On the Rise of Reluctant Heterosexuality

Human beings are, of course, perverse—both in ways that enrich our lives and in ones that hinder us. All too often, we remain “secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken,” as writer Asa Seresin memorably put it. Seresin was talking about “heteropessimism,” an instantly viral term he coined in 2019—and then quickly renamed “heterofatalism”—that describes a still-prevalent postfeminist mood of resigned, anti-utopian misandry among straight women who have no intention either of eschewing heterosexuality or, for that matter, transforming it.

Article continues after advertisement

Heterofatalists (or heteropessimists), in short, wish that they were not attracted to men; yet they are unwilling to join a political struggle to change men or the situation responsible for these feelings.

Seresin’s simple yet devastating observation swept up Western pop feminist commentators and gender studies departments alike, launching a fretful debate that still hasn’t subsided, five years later, around a number of vexed questions: What kinds of lives should feminist heterosexuals pursue in the twenty-first century? Is it “pessimism” to say that the choice to make babies the standard way, i.e., coupling up monogamously with a man, is the only option available? Or does the more pessimistic path entail a “cat lady” lifestyle of the kind feared by America’s arch-misogynist vice president J.D. Vance: a matter of embracing the fertility crisis and helping speed national demographic decline? (Surely there couldn’t be a secret third thing involving both cats and a wealth of children—each with more than two parents?—as well as an abundance of liberated sex, hetero- and otherwise, to boot . . .)

It is now common to conflate or at least link heteropessimism, erroneously, with feminist endeavors by women’s separatists in East Asia, even though Seresin’s term, definitionally, precludes any kind of activist mobilization. In July 2024, an article in Vogue straightforwardly compared the hashtag #boysober in the West, meaning an anecdotal uptick in American female “voluntary celibacy,” to an organized campaign in the East that “has seen thousands of women boycott men entirely over the last half decade.”

The Vogue author was, of course, talking about the 4B movement, so called because of its four “bi”s (bi means “no” in Korean)—bihon, bichulsan, biyeona, and bisekseu—in other words, negating the four pillars of heterosexuality: childbearing, dating, marriage, and sex. Self-described as a “radical feminist” uprising, albeit one that is anticommunist and girlboss-ish in its actual content, 4B coordinators have mobilized cissexual, non-sex-working Korean women across the political spectrum into a “marriage strike,” “sex strike,” “dating strike,” and “birth strike” in sufficient numbers to provoke a panicked response internationally, even as their own government dismisses the movement’s grievances out of hand.

God forbid, it seems, that men be treated as true human equals, let alone comrades in sexual liberation.

Western liberals appear sometimes to fantasize that feminine East Asian political phenomena are more radical than they really are: “The very idea of women of color rebelling against a so-called authoritarian state,” comments Zehao Pan, “invites some of the most romantic imaginations.” To be more uncharitable still, it seems possible that white progressives, whether consciously or not, reflexively celebrate tendencies that attempt to decrease the human birthrate—as long as they’re abroad, in Asia.

In the 1960s, while abortion remained inaccessible for many women in anglophone countries, British and American politicians and NGOs pressured their nations’ Eastern allies—notably Japan and India—to aggressively limit their population growth, often using foreign aid as an incentive. Now, over half a century later, when a self-described “radical feminist” Mumsnet user in the UK posts an article “about the amazing, strong and brave women of South Korea who opt out of men,” she is speaking symbolically, as a “mum,” from within the institutions of heterosex, marriage, and childbearing, even as she enthuses: “Let us take inspiration here in the West, from our South Korean sisters, to find that same courage. This is what feminism looks like.”

In this way, some admirers on anglophone feminist message boards have leaned in (if only rhetorically) to the shrill civilizational catastrophism among Eastern elites that the very notion of a Big Quit by the self-described “baby machines” of Seoul, Busan, Daegu, and Incheon inspires. The sexism presently on display, for example, from politicians like Jeong Kab-yoon, of the Liberty Korea party—who likes to tell his woman colleague to “please fulfill your duties to the nation,” i.e., make babies—elicits in Western onlookers a complex mix of pleasurable indignation, relief (linked to imagining having better cultural circumstances ourselves), and nostalgia for a bygone era of enraged “political lesbianism” in our neck of the woods.

Instead of paying attention to the avowedly pro-work, personal investment-oriented, and anti-collective tenor of 4B,some Euro-American observers are clearly projecting ideas lifted from their own ’70s Women’s Liberation history onto contemporary Korea. Yet 4B evokes an older story than that.

In Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, statesmen walk around for a while with horribly painful erections because the city’s upper-class women have coordinated themselves successfully to withhold sex and childrearing from their husbands in order to force a ceasefire and end the Peloponnesian war. (Spike Lee adapted the play as a Chicago-based musical film, Chi-Raq, featuring working-class Black women planning a sex strike, in 2015.)

It is certainly tenable to draw comparisons between the Ancient Greek plot and the bichulsan and bisekseu campaigns, as well as Escape the Corset, a precursor to 4B that involved a boycott of beauty products that serve the Korean patriarchal beauty standard, targeting the largest gender pay gap in the rich world. (Korean women earn 31 percent less, on average, than men.) But not all feminists see a positive horizon of possibility in the ancient format of a motherhood and femininity strike. Hawon Jung, the author of Flowers of Fire, an acclaimed book on South Korean feminism, wrote far more ambivalently—if melodramatically—in the pages of the New York Times, that “the trend is killing South Korea.”

Warning that the country’s politicians must address straight women’s complaints fast or else face existential collapse, Jung declared of the 4B strike: “Survival of the nation is at stake” (here pointing to the cratering fertility rate). In December 2016, the Korean birth rate was 1.2 babies per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1. In an attempt to reverse the trend, the alarmed government launched an online “National Birth Map” showing the number of women of reproductive age in each municipality, to illustrate, in the words of one journalist, Anna Louie Sussman, “just what it expected of its female citizens.”

The power of a full-throated mass “I would prefer not to” is not to be sniffed at, and indeed, it was a coordinated repudiation of the state’s explicit patriotic birthing imperative that the outraged feminists behind 4B sought to bring about. Unfortunately, their proposed alternative is only female hypercapitalist individualism. In Europe, Australia, and North America, in contrast, no analogous initiative has yet formed—notwithstanding acclaimed socialist-feminist books calling for an anticapitalist version of the same, like Jenny Brown’s 2019 manifesto Birth Strike.

The Western birth rate, of course, is plummeting too. In the US and UK, high-profile Gen X commentators fret that “our” young people are emulating 4B on the basis that they aren’t ostensibly fucking, getting engaged, or giving birth, at least, not as enthusiastically as “we” would like them to. Because they don’t always couple up, Gen Z are routinely accused of “giving up.”

Although Britain’s Dazed magazine recently announced that “the sex recession is over,” referencing tentative new data from the online dating website eHarmony, most Anglo-American newspapers have continued to doomily wring hands about research from 2018–2021 that they’ve interpreted to mean that Gen Z are a bunch of “sexless” singles.

It is evidently easier to mock “puriteens” than to perceive young people as, say, selectors of quality over quantity, queer preferers of nonpenetrative intimacies, refusers of compulsory neoliberal sex/self “optimization,” or, you know, children of a global pandemic. The writer Simran Pasricha has proposed that some of Western youth’s perceived sex-negativity is actually a form of positive sex-radicalism in and of itself: It’s just, she says, that “Gen Z is much less tolerant than previous generations of unwanted behavior.” But in the more prevalent cultural discourses, heteropessimistic Gen Z affects in the West are misleadingly imagined as a kind of “failure to launch” driving demographic decline.

The reaction is often rather stomach-turning. Relationship advice articles that preach a “realist” hetero-optimism, with titles like “Is Heteropessimism Sabotaging Your Relationship?” or “Heteropessimism: 5 Ways Your Inner Man-Hater is Wrecking Your Relationships” now abound, complete with disclaimers, at the end, providing the number of the National Domestic Violence Hotline or disclaiming that “Mental and emotional abuse, physical abuse and safety concerns are much more serious than heteropessimism.” According to these self-help pages, to feel “resentful” about #trad gender roles, or criticize your man to your friends, is self-hatred and self-sabotage.

At the same time, editors cover their asses, adding that you should still, of course, refuse to be a battered girlfriend or wife. God forbid, it seems, that men be treated as true human equals, let alone comrades in sexual liberation.

Female sexual liberation within heterosexuality used to be a central problem of anticapitalist thought and practice.

The options implicitly presented to women in most anti-heteropessimism discourse are grimly limited, namely: a miserable separatism, or contented resignation. Supposedly, 4B and heterofatalism both represent “feminism,” i.e., the “separatist” side of things, even though, in reality, heterofatalism is an at best abjectly feminist form of ideation. (The writer Lily Meyer has recently glossed heteropessimism simply as “today’s men-are-trash-ism.” But the crux of the concept, a dimension frequently overlooked, is the lack of radical vision.)

I think of “On Heteropessimism” every time I see a sign in an antique shop that says “Park Your Husband Here,” or when I contemplate the revival of Andrea Dworkin, who (by the way) spent her whole life with a man. As Seresin foresaw, neither heterofatalistic noir jokes nor Dworkinian apocalypticism steer young women away from traditional sexuality, marriage, and childbearing. Quite the contrary.

Consider the vastly popular heterofatalist novels of Sally Rooney. There, initial pessimism is routinely channeled, in the end, into a resigned conciliation with heternormativity. “I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy,” writes Alice—Rooney’s protagonist in Beautiful World, Where Are You—“except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through.” (What do Alice and Eileen have now, along with all women of their generation, by way of alternative? “Nothing.”) Ultimately they settle down into mortgaged monogamous privacy with their respective beaux. As the culture scholar Sarah Brouillette has pointed out, the choice in Beautiful World, Where Are You is presented in stark terms: either an aseptic non-life, or the consolations of heterosexual coupledom.

Crucially, Beautiful World “needs to castigate sex work as uniquely degrading,” Brouillette notes, “to help to prop up the idea that a life without heterosexual monogamy is ‘sterile.’” Similarly, in Normal People, it is BDSM that is cast as uniquely degrading and contrasted to the kind of “normal” hetero domination that red-blooded, “protective” boyfriends enjoy. All in all, as Brouillette suggests, Rooney’s literary romance narratives are deceptively conservative. They tend to launder—especially for leftist women—the bourgeois idea that marital coupledom does not (unlike kink or sex work) involve material relations like power, labor, property; that it offers, rather, an escape from all that.

Female sexual liberation within heterosexuality used to be a central problem of anticapitalist thought and practice. Many feminist Marxists believed, in the ’70s, that the liberation of sexuality would change the way that all people love one another and inhabit their bodies, such that the very categories of cissexual society shall become odd and meaningless. Carole Vance, editor of the renowned Pleasure and Danger anthology, insisted all the way into the ’90s that for women “to experience autonomous desire and act in ways that give them sexual pleasure in a society that would nurture and protect their delights is our culture’s worst nightmare and feminism’s best fantasy.”

Far from heteropatriarchal—I’d add—feminine sexual self-actualization (regardless of its object) is a challenge to the privatization of life that undergirds capitalism. But this kind of communist, utopian “sex-positivity”—this stance of willful optimism, confident that the admittedly risky pursuit of bodily vulnerability might help transform the species and remake humanity—is utterly out of vogue, both on the scholarly left and in culture at large.

It isn’t difficult to see why. Many women, still deep in the mass grieving process that attends the movement known as #MeToo—as well as the years-long backlash against it that has now been turbo-charged under Trump 2.0—have no time whatsoever for heterosexual (indeed, just sexual optimism. During #MeToo, I noticed, leftist women celebrated an ostensibly optimistic book about how “women have better sex under socialism,” even though the book in question seemed unable to envision outright good sex; unable, indeed, to dream up anything better than, simply, an absence of domestic abuse. Again: perhaps this stern realism and grim anti-utopianism about what sex with men is and, implicitly, always will be, feels unavoidable to some. With raping, raving misogynists in the highest offices and loudest cultural bandwidths of the world, women of all classes have cause to be righteously filled with rage, betrayal, and disappointment.

Nevertheless—as Rooney often captures well in her novels—the reason that sharing life with men can feel like slow violence is ultimately not the men themselves (not in many cases, at least) but, rather, the hierarchies that, flowing through us all, elevate them and suffocate us.

Whether we are feminist or antifeminist, most of us are too overworked, too exhausted by capitalism’s demands and exhausted by its “enjoyment” culture, to find out how to have really good sex—be it with men or plants or ourselves or the topside of a washing machine.

The repudiation of “sleeping with the enemy” enacted by some feminists in the 1970s was and remains widely and rightly derided. Rarely, however, do contemporary feminists acknowledge that a lot of sex is experienced as making a gift of oneself to one’s oppressor, despite how nice and love-worthy the guy in question is or isn’t. Rarely do we talk about “political lesbianism” as a poor strategy founded on a factual albeit “dramatic” assessment of heterosex under patriarchy; that it is perilous for women’s spiritual health. Even more rarely do we seem to grasp that the opposite position—the position of Carole Vance and the women’s movement’s sexual liberationists—shared much of that same assessment . . . only, the dream and promise of their utopian horizon of post-gender pleasure made the perils of having sex in the present worth risking, in their eyes. Vance and others stood for the conscious and collectively supported acceptance of risk; for the agreement to meet, if need be, a quantum of danger on the way to pleasure. They were not somehow misinformed about sex’s perils. They were not idiots.

In our present moment, there are, as Lauren Berlant commented already at the 2019 Duke Feminist Theory Workshop, “many new sex-negative feminists” cropping up who are “incompetent about even their own desire.” Kate Wagner, writing in Lux magazine in 2025, proposed a sympathetic explanation: “Our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public,” which means, she hopes, that “we are very afraid not of sex, but of exposure.”

I’d add to the latter only this: The rent is too damn high. Whether we are feminist or antifeminist, most of us are too overworked, too exhausted by capitalism’s demands and exhausted by its “enjoyment” culture, to find out how to have really good sex—be it with men or plants or ourselves or the topside of a washing machine. Capitalist society is centrally predicated on commanding us all, women especially, to unrepress ourselves, to talk about sex constantly as though “confessing” something innate, and, always and ever, to enjoy. It is the next step in the chain of logic that is missing: the observation that this stressful pressurized prurience isn’t remotely conducive to actual, guards-down, polymorphous experimentation.

Apparently, this warrants spelling out: the great sex experience that the market commands every optimized self-managed subject to be consuming isn’t good sex. Yes, porn is now precisely taxonomized for optimum accessibility, hook- ing up is algorithmically managed, being “horny on main” has gained acceptability, yet desire seems elusive. Saying “I would prefer not to” in rejection of this prescribed, coerced regime of sexuality need not necessarily be a rejection of sexuality per se (though of course it can be). “I would prefer not to” is the most crucial, ground-zero ingredient of sexual communion.

But today, in popular feminism, the unfruitfulness of the “androcide” and “exodus” positions has given way, not to a revival of the dream of sexual liberation but to a widespread stance of misandry-lite, characterized by martyred resignation to the dismal quality of heterosex and an abandonment of desire tout court. Not so much “I would prefer not to” as “I absolutely refuse to prefer.”

__________________________________