Heterosexual women are not okay. Probably they never have been. At least, that’s the story I keep reading online, where the worst of the worst tend to mingle. Boyfriends are embarrassing and dating is harder than ever because men won’t commit and do chores. If a woman does marry, her husband might end up hating her, based on the stories that flood Reddit each Mother’s Day. He might try an alpine divorce and leave her to die on a mountaintop. My friends are exhausted by the apps, and for many, the mere act of dating men can still feel like a risk, if only an emotional one.

Or maybe not. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say it,” Magdalene J. Taylor declares in the New York Times. “There has still never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue heterosexuality, if that is your thing, as it is mine.” Despite all the grim headlines, straight Americans “have greater freedom than ever before to become whom we want and to date whom we want,” which should create “an optimism strong enough to render the gender wars irrelevant,” Taylor argues.

Taylor takes issue with heteropessimism, coined by scholar Asa Seresin in 2019 to describe “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality,” often in the form of “regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness.” The heteropessimist says she is unhappy, even “ashamed” of her sexuality, Seresin writes. In Taylor’s words, she decides “the opposite sex is a trap best avoided.” Seresin later revised the concept to heterofatalism, a bleak term for a bleak outlook. Taylor suggests an alternative, hetero-optimism, which gestures at the “real and imagined” problems of straight America while “believing that some hope for our romantic future exists.” Rather than dwell on our stark political and cultural realities, Taylor celebrates “the choice to never marry, date, or have sex again,” or “the choice to date younger, date older, date around, or date one person forever,” and........

© Daily Intelligencer