A Critique of the “Having a Boyfriend Is Embarrassing” Discourse
- Zoha Khan
- Dec 3
- 4 min read
Recently, a British Vogue article titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” circulated widely among twenty-something women online. The headline alone became a kind of cultural moment—sent around group chats, discussed all over social media, and even forwarded by professors (my roommate’s Justice and Peace Studies professor included). While the piece frames itself as an exploratory cultural observation rather than a theoretical intervention, that framing only makes more apparent the article’s missed opportunities. In my eyes, what the title promised was the possibility of a meaningful critique of heterosexual dating norms: why certain forms of connection feel shameful or regressive to young women today. Instead, the piece defaulted to a familiar and deeply unproductive position: it repeatedly leans on ridiculing women’s relationships while failing to interrogate the conditions that shape them. The article did not challenge patriarchy; it simply rearranged patriarchal logic and then called it feminism.
A central claim of the piece is that heterosexual relationships completely deplete female identity. The author cites TikTok comments asserting that a boyfriend “takes hits on a woman’s aura” and quotes content creator Sophie Milner, who admits that she becomes more “beige” and “watered-down” online when in a relationship. These examples don’t reveal anything about patriarchy, intimacy, or the complexities of modern relationships. Instead, they function as evidence for a predetermined thesis: that, as a woman, to be partnered is to be compromised. The article’s argument is not that patriarchy shapes these relationships, but that relationships themselves are patriarchy. This collapses feminism into a flat denunciation of women’s choices. To be fair, the article is operating within a media-focused register focused on online self-presentation. But even within that scope, the analysis remains surprisingly shallow.
What is most striking is the absence of intellectuality at the core of the argument. The piece fails to ask why some women’s identities become flattened in relationships. What mechanisms of socialization produce that pattern? Which relational practices have become normalized? Instead of analyzing and denouncing the gendered expectations women have been taught to comply with in partnership, such as emotional labor or the expectation of agreeability, the article often substitutes a tone of mockery for any meaningful structural analysis of women’s relational choices. It presumes the woman is embarrassing for choosing intimacy, rather than asking whether certain forms of male behavior and power have made intimacy structurally embarrassing in the first place.
There was, in fact, a far more rigorous direction the author could have taken—the one her clickbaity title seemed to gesture toward. She could have interrogated why casual sex and emotional detachment are increasingly valorized as freedom for women. She could have asked why “dating like men” is now framed as aspirational for women. The article could have explored whether the desire for a boyfriend is coded as embarrassing precisely because, in our generation, the disavowal of attachment now functions as a badge of empowerment for women. Instead of interrogating how women have been socialized to accept certain forms of emotional poverty as normal, the article implicitly treats women’s desires outside that norm as something to be scrutinized or mildly mocked.
The virality of the headline is part of the story. The readership responded not to feminist interrogation but to misogynistic pleasure: the pleasure of a narrative in which women are positioned as the ones who appear ridiculous once again. The article effectively argues that having a boyfriend is embarrassing because men are embarrassing. It quotes a woman who says, “Even though I am a romantic, I still feel like men will embarrass you even 12 years in, so claiming them feels so lame.” Embedded here is a cynical truth about modern heterosexual dating, yet the article does not pursue that truth. Instead, it uses it to justify the shaming of women for their attachments. In other words, although men’s behavior is framed as the source of embarrassment, women are ultimately blamed for tolerating or desiring them. This reversal turns male failure into another reason to ridicule women.
The piece even references the concept of “heterofatalism,” defined as a profound disappointment with men in modern dating. But the concept, as deployed, is analytically impoverished. Rather than examining how patriarchal conditioning and gendered entitlement produce that disappointment, the framework centers women as the psychological subjects of pathology, the ones experiencing a diagnosable fatalism. This is a familiar pattern within neoliberal feminism: women are framed as the problem or the symptom. Men’s behavior is rendered an inevitability, and women’s reactions to men become the object of critique.
This is the precise structure of flat feminism. Women are shamed for casual sex. Women are shamed for being single. Women are shamed for being gay. And now, in this new iteration, women are being shamed for having boyfriends. The object of ridicule shifts, but the function remains the same: women’s choices are always the subject of embarrassment. Women remain the punchline.
The British Vogue piece did not analyze how heteronormative standards produce relational disappointment. It did not question whether women are settling for men who have been socialized to provide so little. Instead, it used the language of feminist suspicion to reinforce the oldest patriarchal move: instructing women that they are wrong, not because they conform, and not because they rebel, but simply because they are women making choices. At the end of the day, this article didn’t challenge patriarchy. It reinforced patriarchy’s favorite pastime: finding ever more creative ways to blame, judge, and mock women for their choices.
So, is having a boyfriend embarrassing? Only in the sense that being open about love has always made women vulnerable to judgment. The embarrassment isn’t in wanting connection; rather, it lies in how our culture teaches women to feel foolish for caring too much. What’s truly shameful is not intimacy itself, but a system that celebrates detachment and mocks affection as weakness. There’s nothing regressive about wanting to be known, chosen, or loved; what’s regressive is believing that emotional distance or nonchalance equals empowerment. To want closeness in a world that rewards irony and self-protection is not embarrassing. Real freedom would mean allowing women to seek intimacy without apology or the expectation of ridicule.
Zoha Khan is a senior in the College, majoring in Economics and minoring in Performing Arts.