"Boyfriends are Embarrassing" is Insecurity Repackaged as Cooties

If desiring men is ugly-coded, the way to truly be a Hot Girl is to find men cringe.

Photo by Julee Juu on Unsplash

For a long time, I’ve been very wary of falling into a trap wherein I see a bunch of unknown all-lowercase bloggers with names like thooshy or zuulia talking about a phenomenon, and I extrapolate it into a Thing that’s happening. Then, I get feedback that “nobody is saying that,” sometimes from the very people who are, in fact, saying that, but also from people who genuinely haven’t seen any of this in the wild and believe I need to log off.

Lately, the “Thing” is the idea that boyfriends are embarrassing. It started with a Vogue op-ed (which was more about posing the question and interviewing women about it, not affirming the inherent embarrassment of boyfriends) and then it started showing up across other publications, not to mention numerous Substacks that vaguely echoed the idea even if not using the exact sentence “boyfriends are embarrassing,” such as the labeling of marriage as “giving MAGA,” and “the ultimate ick.”

My first thought was simply that this isn’t really happening in any meaningful way outside of edgy articles and blog posts. Like “heterofatalism” and “mankeeping,” the idea that a boyfriend was embarrassing (or that marriage was ick) seems like the latest *SNL Stefon voice* hottest trend all over sex and relationships media. But I actually think the embarrassing boyfriend discourse has a different motivation. A lot of this other vaguely anti-man stuff seems to be about personal grievances that have been extrapolated to Heterosexuality At Large (the idea that “men don’t want to date,” isn’t really true, for example, but it might seem true if you’re divorced, in your forties, and dating within the literary scene in New York City.)

No—this is something different. The idea that boyfriends are embarrassing, marriage is lame, whatever…this is “boys have cooties” repurposed to cover anxiety, vulnerability, and to ironically, signal status as the most important thing: a Hot Girl who is desirable to men. If desiring men (and potentially being rejected!) is ugly-coded, what’s the sexiest, coolest, most I’m-a-hot-girl thing of all? Not wanting men—and not wanting them so aggressively that the very concept of acting on your own heterosexuality becomes cringe.