2025 seems to be the year of man hate with Sabrina Carpenter singing “there’s nobody’s son, not anyone left for me to believe in” and “that boy is corrupt, get PTSD on the daily.” Also, Chanté Joseph is ruffling some feathers with her opinion piece “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” that she published in Vogue on Oct. 29.
She was focusing on the aspect that, over the past few years, it has become uncool to show your boyfriend all over social media, and it is not really something to brag about anymore.
A lot of people immediately jumped on that idea and shared TikToks agreeing with Chanté’s view that it is embarrassing to have a boyfriend. I would argue that this happened because heterosexual relationships nowadays are seen as bad for women due to the current political climate that uplifts the patriarchy.
Women do not need men anymore, but a lot of them still settle for the bare minimum and have to face so many concessions, whereas men typically face very little and gain a lot with every relationship. Men and women work roughly the same amount of time, but women spend more hours on top of that doing household chores, which means that women actually work more, but earn less money, which makes for an uneven playing field. At the same time, intimate partner violence and femicide happen far too often.
So, I think that is why people say having a boyfriend is embarrassing. There are too many storytimes out there about weaponized incompetence and women who kind of have to “raise” their boyfriends because they are acting like manchildren. It is understandable to call that behavior embarrassing.
But, it is important to remember that just because some straight relationships are like that, it does not mean that all of them are. A lot of relationships are beautiful, amazing, and not embarrassing in the slightest.
So, cancelling straight relationships in general because some are bad is not the solution.
But it should not stay the way it is right now because there are simply too many examples of men behaving awfully in heterosexual relationships. In those cases, we should not blame the women for “settling” or enduring these horrible traits. We should blame and shame the men into changing.
If women have to change their feeds and social media so that society does not view them as “boy-crazy” or claim their content is embarrassing, does that not once again put all the blame for men’s behavior on women?