This Pride Month, will no one think of the straight people?

As of June 2025, the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School estimated that more than 820,000 same-sex couples lived in the United States. The total population at that time? Roughly 340 million. I point this out because reports of heterosexuality’s demise have been exaggerated, and as much as I hate to interrupt the first week of Pride Month with straight business, I want to stress that, no matter what you’ve heard, heterosexuality persists as the national as well as global norm. We are not at threat level HETCON 1. Heterosexuals are not being chased out of villages like Frankenstein’s monster by mobs of LGBTQ citizens wielding torches, pitchforks and rainbow flags. Straight couples are not being forcibly separated and sent into the Gay Mines to extract and process homosexuality for mass consumption. Male-female pair bonding is in no danger of extinction.

That said, the confusion is understandable, given the amount of hand-wringing over dating recessions and falling birth rates we regularly hear about. Still, The New York Times might have flown a bit too close to the sun with one particular opinion piece published last weekend. Originally titled “Being straight is great, actually,” the headline changed when, presumably, someone noted the optics of running a piece with that title on Pride Eve; it now reads “There’s nothing wrong with wanting men.” But the message remains the same: The sad state of straightness can be fixed — but only if women stop reminding themselves and each other that heterosexual partnership is no longer something that stands between them and the lives they want to lead.

Written by Playboy senior editor Magdalene J. Taylor, “There’s nothing wrong with wanting men” is a plea to her fellow straight women to chill out. Must we really dwell, ladies, on the downsides of heterosexual dating, marriage, childbearing, and domestic labor as though they are issues of life and death? Wouldn’t it be easier to not think about how forthcoming politicians and tech broligarchs have become about their plans to curtail reproductive autonomy, employment, cultural participation and voting rights? Can’t we just decide that optimism alone is “strong enough to render the gender wars irrelevant”? Like those in countless think pieces that came before, Taylor’s prescription for a heterosexuality glow-up doesn’t involve policy or paradigm shifts — only a selective acknowledgment of reality.

I do have to hand it to Taylor: Suggesting that the world’s most common sexual orientation is a wounded warrior that requires “Braveheart” levels of defense is a great example of just how badly the internet’s contrarian-industrial complex has aged. All the hot takes are now lukewarm at best; the days when we luxuriated in deliberate provocations like Twitter’s “Washing your legs is classism” or #slatepitch all-timers like “Bite me: An evolutionary case for cannibalism” and “The Case Against Eating Outside.” These days, the prevailing style of curmudgeonry is either nakedly bigoted or, like this one, an extended straw-man argument recast as a bold, brand-new revelation: Heterosexuality is good? Should I alert the networks? Should we throw a party? Should we write it in the sky?

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting men” begins with the iffy premise that extremely online discourse drives what people care about offline. The uptick in digital heteropessimism Taylor references exists largely thanks to algorithm-driven platforms where gendered trash-talking of any kind is pure, uncut engagement bait. Another problem emerges as the piece goes on: Taylor herself is in love. Congratulations and best wishes, obviously. But her desire to believe in the power of positive heterosexual thinking is not unrelated to her own status: It’s a lot easier to ignore the problems when  you’re young, employed, and in a good relationship that’s uncomplicated by, say, raising children.

Taylor acknowledges that heteropessimism, a term used by Asa Seresin in a 2019 piece in The New Inquiry, isn’t the same as actually denying or refusing to engage with heterosexuality. In defining the word, Seresin emphasized that heteropessimism’s “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality [are] usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience . . . That these disaffiliations are ‘performative’ does not mean that they are insincere, but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality.”

In this sense, heteropessimism is a more contemporary form of compulsory heterosexuality, a concept Adrienne Rich identified in 1980 to differentiate heterosexuality as a sexual preference from heterosexuality as the framework of civilizations and the blueprint for building societies. And just as compulsory heterosexuality has existed alongside heterosexual couplings, so has heteropessimism, for the same reason — the institution of heterosexuality is the bedrock of patriarchy, which, in turn, has defined the world in which everyone lives.

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Heteropessimism isn’t an anti-straight ideology or a refusal to couple up. It’s not an ideology at all. It’s a presentation, a release valve, an acknowledgement that heterosexuality — for everyone — is not always what it’s cracked up to be. What Taylor’s piece obfuscates, says film critic, essayist and podcast producer Cate Young (one of a number of feminist writers who tackled the subject of heteropessimism in the 2010s, when it was dubbed performative misandry), “is that heteropessimism is a lament, not a declaration.” “Straight women want to find love and be partnered with men who respect them as equal partners,” she says. “The problem is there are fewer and fewer men who believe in the project of gender equality.”

Critiquing heteropessimism without the performative context misses the point: Satistically, the women posting “Throw the whole man away” gifs isn’t committed to remaining single forever. The one who replies “I’ll bring the shovel and your alibi” to a mutual’s mention of a heartless breakup text is, first off, almost certainly not planning to bury a body. Secondly, she’s likely to be going home to a partner of the opposite sex, just as women have always done after letting off some steam at the sewing circle, the consciousness-raising group or the Bravo watch party. This kind of commiseration in the form of light, joking banter exists wherever heterosexual women gather. As rhetoric rather than intent, it’s basically locker-room talk. And we all know not to make a big deal about that, right?

Taylor is correct that heteropessimism isn’t just for women but incorrect in citing professional misogynists like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes as practitioners. However weary she may be of women who curse that they were “born this way” (that is, straight), it is wildly disingenuous to equate them with men whose entire online presence is built on monetizing disdain for and hatred of women. These are not in the same ballpark. They’re not in the same ZIP code. They’re not even in the same city. Women who weaponize heteropessimism exist, obviously. But if straight women externalized it at even half the rate that men do, every town in the nation would have a women’s prison, and they’d all be at capacity.

The piece’s most telling detail is its failure to read the room. Taylor argues that women “have greater freedom than ever before to become whom we want and to date whom we want,” but doesn’t point out that this is precisely what a worrying number of people (not all of them men) are intent on changing. Hetero-optimism can’t thrive without acknowledging the context of heteropessimism: A culture in which misogyny regularly, systemically impacts women’s ability to exist in the world. Complaining that women are insufficiently pro-hetero in a time when the Epstein Files are in a seemingly endless loop of removal and redaction — and when thousands of men visit online chat rooms expressly to learn how to violate their sleeping wives, and when voting rights are being stripped away from anyone who isn’t a white man — is bizarre.

Asserting that hetero-optimism is necessary for heterosexuality to thrive is both defensive and ahistorical. For centuries, marriage was not the consecration of love, but rather an economic transaction between families who paired up their children in order to consolidate power and land ownership. Were these sons and daughters all big fans of the opposite sex who dreamed of happily ever after? Or were they children treated like breeding stock, with no say in the matter? Likewise, at a time when homosexuality was charged as a crime and classified as a mental illness, plenty of men who loved men married women, and plenty of women who loved women married men. Were they actually repping Team Hetero? Or were they swimming with the normative current in order to maintain careers, families, social standing — or, for that matter, to avoid being sent to asylums for shock treatment?

Heteropessimism exists alongside heterosexuality not because being straight is terrible or embarrassing or out of fashion, but because it is, first and foremost, an institution — one that in many places remains dangerous to spurn. But Taylor’s piece does point to one truth: This institution is no longer as powerful as it once was. In large part, this is the work of decades in which LGBTQ communities and individuals fought for the legal and social recognition of same-sex partnership — hard-won rights that the current political leadership is determined to repeal.

But the waning power of heterosexuality is also the result of oppositional economic conditions: A nation that prioritizes profit over people shouldn’t be shocked that currently existing people don’t prioritize making new ones. A corporate culture that favors shareholders over workers makes for a lot of would-be daters who can’t fit dinner and a movie — much less marriage and children — into their financial futures. A market in which private equity increasingly buys up single-family housing isn’t going to yield havens of picket fences and prosperity. And a government that chooses to force childbirth on its citizens as a form of moral punishment is going to see fewer people want to dim the lights, draw the blinds and cue up the Barry White.

Do not cry for heterosexuality. If its overall favorability rating has fallen — and again, we are talking about the worldwide default here — it’s not because women are liking and sharing Reels or engaging in the kind of dark humor that’s the birthright of any minoritized population. But perhaps more to the point: If heterosexuality is so great, why does it require a sales pitch at all?