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. 

How would you like your society?

Stefan Molyneux, who I generally respect as an independent minded thinker, posted the following comment on social media:

It's as radically individualistic as you can get. And it highlights why philosophy is so important when it comes to politics. 

One issue that comes to mind is that of universals. If you take a nominalist view, that general concepts have no existence outside the mind, you are more likely to believe that only individual instances of things have real existence. In this case, that there are individuals but "society does not exist".

The comments to Molyneux's post were overwhelmingly against his position. There were two main objections to his claim. First, that it makes sense to talk about emergent properties, i.e., that a complex system has properties that cannot be found in its individual parts alone. Second, many commenters pointed out that if you strip something down to its individual parts, that you could not then stop at "individuals exist" because those individuals are made up of cells, and those cells of molecules, and those molecules of atoms and so on in a descending series.

Personally, I would go much further and defend a notion of philosophical realism. My own view is that there are universals, such as the masculine and the feminine, that do exist as qualities or essences. We can, as individual men and women, seek to embody and express the higher aspects of the masculine or the feminine, thereby connecting our own being in the world to a transcendent good that is inherently meaningful. 

This was once more commonly accepted. Academics like Professor Judith Butler took aim at it, claiming that the masculine and the feminine had no real existence, but were merely socially constructed:

... gender is a performance ... Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction...

Something similar is at play when it comes to communities, whether families or nations. Modern academics tend to emphasise the socially constructed and historically contingent nature of these communities. There is little recognition that these communities might have an 'essence' of their own, in the sense that they bear a distinct and uniquely meaningful character of their own, and carry this through time. People once discerned this as such a good, that they would make considerable sacrifices to defend it. Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it this way:

Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God's design.

Family and nation, in this sense, also connect us to transcendent goods, which is why most people do not feel them to diminish their individuality, but rather to add meaningfully to it.

There is perhaps another philosophical divide at play involving cosmology. I've lately been reading Regime Change by Patrick Deneen. Deneen laments that in modern times the "few" (the elite) and the "many" (the working class) are set against each other, trying to defeat the other. He argues that in times past there were virtues attributed to each class:

Those in the upper class were more likely to attain cultivation and refined tastes. They were more likely to be the beneficiaries of liberal education, and hence liberal by the classical definition: people free from daily cares, and able to develop certain virtues or excellences of character that required leisure and refinement. They could come to appreciate and cultivate fine and high culture, often patrons and preservers of many of the world's most treasured objects of transcendent beauty. At their finest, they governed well for the sake of the whole polity, inspired by lessons of noblesse oblige and chivalry, a disposition that arose in recognition of the gift and privilege of their distinct positions, and the corresponding responsibilities and duties that such station entailed. (p.23)

He then describes the virtues once ascribed to the working classes,

They were more likely to be grounded in the realities of a world of limits and  natural processes, in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tide, sun, and stars. If upper classes could set their sights on higher culture, the working classes often developed practices that reflected life's constant realities, its joys and pains, celebrations and suffering. They have been extolled as the political embodiment of "common sense," bearers of a deposit of practices and beliefs born of close experience with reality, largely untouched by distorted views of reality too often born of abstract theories made possible by a disconnection from limits. Because they lived in more straitened circumstances, they would develop certain virtues that came of necessity, such as frugality, inventiveness, craft, common sense, gratitude for small blessings, and, often, stoic cheerfulness even in the face of penury and suffering. They were often the bearers of everyday culture that acted as a kind of bottom-up law and education, offering guidance to each successive generation on how best to make one's way in a challenging world. While lacking high culture, this "low culture" was often the very essence of culture in its widest and deepest sense: the social loam in which human life grew, persevered, and was memorialised and renewed. (pp. 23-24)

I would not usually quote at such length, but have done so because these descriptions reminded me that human societies were traditionally not conceived of as a collection of discrete individuals. Instead, individuals made up "estates" of the realm, which together formed the "body politic". Just as the different parts of a body need to function well for the good of the body as a whole, so it was with the estates. Perhaps to have a healthy society you need the social classes to develop toward the virtues they are most capable of, and to expect the other social classes to do the same. 

I don't believe that the current elite sees things this way. They don't see themselves as part of one body politic together with the working classes and that each contributes significantly, albeit differently, to the health of the body as a whole.

What I am describing would fall under the category of an organic view of society:

An organic society is a concept that views society as a living, interconnected organism where the various parts work together to sustain the whole. This idea contrasts with the view of society as a collection of autonomous individuals

Or as Dr Tyler Chamberlain explains "the organic theory of society":

Just like a physical body, the body politic requires many parts, each of which must perform its assigned function if the organism is to flourish.

This view seems to have been gradually replaced by something like a "mechanical atomistic" view of society. Social atomism has been defined as,

the tendency for society to be made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms

Social atomism tends to see communities as merely aggregates of individuals:

Individualist – atomist – theories emphasize the self-sufficiency and moral autonomy of persons. They speak of freedoms, rights and exceptions; rarely or never of reciprocities, duties and connections. Individualism dominates our self perception. It encourages us to deny the ligaments and nerves of our social lives. Perceiving every society as an aggregate, it assaults or diminishes the systems ... where personal identity, security and satisfaction are achieved. Every such system is, in atomist eyes, no less an aggregate than the passengers in a bus.

Despite the emphasis on the individual, it can nonetheless diminish individuality by treating individuals as fungible (replaceable) within a technocratically ordered system. The sociologist Elizabeth Wolgast argues that,

From the atomistic standpoint, the individuals who make up a society are interchangeable like molecules in a bucket of water – society a mere aggregate of individuals. This introduces a harsh and brutal equality into our theory of human life and it contradicts our experience of human beings as unique and irreplaceable, valuable in virtue of their variety – in what they don't share – not in virtue of their common ability to reason.

This does not mean that those holding to such an outlook are uninterested in achieving social harmony. One wave of modernists promoted the idea of individual rights as a way of achieving harmony. Some second wave liberals wanted to achieve harmony by erasing distinctions. They wanted to abolish classes and nations and even distinctions between the sexes. What would be left would be equal individuals within a universalist framework of individual rights. Some moderns have called for the will of an absolute ruler to be the foundation of harmony; others have advocated for the general will of the people to play this role. I believe it's the case that some leftists today think that harmony can be achieved if all people can be made to join in a group consensus politically, with those who disagree being ostracised for "hate speech" or some form of prejudice or supremacism. 

None of these strategies has functioned adequately. It is painfully obvious that the sexes have been set against each other in modern life, as have the classes. There is an evident absence of loyalty within modern societies, and an absence of a commitment to the common goods of social life. 

I am not suggesting that past forms be revived just as they were. We should, however, look to them to see what principles within them are worthy of being taken forward into newer social conditions.