The last few years have presented a brief, poignant window where you could watch an army of once-dedicated believers let their ideology slip loosely from their hands, in real time. A set of public-facing people had spent the better part of a decade building careers, brands, whole moral identities on the premises of fat acceptance – the notion that their plus-sized bodies were perfect as-is, that the desire to be thin was a patriarchal cudgel, that “a healthy weight” was a slur. I say with total sincerity that I had and have immense sympathy for most of them, as our society is relentlessly cruel to fat people and the vagaries of genetics ensure that different people have vastly different odds of losing weight and keeping it off. I was however often frustrated by their extremity and tendency to make claims that contradicted established science. As is so often the case, questions of fat acceptance seem to be caught in a rigid binary of extremes, with total fatalism about weight loss on one hand and facile “self-control” dogma that leaves out an immense number of relevant variables on the other. It felt like we were stuck in that binary… until those same fat acceptance acolytes began, quietly, getting the shot. Suddenly, the fat acceptance people were on Ozempic.

Not all of them, obviously. But enough that that world acquired a distinctly sheepish texture, full of essays about “doing it on my own terms,” selfie-cam missives on Instagram stating that “this isn’t about thinness, it’s about my blood sugar.” People who had insisted on the wickedness of any medical or social preference for being thinner rather than fatter were suddenly taking medication to become thinner. And, you know, cool. That’s absolutely legitimate. We can certainly advocate for the equal dignity of fat people, for their right to privacy, and for an ethos of kindness regarding weight and related issues while allowing for anyone to use GLP-1s if they and their doctors think it’s a good idea. If your perspective is simply “fat people can’t just choose to not be fat, they shouldn’t be ridiculed for their figure, somebody else’s weight is none of your business,” then there’s no contradiction. The trouble is that many of the fat acceptance people had in fact gone further and insisted that a preference for thinness in and of itself was disordered and that there was no legitimate reason to prefer to weigh less rather than to weigh more. And when Ozempic started to become widely available, well, they were in a bit of a pickle. A very understandable pickle, to be sure, one we should view with equanimity. But we also should take the lesson about what people are really like – about wanting to be thin, yes, but also about the ever-present seduction of trying not to want what we can’t have.

I want to suggest that “heteropessimism,” the gender discourse concept that’s launched a thousand essays at exactly the venues you’d expect, is just like fat pride, and that the right partner is just like Ozempic. Both are rejections of something the person doing the rejecting claims not to want until, when there’s a new option, they do want it. And this is OK. It’s better than OK, it’s good! And it’s good especially because, as cool and radical and self-defensive as rejection of romantic love may appear to be to some straight women right now, an actual life lived intentionally without long-term romantic partnership is going to prove to be very much not for everyone. For some, sure. But I suspect, in fact, that the women who will be content without romantic partnership are not the ones throwing the term heteropessimism around at all. There have always been women who are OK without a man, after all, but it’s only recently that a lot of women have tried to make that status their brand. And, you know… we’ll see. If the right guy comes around? Yeah, I have my doubts that a viral TikTok is going to outcompete the dictates of the human heart. Still we should be gracious about all of this, if I’m right. The woman who’s proud to be fat until GLP-1s give her the chance to be skinny is only human; the woman who’s a heteropessimist until she finds herself charmed by the right man is only human. But both should probably consider what exactly their choices tell us about the broader human condition.

Heteropessimism, which I believe was first coined by Asa Seresin in a 2019 New Inquiry essay, is a term describing the performance of despair about straight life, a lament over the lack of good (male) partners and an expression of studied doubt that this condition can ever improve. Seresin writes

Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem…. Social media is a playground of performative disidentification, and heteropessimism thrives there.

Seresin’s essay is worth reading in full. I absorbed the concept long before I ever actually encountered piece, though, and seven years after it was published I would say that heteropessimism now exists as the intellectualized, tote-bag-lady version of a woman announcing that men are trash, that dating is a hellscape, that she’s “so done,” that she’d genuinely rather be alone with her dog and her low expectations. I suppose there may be some men trying to claim it for themselves, but this is just about 100% a phenomenon found among women, and of course a particular class of women, the essaying class. The kind who read and write and grapple with the great questions of the Earth and always, always see in their own petty interests the fate of humanity. (Part of the curse of the smart kid is an inability to ever view one’s problems as merely one’s problems but instead to make every last turn of adult life into a statement on The Way We Live Now.) For this reason, it can be difficult sometimes to separate heteropessimism from garden-variety men-are-trash quasi-feminist pop politics.

Seserin, to my lights, makes two important distinctions. First, she herself rejects the personalizing tendency I described above, making the move that has become inescapable in American letters since Occupy Wall Street: she turns heteropessimism into a class movement. She argues that treating heterosexuality’s problems as an expression of personal, individual conditions forecloses collective solidarity and political change. What exactly that solidarity looks like and what political change exactly heteropessimists are trying to accomplish are a little underdrawn, but then that too is a tendency that has been inescapable in American essays since Occupy Wall Street. The other important point I’d make about Seresin is that she is pessimistic about heteropessimism, that there’s nothing triumphalist about her essay. Crucially, Seresin noted at the time that this posture is almost never accompanied by actually leaving heterosexuality. The pessimism is a shield, a pre-emptive flinch, a way of being disappointed on purpose so that reality can’t do it to you first. Seresin treats heteropessimism not as honest despair but as an anesthetic (her term) a preemptive flinch that lets women disavow heterosexuality without ever leaving it, and in doing so quietly forecloses the harder work of actually changing it. You get to renounce straightness rhetorically while staying fully enrolled. It is, in the technical sense, a cope. 

And like all good copes, it’s embraced only as long as the alternative seems foreclosed. When opportunity rears its shaggy head, I’m willing to bet, a lot of these attitudes will change. That’s the opposite of sour grapes. Right? You’re a heteropessimist in good standing, you can cite chapter and verse about why men suck, you’ve got the scars to prove it. You have luxuriated in an intellectualized defense of the feelings you’ve already naturally felt. And then you meet someone. He is, against all your stated principles, good enough. (Young people, we are all always looking for good enough in a partner, and resistance to this reality only produces unhappiness.) You find that, for all of his flaws, this guy is attentive in the specific ways you’d decided no one was capable of. And within about six weeks, you, the woman who could not stop telling insisting that all men are trash, you’re posting soft-focus photos of his hands with a caption about how you “didn’t know it could feel like this.” The politics didn’t survive contact with the option. Perhaps they were never politics at all. By then, you won’t care.

We should be fair to the believers, of both the fat acceptance and heteropessimist variety. Both movements speak to something real. Senseless personal cruelty towards fat people is omnipresent, destructive, and (despite so much social change) still largely permissible in our society. Medical mistreatment of fat patients is not an invented problem; reams of research shows that doctors really do shrug at fat patients and write “lose weight” in a way that often results in a failure to recognize deeper problems. And the… asymmetries heteropessimists name are real too: the emotional labor gap, the way straight dating can feel like an unpaid internship at a company that may not actually exist. You don’t need to tell me that many straight men are feckless, deceitful, and unfaithful, to say nothing of physically abusive. These are legitimate grievances. The trouble is not that the converts to these ideologies have no fair targets; the trouble is that neither pridenor pessimism constitutes an actual critiques. A critique says “this is unjust and should change.” Pride and pessimism, in this context, both say “I have stopped wanting the thing.” And the tell, the whole tell, is what happens when wanting the thing becomes possible again. In a weird way, both fat pride and heteropessimism leave their adherents with the weakest forms of their own arguments, because in both cases those arguments are susceptible to the fickle hand of wanting. Against the power of wanting, we are usually powerless.

And not because we lack character or the courage of our convictions, to be clear. We are, of course, animals. As animals our desire to touch and be touched by another member of our species is an often-wonderful but always complex part of our genetic endowment. I do find it funny how we think we can defy that endowment, in large masses. There’s something almost touching about the confidence with which we deploy our little instruments against the oldest forces on earth, our essays, our memes. A bracingly cynical BlueSky thread about why men are trash, composed and posted and liked, as if three hundred words of irony could meaningfully oppose a few hundred million years of relentless, single-minded optimization toward exactly one outcome. Every ancestor you have ever had, every last one, in an unbroken chain back to the first squirming things that reproduced rather than merely lived, succeeded at this. You are the living terminus of an uninterrupted winning streak at pair-bonding and reproduction, and you think you’re going to break it with a clever webcomic? Natural selection does not read your newsletter. It was here before language and it will be here after, and it has buried better arguments than yours into your bones, your viscera.

This is why the cope so often fails to hold the line. The heteropessimism, the studied indifference, the whole performance of having transcended the need… it’s a thin film of culture stretched over a drive that predates culture by an order of magnitude no human timescale can even render legible. Our intellectualized beliefs are real; they can shape how our drives get expressed, who they lands on, what we tell ourselves about it all. What our intellect cannot do is repeal the thing underneath. So the meme wins the moment and the limbic system wins the life, and one day the person who built a brand on not wanting meets someone with a nice laugh and discovers, with the kind of astonishment that’s specific to learning about ourselves, that they want. Wanting, it turns out, was never incidental; it was structural and inherent. Just like the fat pride types who outwardly shunned the thin body until they could have it. They wanted to not want but then… they did.

I know women who are genuinely happily single just like I know people who are genuinely happily fat. (God, what a glory freedom is!) I suspect that even among those, though, there are some who would give up solitude if there was indeed a man worth giving it up for. The realest objection to my essay here is that love isn’t a drug. Novo Nordisk is not churning decent men out on a conveyor belt. Ozempic has a dose and a mechanism; “the right person” has neither, and plenty of heteropessimists are pessimistic precisely because the right person stubbornly fails to materialize. True. But notice that this cuts the same way: the heteropessimist who falls in love didn’t reason her way out of her position, and she didn’t get cured by an essay. Right? She got lucky, and then she retroactively rewrote the politics to make the luck feel like wisdom. She is no more free from the influence of events and chance than the heteropessimist woman who never meets a decent man. Which is all of it the most human thing imaginable, and also exactly what motivated fat-pride-to-GLP-1 pipeline. Nobody shouted “I was wrong!” They whispered “this is different.” And so it was. And so it was.

Heteropessimism is not a worldview, not really. Like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and the other maladies GLP-1s are meant to address, heteropessimism is a pre-existing condition. It’s what wanting love looks like when you’ve decided in advance that you can’t have it, the same way fat pride was, for a meaningful slice of its adherents, what wanting to be thin looked like before something finally worked. The beauty of modern life is that you do get to choose; here in the developed world in 2026, very few women have to face the injustice of a genuinely forced marriage. And some women will go on puttering along in happy lives without men the same way they always have. But the essaying class women, the gender wars newsletter subscribers, the TikTok philosophers – yes, I do think you protest too much. Yes I do. I do think that the studied insults and theatrical irony and plaintive dismissals are intended to hide the feelings you so badly want everyone to know you don’t have. Well, you know, you don’t have to believe that the grapes are sweet. You know? You can go on being proudly single, if you’d care to, while some will go on being proudly fat. But I feel that it’s my duty to you to point out that you’re calling the groups sour while you’re still busily jumping, like so many of us, trying to stretch your arm a little farther.