Nobody is Doing "Heterofatalism," But Also, It's Good

I was told I completely imagined the concept of heterofatalism. The same day, the New York Times published a piece on it.

Forgive my 2010s meme habit

For a long time now, I’ve noticed that whenever I write about something I notice is happening (or something that already happened) I immediately get criticism from people who insist I’m imagining the entire thing, or that if I only “logged off,” I’d realize that none of this was real. Given what I wrote two days ago, about how loud misanthropic anti-flirting voices drowned out the majority of normal women who just don’t want to be harassed but still enjoy some male attention, I received this response in spades: nobody was ever saying that. Apparently, I completely imagined any unreasonable changes in the social norms around public socialization—the only thing anyone took issue with was egregious harassment. Meanwhile, some men were quick to tell me I was underplaying the issue and failing to condemn feminism for its evils, because of course.

And what do you know—I didn’t discover this until yesterday, but my thesis (not just about public flirting, but about a minority of neurotic straight women who seemingly don’t even like men having a disproportionate microphone online) was confirmed by none other than a NYT article titled, “The Trouble With Wanting Men: Women are so fed up with dating men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism. So what do we do with our desire?” about this exact phenomenon (the phenomenon I’ve been told “isn’t happening”) which now has a name, heterofatalism. Although this article isn’t specific to public approaches, I wrote about heterofatalism more broadly (although I didn’t use that word) a few weeks ago.

I feel like I’m waving my arms frantically, pointing to some kind of ghastly apparition which nobody but me, and perhaps the ladies of

Feminine Chaos

and adjacent writers can see.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy

even told me that she pitched an article on this topic a while back, but was shot down because “this isn’t happening.”

This denial-endorsement phenomenon isn’t unique to women. When I wrote about the manosphere’s collective delusion that wealthy men always marry much younger, less educated women, I was told by the aforementioned men that “nobody ever said this” and that their only claim was that billionaires and Hollywood celebrities often marry much younger women (I don’t disagree, but their initial claim was that all women would prefer a much older man with “resources” over someone her own age.) They also took issue with my characterization of how men perceive women’s jobs. They had previously insisted that men were actively repulsed by a woman making a good income. I confirmed this wasn’t true, and they reversed courses, claimed “nobody was saying that,” and revised their position that men didn’t have a strong preference at all.

But back to heterofatalism. The author of the aforementioned NYT article, while discussing a man she’s seeing, spells out something so bizarre that it almost seems like satire. Men, in her words, are a “tainted” category (just wait, it gets really good.)