless something deeply conservative about this determinedly apolitical and individualistic approach that minimizes the reality of structural oppression while downplaying the necessity of hetero women’s complaints about the dating landscape right now. “Sure, men who spout hateful ideas exist,” Taylor writes, before simplistically brushing off those men like a rare and petty nuisance: “We have the privilege to ignore them in favor of men who don’t.” Note how this rhetorically settles on the lowest of bars: men who don’t hate women. I’m reminded of the excerpt from my book, My Mother’s Daughter, that I recently published in Cosmopolitan about the stories I grew up with about my grandmother, who spent her decades-long marriage hoping that her husband would die first so that she would have another chance at a happy life. I wrote:
Taylor believes that you should just navigate around the bad dudes, as she has, and find a good man. She credits her relationship not just to luck, but also “intention” and “commitment.” It’s textbook neoliberal empowerment, the kind that implicitly blames women for their romantic miseries as personal failings, even when those miseries have broad cultural and political roots. Do I have to trot out my “hetero-exceptionalism” essay again? Yes, fine, a refresh:
In recent years, I have actually joked about being a hetero-optimist myself, but it has little to do with my own love life or the fact that, like Taylor, I feel lucky to be in a relationship with a man I love. In fact, my sense of luck is in part an expression of my cynicism around how bad things are out there; I realize just how easily I could have ended up in a relationship with a man who was not so keen to treat me as an equal. My optimism has everything to do with my belief in our collective ability to be better. That includes hetero men doing better, and helping each other to do better, as well as the lot of us working to overhaul the worst of hetero culture. My optimism is part of my feminist belief in envisioning and fighting for a better future for everyone. And that—more than eking out some personal romantic happiness despite it all—is a truer rejoinder to hetero-pessimism, at least as it was initially conceived of by Asa Seresin (the original critique being that it was performative and defeatist in nature, and that it did nothing to resist or change the miseries of hetero culture). I actually believe that women’s complaints—which Taylor dismisses as “getting angry on the internet”—are an important part of that fight. Complaint can be part of an attempt “to reject and change the norms of straight culture,” as my Dire Straights pod co-host Amanda Montei puts it. It is not inherently fatalistic. Complaint can be utopian. It can be part of imagining new possibilities, new ways of being, for all of us.
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