The above snapshots of popular online culture constitute a spectrum of criticality – arguably the stories Clementine Ford collects are proffered by women who are, if not already embodying a critical feminist sensibility, at least well on their way to it, while the meme examples tend to be of a sort that is compatible with a mainstream, less explicitly feminist, interpretation of gender roles.  What they all have in common is an unrelenting, even fatalistic, pessimism about the relationship between male and female genders.  The complaints offered up – whether true stories from individual women or encapsulated in a short generalised adage – do not envisage any ‘end’ to the complaining, neither in the sense of one day coming to a conclusion, nor in the formal sense of a ‘goal’ or endpoint to be achieved.  They are descriptive rather than prescriptive; they are a sigh of despair at the state of gender relations.  They are critical without being constructive: there is no way out, which points to another aspect of heteropessimism – the idea of (for some / most people) the necessity of heterosexuality, in spite of the inescapable nature of gendered domestic conflict and injustice.  The ontological and communicative gap between the genders is believed to be a canyon, across which no bridge is possible.  Shouting at or about one’s spouse, whether online or in real life, is merely shouting into an abyss.  In this schema there is no sense in which one could ask for anything: ask to be treated better, ask for more respect, more help, more intimacy; there is no hope that any personal growth or learning could be achieved; there is no problem that could have a solution, no work that could be done to overcome the misunderstandings and ill-treatment.  If Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus or Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps or Men are Waffles and Women are Spaghetti (all actual book titles, unfortunately), then the only hope in a relationship is to practise acceptance, with the option to ‘vent’ one’s complaints into social media rather than ever talk directly to one’s spouse.

​

Although beyond the scope of this short essay, I want to acknowledge that there are religious as well as secular versions of heteropessimism, where the religious versions tend to advocate for a more ‘stoic’ pessimism, in which one keeps one’s pessimistic impulses to oneself, abstaining from public complaints on social media, and nobly endures the depressing relationship as an act of piety and virtue, characterised, for example, in Christian tradition as the particularly feminine virtue of ‘submission’. 

​

While there are grounds for believing that both men and women share a popular pessimism about their relations, there is no escaping the gendered asymmetries of this situation.  While both genders’ pessimisms could be said to regard heterosexuality as a ‘necessary evil’, women on the whole do not believe in the potential for changes that could render it better – i.e. they do not hold hope for better treatment or more equable outcomes.  This is not necessarily because they cannot envisage a better situation, but because they do not believe the cultural and personal changes that would have to occur could happen in their lifetime.  That is, they may be able to envisage a better relationship, but not the mechanism by which it could be achieved.

​

Some men, by contrast, believe that the evils of heterosexuality, stemming from women’s purported moral inferiority, may potentially be mitigated by a return or upholding of male supremacy – that is, a belief and practice of male authority and power at the expense of female authority and power (exhibited, at its most extreme, in the Incel and Men Going their Own Way movements). Men can both hold that women are morally (and in other ways) inferior and praise women for fulfilling a subordinated function of helping and never opposing men, i.e. performing their inferiority in the right way, which is to say in men’s interests, not against them.

​

Straight culture is, it seems, a pessimistic culture and to envisage an optimism is to reject such a culture or at least radically revise it.  Jane Ward, as a queer woman looking in from the ‘outside’ accordingly proclaims in our interview a ‘mostly pessimistic’ view, while pointing to the way straight women seem to be complicit in their own suffering: