Heterofatalism: Why Gen Z Women Are Opting Out of Hook-Up Culture

Sunday, August 10, 2025.

Heterofatalism — the belief that heterosexual relationships are structurally doomed to disappoint — is no longer just an obscure academic term.

For many Gen Z women, it’s a working theory of modern romance. And it’s reshaping the way they approach dating, sex, and consent.

Coined by scholar Asa Seresin, heterofatalism isn’t a tantrum or a manifesto.

It’s a quiet conclusion reached after too many underwhelming dates, too many safety calculations, and too much unpaid emotional labor dressed up as fun.

In this worldview, even the best straight relationships carry a familiar imbalance of risk and reward.

And now, it’s influencing everything from dating app use to the quiet rise of the Gen Z celibacy trend.

What Is Heterofatalism and Why Is It Trending Now?

Gen Z didn’t invent disappointment in heterosexual dating — they just stopped pretending it was a bug rather than a feature.

Heterofatalism is the sense that straight relationships are structurally flawed: that even the “good ones” are compromised by unequal effort, unequal safety, and unequal payoff.

This is a generation that came of age during #MeToo, the Roe v. Wade rollback, and the pandemic, all of which made the costs of heterosexual intimacy more visible. Romance, as currently built, looks less like an adventure and more like a negotiation with uneven terms.

Dating App Burnout as a Symptom of Something Deeper

A Forbes Health survey found that 79% of Gen Z are burned out on dating apps.

It’s not just swiping fatigue; it’s pattern recognition.

Profiles pile up, but the human experience behind them often boils down to three predictable archetypes — none worth the emotional investment.

In the heterofatalist reading, dating app burnout isn’t about technology fatigue. It’s the slow realization that the “abundance of options” is mostly an abundance of repetition.

Celibacy: From Personal Choice to Cultural Countermove

A Psychology Today survey found that one in six American women are celibate by choice. The motivations vary:

• Sex sober resets to break unhealthy patterns.

• Faith-based abstinence grounded in spiritual values.

• Quiet celibacy that emerges without a vow or label.

Melissa Febos’s memoir The Dry Season documents a year of intentional celibacy, marked in milestones — three weeks, three months, nine months. By month nine, the habit no longer needed a calendar.

For those shaped by heterofatalism, celibacy isn’t retreat. It’s strategy. Why keep playing a rigged game when you can walk away with your energy, dignity, and weekends intact?

The End of “More Is Better” in Sexual Liberation

From Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones to the hookup culture of the 2010s, female sexual empowerment was marketed as a numbers game. More partners meant more freedom.

But in an unequal system, “more” often means more unpaid labor, more risk, and more “empty consent” — Febos’s term for sex agreed to out of obligation rather than desire. Heterofatalism flips the metric: liberation isn’t about how often you say yes, but how easily you can say no.

The Risk Equation After Roe v. Wade

Post-Roe, the stakes of heterosexual sex have shifted. Kinsey Institute researcher Justin Lehmiller notes that restrictions on reproductive freedom have made many women more cautious. Add ongoing safety concerns, emotional labor, and the frequent mismatch between effort and pleasure, and the casual availability once framed as “freedom” now looks like a liability.

Heterofatalism doesn’t require hating men — just paying attention to the math.

Celibacy Goes Mainstream — and Marketable

Julia Fox has declared her celibacy. Lenny Kravitz too. Even Feeld, the alternative dating app, now lets users list “Celibacy” as a Desire tag, right next to polyamory. The act of not having sex is now a visible, selectable identity.

This isn’t about purity politics. It’s about rejecting the cultural script that constant romantic or sexual pursuit is inherently valuable.

From Saying “Yes” to Saying “No”: The Consent Revolution

Seen through the lens of heterofatalism, the Gen Z celibacy trend isn’t prudishness or fear. It’s a quiet rebalancing of power. If the old metric of sexual liberation was frequency of yes, the new one is freedom to say no without penalty.

That’s not regression. That’s reprogramming the operating system. In a century or two, historians may look back and see this not as a loss of sexual freedom, but as the moment a generation stopped mistaking motion for progress.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.