Saturday, April 9, 2022

Heteropessimism and the Trouble with Freedom

From an article about sex and dating in the NY Times:

Navigating our love lives has always been difficult. But today, the general outlook among heterosexual daters has come to take on a less playful, more depressive tone — manifesting in what the writer Asa Seresin calls “heteropessimism,” a mode of feeling “usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment and hopelessness about the straight experience.” (Queer relationships, being less beholden to male-female gender dynamics, may present fewer issues — but they aren’t perfect either.) It’s an anesthetic posture, one that young people use to avoid fully feeling a sense of sorrow for their lack of control and repeated disappointment or fully acknowledging the pervasive awfulness of a sexual culture that’s not suited to their happiness.

This pessimism comes at a moment when we might expect the opposite. After all, one could say that we’re living in a golden age of sexual freedom. The average age of first marriage is rising; it’s more acceptable than ever to remain single or pursue a wide variety of relationship styles. A majority of the public finds premarital sex acceptable; birth control for women is widely available and, with health insurance, often free. Sex positivity is celebrated in progressive circles, with sexual adventurousness championed and inhibition often looked down on. We have breached the ramparts of repression, and the wall of silence that prevented us from expressing our sexuality has, for the most part, fallen.

Getting rid of the old rules and replacing them with the norm of consent was supposed to make us happy. Instead, many people today feel a bit … lost.

In the immortal words of the Hagakure, “this understanding extends to all things.”

For two hundred years, many Europeans and then Americans believed that sexual repression was at the root of all our problems, and the improvement of the human condition had to start with free love. I believe that this is now the most thoroughly refuted idea in the history of ideas.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The lesson is, basically people are going to bitch no matter what. Heteropessimism, oh brother is this ever an eye roll. I got news for the NYTimes, these are the kinds of problems that only the readers of the NYTimes have. Every week there is some new coinage for some new esoteric First World Problem.
They really missed the boat on the "Why Heteropessimism is Worse Than You Think" headline, too. Do Better, NYT.

Anonymous said...

Let's take away their freedom and have them set up in arranged marriages at 20 with a member of the opposite sex regardless of their sexual orientation and see how 'lost' they feel then.
Waaaah I have too much freedom!

John said...

All the studies I have seen of arranged marriages show that they are about as successful as others.

I agree that some of this is just people complaining no matter what. But if you read radical writing from the 19th and early 20th centuries you will encounter over and over the idea that freedom in love and sex will magically fix all kinds of problems: war, tyranny, unhappiness, etc. All sorts of serious people embraced this idea.

I don't believe modern love is worse than 19th-century courtship, but I believe very much that freedom in this area is no cure for what ails societies and people.

David said...

Smashing up radical thinkers from that era is always good fun, partly because it's easy. But isn't the real question, what, if anything, do we replace free love with? I don't think any attempt to reinstitute religion-and-tradition based society across the board--as opposed to in small, dedicated communities--is going to stick. One can cite statistics about how religion-and-tradition makes people happier, or helps them get better grades and stay out of jail, or makes stronger marriages, or whatever, but I just don't see it as a viable mass alternative now, whether one thinks it a good idea or not. (And the old ways created a lot of their own forms of misery, as we're all well aware. Recall _Wild Swans_.)

So what do we do? Program a giant AI to choose our partners for us?

G. Verloren said...

For two hundred years, many Europeans and then Americans believed that sexual repression was at the root of all our problems, and the improvement of the human condition had to start with free love. I believe that this is now the most thoroughly refuted idea in the history of ideas.

Do you honestly think we've even come close to "free love"? We're still overwhelmingly mired in old ways of thinking, and have yet to even approach arriving at truly new ones. You're claiming that a potentially centuries long process is refuted only a few decades into it? Absurdity.

We've barely scratched the surface of what needs to be done. A culture of consent and freedom from repressive societal strictures is not the finished construct - it is merely a solid foundation upon which to build. There is still a lot of old baggage that needs sorted through, and new ways of thinking that need to not only be created and/or fleshed out, but also adapted to, and accepted, on a broad societal scale.

And then there are all the ancillary issues that need addressed - problems and wrinkles caused not by the new sexual values and philosophies being put in place, but by other societal factors entirely. There's nothing inherently sexual about housing, for example, but the fact that huge swathes of young people (both in America and abroad) cannot afford their own homes has a profound impact on when and where they can find the privacy to have sex. Or consider the current state of public spaces for socialization - youth culture has shifted somewhat away from "nightlife" venues, and the hoped for replacement in online spaces has not really materialized - or rather, has materialized in ways that are not designed to facilitate meaningful social interaction, but rather to drive the corporate profit engine.

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But if you read radical writing from the 19th and early 20th centuries you will encounter over and over the idea that freedom in love and sex will magically fix all kinds of problems: war, tyranny, unhappiness, etc.

I would note that the current youth generations are the most liberal in known history, including being the least bellicose, the most democratic and justice minded, and arguably even those most invested in leading happy lives. But as I often note, they live under the thumb of a global gerontocracy which prevents them from achieving their desires and ambitions in regards to such things. It's not young people who are starting wars, promoting tyranny, and enacting both governmental and economic policies which create unhappiness at large - it's their miserable, greedy, immoral elders, most of whom were obsessed with sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the most toxic of ways when they were young, and then aged into monstrous hypocrites.

Anonymous said...

All the studies I have seen of arranged marriages show that they are about as successful as others.

Define "successful". My aunt, for instance, was Catholic and stayed in a deeply unhappy and borderline abusive marriage for life because "Catholics don't get divorced". Is that successful? I mean, the marriage lasted, right?

Anonymous said...

It's not young people who are starting wars, promoting tyranny, and enacting both governmental and economic policies which create unhappiness at large - it's their miserable, greedy, immoral elders, most of whom were obsessed with sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the most toxic of ways when they were young, and then aged into monstrous hypocrites.

And it's those young people that are going to grow up and become monstrous hypocrites themselves when they realize the world is a lot more complicated than they though.