It’s 7:45 on a Monday morning, and Corinne Low and her wife, Sondra Woodruff, each have big days ahead. It’s Woodruff’s first day at a new job, and Low is steaming a black denim shirt for her. Low, a Wharton professor who researches household and gender economics, is heading into New York to tape a podcast for her recently published book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, and Woodruff mentions she still needs to pack her makeup bag and breast pump for her. Low helps Woodruff finger-comb her locs while their 3-month-old daughter snoozes in a pink onesie on their bed, where the three of them had spent the night co-sleeping. Every 15 minutes or so, Low calls out “Brush your teeth!” to her 8-year-old son, who is readying himself for camp in the next room.
If this seems like an almost performatively blissful portrait of mutual care and tenderness, Low came by it honestly. Her first marriage, to a man, ended in divorce after she twisted herself into knots trying to accommodate his needs. In Having It All, she describes shouldering the vast majority of household tasks, from cooking meals to dealing with Amazon returns, even when she was the primary breadwinner and commuting from New York to her job in Philadelphia. The turning point came soon after their son was born in 2017. She found herself pumping in an Amtrak bathroom on her commute, crying because she wouldn’t be back in time to put her son to bed, while her husband was making no money, working from home after he left his job in marketing to start a business.
Low knew from talking to friends that she wasn’t alone, but she hadn’t understood how pernicious the phenomenon was until she and her co-authors, Jeanne Lafortune and Kyle Hancock, carefully analyzed a survey of American time use for their paper “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too.” They found that even when men earn far less than their wives — even when they’re unemployed and making bupkes — their contribution to housework stays remarkably low. In fact, women’s time spent on housework actually fell after they divorced, and men’s rose, indicating that men technically could perform basic chores but were simply electing not to.
Her research suggested that parenting the second child she’d dreamed of could actually be easier as a single mother. Having it all, in her case, meant subtracting her male partner. She also realized anyone she dated next was not going to be a man. “I’m not physically repulsed by men,” she jokes. “I’m socially and politically repulsed.” She had the good fortune to be, in her estimate, a 2.5 on the Kinsey scale, in which zero is exclusively heterosexual and six is exclusively homosexual, although she now says she’s closer to the homosexual end. “Being attracted to women wasn’t a conscious choice, but actively excluding men from my option set for partnership was,” she explains. Becoming a lesbian, she says, was an “evidence-based decision.” That description amuses Woodruff, who has long known she is queer but is also familiar with the dynamics that Low documents from living with male roommates. “People use evidence to either validate or confirm what they already know,” she observes. The two married in December of last year.
Having It All is an economist’s take on heteropessimism, the ambient disappointment with men that straight women have been registering since at least 2019, when the theorist Asa Seresin coined the term. Amid reams of anecdotal and statistical evidence that men are less mature, less educated, and less emotionally available than their female counterparts, straight women have despaired at their options. A growing number of women are remaining single, making what Low sees as a rational choice to pass on the current dating pool. “I know of few women who would say, ‘There’s no man out there I would want to marry,’ ” says Low. Rather, these women are “opting out of the options that are available.”
In some quarters, heteropessimism has escalated to what you might call “heteroantagonism.” Some women have taken inspiration from South Korea’s feminist 4B movement, which eschews any voluntary contact with men. Meanwhile, the largely male political leadership in this country is pushing women to have more babies, tech authoritarians like Elon Musk are fomenting a natalist cult, and conservative women with social-media followings in the millions are ginning up grassroots enthusiasm for lifestyles centered on traditional gender roles, heavy on homeschooling, wellness, and from-scratch breakfast cereal.
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Like most women, Low doesn’t fall into either of these extremes. But both in theory and in practice, she has found men wanting. And the payoff of her decision to wash her hands of men is apparent. The previous evening, she, Woodruff, and their 8-year-old chopped vegetables for fresh corn chowder and salad with a cilantro dressing and pickled onions prepared by her son, who is currently in training to be a not-useless man.
She and Woodruff divide their tasks evenly. Woodruff does the majority of cleaning and laundry, and Low does most of the cooking; unlike in her previous marriage, both of them prioritize maintaining a clean, welcoming home. But though Low is the more femme partner in the relationship, she says, that was not a given. “I think there was a part of me that was resentful toward, like, men as a phylum because of how much I felt gender had written the script in my marriage,” she says. Dating women was refreshing not least because, she adds, “you get rid of assumptions or defaults.” Steaming her wife’s shirt, for example, “can be a gesture of love and care because she’s super-nervous about her first day, rather than I’m expected to do this because of patriarchy.”
Low is aware that abandoning men is not an option for most straight women. “I want them to set more boundaries, renegotiate things, reclaim their time, correct leisure inequality,” she tells me. “Not everyone needs to get divorced!” In fact, she was inspired to write Having It All in part by the steady stream of straight female students flocking to her office asking if they should break up with boyfriends who weren’t much help around the house. While it would be inappropriate to give them personal advice, Low says, she could tell them, “Well, here’s what the data says.”
The data is intended to show women exactly what they’re up against so they can make the best possible “deals” for themselves. Her economist’s focus on individual optimization — say, by finding a job that might allow you a better work-life balance — is tempered with reminders that only systemic change can truly alleviate these constraints. Think Emily Oster with a touch of Audre Lorde.
It’s not clear where systemic change will come from at a time when men often hear from other influential men that women should exist only to breed children and keep house. Entrepreneurs in the manosphere, plus tech-enabled alternatives such as AI companions or an endless buffet of porn, lull men into believing they have little to gain by negotiating with flesh-and-blood women. At the same time, a growing share of young people identify as LGBTQ+ — all trends that bode ill for the survival of the traditional heterosexual partnership.
Low believes men are still in the denial and anger stages of grieving their loss of privilege but could eventually reach acceptance. She is cautiously optimistic that men, not least for the sake of their own happiness, might begin to change into the kinds of partners women are looking for: “That’s the second part of the gender revolution, because we’ve seen such a big change in women’s roles that I don’t think it’s sustainable for men to just stay fixed.” Whether women and men like it or not, she says, “Heterosexuality will always be there.”
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