Straight Women are Embarrassed by their Boyfriends.

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I am here with my spouse Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And today we are asking the question: is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? So I have an article here from Vogue that is making the case that it is officially uncool to have a boyfriend. Obviously we talk a lot within our community and our social circles about how heavily weighted society is toward partnered couples. So I’m very curious to discuss this phenomenon.

Royce: Yeah. What direction are they going to take this in?

Courtney: Well, immediately, right off the bat, I’m thinking it depends on who you are, for whether or not you think it is embarrassing to have a boyfriend. And I do think we have gotten to a point where there are a large percentage of straight women who are 1000% embarrassed to have boyfriends. I do think we have gotten to this point. Because, I mean, think about the people we know and the people we have known. Our friends who are straight women, who are unmarried but also not single, tend to be embarrassed by their boyfriends. Except for the one every now and then who isn’t. In which case – have you noticed this, Royce, because I have – even in straight unmarried partnerships, if they are not embarrassed by their boyfriends, they’ve started calling them partner.

Royce: Oh, I haven’t correlated anything there.

Courtney: But that’s totally a thing, right? [chuckles]

Royce: I have caught a few people here and there that, with nothing specified out loud, I have wondered, maybe you or your relationship is at least a little bit off of, like, the mainstream societally expected path. Like you may not be, you or your partner may not be non-binary, but maybe you are, like, less traditional or less conservative or something of that manner. Like one of them may look a bit alternative or have some interests, you know, in those areas. Or at least something that isn’t very, very status quo.

Courtney: Yeah, but there’s like, in those relationships, there’s a distinct lack of the brand of heterofatalism that you do get with these– with the crowd who is like, “Yeah, I do have a boyfriend, but I am embarrassed by him. But we’re not gonna break up, we’re gonna stay together. But he is embarrassing.”

Royce: Heterofatalism.

Courtney: Oh, is this not a thing we’ve talked about at length? Because I think about heterofatalism all the time.

Royce: I don’t think that is a word that I have heard spoken.

Courtney: Oh.

Royce: I think I understand what you mean.

Courtney: That’s gonna have to be like a whole other episode in and of itself, because I think about this phenomenon of heterofatalism all the time. Maybe we’ll wade into it a little bit with this article, but I very much want to put a pin in that for a larger topic of conversation.

Royce: To summarize that phrase very quickly, does it basically mean the feeling of, “Oh no, I’m straight and I’m doomed”?

Courtney: Yeah, yeah. In very simple terms, yeah. I mean, think of how many, like, left-leaning comedians have made the joke about like: I’m straight and it’s my biggest character flaw. Like, I’m sure I’ve heard half a dozen people make that joke in some way or another.

Courtney: So returning to this article, it opens saying: “If someone so much as says ‘my boyf–’ on social media, they’re muted. There’s nothing I hate more than following someone for fun, only for their content to become ‘my boyfriend’-ified suddenly. This is probably because, for so long, it felt like we were living in what one of my favorite Substackers calls Boyfriend Land: a world where women’s online identities centered around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed.”

Courtney: I do want to come back to that substack with the Boyfriend Land, but we’ll press on for now. But the main point of drawing attention to Boyfriend Land is that there is a very real element of social clout that women, mostly cis straight women get by like flaunting their boyfriends or their husbands on social media. And that is a real thing. That is a very real thing, not only on social media, but we do live in a society where there is social clout to be gained by being partnered, which is in and of itself a problem. However, this article makes an assertion that times are a-changin. Apparently women instead of showing their boyfriends full faces, full bodies videos are opting for – quote – “Subtler signs: a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone’s head.”

Courtney: Or apparently, and I have not seen this because I have joyously been social media-less, apparently women are starting to blur out the faces of their boyfriends and husbands in, like, social media photos. It gives examples here that they’re even blurring them out of, like, wedding pictures and entire, like, professional photos and videos. They’re like cropping their fiancees out of shots and blurring faces. And that’s the only reason I can think of for doing that is, like, if you’re a relatively sizable content creator and, like, you and your partner mutually decide, like, you don’t want them to be a part of your content.

Royce: Yeah, like this is your thing, I want my privacy. That’s interesting. When you’re saying wedding, do you mean like an unmarried couple went to someone else’s wedding or like they are the married couple and this is their wedding?

Courtney: I think it’s they are the married couple.

Royce: Okay.

Courtney: And they’re just like– They’re like still posting the photo but blurring out the guy’s face, which is a thing I have not seen, but this article is saying that it’s beginning to become a trend. And this line sums it up by saying: “Women are obscuring their partners’ faces when they post as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.”

Royce: I don’t know if I’d go that far.

Courtney: It does seem a dramatic way to put that. But also, yes, if you’re posting like a wedding photo and blurring out the face of the other party, why post that photo? You could just get a photo of yourself if you just want to show off yourself like in your nice dress. That’s a thing that is allowed.

Royce: I kind of get it. Particularly if, again, I don’t know how large of channels these are or how large of profiles these are, if this is just a person posting. But if this is just a big swing in like internet privacy and things like that, it makes a lot of sense to me to just really blur out anyone other than yourself.

Courtney: And that does make sense. I mean, we’ve definitely had that conversation or started having the conversation about, like, posting your kids. Because there was for sure a period of time where lots of parents were probably posting way too much about their very young children who couldn’t consent. And now that we’re starting to have those conversations, that is a good thing.

Royce: And I do see a difference between taking a picture, like, at the altar with whatever backdrop the actual ceremony had, and just anonymizing the other person. I think that is different than just giving a picture in a wedding dress.

Courtney: Well, the author of this article says: “So what gives? To me, it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds. One where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner, but also not appear so boyfriend-obsessed that they come across as quite culturally loser-ish. – quote – They want the prize and celebration of partnership, but understand the norminess of it.” Oh look, they even bring up the word heterofatalism. Look at that! [reading] “In other words, in an era of widespread heterofatalism, women don’t want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered.” But this is for sure an extremely hetero-phenomenon, because it is cool to have a boyfriend if it’s not in a normie way. Like it is cool for, you know, a gay teenager to have a boyfriend. Think about Heartstopper, enormous phenomenon.

Courtney: Everyone loves seeing young boyfriend love, if it’s between two guys. Because, and I’ve seen even older folks in the Queer Community say things like, yeah, this is the high school dream. This is a thing that I didn’t get to see on camera when I was this age. So it’s a very cool thing that we get to see things like this now. And sometimes that even comes with, like, an element of pain or grief from older generations that didn’t get to live that life as openly or as celebrated. And we’ve still for sure got a long way to go. But the fact that it is as socially accepted now as it is is, like, a huge win because we’ve had to fight for that. In the case of straight women, though, if anything, they’ve had to fight in the opposite direction to be seen as a whole person on their own without a partner, without needing a husband, having to fight stereotypes like, you know, the cat lady trope.

Courtney: So now there’s sort of this weird thing happening, I think, where women who do still want to be partnered in a straight, cis, monogamous way maybe aren’t getting the same amount of, like, day to day social acceptance or praise that they once did. Because I don’t think it’s, like, as cool anymore as it used to be even ten years ago to be like a fiance. It used to be really cool. Like, “I just– I want to be a fiance.” I would hear women say that, “I want to get engaged just so I can have this period of time being a fiance and shopping for dresses and telling people I’m engaged and showing off my engagement ring.” Like that itself used to be an aspirational thing to be.

Royce: And then hearing that all the time so much, particularly as social media blew up, got annoying?

Courtney: Apparently to some people! Apparently to some people. But it’s– it’s a weird thing. Because in some ways, maybe interpersonally, people are kind of sick of it and over it and aren’t going to lavish praise upon you just for having a boyfriend or just for being a fiance or just for getting married in the same way they used to. But we still have so many laws and tax codes and perks and benefits for people who do get married. So regardless of what people think on a day-to-day basis about whether or not you’re posting and flaunting your boyfriend, ultimately becoming legally partnered in the form of a marriage is still an enormous financial and social benefit for most people.

Courtney: So I could maybe see it subconsciously being a little weird if people who don’t have these conversations as often as we do and don’t identify sort of the core issues of these things, if they’re sort of sensing like, the immediate people around me and people on social media, my followers, the people in my community, my friends, my family don’t think this is as cool or as worthy of abundant praise anymore. But I do still want it and it is still going to be a good positive thing for me and I will still be better off in some ways in a partnership than single. So it’s almost like diverging in two different ways. Because we– we reviewed even Project 2025 and all the things they were saying about how we want to incentivize more people to get married. We want more benefits for married people.

Courtney: And we see that all the time with articles now, too, about the, you know, alarmist coverage of the population decline. A lot of people are attributing that to people aren’t getting married as often. And if people just kept getting married at the same percentages that they used to be, we’d continue to have more babies, which is also not how that works. You can, in fact, get married and not have babies, turns out. So even though I don’t know that on an individual level people posting on social media are like, “Oh, I want people to know I’m partnered, but I don’t want to seem so excited by this,” I don’t know how much that’s actually driving individual posting patterns.

Courtney: But deep down, I’m sure people have to sense, like, “I am getting social benefits in being partnered. But why aren’t people acting like it anymore?” But the article continues. It says it’s not only about image. And this author did a sort of a call out on Instagram and apparently all the responses she got back about why people are allegedly posting their boyfriends without posting their boyfriends. So I think this is still in reference to, like, blurring faces, cropping people out. Apparently some are superstitious. It says some feared the – quote – “Evil eye: a belief that their happy relationship would spark a jealousy so strong in other people that it could end the relationship.”

Royce: A virtual manifestation of harm? That’s interesting.

Courtney: Well, the evil eye thing is– I don’t have the capacity to meaningfully explore that as a phenomenon, but it has risen over recent time like trends do. And I find it very fascinating that there is this belief, this cultural belief, this– you know, the article refers to it as a superstition, that more people have just kind of like adopted, probably almost entirely because of social media. And I truly, truly do not know enough about it to be able to talk about, you know, whether there are ways to harmfully, like, misappropriate these beliefs in a cultural appropriation kind of way. But that’s been one where I’ve just seen a lot more people wearing jewelry with the evil eye, a lot more people hanging those eyes above, like, door frames in their houses. But I have never known, or at least not knowingly known and had a conversation with someone who has expressed like, “I believe in the evil eye and therefore this is how I have modified my behavior.”

Courtney: And since this is being seen as sort of a new trend, I do wonder where this comes from. Because while I’m also sure that a lot of people who have adopted these beliefs in recent years genuinely have adopted the belief, I also fully have observed some people just treating the evil eye as, like, a fashion fad almost. But then apparently others didn’t believe that jealousy would cause the relationship to end necessarily, but did still fear the end of the relationship as a reason for not posting and then being – quote – “stuck with the posts.” Which that’s an odd one for me too, because you can delete posts. You are allowed to do that.

Courtney: This quote from a 38-year-old says, “I was in a relationship for 12 years and never once posted him or talked about him online. We broke up recently, and I don’t think I will ever post a man. Even though I am romantic, I still feel like men will embarrass you even 12 years in, so claiming them feels so lame.” See, that’s some good ol’ heterofatalism right there. It’s like, “I want a man, but men are terrible.” And this is why I do think this should be an episode in and of its own to explore that concept, because how often have we heard–? Well, I guess I can’t even say they were all straight people. It’s not a purely heterosexual thing. But there’s like layers, right? So we’ve heard straight people be like, “Man, I wish I could be gay.” Especially straight women, like, “I wish I could just be a lesbian.” That’s a thing people say. Tends to be frowned upon by most queer people, ’cause we’re like, “That’s not gonna fix it, babes.”

Courtney: But how many allosexual people have we known that are like, “Wow, I wish I could be ace, that would be so much easier. I wish I could be asexual. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if I wasn’t sexually attracted to people?” Which is again another situation of like, I don’t think you understand the full implications when you say that. But we do get those flippant comments like that. So maybe there’s a broader overarching allofatalism out there hanging as an umbrella over heterofatalism. [reading] “But there was an overwhelming sense, from single and partnered women alike, that regardless of the relationship, being with a man was an almost guilty thing to do.” It talks about various online comments such as: Why does having a boyfriend feels Republican?

Royce: I was assuming that was going to have some sort of political implications.

Courtney: I mean, the Republicans want you partnered. Preferably in a straight way. Definitely in a married way. Procreative way? Absolutely. That is literally what they want so bad that they are changing laws to try to make it harder and harder for you to not do that and still have a financially viable life. Could it be– Could it be that the left-leaning straights are finally starting to feel this guilt of, like the unearned privilege as Dr. Bella DePaulo puts it, of the benefits that only married people get in this country, for example? Of which there are over a thousand. Like, I don’t think you need to know what all those laws are to be aware that the laws do incentivize this. It is easier to do it. And even on just an easier basis, like, how are you going to afford a home if you don’t pool income with another person. How are you going to afford having kids on a single salary? It’s nearly impossible for a lot of people.

Courtney: Other comments include: “Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right.” And apparently a lot of people leading these conversations about how boyfriends are out, very uncool to have a boyfriend, very Republican coded to have a boyfriend, are often straight women with partners. And the article calls attention to this. It’s like, “Even partnered women will lament men and heterosexuality, partly in solidarity with other women, but also because it is now fundamentally uncool to be a boyfriend girl.” Apparently a fellow British Vogue contributor hard launched her boyfriend on social media and literally lost hundreds of followers. Which is fascinating.

Royce: Hard launched her boyfriend.

Courtney: Hard launched.

Royce: Like a product.

Courtney: I think that means she posted him with face and everything. I think that’s hard launching a boyfriend.

Royce: Detailing their relationship or mentioning their relationship, I assume.

Courtney: Probably.

Royce: Whereas, let’s see, what soft launching would just be like in the background or maybe like a ring in an image, or…

Courtney: Yeah, that’s what they were talking about earlier.

Royce: Okay.

Courtney: Where it’s like, oh, just like a hand…

Royce: I get it. It’s just those are normally marketing and product terminologies, but I guess if your industry is your life, that makes sense.

Courtney: Yeah, social media has turned everyone into their own brand and marketer, and it’s awful. So like, I don’t want to talk about people in terms of brands and products and marketing, but could it be that you have turned yourself into a brand and your followers are your consumers, and you have now fundamentally changed your brand by hard launching a boyfriend? Because like they’re here to see you, presumably, or whatever it is that you normally post. And if what you normally post is not your relationship, then all of a sudden you start posting about your relationship, that’s not what they were here for. Did you product test your boyfriend?

Royce: Is this one case where product testing on animals is actually okay? Like, does the dog like the boyfriend?

Courtney: Oh, God, that would absolutely be a social media trend of, like, introducing my dog to my boyfriend for the first time.

Royce: What is it?

Courtney: Let’s see– [laughs]

Royce: What would a more common rebranding effort be? Is it completely new boyfriend or is it just like a makeover? Like, sorry, you didn’t test well with the audience. We have to break up now.

Courtney: [laughs] I’m sure there are people out there where that has happened. I’m sure that has happened because social media is bad. Another content creator also experienced people unfollowing her when she shared a romantic relationship. [reading] “This summer, a boy took me to Sicily. I posted about it on my subscribers section and people replied saying things like, ‘Please don’t get a boyfriend’.” But then she admits that her content perhaps becomes less exciting when she’s in a relationship. [reading] “Being single gives you this ultimate freedom to say and do what you want. It is absolutely not every woman, but I do notice that we can become more beige and watered down online when in a relationship, myself included.”

Courtney: I am– I do think I am starting to convince myself that this truly is just a social media branding issue at this point because– I’m gonna come to the Boyfriend Land Substack here in a minute, because that one is all about social media trends that do revolve around boyfriends, and how that content is actually very popular, and people can go viral, and lots of trends come out of content like this that get replicated. So it’s not that everyone across the board doesn’t want to see a relationship. There are still, like, relationship influencers out there, surely. I mean, how often have we heard about tradwives recently? The social media tradwives? [reading] “From my conversations, one thing is certain: the script is shifting. Being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore. It is no longer considered an achievement, and if anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.” Which, that’s interesting.

Courtney: We’ve got a contradictory state of affairs happening here. Because earlier, I think I skipped over this line actually, the same people who were saying it is, quote, “cringy and embarrassing to be posting your partner these days, is the same person who then says, ‘There’s a part of me that feels guilty for sharing my partner, especially when we know the dating landscape is really bad at the moment, so I wouldn’t want to be boastful’.” So people are simultaneously saying, it’s not cool, I look less interesting to my followers if I’m in a relationship, but also, I don’t want to brag. It is kinda great to have a boyfriend, and not everyone has one.

Royce: There’s probably a somewhat bad read on that where someone would say, much like you would of any more traditional creator, an artist of some kind, that the best creations come when there’s some bit of strife there.

Courtney: There are a lot of artists who tend to be better when they’re miserable.

Royce: There are a lot of comedians with chronic mental health issues.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: But I do get the, from a content creation perspective, being single and having the free time to focus on that and just go do whatever, I could definitely see things slowing down and getting more repetitive once a relationship starts, particularly in the earlier stages. So that doesn’t surprise me at all.

Courtney: Yeah. It’s interesting here, too, because it says being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore. Which I think, more and more women do agree with that, whether or not they are partnered, which is a good cultural shift on the whole. And yet at the same time, we have the Scott Galloways of the world out here right now on every major platform every damn day saying that to have a positive, affirmative grasp of masculinity, you do have to get laid and you do have to provide for a woman and you do have to have kids and your life will be so much better if you’re in a relationship. So I kind of think even straight cis women might be beginning to queer themselves a little bit, trying to step outside of the traditional bounds, trying to define for themselves what a good life can look like when you aren’t so strongly tied to the traditional ‘get a boyfriend, get engaged, get married’.

Courtney: But I think it’s really, really hard for them to do that when they do actually, for themselves, want that. They’re like, “I don’t want to want this. I understand that not everybody needs this and not everyone should have to have this as a prescriptive way of living, but I kind of still want it.” And it’s probably even harder when a lot of their dating pool are hearing these talking points all the time, doubling down on that heteronormativity. So while there are straight men out here who are really doubling down saying, “I do need a relationship to affirm my masculinity,” the people they’re dating are saying, “I don’t need a relationship to affirm my femininity.” So I think there are growing pains. There are growing pains for a couple of different reasons.

Courtney: So popping over to this Boyfriend Land, the subtitle is: “On TikTok, every trend is just the patriarchy.” According to Tell the Bees here. [reading] “Over half of the trends that go viral end up being co-opted by people showing off their male partners. There are comparatively few trends of men showing off their girlfriends or wives.” Apparently 99% of the time it’s women showing off their boyfriends or husbands. This writer started keeping a tally at the beginning of 2024 and gave up around March and just deduced the app itself is just patriarchy. It was so heavily skewed it wasn’t even worth continuing to keep the tally. It has a lot of screenshots of examples here like, “Other people’s boyfriends vs mine,” or “My Swedish boyfriend tries a Rice Krispie treat for the first time.”

Courtney: Those in isolation, fairly innocent. But then it goes on to talk about some of the ickier ones like a video that went viral of a groom popping a bottle of champagne directly at his bride’s face. And the comments were apparently all like, “He’s a golden retriever! He’s just excited! Why can’t you lighten up and have fun?” Or a video of a woman saying, “Begging my dad not to flip me on the dance floor at my wedding,” and then he does flip her, and all the comments are like, “Aw, so sweet. So cute.” And, “Oh the way he tippy-tapped away at the end. He’s so tickled with himself.” With all these emotional emojis. And this writer, justifiably, I think, asks why men, always men and only men, why do they get to behave atrociously and then have millions of people rush to defend them?

Courtney: And why are people posting, “Hey, I set this boundary,” someone crossed the boundary, and everyone’s going, “Oh this is cute. This is great, actually.” The writer surmises that, “When society teaches people to accept bad behavior, bad behavior becomes normalized.” And apparently there’s a trend of people just, like, posting pretty cruel screenshots of text interactions with, like, men in their life, and they’re– they come in many forms, like ‘texts from my situationship’, or ‘sometimes all you need is your boy best friend’, or ‘texts from my brother’. And they’re all, like, insulting the women. And the women are just posting these screenshots, like, “Haha, funny.” And then we get all these, like, really creepy comments about, like, this one says, like, “Haha, I live with my guy best friend and his three friends, and I am now the proud mom of four grown men.” And everyone’s like, “Hahaha, hilarious.”

Courtney: And apparently now– Like, mind you, I am not on TikTok, so I am just seeing all these screenshots having not I have experienced these trends in the wild, but apparently there’s also a trend of people who just like post their hot family members who are guys, like, ‘Everyone look at my hot brother’ or ‘Here’s my hot dad.’ And these are doing numbers. A lot of these screenshots for examples of these trends have like almost half a million likes on what I assume on TikTok is an incredibly short video. The writer here says, “I know there is a certain segment of society for whom having a boyfriend or a husband is quite literally the most important thing you can do. But the millions (millions!) of posts about it make me question what exactly is happening. TikTok content is memetic: when something performs well, people jump on the bandwagon and trends are born. But as someone with two degrees in sociology, I shudder a bit when I see the types of content that breaks through. It’s another to watch every trend boil down to: look at this man. Look at me standing near this man. Look at my man. My man, my man, my man.”

Courtney: And leaving off on a rather haunting note, I would say, the author writes, “It’s probably a coincidence that this content is so popular on TikTok as Roe is repealed and tradwife numbers rise, right? There simply can’t be a connection… but what do I know? I’m just a hater without a boyfriend.”

Courtney: So it is just this contradiction in this duality, which I think is truly just growing pains, like I said earlier, where a huge segment of straight cis women are questioning the conventional norms, even if that’s what they want for themselves. And things are getting weird because there are still trends that are heavily patriarchal, that get rewarded, that get numbers, that get views, that become memed, that become repeated. So there are people rewarded with attention for doing these things, while on the other hand, there are people who might post their boyfriend and get hundreds of people unfollowing them. And I think both things can be true at once because cultural change is not linear.

Courtney: So I think that is going to be all for us for today, but I’m gonna be ruminating more on heterofatalism, or a potential allofatalism, because I think that could make an interesting future topic in its own right. But for today, we will leave you off, as always, with our featured MarketplACE vendor, Winter Hart Arts, where you can find artwork and digital art pieces, both fanart and original, created by a disabled, graysexual, grayromantic, biromantic, non-binary and neurodivergent artist. There are a couple of very nice holiday pieces in here, so ’tis the season, as they say. There is a holiday tree digital wallpaper in print, which is very pretty, as well as a Christmas ornament. If you’re not so much in a holiday mood, fear not. There is, there are some landscapes, like a rocky beach, there is Pokémon. I know a lot of you out there love Pokémon.

Courtney: And of course, commissions are open. You can get characters done, you can get tarot card pieces done, headshots, Pokémon fursona, all sorts of options here. And of course, if you are feeling generous, as always, there will be a link to the creator’s KoFi where you can just leave them a tip because we love our MarketplACE vendors and they deserve money. Links as always are going to be in the show notes on our website as well as the description box on YouTube. Thanks as always so much for being here and we will talk to you all next time.