Romance & Heteropessimism

a lukewarm defense of being attracted to men

If you give me a few minutes to talk about theory I promise I will talk about Deep End and Other Excellent Horny Books. This substack references some explicit sexual content from adult romance novels so if you are not in a place to read that, steer clear! References, recommendations for other reading, asides in footnotes as always.

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The Exercise

An occupational hazard of being a baby-academic who moonlights as a mediocre-book-content-creator is that I bring my brain wherever I go. Sometimes, that place is the comment section of a horny book recommendation or a thirst edit of Declan O’Hara. A comment section that is frequently riddled with the phrase, “I can feel the feminism leaving my body,” in the context of being attracted to a man. I wish I could be normal about how much I hate when people say this. I wish! But I’ve never met a soapbox I didn’t love.

“I can feel the feminism leaving my body,” is really just a novel spin on a much broader family of statements endemic to online discourse about women’s sexualities. You might recognize its older sisters: “If sexuality was a choice, I would not be attracted to men,” or “heterosexuality is a prison,” or “I wish I could be a lesbian, they have it so much easier.” You might also recognize its cousin: “as a bisexual, I’m attracted to all women and like 3 men.”

This rhetorical family is corralled by a term Asa Seresin calls heteropessimism, defined as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.”¹ It’s not an attitude exclusive to women– actually, incels are the prime example of heteropessimistic men– but I’m only talking about women here. In the case of women, heteropessimism accepts that it is extremely maladaptive for women to be attracted to men because men are fundamentally bad faith actors within heterosexuality, and yet women persist anyways.

a very typical sort of heteropessimistic meme

Seresin’s critique of heteropessimism maintains that these performative disaffiliations, while sincere, are largely toothless. Rarely are the women² who voice these statements actually attempting to extricate themselves from heterosexuality’s clutches (the political lesbianism movement is not gaining ground; the 4B movement discourse in the United States collapsed almost instantly after blowing up; convent enrollment is not on the rise, as far as I know)– it’s all just disaffected complaint. He also contends that heteropessimist sentiments:

• Are anesthetizing. In anticipation of the violence of heterosexuality, heteropessimism presupposes a kind of psychological detachment that inhibits necessary curiosity and deep feeling about heterosexuality.

• Privatize heterosexuality. Individual performative detachments from heterosexuality foreclose on the possibility of improving upon heterosexuality on a structural level at all, ultimately reiterating and reifying heterosexuality’s construction as stagnant, immutable, inevitable (in Seresin’s words, “To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better”)

• Can rely on a kind of misandry that allows white, cis women to disengage from their own complicity in harm. While Seresin uses this critique as an opportunity to talk about the careless interactions that can be commonplace between straight women and lesbians (i.e. “men are so trash, lesbians have it way easier”), it also brings to mind the specific ways white women have weaponized sexual power against men of color.³

Personally, I’m most interested in Seresin’s suggestion that heteropessimism works against women’s ability to articulate desire. If it’s embarrassing, shameful, regretful, tragic, stupid to be attracted to men, how do we make room for desire? The reality that most women, statistically speaking, are attracted to men and will continue to be?

In the academic and internet circles I occupy, heteropessimism is rampant. It is widely accepted and joked about that women being attracted to men must, fundamentally, come at the expense of their self-preservation, wellbeing, and general common sense. I struggle with this logic in part because there are times when I feel that it must be true. In the depths of a stack of Hinge (derogatory) likes, after the thirtieth consecutive “my controversial take is that pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza,” I feel sort of stupid and silly about the fact that I persist in one of the most Sisyphean tasks in the modern world: attempting to date men.

And yet I also know that attempts to discipline desire are often misguided, in part because desire is unruly and persistent, like a fungus under the skin. Desire has a funky way of crawling to the surface and placing deep roots no matter how hard you try to suppress it and rein it in and deny its existence. In part, I balk at how heteropessimism places the onus on women to self-regulate their desires for their own safety by positioning the poor conduct of men as unchanging, inevitable, irredeemable, simultaneously accepting, implicitly, that women are the more malleable and reformable quantity in this equation.⁴

In the end, desire is what Seresin comes back to, too:

Particularly for women, radically transforming heterosexuality might begin with honest accounts of which elements of heterosexuality are actually appealing. the house is clearly on fire, but is there anything worth saving? Such accounts are totally foreclosed by heteropessimism, and must therefore be drawn from conversations and narratives that—even if only momentarily—transcend a heteropessimist register.

I find the end of the essay to be kind of tender and, above all, pragmatic. Women who are attracted to men aren’t going anywhere, and being casually dismissive about their attractions to men hasn't been particularly useful. Why not try a different tack?

Yearn Maxxing

Of all the research I did for this essay, my favorite reading is a 2023 article on heteropessimism from Adora Svitak elegantly titled, “How do we write about love of cock?”⁵ Svitak writes about the necessity of seriously theorizing desire, cultivating what could be referred to as a “pornographic imagination,” within academia. She suggests the value of making room for portrayals of other kinds of hetero sexual relations, ones wherein a woman is not just attracted to men, but hungry, wanting, desperate, monstrous in her desire. There’s no doubt that stories about sexual violence between men and women are honest, important, and powerful. Such accounts are at the core of feminist advances in the last four decades, but are stories of desire any less honest? Important? Powerful? Are stories of desire incompatible with women’s accounts of sexual violence and harm?

Romance novels are a place where these ideas find particularly fertile speculative ground. They’re rife with both harrowing representations of gendered violence and rich, textured, meaningful accounts of desire. The really good ones are particularly adept at walking the sharpened blade between the two.

I’m thinking about my recent read of Shadowheart, by Laura Kinsale. It’s a medieval romance featuring Elayne, a long-lost Italian princess who, after a broken off almost-engagement to an Englishman named Raymond, is abducted by a rakish, older, exiled assassin named Allegretto while traveling back to her homeland. Allegretto and Elayne quickly end up married because Allegretto drugs and rapes her and coerces her into acquiescing to the union.

When Elayne first encounters Allegretto, who goes by the very-dramatic-very-theater-kid title Il Corvo (The Raven), she’s struck by his presence: “He was like a statue of pure metal, something– some thing, inhuman– elegant and fantastic. Elayne was not even certain for a moment if he were real or a marble figure come to sudden life, but dark as sin, as gorgeous and corrupt as Lucifer himself.” When expected to bow in respect, eyes averted, she can’t make herself look away, peering at him through her lashes in a gesture both irreverent and reverent at once.

As you might guess by the plot summary, Elayne’s attraction is not uncomplicated. Allegretto asserts his will over her in ways that are horrifying to Elayne. He is manipulative, cruel, frightening. She resents the depth of her desire for him (“She was angered by her own desire, by how his beauty alone lured her close to him. It was not the love she felt for Raymond, nor the conjugal duty she would have owed a truly wedded husband, nor anything but simple, sinful lust”) but resigns herself to it quickly (“If she could never have the man she loved— wella, then she would take a beautiful murderous bandit instead, and read his books and learn his wiles and live with him in wickedness.”). The shape of her desire is not a traditional one. Elayne quickly takes charge in the sex between the two, displaying an affinity for light sadism and dominance that fits right in with Allegretto’s repressed bratty sensibilities.

“You know what I wish. Do you know it?” It was half a question, half a cry.

His lips parted. She saw his chest rise and fall. “Tell me.”

“To give you hurt again!” she exclaimed, with a tinge of panic. “God save me.”

He made a sound like a muted growl. “Hurt me, then.”

She was panting. She turned away, in recoil from her own self. “Nay,” she breathed.

“I want it,” he whispered. “I have lived in dream of it for days.”

Elayne loves to hurt him. Loves to sink her teeth into his shoulder and leave marks on him that he tracks with his fingers for days after. He loves to be hurt. Elayne loves that the most skillful, scary, manipulative, beautiful man she knows will shed his armor and his blades and his authority for her pleasure, and that her power over him by the end of the novel is absolute. Allegretto loves that Elayne is the one person in the world that he can not, would not, need not defend against, the singular figure who he can cede everything to. The desire between them is a feral thing, an articulation of the possibilities between two people who are, for once in their lives, able to be totally honest about what they want.

Cat’s endorsement of Shadowheart

In preparation for this Substack, I solicited responses from people on Instagram asking for the most “skillfully erotic,” M/F romances that they’d read⁶. A handful of folks, unsurprisingly, mentioned one of my favorite contemporaries: Regina Black’s The Art of Scandal. The novel opens with Rachel, a 37-year-old Black woman, finding out that her white, wealthy, politician husband, Matt, has been cheating on her for the better part of the last year. Matt, on the cusp of a re-election that could be the beginning of a very long and storied progressive political career, asks Rachel to stay married to him gesturally until the votes are counted, holding a considerable divorce settlement over her head in the process. Rachel agrees, even as she’s starting to cultivate a secret, intimate relationship with younger, attractive, mysterious Nate.

Nate’s appeal is multifold. He’s tall, with broad shoulders, large biceps, and a dimple. He thinks she’s beautiful, looks at her carefully and attentively, lets her be emotionally volatile, difficult, insatiable without judgment as she does a retrospective on her last 13 years and maintains a charade with her husband. By her own admission, “He always seemed to show up just in time to undermine her misery until it vanished.” He’s funny and irreverent. In their first conversation, he asks “So, what do you want now?” and it prompts Rachel to actually consider the question. For the first time in a long time, there’s a possibility of her wanting and being something that isn’t a prop for her husband’s career (“unpaid labor,” as she describes it). He reconnects her to her love of art and curation, encourages her ambition, and rekindles a sense of desire in her. Nate becomes, for Rachel, one of the few things in her life that is really, truly, hers and not Matt’s.

The taboos of their relationship heighten the stakes. He’s younger, she’s still married, the insular world of Oasis Springs is always watching for transgression. But Rachel’s relationship with Nate is part of what enables her to form a new sense of self in the wake of a shattered marriage. After 13 years of being embedded in the image-conscious machine of her husband’s political career, Nate is the lone figure she doesn’t have to be so militantly self-conscious about her affect and presentation with.

Regina Black is doing something really lovely here: (1) repudiating and meaningfully critiquing a version of heterosexuality that relies upon Rachel’s never-ending, tokenized, unrecognized labor within a white context that derides her and dismisses her and (2) constructing an alternative life where Rachel’s intimate, honest, sexy relationship with Nate is the bedrock of her ability to repair the alienation (in the labor sense, in the social sense, in the intrapersonal sense) that version of heterosexuality left her with.

A similar thing plays out in Deep End by Ali Hazelwood (do I need to summarize this, haven’t you all read it?). Scarlett “Vandy” Vandermeer has known for a long time that her sexual appetites leaned kinky– specifically, submissive– but doesn’t find a partner who can meet her beat-for-beat until she finds Lukas Blomqvist. In the lead up to their relationship, Scarlett’s internal monologue occasionally reflects a familiar kind of heteropessimism: “It’s not morally wrong. It doesn’t hurt anyone. There are no victims here, but maybe it’s messed up? At the very least it’s so fucking—I don’t even know, heteronormative of me. Gender conforming. Regressive. Stereotypical. Banal. I hate it. I love it.”

But for Scarlett, her relationship with Lukas is deeply personally transformative. He’s big and tall and attractive to her in some concrete, bodily, masculine way. He smells good and he’s accomplished. He’s also infinitely self-assured and self-disciplined and perceptive, qualities that render him “safe,” to her as a person who previously dealt with emotional abuse at the hands of an angry, volatile, hostile father. Maybe most interestingly, Lukas is skilled at doing a thing that Scarlett seems to really need as she’s dealing with a massive mental block from a diving accident that takes place before the book: intervening in the fracture between her mind and her body and briefly taking the reins out of her hands so she can just be.

I feel like an object, created for him. By him. Did I exist before the first time he fucked me? I have no memory of it. Do I exist when we’re not together? I’m just a toy. His favorite. Irreplaceable.

The obvious critique is that reappraisals of a kind of sexual dynamic that replicates the broader structures of power and subjugation in the world can hardly be called radical. Sure. I’m not necessarily invested in calling this “radical,” sex, whatever that may look like. I think the case could be made that Lukas and Scarlett’s sex replicates a familiar power structure. I also think that if you look closely, it could be something else. It could be really good sex. Sex where she is safe and fulfilled and trusts her partner and gets to experiment with her body’s abilities and feels a full, embodied, expansive kind of desire. Sex where she gets pleasure, but also respect and tenderness and loving attention that doesn’t think of her as fragile or brittle.

Part of my reading of their relationship is filtered through Talia Bettcher’s theory of erotic structuralism⁷ and some of Lacan’s writings on desire⁸ and maybe a little bit of Iris Murdoch’s idea of a “just and loving gaze.”⁹ My kind of shitty synthesis of this body of work is that intimacy is the closing of distance between Self and Other, and that in erotically experiencing the Other, we erotically experience the Self.¹⁰ Scarlett experiences herself through the filter of Lukas and his self-assured, self-disciplined masculinity. For a character who is frequently anxious, full of self-doubt, uncertain, it’s the erotic encounter that grants her permission to consider herself differently and more lovingly.

Lukas is on his knees, my thighs trapped in the spread of his. He must be looking at my ass, and if this was anyone else, I’d be fretting over it. Am I pretty enough? Have I disappointed him with my body? Except, he’s the one who gets to decide what happens. And if he didn’t like me, he simply wouldn’t continue. My worries quiet down, and I smile into the comforter.

Scarlett gets to borrow from Lukas, to relish in his self confidence when he slips between her and her body as a beneficent tyrant. There’s no room for self-consciousness when the Other is so wholly, completely, intimately upon the Self.

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Both of these examples have been kind of cerebral but I don’t really think that’s required to meaningfully participate in this exercise. Part of the answer to “How do you write about love of cock?”¹¹ is just to like, write it. Nobody does this quite like the inimitable Talia Hibbert. I’m thinking about the most memorable sex scene in the iconic Act Your Age, Eve Brown, which kicks off when Jacob, Eve’s boss, accidentally unearths her glittery purple dildo from under her bedsheets.

In the scene, Eve’s chest tightens and her stomach squeezes and she describes herself as feeling “hot and glittering inside.” Eve’s eyes are drawn to his “long, strong fingers,” and the intensity of his stare and the steel of his voice. She fantasizes about his punishing grip on himself while he jerks off to thoughts of her. Her desire is both animated by him and by his desire for her. She wants to be the person he thinks of when he orgasms, wants to be wanted, and wants to be touched. Eve talks about how he gropes her, how he traps her in place, how he’s like a “marauding bandit.” It’s language that could feel more fraught, maybe, if Hibbert wasn’t so clear about how Eve wants sex exactly like that. Eve wants him to touch her hard (he complies), she wants to be penetrated (he does), and she wants to be looked at (boy does he do plenty of that). She loves his body and the way that he speaks (directly, honestly, commandingly). Eve is, at the end of the day, spectacularly, beautifully horny:

The noise Eve made at that moment was less words and more a garbled tangle of OhmyGodJacobnoyesfuckyou. It was like he’d heard everything she’d told him and then more, the secret parts, the unspoken parts, the parts where she wanted that abrupt stretch, the feeling of fullness forced on her. Because he shoved the toy’s merciless girth inside her without hesitating, and when she squirmed away from the pleasure he put his right arm across her belly to pin her down.

Part of what I find to be magical about this scene is Hibbert’s ability to write about bodies as real, touchable, living things. Eve wants to be held down and fucked, and she knows it. One of the earliest introductions to Eve is her fascination with Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes erotic fanfiction. She delights in men’s bodies and in her own pleasure at their hands and her own. Attraction, conceptually, is a complicated thing, but Eve’s attraction to Jacob is a deliciously straight arrow between wanting and receiving that doesn’t feel unrealistic for its simplicity. It just feels honest to her character.

If heteropessimism is, by Seresin’s account, anesthetizing, disaffected, dissociative,¹² then romance novels are the opposite: brimming with feeling, with a kind of sentimentality that can be earnest and cloying.¹³ If heteropessimism is a foreclosure of possibility within straight existence, romance novels are all possibility. The possibilities within love, within intimacy, within connection. Even in these four accounts of heterosexuality, there’s considerable variety in power dynamic, tone, and purpose: asymmetrical or egalitarian, cerebral or embodied, tense or playful.

That isn’t to say that romance novels are a panacea for the fraught state of heterosexual relations— they’re not, nor should they have to be. I actually find that to be a tiresome way to read and write romance. Nothing about these stories is “inherently empowering” or radical. Romance novels are just an interesting cultural object, one that can be read and experienced and filtered through many discourses, one that I’d like to use to think differently and more richly about desire and intimacy.¹⁴

moodboard for this substack

Critiques

Truthfully, the first time I read On Heteropessimism, it pissed me off. It read like a dismissal of the power of complaint as a core mechanism of activating towards change.¹⁵ It felt like a dismissal of the relentless, unsparing, oppressive blanket of misogynistic violence that drives women towards heteropessimism in the first place.

On reread, though, Seresin is considerate of this, too. He does acknowledge the role of heteropessimism in changing heterosexuality (“Today, heteropessimism might actually obscure the extent to which heterosexuality is changing—even as it is also causing it.”). He doesn’t dismiss gender-based violence, rather he declares it as the reason for his critique: that gender-based violence is so omnipresent a concern that we must believe we can change how things are done. His suggestion to think about the appeals of heterosexuality is not a denial of the legitimate rot at the root of heterosexuality, it’s an invitation to be radically honest with ourselves. It’s an invitation to imbue heterosexuality with a sense of possibility, to position it as shifting territory that can be reconstituted by wider, thicker, more complex discourses.¹⁶

My hope is that this doesn’t read as a defense of heterosexuality as it currently operates. I agree wholeheartedly that the house is on fire. I don’t think that straight sex and intimacy is subversive or transgressive or radical. I just also think we have to believe that other worlds are possible, and only through closely, non-judgmentally, curiously excavating one’s desires do we get to a place where we can actually do something about them. In this way, challenging heteropessimism isn’t about becoming a heteroidealist or whatever, it’s about being utilitarian. It’s about finding a functional way forward in a fucked situation.

If nothing else, I’m a little over it with the implication that feminists who are attracted to men must be sexless in order to be principled, or with the idea that men are fundamentally, irredeemably poisonous and without merits (which is, of course TERFy as hell). Both logics strike me as incurious and limiting. Don’t we know better by now?

1. https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/ The essay rocks and you should read the whole thing; heteropessimism is associated most with Seresin, but was maybe used first by Lauren Berlant

2. We’re primarily talking about straight women and straight culture, here, but I think heterosexual is a little more elastic a term. Generally, I’m referring to anyone who is attracted to and wants to have sex with men— bisexual, pansexual, queer, etc.

3. Check Women, Race and Class (1981) by Angela Davis for more on this.

4. There are a few things you could read for this, but maybe start here for a framework (discussing “disordered” eating as a disciplinary outcome).
Brown, C. (2007). Discipline and Desire: Regulating the Body/Self. In C. Brown & T. Augusta-Scott, Narrative Therapy: Making Meaning, Making Lives (pp. 105–132). SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452225869.n6

5. Svitak, A. (2023, July 13). How do we write about love of cock? - Post45. https://post45.org/2023/07/how-do-we-write-about-love-of-cock/
The entire issue this article is from is great (all on Heteropessimism)

6. Funnily enough, one of the responses to this poll was “skillful hetero-eroticisim???” lol.

7. Bettcher, T. M. (2014). When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach About Sexual Orientation. Journal of Homosexuality, 61(5), 605–620. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2014.865472

8. Weirdly…. got a lot of good stuff from this book section on organizations and management lmfao: Starkey, K., & McKinlay, A. (1998). Afterword: Deconstructing Organization – Discipline and Desire. In A. McKinlay & K. Starkey, Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panoptic on to Technologies of Self (pp. 230–241). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221686.n13

9. Snow, N. E. (2005). Iris Murdoch’s Notion of a Loving Gaze. Journal of Value Inquiry, 39(3–4), 487–498. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/jrnlvi39&i=485

10. If you’re thinking that this sounds soooo Call Me By Your Name-coded, you’d be right. Luca Guadagnino does kind of strike me as a Lacanian.

11. The emphasis on cock might feel uncomfy to people, but the scene in Eve Brown is not actually reliant upon Jacob’s intimate anatomy being any particular way. There’s flexibility here/bodies can look any kind of way and be configured any kind of way for this question to be asked, I think.

12. Wang, H. (2023, July 13). The Age of Anesthesia—Post45. https://post45.org/2023/07/the-age-of-anesthesia/

13. said with love ❤️

14. I own that part of what I’m doing here is the critique levied against heteropessimism- presenting individual, privatized cases of intimacy rather than acknowledging a structural issue!!

15. A few references you can check for feminist discussion of the issue of Complaint— Sarah Ahmed’s Complaint! for one, but Lauren Berlant’s work too.

16. This is Foucault again, btw. History of Sexuality and also kind of his later work.