The heterofatalism of Jean Garnett

There is a term doing the rounds, "heterofatalism", which refers to the disappointment that women feel about relationships with men:

Heterofatalism is a term coined by scholar Asa Seresin for the pessimistic view held by many straight women that heterosexual relationships are destined to be disappointing, even harmful, and that men's mating behaviors consistently lead to negative outcomes for women. This concept, also referred to as heteropessimism, captures a sentiment of weariness with the dynamics and perceived inevitable failures within heterosexual dating and relationships.

I am not at all surprised that such a term has appeared. There has been for a long time now a conflict between aspects of liberal culture and heterosexuality - the two are not easily made compatible. 

Jean Garnett

To illustrate what I mean, I'd like to turn to a recent treatment of heterofatalism by Jean Garnett in the New York Times. It is titled 'The Trouble With Wanting Men: Women are so fed up with men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism. So what do we do with our desire?' (NYT, July 21 2025).

Jean Garnett is in her early 40s, is divorced and has a daughter. She is a progressive leftist writer from New York. She is very clearly libidinally drawn to men:

I felt he wanted me, which was what I wanted — to be organized and oriented by his desire...I kept catching myself staring at his mouth, his bottom lip. He told me to slow down....

The bitterness does not replace wanting men, a man, the smell of a man’s thin T-shirt, the dampness of the hair at his nape after he exerts himself; the bitterness grows from the want and is mixed up with it.

But the men she goes out with, post-divorce, aren't as keen to commit to anything as she is. Some of them claim to be too anxious. Others just want the physical side of relationships.

So what is going wrong? Well, first there's the problem of the liberal concept of freedom. Liberals focus on an ideal of individual autonomy in which we are free to choose in any direction at any time. Logically, this means that we should prefer relationships which are fluid, open-ended, self-determined, cancellable. Jean Garnett spells this out herself in considering why queer relationships might be preferable:

But in queer relationships the roles are at least less determined, with perhaps more freedom and flexibility in who assumes which, and how. In other words, maybe our pessimism about straightness arises in part from a dawning sense of its anachronism. Maybe, like the surge of interest in straight nonmonogamy, it’s part of heterosexuality’s clumsy process of queering itself into a more fluid future.

In Jean Garnett's progressive milieu, heterosexuality has already taken this turn. Her own marriage was open, and she describes dating men who invited her into group arrangements.

The liberal concept of freedom has replaced a much older one in which we were supposed to discipline our own passions, so that they were integrated into the higher goods and purposes of our lives. What liberalism has tended to do instead is to remove cultural restraints as part of a sexual revolution. It's difficult not to notice, though, reading through Jean Garnett's description of her dating life, how disordered this has left the cultural landscape. Acting through impulse alone paves the way for a falling away into entropy, in which the culture becomes increasingly disorganised, leading to a fatalistic view - a heterofatalism - that relationships will inevitably fail or, perhaps, never be successfully formed.

The liberal concept of freedom, focused as it is on choice, also tends to emphasise the idea of consent as the one key aspect of sexual morality. As long as people are freely consenting to something, that thing is declared moral. Here is how Jean Garnett describes the man she dated who wanted a group arrangement:

He was partnered already, he had told me, and seeking only companionate sex; his dating profile referenced this clearly...I meet this type around sometimes: fluent in the language of polyamory, waving his respectful desire around like a plastic light saber...Good guy. Protesting a bit much on the consensuality front, but basically a stand-up guy. Evolved, transparent, an enlightened creature of our new romantic age. If only I could desire a man like that, a man bringing such clear terms to the table...

Which means that women like Jean Garnett can simultaneously be so demoralised with dating that they declare themselves "heterofatalist" but not have the moral language through which to raise some different standard. Mr Polyamory is the evolved, enlightened one in this world view. He is the one playing by the liberal rules.

This is further complicated by the lack of a vertical structure within a liberal cosmology. If something becomes the "good" by virtue of the fact that I desire it, then all things that are genuinely desired are equally the "good". There is no way to distinguish the higher and the lower, the noble and the base. There are just uniquely individual preferences, which by their nature are equally preferences. 

So, again, in the absence of a vertical structure, it becomes difficult to justify standards that might make claims on people but that might also serve higher goods, or common goods, such as those involving relationships between the sexes.

Liberal modernity also sets its against heterosexuality by taking an anti-essentialist view of sex distinctions. In this view, there is no quality of "masculinity" that represents an ideal that men might strive for, that connects manhood to a transcendent good. And so you get the odd situation in which Jean Garnett is heterosexual but anti-male:

I haven’t been dating long (just the other day my ex-husband and I received our Judgment of Divorce as an email attachment), but long enough to discover that I have a type. He is gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a “good guy.” He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of “men,” and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.

She does not seem to connect the dots, that she wants men to be non-masculine but is then scathing when such men declare themselves to be too anxious to commit to relationships:

She told us about a woman she knew who was dating a man from another city. After weeks of saying “I can’t wait to see you,” the man ghosted her during his actual visit. His explanation later? He’d been “too anxious.” 

“Aww, poor baby!” cried the historian, and we all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to “man up and [expletive] us.”

 Or this:

“I was really looking forward to seeing you again,” he texted me the following week, around lunchtime, “but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low.” 

“Totally understand,” I replied, but I didn’t. Feeble, fallible “looking forward” is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all.

Then there is the lingering issue of feminist gender war. There has been a strand of leftism which has explained the failure of utopia in terms of power structures within civilised societies. Feminists identified one of these structures as patriarchy, with men cast as oppressors and women as victims. This is why Jean Garnett can simultaneously complain that men are not sufficiently devoted to her whilst also attacking men as the enemy class. She wants closeness whilst also fearing and raging against men:

The men I want are not wanting me badly enough, not communicating with me clearly enough, not devoting themselves to me: All this certainly seems calamitous enough to warrant an “ism.” And if it is an “ism,” the problem cannot be me. It must be men, right? Men are what is rotten in the state of straightness, and why shouldn’t we have an all-inclusive byword for our various pessimisms about them? Domestic pessimism (they still do less of the housework and child care); partner-violence pessimism (femicide is still gruesomely routine); erotic pessimism...And the petulantly proud masculinist subcultures that have arisen, at least in part, as reactions to these pessimisms keep coughing up new reasons to fear, rage against and complain about “men.”

Finally, I'd note how she began the above quote: "the men I want are not wanting me". Jean Garnett is part of a professional class. Her friends include historians and therapists who are trying to date lawyers and surgeons. There is an unintended consequence of our society pushing female careerism so hard, which is that it makes it more difficult for women to find men they are likely to want to date, i.e., men with equivalent or superior resources and status. This is especially true for middle-aged divorced women with children, which is the situation Jean Garnett is in. The relatively small number of leftist, single men who would potentially qualify for a relationship with her will have many options, perhaps so many that they will not feel pressured to settle down. In theory, women like Jean Garnett should be trying to lock down such men earlier in life, but the culture they are part of does not encourage lifelong monogamy. 

We need not be heterofatalists. It is not impossible for us to create better conditions for family formation. Jean Garnett herself writes that she could not accept the casual relationships on offer to her because "I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration". This is an underlying instinct that points in the direction of a healthier and more stable culture of marriage. But, as I have tried to argue, it is difficult to integrate her healthier instinct with other ideas and influences circulating within liberal modernity. If you read her essay (behind a paywall), you will most likely come away with the impression of a disorganised, perhaps even dissolute, progressive culture in which fatalism about heterosexuality is a predictable defensive reaction.