Over the past few decades, one particular question has played out across numerous books, films, and essays: Can men and women be friends? That debate can seem awfully quaint. The concern has now hardened into a much gloomier one: Can men and women even get along? Recently, the retrograde gender politics of the right have influenced young men through podcasts, websites, and other “manosphere” content. Meanwhile, the increase in education and economic autonomy for women has shifted dating norms and expectations, and many people (regardless of gender) are disappointed by app-based courtship. These developments have, for some people, called into question the future of heterosexuality itself.
Into the fray slips the British-born writer Claire-Louise Bennett with her third book, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. Set in the period after a breakup, the novel contains moments of sharp analysis that appear, at times, to endorse this fatalistic vision, termed “heteropessimism” by the writer Asa Seresin in an influential 2019 essay. Heteropessimism is an attitude, Seresin wrote, “usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or h
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