do straight men even like women?

and do straight women even like men?

Straight rage is a familiar part of my social feed but this week it reached a fever pitch when Psychology Today published a piece arguing that the record-breaking rise in single lonely men was due to heterosexual women’s *impossibly high dating standards* like being “emotionally available” and being a “good communicator.” As a result, the entire internet was ablaze with men annoyed that they can’t meet any women, and women who are mad that men can’t meet their standards.

If you talk to heterosexual people, it sounds like being straight is less of an identity, and more of curse. Straight people will talk about yearning to date the same-sex the way a lactose-intolerant person will lust about milkshakes.

When did heterosexuality become such a meme?

While LGBTQ activists spent much of the early 2010s reminding straight people that being gay is a not a choice, a lot of straight people are now saying they are well aware sexual orientation can’t be chosen because they would never chose to be straight.

It’s especially common to hear this from women who feel frustrated by the surplus of emotional and domestic labor they are expected to perform in straight relationships. Straight women are also the only group who experience an orgasm gap in their relationships because a lot of men still somehow don’t go down on them. When I interviewed straight women about dating men for my book For the Love of Men, many of them told me they didn’t feel like they were dating men. Instead many of the women felt like they had become personal rehab centers for their male partners. Some even tried to date women, something feminist scholar Adrienne Rich would be pretty happy about given that she coined the term “compulsory heterosexuality” and saw heterosexuality as a dangerous political institution that ensured the "male right of physical, economical, and emotional access" to women.

Men are also expressing confusion and frustration in their relationships with women because ideals of masculinity are shifting so quickly. They don’t know which parts of their prototypical masculine roles to keep and which ones to toss, and they’re not sure what to replace them with. A lot of guys don’t ask women out at all because they’re afraid they’ll come off as a creep. There are very few positive models they can follow, and a surplus of very terrible ones. When those influential male figures are instructing them that women are their property and that female rape victims “bear responsibility,” it makes women question whether straight men actually like them. No wonder research shows that women have less anxiety and build intimacy more quickly with gay men. The code of masculinity also makes intimacy a weakness for straight men which makes them ill-equipped to build successful romantic connections with the opposite sex.

Shows like Love is Blind and Love Island showcasing the peak chaos of heterosexual relationships isn’t helping straight people’s case. In fact, Twitter has become flooded with queer people watching these shows gobsmacked by how exhausting being straight seems to be when you’ve been programmed to see marriage as the ultimate goal in life and finding a partner as the way to complete yourself.

Trixie Mattel™ @trixiemattel

Straight people are on another level.

But you can’t solve a problem you can’t name. Thankfully, there’s a perfect term to describe the strange phenomenon of men and women being both reckless with and hopeless about each other, it’s called heteropessimism. Coined by gender scholar Asa Seresin back in 2019, it explains why being straight has become the ultimate cringe. I interviewed Seresin (who uses the pronouns, they) last spring and they agreed to answer a few questions for our community. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Liz Plank: What is heteropessism? 

Asa Seresin: It's when straight people express negative feelings about heterosexuality, such as when men refer to their wives as "the old ball and chain" or when women say "men are trash" or "life would be so much easier if I was a lesbian." It might seem like a new thing, and there is certainly a particular wave of heteropessimism happening at the moment, but really it's existed for a very long time - at least as long as heterosexuality itself! 

Liz Plank: How do gender stereotypes prevent connection and intimacy between straight couples?

Asa Seresin: Gender stereotypes can create highly restrictive taboos. For example, they might prevent men from being emotionally vulnerable, or women from expressing their sexual desires. The idea that gender is an enormous, natural binary that divides the world into two very different types of people can obviously create distance between straight couples, who feel at odds with one another and struggle to understand the other. At the same time, as a researcher I am interested in how gender stereotypes create as well as prevent intimacy within heterosexuality. In straight culture, gender difference is eroticized and tends to be a source of both pleasure and pain. 

Liz Plank: Queer couples report higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship and split housework more equally. Why do you think queer couples seem happier than straight ones?

Asa Seresin: The answer to this mostly lies in the statistic about splitting housework. Under capitalism, gender operates primarily as a way of dividing labor. Much of the work women do, particularly poor and racialized women, is either badly compensated or not compensated at all. Every heterosexual couple to some degree internalizes this unequal division, even if they are also trying to actively undo it. Same-sex couples do not generally face this problem, although there might be other forms of inequality between the partners. 

Liz Plank: What could straight people learn from queer people to have better relationships?

Asa Seresin: I tend to reject the idea that straight people need to learn from queer people in order to have better relationships. Going back to my previous answer, if the major problem in heterosexuality is economic and structural, this is not going to be fixed by straight people just trying to be more like queer people. I also think that straight people do experience certain pleasures in heterosexuality that they shouldn't disavow or repress because they think it's more politically progressive to imitate queer people. 

Liz Plank: There's a trend on TikTok of women and queer people asking "do straight men even like women?" pointing to all the ways that patriarchal masculinity demands a disdain of women that seems to contradict the compulsory heterosexuality that it simultaneously prescribes. How do you explain this contradiction and how can straight men escape it?

Asa Seresin: It's important to understand that while it might seem like a contradiction, misogyny is actually built into heterosexual culture, which is often a highly homosocial culture - meaning it encourages deeper connections between people of the same sex than opposite, even if those people do not couple up in sexual/romantic units. Another scholar of heterosexuality, Jane Ward, has written a lot about this question in her two books Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men and The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. She suggests that men should practice what she calls "deep heterosexuality," which means genuinely liking and loving women as part of being straight. 

Liz Plank: Do you think this performance of idealized hyper-masculinity becomes almost homoerotic like it seems to be in Tucker Carlson's extreme manhood trailer?

Asa Seresin: In contemporary Western culture, hypermasculinity and homoeroticism are often presumed to be opposites - but historically, the reverse was usually the case. In Ancient Greece and the Ottoman Empire, for example, having sex with other men (specifically topping younger, beardless boys) was a totally normative way to prove your masculinity. Even though this kind of thinking has sort of fallen away in the presence, it survives in other forms. And when you think about it, it makes sense: hypermasculinity means you are obsessed with manhood and being a man. It's not exactly a huge leap to become sexually obsessed with other men!

Liz Plank: What is the last thing that made you feel hopeful?

Asa Seresin: Young queer and trans people give me hope. We are living in this terrifying time of intense backlash against gender and sexual liberation, but ultimately I don't think this backlash can succeed in the long run. Once you give enough people a glimpse of a world where they are affirmed in who they are, it's very hard to go back on that - it's a light that cannot be put out.