“Heteropessimism” is a trendy buzzword right now, with female writers lamenting the state of straightness in thought pieces and TikTokkers pitting the sexes against one another.
And a Wharton professor’s book is being lauded as, according to New York Magazine, “an economist’s take on heteropessimism,” as though more negativity about heterosexuality is what we need.
In her media rounds for “Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours,” associate professor of business economics Corinne Low has ruffled some feathers.
“I’m not physically repulsed by men. I’m socially and politically repulsed,” she “joked” to New York Magazine, before revealing that her move to exclusively date women after divorcing her husband was an “evidence-based decision.”
Making it even more clinical, she recently told the Times of London how “Dating women was an efficient decision. I didn’t have time to filter through [men]. I needed to take another draw from the distribution, as economists say, as productively as possible.”
They say romance is dead, but perhaps it’s just been replaced with a formula.
The author claims that many wives end up with a husband who is “a junior employee” they have to “manage” as opposed to a “co-CEO of a household.” She cites her 2025 study “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too,” which found that heterosexual wives still carry much of the household workload, regardless of how much they earn relative to their husbands.
Low, 41, appears to be advocating for a sort of mass marriage strike, promoting lesbianism as a way to stick it to men who are not pulling their weight: “I need men to be more scared. I need men to be like, ‘If I don’t learn how to show up as a worthy husband and partner, then I’m going to end up alone.’ We need real consequences.”
She’s gotten plenty of attention for it. So much that Low now claims she was — mostly — joking.
“I have been a little tongue-in-cheek about my personal situation, and I don’t think that translates on paper with the humor I intended,” she told me. “I wanted to use my personal story to shed light on what I’ve been calling a kinda awkward phase for heterosexuality, where women have taken on new roles and men’s roles haven’t changed.”
Maybe I just don’t get millennial humor.
But plenty of other women are on the no-boys-allowed bandwagon — and not backpedaling.
In July, the New York Times ran pieces that referred to hetero marriage as though it’s some horribly mundane household chore named “man-keeping,” as well as one arguing that “men are what is rotten in the state of straightness.”
Young women on TikTok fully embraced the “boy sober” trend, swearing off men as if they are a toxin. The rules: “No dating apps, no dates … no kisses, no hugs.”
But this sort of rhetoric — dismissing men as the bad guys in dating — can obscure a more nuanced conversation about how we can improve dating without ditching it entirely.
It is true that dating is hugely difficult thanks to new challenges of the modern era: dating apps, internet porn, shifting gender roles, the list goes on and on. But it’s become fashionable to castigate one gender and shift all the blame onto them.
For young men, it’s been the incel movement that claims women are rejecting them unfairly. For women, it’s as extreme as the hardcore 4b movement that started in Korea and has women permanently swearing off men. (The b is a version of the word “no” in Korean: no dating men, no marrying men, no sex with men, no having kids with men.)
A lot of this discourse has devolved to finger-pointing that absolves us of introspecting. Men and women both can stand to better ourselves for the sake of the other.
Going sober from men as if they’re a toxin — or categorically dismissing them as statistical inferiors — might be trendy, but it won’t bring us any closer to a new romantic normal.
