Boy Crazy

Imagine a woman who likes men. Any woman. She can be a teenager in Lovington, New Mexico, never kissed, though it almost happened once, she’s sure, after the neighbor pretending to drown her in the pool finally let her up for air. She still thinks of the away team senior who winked at her last January while she sat in the bleachers at her brother’s game. What did it mean? What should she have done in response, and why didn’t she do it? Yesterday, she climbed into the bed of an F-150 with five other kids, and ended up next to a highly caffeinated mathlete who didn’t notice his thigh pressed against hers, though she was aware of nothing else. 

Or maybe she’s an Atlantan accountant on her second marriage, which isn’t going any better than the first. She eats lunch while scrolling videos, her algorithm impeccable: male ballet corp members doing trending dances backstage in incongruous costumes; skateboarders goofing off, crashing, calling each other “pussies”; undergraduates’ intra-frat pranks. Her favorite moments are when low, affected guffaws break into to surprised, higher pitched laughter, the abrupt and helpless revelation of the boys lingering inside the men, though her favorite account is a tattooed gym bro whose every post is him bare-armed and shotgunning beer, chin tipped back, full length of his pumping throat shown. 

Or she just turned thirty and she’s falling in love with another therapist at her practice, a skinny, supremely gentle man she’s never seen without his glasses. She’s an empty nester renovating her home, running to the hardware store on any little errand so she can hear the owner call her “darlin’.” She’s a regret-free retiree who married her husband mainly because of his accent and the smell of his armpits in the morning. She’s a young widow who goes to sports bars though she doesn’t care about sports. She knows plenty of women do, but she doesn’t. She just likes being in a room where men cheer and groan all at once. 

But I’m not speaking of affinity alone. I am describing desire—a desire born out of incurable affinity, a yearning for sex as well as camaraderie, intimacy, affection. Because the desire belongs to women, it is definitionally mapless, as mysterious as dark matter and nebulous as mist, threatening deception and disorder. 

Casual sex has been the norm across genders for my entire adult life, but sexist stereotypes outlive the sexual mores they once occasioned. Male instincts continue to be sketched in crude and cynical terms that reinforce men's bodily validity, which is a way of affirming their purity, their naturalness. If men of any orientation want sex, it simply means they’re horny—to say as much is basically a tautology—and they’re assumed to choose their partners intuitively, out of convenience and lust. But if a woman pursues sex, it’s evidence of scheme or error. She can never have a sexuality as authentic as a man's because of who (what) she is; she can only be instinctively frigid or dangerously oversexed. In a heterosexist society, women are presumed to be drawn to men, but because that movement is compulsory it’s also suspect, as women themselves are suspect, furtive, alien creatures. A woman who seeks even the non-sexual company of men is probably angling for something else, be it advancement, which makes her conniving, or approval, which renders her pathetic.

Years ago, I attended a panel at which the artist Cecily Brown shared an anecdote about a man shocked to learn her work was her own. He’d been sure that her explicit paintings—one of which, for instance, features a seated man gripping his sizable erection—were the product of a gay man. In 2021, a journalist asked if she intended her paintings to be “homo-erotic.” The answer was no. “They are sexy, naked men to be looked at,” she said of her figures, “and for their bodies to be enjoyed, by everyone.” She added that she is frustrated by the insistence that female nudes are for the male gaze "and then male nudes are also for the male gaze, even when they’re by a straight woman.” The female gaze is categorically denied, not merely left unsatisfied but unacknowledged as a reality or even a possibility. 

This remains the state of affairs, in writing and visual art, and in the inherited suppositions mistaken for truth. Appreciation of and interest in men is the domain of other men, not of women. And passionately wanting men, especially many men, is not a hallmark of a straight woman. It is instead the marker of a gay man. 

Accordingly, there is a long tradition of ardently man-desiring women, myself included, who have resorted to describing themselves as a double negative, swapping both gender and orientation so we might loop around to the spot where we already stand. For a woman to say she is “like a gay man” can seem the only adequate way to convey the deep-seated sincerity and joyous extravagance of what is otherwise labeled sluttishness, nymphomania, promiscuity—feminine words that cast multi-faceted erotic appetite as a mistake, pathological and damaging to self, society, and any man haplessly ensnared.

To solve the intractable problem of woman’s desire, then, is to filter out the woman by passing her desire through a man. In a man, woman’s desire becomes intelligible.

Legitimization is one function of BL (Boys’ Love) or M/M fiction, meaning homoerotic stories composed by and primarily for women, whether those women are straight, bi, or gay themselves. The reader or watcher need not be someone who projects herself in the place of one member of the romantic dyad in order for M/M to subconsciously bless her desire. Validation occurs automatically, as does the pleasure of contemplating attractive men in situations where women aren’t present due to a positive excluding force (men’s overwhelming desire for one another) as opposed to a negative (misogyny).

The staggeringly popular Heated Rivalry has led a mass of otherwise BL-ignorant men and women to speculate on the reasons for such material's existence. Among newly minted fans and mystified onlookers alike, the go-to justification is that romance between men excises, like a tumor, the libido-killing burdens of womanhood. Between men, it’s assumed, there need be no pregnancy scares or awkward birth control discussions, no foregrounded fear of sexual assault and coercion, no expectation that one partner give up his job to cook and clean for the other. Between men, attraction, love, and sex can flow forth untainted—designer drugs direct from the lab of the soul. 

That explanation, while not wholly wrong, doesn’t satisfy me, and given the frequency of this debate among self-professed fujoshis, its insufficiency is widely felt. One glaring issue is that while plenty of M/M comics and TV shows and books are “fluffy” “green flag” tales in which both main characters are sweet and considerate—and may never consummate their relationship, or even kiss—these works are vastly outnumbered by those in which the most oppressive, female-coded afflictions are meticulously added back in. In BL, as in real life, men rape their lovers. They use deception and financial pressure to get what they want, and express their alleged devotion through jealousy, violence, and control. Abusive elements in these stories enhance erotic charge rather than foreclose it. 

Reproduction, moreover, is inescapable. Omegaverse and other mpreg fantasies revolve around cis male pregnancies and child-rearing, usually unplanned yet transformative, and tearfully embraced if not yearned for. Similarly, in straight romances with no allegiance to plausibility (rich celebrity falls in love with broke, average-looking woman, etc.) pregnancy is regularly deployed as yet another wish-fulfillment. Content has never been more thinly sliced by preference, so a woman who wants to read a straight romance without rape or pregnancy should have no problem doing it without resorting to BL.

It's true that for many women, attempting intimacy with men entails navigation of physical vulnerability. But a still more universal experience is the mental and emotional pain of intractable, overt disrespect, which occurs in hetero non-sexual—familial, professional, social —interactions, too. Trend pieces indicate the grinding oppression of sexism with invocations of Trump, Epstein, and #MeToo’s failed start, but that shorthand leaves too much unsaid. The brazen untouchability of outspoken misogynists and serial rapists is sickening, yet women's second-class status is already integral to policy, culture, and the economy. We live within and through it. It’s not as if we need reminders. 

Worse (and it does feel worse, because it feels targeted, personal) there are men in our lives who will never let us forget. This is the poison sipped throughout the day: however much you as a woman might like or respect or love a man, he is unlikely to see and treat you as a peer. Same-sex pairings don’t guarantee equality between partners, but at least they don’t preclude it.

When these enduring concerns were voiced by second-wave feminists, they were often connected to complaints of sexual objectification that now seem almost quaint. It was something of a truism that men's inability to hold women in high regard was enmeshed with their wolfish appetites—they don't take us seriously as comrades because they're just hoping to get in our pants—but in 2026, this formulation doesn't hold. The internet is rife with women detailing the elaborate humiliation rituals to which they’re subjected as punishment for going on a date with a man, like being told to dress up only to be taken to a dive bar, or being made to pay for his meal as well as her own after his card is declined or he says he forgot his wallet. A willingness to drive to his house and deliver her body like a free pizza might earn a comparatively more humane ghosting, or else a lame excuse for unresponsiveness that comes three days later. 

This behavior is not confined to men who are intentionally aligned with men’s rights activists, incels, or the far right. Where we once had pickup artists, we now have a sex recession: men don’t care about hooking up, though they might message or match with a woman to string her along indefinitely under the pretense of doing so. Months ago, I saw a haunting video montage that has stayed with me, in which a cute college boy prepared to kiss more than a dozen stunning women at a club just to swerve his face at the last moment and smile roguishly at the friend filming him. Women are also capable of squandering romantic opportunities through caprice and poor judgment, but few would reject a willing man so cruelly or so publicly, and fewer still would document it for broadcast.

No wonder some young straight women have taken to claiming, tongue barely in cheek, that all men are gay. What other explanation could there be for why men would rather torture us than sleep with us when, historically, they’ve long seized the prerogative of doing both? Why perform desire only to withhold it? To skip sex and go straight to sadism is a newly common predicament. We thought the ultimate indignity was being used for sex devoid of basic courtesy or warmth, but now we find the dream of being well-loved seems as remote as the dream of being well-fucked. 

In BL, no speculation is required. Every man is gay—though he doesn’t know it yet. That's why it doesn't hurt.

Forgive the descent into anaphrodisiac bleakness. This essay is still about desire and affinity, two of life’s most electrifying, delicious experiences. The rush of spontaneous attraction; the billowy lean of one’s inner self, like sails on a boat that’s found its wind; the anticipation and profusion of potential; the luxuriation in an appreciation that need go no further—these are sensations that should be treasured. But it’s hard to give into, let alone celebrate them, if you’ve learned they are inextricable from degradation and disappointment. 

Since its coinage in 2019, Asa Seresin’s term “heteropessimism” has been indispensable for understanding straight women’s lives, though the word is usually, erroneously, invoked to mean “bad feelings about heterosexuality.” Seresin put the emphasis on women’s disavowal of heterosexuality rather than the emotions behind that disavowal, writing that heteropessimism was marked by “performative disaffiliations,” i.e. those not made manifest. Such un-acted upon disidentification, in Seresin’s argument, is meant to protect the speaker against the “overintensity of feeling” that comes with persistent attachment to the sexual practice they can’t or won’t give up. Significantly, that superabundance of feeling itself is something “for which straight culture is determined to make [women] ashamed,” which makes its dampening extra useful. 

Recent furor over BL confirms as much. Some women have found a safe haven for their excessive (read: hysterical) sexual reactions and tastes, one that places no obligations on nor infringes upon men either straight or gay, yet this innocuous behavior inspires disgust and incomprehension, complete with overblown claims about why it's wrong. 

The real offense seems to be the fact of the female gaze. But it is real and it's ours and it's not going away. It asserts itself from the position of consumer and creator, in obsessing over imaginary childhood friends who slowly realize their connection isn't merely platonic; athletes whose mutual cult of the body yields to an inevitable climax; coworkers whose office competition is the ultimate aphrodisiac. People's sexual proclivities are notoriously sticky and resistant to reprogramming regardless of elaborate incentives and punishments put in place to that end. Straight women's desire, as is true of every other demographic, is tenacious. We want men and we find pleasure in the wanting regardless of the costs. 

For women who love men, BL is an escape from gender that simultaneously confirms our sexual orientation. It may seem paradoxical to outsiders but experientially, there's nothing complicating or confusing about it. Many times since embracing BL, I've realized I care less about my own gender identity than who I'm with; I'd be anything or everything as long as it wouldn't preclude me being with men. What might be called a queer impulse in this context is simplifying and direct, like the aforementioned double negative that loops back around to where you already were.  

BL allows women to worship at an altar otherwise kept behind barbed wire, to bathe in a fountain otherwise locked behind a gate. The ecstasy of immersion is made sweeter because it’s been so long denied. To passionately adore that which invites your adoration is bliss. That’s one way of saying I love loving men because I love men.