Is heterosexuality cringe? |
In recent months, freelance writer Chanté Joseph noticed a surprising trend on her social media feeds: Women had stopped posting pictures of their boyfriends.
For a long time, boyfriend pics were good social media fodder. Whether on vacation or chilling at home, these images sent a message of heterosexual bliss, of contented couplehood. A world, as Joseph wrote, “where women’s online identities centered around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed.”
But then the boyfriends disappeared. You might see a hand, or a shadow, or the back of a head. But the faces of these men were cropped out or blurred out, “as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.”
Women were living their lives, and their guys no longer served their personal brands.
Joseph puzzled this out in an article for Vogue called “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” The piece went viral, sparking a wave of TikTok discourse and prompting a follow-up story a couple of weeks later.
Today, Explained host Astead Herndon called Joseph up to talk about her piece, the reaction it received, and the state of heterosexual dating now.
View LinkYou wrote what I would think is one of the most memorable pieces of the year, a piece for Vogue that went viral in 2025, specifically about a question that you put into the zeitgeist. Can you tell me about the piece?
The piece was essentially asking this question if having a boyfriend has lost the social standing it once........