Professor’s book reduces love to male-denying mathematical equations

“Hetero-pessimism” is a buzzword at the moment, with female writers bemoaning heterosexism in ideological works and TikTok users pitting the sexes against each other.

According to New York Magazine, a Wharton professor’s book has been praised as “an economist’s take on hetero-pessimism,” as if we need more negativity toward heterosexuality.

Corinne Low, associate professor of business economics, angered some people when she published a media interview titled “Having It All: What the Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Making the Most of Your Life.”

“I’m not physically repulsive to men. I’m socially and politically repulsive,” she “joked” to New York Magazine before revealing that it was an “evidence-based decision” for her to only date women after divorcing her husband.

She recently told the Times of London that “dating women is a valid decision. I don’t have a time filter,” making things even more clinical. [men]. As economists say, I need to draw again from the distribution as efficiently as possible. “

People say romance is dead, but maybe it’s just been replaced by a formula.

The author claims that many wives end up with husbands who are “junior employees” that they have to “manage” rather than “co-CEOs of the household.” She cited her 2025 study “Winning the Bread and Baking It,” which found that heterosexual wives still do the majority of housework, regardless of how much they earn relative to their husbands.

Low, 41, seems to be advocating for some kind of mass marriage strike, promoting lesbianism as a way to keep men who don’t do their part right: “I need men to be more afraid. I need men to say, ‘If I don’t learn how to behave like a worthy husband and partner, then I’m going to end up alone.'” We need real consequences. “

She received a lot of attention for it. So much so that Lowe now claims she was mostly joking.

“I was kind of tongue-in-cheek about my personal situation, and I didn’t think it conveyed the humor I wanted on paper,” she told me. “I wanted to use my personal story to illuminate what I call a somewhat awkward phase of heterosexuality, where women take on new roles while men’s roles remain unchanged.”

Maybe I just don’t understand millennial humor.

But plenty of other women have joined the boy-ban bandwagon and aren’t backing down.

In July, the New York Times published an article that dismissed heterosexual marriage as an extremely mundane chore called “Taking Care of Men,” and another that argued that “men are rotten things in heterosexual relationships.”

Young women on TikTok have fully embraced the “boy sober” trend, swearing at men like they’re toxins. Rules: “No dating apps, no dates…no kisses, no hugs.”

But this rhetoric—casting men as the bad guys in dating—can obscure more nuanced conversations about how we can improve dating without giving up on it entirely.

Indeed, dating has become very difficult due to the new challenges of the modern era: dating apps, internet porn, changing gender roles, the list goes on. But it has become fashionable to condemn one gender and put all the blame on them.

For young men, the involuntary celibacy movement claims that women are unfairly rejecting them. For women, it’s as extreme as the hardcore 4b movement that started in Korea and attracted women permanently Cursing men. (b is a variation of the Korean word for “no”: no dating a man, no marrying a man, no having sex with a man, no having children with a man.)

A lot of these discussions have turned into finger-pointing, which keeps us from introspection. Both men and women can better themselves for each other.

It may be fashionable to distance ourselves from men as if they are a toxin—or categorically treat them as statistically inferior—but it won’t bring us any closer to a new romantic normal.