The Future of Female Friendships
Heteropessimism, 'girlfriend rehab' and the mislaid political potentiality of female and queer bonds.
(Author’s note: While I have made sure to include queer identities in my discussion of “female” friendships, it may be inevitable that — for the sake of economizing my arguments — I may have resorted to using just “female” in certain places. Please keep in mind that my discussion is all-encompassing, and relates to all kinds of platonic bonds that are not explicitly shared by cis and straight men.)
Aristotle and Montaigne, who both wrote about friendships, believed women failed to make the cut.
But things appear to be changing.
At a 2015 Sundance Women in Film brunch, Jane Fonda says it is her women friends that “keep starch in my spine” throughout her long and incredible career in Hollywood.
In a widely shared segment of Sex and The City (2000), Charlotte York says, “Maybe we can be each other’s soulmates. And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with.”
The central takeaway of British journalist Dolly Alderton’s National Book Award-winning 2018 memoir seems to be that nearly everything she has learned about love has been from her long-term friendships with women. This line from the audiobook has been superimposed on countless Tik Tok montages celebrating female friendships.
In a recent interview, Phoebe Bridgers (talking about her friendship with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker) says, “It wasn’t like falling in love. It was falling love.”
The ongoing cultural aggrandization of female friendships — its promise of a utopian model of intimate relations in which there exists unconditional positive regard — has emerged mainly from a place of heterosexual disillusionment.
People are increasingly embarrassed to be straight and they will readily admit to it in simultaneous acts of allyship and self-flagellation. They constantly tell you if it were a choice, they wouldn’t be attracted to men. The Instagram account Hets, Explain Yourselves displays common heterosexual gaffes like seduction boot camps, gender reveal parties, relationship coaches, and run-of-the-mill spouse-hating jokes. There is also Straight Pride, a conservative-aligned counter response to gay pride, which just seems like a bad PR move. Then, of course, there are the much more serious problems like domestic abuse, sexual assault and violence.
From our socially conscious vantage point, being straight looks tragic.
The cultural critic Ara Seresin terms this as ‘heteropessimism’ in her 2019 essay. She defines it as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about the straight experience”1. This feeling of heteropessimism seems to be morphing into a sort of defeatist fatalism. Implicit in people’s decrying of all cis and straight men as fucked up beyond workability is a sort of dire political hopelessness — a throwing up of hands in the air. It seems to reject helpful analysis for a complacently grim attitude.
Cynicism makes anyone look smart, worldly, like they’re one poised step ahead of the treacherous curve. Women, who have been fashioned into fools for so long, and so insistently, regard this to be a careful defence against embarrassing sincerity and effort.
The phrase “I hate men” or the idea that "men are trash" emerged primarily in specific response to feminist burnout and as a legitimate defence mechanism against pervasive misogyny. It also ventured to flip the script on the bitchily vilified image of the man-hating feminist by reclaiming it. It indicated, at least in the beginning, an inherent opposition to dominant systems of power. But lately, I’ve grown suspicious of its political utility. It serves more as a catch-all, one that signifies a particular bent of a hyper-online, quasi-woke sensibility. It has also been appropriated by so many diverse groups — from girlbosses to TERFs — that it thrives by the merit of its ambiguity in the mainstream political realm. It is too ideologically bereft to serve as a meaningful tool for solidarity any more.2
This attitude of defeat and helplessness further translates into the way we think about heterosexual dating practices. While sexual attraction to men may not be an explicit choice, reformative political action very much remains so.
This cultural pessimism towards heterosexuality then results in the pop-feminist narrative of what I semi-jokingly refer to as “girlfriend rehab” — a limited period in a straight woman’s life where she, curdled by the universal lucklessness of heterosexual monogamy, turns to her platonic bonds as a source of ‘empowerment’ (we’ll get to that) and love.
Although I hesitate to employ oversimplified celebrity narratives as pedagogical tools, Taylor Swift’s 1989 era illustrates this perfectly. Here’s the story (simple enough): in the aftermath of a really calamitous breakup, the everywoman swears off men and embarks on the project of self-discovery assisted by her female friendships. Swift exited her Red (2014) era by mainly embracing her female friendships. It became a widespread cultural phenomenon, escalating ‘squad’ into the mainstream vernacular from its 1990s hip-hop origins. The New York Times wrote, echoing public sentiments: "It was a public service announcement for the healing powers of female friendship.”
But how true is that?
The girlfriend rehab, while seemingly a countermeasure to straight relationships, is ultimately both relational and reciprocal to its existence — you love the girls around you as much as you hate the man who hurt you. A night-out with your girlfriends is night he missed. A self-optimising choice is one that increases your cultural value in the rating-and-dating industrial-complex, which in turn makes the man who left you behind regret it.
It becomes a spectacle for the missing male. In a bigger sense, it becomes a performance for patriarchy itself — a proselytising tale that women can be happy with other women, a post-industrial folklore that women divinely re-enact for the ever-present male gaze rather than themselves. It becomes a mythopoetic exercise, a wish-fulfilment fantasy. This performance is continued until Boyfriend is replaced by another Boyfriend, a dissatisfactory expression of heterosexuality by another self-same relation. And the cycle begins once again.
The girlfriend rehab, most importantly, is characterised by its dependence on fantasy rather than ideology. It is a modern day fairytale that our material discontents with capitalist patriarchy can somehow be resolved with glasses of wine emptied with the accompaniment of self-help talk, retail therapy and dating apps that are algorithmically designed to suck. It is, above all, a politics of sentimentality.
It is a space of make-believe where women join each other, not in feminist community action, but in the process of making themselves over through cosmetics and clothing in an endless project of self-optimisation.
Crazy Ex Girlfriend has parodied this liberal feminist rhetoric in female friendships far more humorously, and brilliantly than I ever can. I highly recommend watching:
In her book “Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood”, UK scholar Alison Winch identifies a range of ‘girlfriend media’ that promotes the image of white heterosexual able-bodied and thin girl-woman as normative. These locations — while a romanticisation of the ideal “we” — are both a source of pleasure and belonging but also surveillance and cruelty.
Building on Foucault’s idea of the panopticon (a self-regulating system of governance where all prisoners of an institution are being observed by a single security guard from a central tower, without them knowing if they are being watched at a particular moment or not), Winch introduces the concept of the “gynaeopticon” — a place where the many women watch the many women. This becomes an essential feature of the girlfriend rehab. Female friendship can be ‘a school of correction’ where, Winch explains, the rules about what is and is not acceptable are meted out. Friends are punished and rewarded according to the rules of the clique. Winch writes about the “girlfriend gaze”:
Here, the straight male gaze is rendered inadequate or redundant and, instead, regimes of looking are promoted between women. The female body still remains at the centre of the gaze, but it is strategically subjected to analysis, calculation and control. In the hypervisible landscape of popular culture the body is recognized as the object of a woman’s labour: it is her asset, her product, her brand and her gateway to freedom and empowerment in a neoliberal market economy.
Although it is glossed as ‘me-time’, managing the body is also the means by which women acquire and display their cultural capital. In this context, dependency on a man is represented as a high-risk scenario, whereas investing in the self – and especially one’s body – is the pathway to self-actualization, coherency, and success.
In Sex and The City: The Movie (2008), Samantha — already a reliable object of causal slut-shaming — gets bodyshamed after a period of emotional eating following a break-up with her long-term partner. “Mother of God, what’s with the gut?” says the token gay man, the archetypal Id who’s lack of censure enables the other woman to vocalise their rude surprise at Samantha’s weight gain. To which Samantha replies, “I guess I didn’t realise how big it was until I saw it on your face.” Cue Carrie in bitch-mode: “How — and I say this with love — how… could you not realise it?” In a slightly different universe (Tina Fey’s, to be exact), this would’ve called for the invoking of the ancient proverb: thou shalt not sit with us!
In the girlfriend rehab, the grieving woman is not allowed to be her authentic self in the face of a breakup; rather, she is required to perform a variable of representable femininity. This comes from a neoliberal ethics of incentivising competition and self-optimising for the free market. Probably traced back to the TV series How I Met Your Mother, there is also this idea of “winning” a breakup — as if the dissolution of a relationship was not a period of expected change, mourning and introspection but something to get a one-up over your ex. If the woman emerges, somehow stoically tearless and three pounds skinnier with a new job, she won the breakup.
One year after her split with Joshua Bassett, Olivia Rodrigo was ranked as the 5th most listened to artist in the world on Spotify with over sixty-million monthly listeners. Olivia was, therefore, winning the breakup. Bassett, who’s musical career was not as nearly lucrative, was less-than-gently advised to “cry, bitch”. In our misogynistic shit-show of a culture, Rodrigo was also pitched against Sabrina Carpenter, who Basset was rumoured to be dating (a little too quickly, in some people’s opinion) after their split. But not only was Rodrigo doubly pitched against her boyfriend and his new partner, but also the ever-present image of the ideal woman.
In the pseudo-feminist rhetoric of the girlfriend rehab, there are only limited ways for women to exist in the aftermath of a breakup. Everyone likes an empowerment story (Legally Blonde, Eat, Pray, Love) that provides a clear-cut narrative of straightforward progress and profundity. The antithesis to this has often been a story where female self-destruction, hysteria and illusion is largely misinterpreted as somehow empowering.
Empowerment remains the basic vociferation of the girlfriend rehab. That is why it only offers limited folkways for the average woman: you focus on your career and become a girl-boss; you start getting up at 5 am, subsist yourself on liquefied greens and do yoga, you can be That Girl; or if you’re especially masochistic, you can become the Sad Girl stereotype, managing the perfect ratio of pathetically sad but endlessly fuckable. To grieve in normal, human ways becomes somehow unappealing and even antifeminist. To cry over a man is to puncture the fantasy of the all-female utopia.
What is Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) if not a twisted, mythological extension of the girlfriend rehab? Christian is the garden-variety image of the white American male and his culturally sanctioned entitlement. In other words, he’s a total dickhead. He is not supportive of Dani’s struggle with familial trauma. He is frustrated by her frequent calls and texts, and complains that all he wants is a girlfriend who “actually enjoys having sex”. He forgets her birthday. He plagiarises the dissertation idea of his black friend. I mean… you get the picture.
What Dani finds in this offbeat, and honestly crazy, Swedish cult — by becoming the May Queen — is a liberatory illusion of escape and community. Heteropessimism seems to be one primary reason this film has found specific resonance within a young, educated, female, liberal demographic who, like Dani, are tired of shitty relationships and long for radical acceptance and love. As Aster has said, “For the guys in the movie, this is a folk-horror movie, but for [Dani] … it’s a wish-fulfilment fantasy, it’s like a fairy tale.”
The ending of the movie is sensationally cathartic, channeling a Plath-like image of female rage:
Aster has analogized the ending as a operatic spin on the rote sort of cathartic endings seen in breakup movies where “the jilted protagonist burns the box containing all the items she collected over the course of the relationship she’s finally liberated herself from.”
But how liberated is Dani? What happens after the credits roll?
That is, of course, not to say that women — or anyone, for that matter — should contend with grief and pain in isolation. A woman’s solitariness, her lack of social bonds, has been historically used against her; the more alone she is, the more vulnerable she becomes to abuse and exploitation; the more friendless she is, the more she comes to believe what is happening to her is a peculiar condition as opposed to an experience shared by half the world’s population.
In the preindustrial era, women congregated in large communal spaces to share gossip, chores and baby care. Friendship was valued more, if not just as much, as romantic love. My mother, who grew up in a small, almost cartographically negligible town, tells me faraway tales of a dozen households bridged with a single courtyard that rang with snakes and folk melodies in the summer and bonfires and roasted corn all through long winters. Personally, I’ve always found many flaws in the individualistic Western model of self-healing. Contending with grief, illness and other hardships all ought to be a community-aided task.
In her 1982 biomythography “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”, Audre Lorde writes:
“Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.”
While Lorde recognizes the important role of sisterhood in acts of both resistance and repair, her worldview never falls into the deployment of sentimental rhetoric to artificially resolve sociopolitical problems. As such, the girlfriend rehab is similar to another heteropessimistic fantasy: the marriage pact.
(Mostly) straight women often make a pact with each other, or their GBFs, that — in the precarious event of being unable to find a viable partner past a socially appropriate age — they will both marry each other. I’ve never been a big fan of the idea, although — until quite recently — I had been unable to articulate coherently why, and I'm not totally sure I’ll be able to do it any better now. But I think it’s because such "pacts" are principally mediated by a heterosexual contingency that presents queerness as an exotic trump card, as an improbable stratagem against undesirable spinsterhood3.
While it seems like a progressive idea, it goes against the principles of queer temporality — the heteronormative imposition on queer people that one must “grow up”, find a marriageable sexual partner to do laundry and taxes with in the environs of their proper and refined white-picket fence lives. These so-called “marriage pacts” often fail to make a good case for the importance of building community or expanded kinship arrangements while ironically being a tired response to the critical lack of those things. The system sucks. It would be impossible for any one of us to survive, all by ourself, past a certain age in this late-capitalist hellscape.
These marriage pacts and the girlfriend rehab are often natural, human responses to the conditions we’re living in. I have sympathy for them. But they are fledgling efforts that ultimately fail to reach their radical promise. Why does this happen?
Well, besides the primary reliance of such rhetoric on sentimentality and the general susceptibility of any emerging political thought to get co-opted by the mainstream combination of capitalism and patriarchy, we also suffer from a critical lack of revolutionary vocabulary. Carrie Bradshaw and friends suggest that they, rather than men, can be each other’s “soulmates”. They’re still investing in the notion of a ‘soulmate’, a cultural fiction of patriarchal romance, instead of remodelling their approach to intimacy in more beneficial terms.
In researching this essay, I talked to several people about their female or queer friendships. Most lacked the words to paint a full picture of what it means, and can mean, to have female friendships. One of my friends that I talked to suggested that it was, perhaps, a bit romantic than that such bonds were frustratingly inarticulable. I can’t blame her. I see the necessary appeal in trying to make the best of what you have — to distract oneself with a remark about the artful glint of the knife that is about to cut you. But it is only in the naming of such concepts that we can utilise their potentiality.
So, the problem is bigger than any of our vocabularies. The precedents consumed by the gaps in our archives. We need to learn to separate our desires from the desires we’re constantly being sold. As a queer person of colour growing up in a developing nation, I was completely sold on these grandiose myths — their marketable allure of a vastly different self. I wanted to drink Boudreaux wine, jadedly spread-eagled across Persian rugs in my New York City penthouse alongside my curated coterie of Victoria Secret girlfriends.What I wanted was rapturous liberation, and this was the visual parcelled off to me.
The reality, as you could guess, differed in many ways. In hindsight, I think my desire to identify with these mostly straight, white women and their inaccessible folkways did not necessarily emerge from a need to be them, or to have them, but to be freed from who I was, with all of its burdensome historical determinations. It was pure escapism. An escapism that delighted, provided momentary respite, was absolutely a necessity at that time but — unfortunately — an escapism that could never logically conclude in final liberation.
Recommended reading:
The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Lauren Berlant
Compulsory Heterosexuality, Adrienne Rich
Of course, not all friendships between women or queer people is based on a mutual disdain for men, and that in itself is not always a bad thing, but ‘heteropessimism’ seems to be an ever-augmenting sentiment in the forming of social bonds between women/queer people in the present.
But hey, if someone still manages to derive some sort of feminist catharsis from saying it, far be it from me to deny someone that right.
Don’t get me wrong. Lavender marriages have always existed as a politics of survival, but these marriage pacts are a far cry from it.
Love this!!!!! Something that’s been bothering me for ages but couldn’t quite put my finger on why. And you’ve articulated it so thoroughly. Great read.
absolutely incredible read