Jean Garnett, The Trouble With Wanting Men, NYTimes, July 21, 2025.
It's not clear to me just what this article is about. Obviously, sex and relationships, and something's wrong with men. I think. Beyond that... So I'll just quote a few passages that seem indicative to me.
Male anxiety & heterofatalism (in 1st 3rd of the article):
My husband and I had an open relationship at the time that J. and I met, so the terms of our involvement were, at first, limited, and although J. exerted a pleasant pressure against these limitations, ultimately they suited him. I was the one who violated the terms by finding it intolerable, after a while, to care that much, in that way, for one person while being married to another. I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration, things I wanted with (from?) J., even as, throughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.
It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who “can’t.” Have these men not heard of “don’t want to?”
Maybe my friend was right about male anxiety at this moment. Maybe the men are taking a beat, “laying low,” unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion.
There are many routes to the species of disappointment I am circling here, but however we get there, the complaint is so common, such a cultural and narrative staple, that the academy is weighing in. We now have a fancy word, “heteropessimism,” to describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the mating behavior of men. Coined by the sexuality scholar Asa Seresin, who later amended it to “heterofatalism,” the term seems, at first glance, to distill a mood that is no less timely for being timeless.
Communication pessimism (midway):
I was doubled over laughing, briefly tasting the knee of my jeans, while the man next to me on the sectional couch strummed a guitar and did a spot-on imitation of Bruce Springsteen. He had that lifting-something-heavy moan down cold, and he was improvising a song about work, American work in the American heartland, hyperbolically tough and tragic male work. Because I was losing it, he kept going, and I kept losing it, and at a certain point I wasn’t sure if I was overpowered by amusement or just overpowered by him.
On the way to his place, I had been texting with my aunt. “Word from an expert,” she wrote. “Wait til he wants it so bad he’s nutsy cuckoo. Sounds facile but, man, truer words were never spoken. ‘Make ’em Suffer’ is my mantra!”
I kept catching myself staring at his mouth, his bottom lip. He told me to slow down; he needed time to get a better sense of how I worked. I lay back to murmur, let him try stuff, and he warmed to his own control, putting his mouth right up to mine, then pulling away when I tried to engage his tongue. “I see what you are,” he said finally, pinning my forearms. “You’re a bratty sub.” He held himself there, just out of reach, breathing on me. “I like to make you wait,” he said.
He did make me wait. I stood at the slot machine watching those cherries and fat yellow coins blur by, and they didn’t stop. He was sweet with me in person, impulsive about biting my nose, but for stretches I wouldn’t hear from him, or I would but only perfunctorily, and then, suddenly, he would pop up. Requesting clarification on what a man feels or wants or sees happening here has gotten me burned before, as it has many women I know. I have learned to regard such demands as “demanding” in a feminized way — simultaneously bossy and supplicating, a reinscribing of the “bratty sub” position. Taking my cues from him, I stayed mostly quiet. Call it “communication pessimism.”
Emotional labor, hermeneutic labor (later midway):
Anderson gives us a new term, related to but distinct from “emotional labor” and more useful in parsing what we might call the micropolitics of dating: She calls the work women do to interpret mystifying male cues “hermeneutic labor,” and she posits it as a form of “gendered exploitation in intimate relationships.” The guy dating my friend may have been too busy lawyering to confirm his plans with her, but meanwhile, Anderson might say, my friend was working two jobs: one to earn her living, the other as sole manager of an emotional entanglement that was also his. Heterofatalism is partly just burnout.
The beginning of the end, wordplay:
“A good man is hard to want,” a good man wrote in the group chat.
“A hard man is good to find,” said another who knows I haven’t had satisfying sex in a minute.
“A man is hard to find good?” said the previous man’s girlfriend.
“A good find is hard to man,” I said, as if a guy were a tricky piece of equipment. “Slow down, I need to get a better sense of how you work.”
Everywhere all at once (still moving):
I toppled the whole structure of my life for a man who, when I asked him, “Do you want to be with me or not?” replied, after a few seconds’ silence, “I want to be with you, and I want everything everywhere all at once.” J. was referring, of course, to the 2022 surreal sci-fi comedy set across a multitude of parallel universes in which many versions of the protagonists play out many versions of their lives, each millisecond branching fractal-like into countless alternate dimensions, creating infinite selves, infinite fates, infinite answers to the dilemma of how to be and with whom. This film had moved him deeply, seeming to capture qualities of his neurotype that he seldom saw portrayed.
It occurs to me that the multiverse mind-set may also reflect the cognitive effects of dating apps that, defeatist by design, project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines. One guy I went out with spoke with a hint of longing about the relationship between his grandparents, who barely spoke to each other before getting married as teenagers in Sicily, thrown together by slim-pickings village life, adolescent hormones and the oppressive myth of female honor. What a system, what a gamble, and then both people were trapped for life. But at least you were spared the anxiety of choice. At least there was that.
Final paragraphs:
To break the impasse of “complementary twoness” that can grip any pair of people, Jessica Benjamin imagines how we might collaborate, over time (and the time is crucial), to create an “intersubjective third,” a space in which your needs and mine, your desires and mine, recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance. To create such a space, Benjamin says, requires a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission. I find this distinction difficult to grasp, which is perhaps to say that I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose. I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here. A good man is hard to want, after all, and my sexuality owes me neither protection nor affirmation; it is out for itself, out for a skirmish, a strain, a smell.
“The old way of mating is dead,” said my friend at our colloquy of female complaint over dinner, “and the new one has yet to be born.” What is the new one? Pessimism may help us feel knowing, but really, we don’t know. For now, life has us pinned here: “I like to make you wait.”
That last paragraph I understand. That makes sense to me.
Join the crowd.
It's not just the old way of mating that's dead. The old way of everything is dead. Welcome to this brave new fucking world.
* * * * *
YouTube:
Emily Jashinsky unloads on the ridiculous New York Times Magazine essay “The Trouble With Wanting Men” that reads like something from a 2011 Jezebel article. She dives into the incoherent worldview of the author, the media’s role of perpetuating toxic masculinity and why women and men are really having problems connecting.
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