Miranda July's Lucrative Fantasies

you are not in fact going to spend the rest of your life cycling from one sexy, stimulating sexual and romantic partner to the next

I’ve always thought that, when you’re trying to plan your next move, when you’re making a choice, it’s essential step try and weed out both your most unrealistic fantasies and your most implausible fears. I know that sounds comically obvious. The trouble is that our fantasies have a way of nibbling around the edges of our conscious minds, working subtly, and so we need reminders.

So say a friend is pondering moving to New York. Would that be a wise decision? The wisdom of the choice is entirely contingent on context - for some people the answer is absolutely yes and for others absolutely no and for many, well, maybe. And these context-heavy decisions are where trying to filter out fantasy is most important; you have to separate your subjective attitude towards the decision as much as you can, and our subjective feelings are all bound up in what we dream about, not just what we rationally believe. Most of us are savvy enough to not say the fantasy version out loud. But we’re still animated by that fantasy all the same; we often come back to it again and again while we’re dreaming of our future life. I know I did, before I moved there. At an extreme, it looks something like this.

I’m gonna drink in the city and all that it has to offer! I’m going to really live once I get there. One day, I’ll be attending a tony dinner party in brownstone Brooklyn. The next, I’ll be picnicking in Central Park. I’ll got to at least one live show or museum, every week. I’ll take the subway or bus everywhere, and never use an Uber, because I support public transit and I want to soak up the ambience of this city’s people anyway. I won’t buy things on Amazon - why would I ever, when this town is filled with proud small businesses that can find me any item I need under the sun! I’ll never eat the same cuisine twice in a week, and I’ll have a strict rule against patronizing the same restaurant more than once a month. Comedy clubs, gallery openings, pop up shops, Broadway shows…. There’s just so much to explore!

This is of course a lovely fantasy and you can certainly work to make your life more like this rather than less. In fact I highly recommend you do, if you live in New York City or any city. But the reality is that, within six months of moving there, plenty of your time is going to be spent watching Netflix in your apartment eating the same old brand of burrito that you had delivered by DoorDash even though the place is four blocks away. That’s just what life is like. People can make the affirmative choice to better take advantage of what the city offers, and when they make the effort to consistently do so, I think their lives are enriched. But the fantasy version doesn’t exist, for anyone; most people are cynical enough about Instagram not to trust its depiction of cool NYC existence but still have a difficult time being equally skeptical about their own fantasies. And it’s also true that this kind of life can’t just be chosen, not entirely, as the city and its people have to decide to give you the opportunity to live this way. I think anyone who has the practical (read: financial) ability to make life work in New York or any other city can carve out a good-enough life. But if they’re making plans based on their most idealized projections, they’re bound for disappointment.

Unfortunately, the wisdom of this advice can sometimes be obscured by politics. For example, you may remember a now-ancient controversy about whether women “can have it all.” This was a big, meaty, thinkpiece-and-take-generating debate years back. What “having it all” meant was never entirely clear, but the basic debate concerned whether women had to choose between having their careers and raising children/having a family. Of course, the answer to all of these questions depends a great deal on whether the woman and her partner have the socioeconomic flexibility to pay for various kinds of child care; this (correct) observation was often dropped on social media like some kind of gnostic bauble. Some attempted to connect the debate to other flashpoints of modern female identity, like the endlessly-blogged “cool girl” speech featured in Gone Girl. I stayed out of this fray, at the time, but privately I held with those who were pointing out that “having it all” was an unrealistic goal for anyone, not just for women. Yes, there are of course unique difficulties when it comes to women both flourishing in their careers and starting a family, and these are no doubt influenced not just by biology but by structural sexism. Still, everyone’s ambitions are constrained in prosaic ways in life, including men, and (like the directive to be cartoonishly self-confident) the goal of it having it all becomes just another set of expectations that women can’t possibly meet.

But despite all of these criticisms and qualifications, there really was a period of time in which suggesting that women could not have it all would be met by immediate accusations of misogyny. “Oh so you, a dude, don’t want women to flourish as much as they can? You don’t want women to get all that they deserve? You’re trying to hold ambitious career women down? I’m shocked.” This was a really common bit of reasoning - that if you suggested that women can’t have it all, that this is an unreasonable demand for anyone given the basic contours of human existence, you were guilty of saying that they shouldn’t have it all, that you didn’t want them to. The trouble is that the modern conception of justice, in the political sense, permits no limitations, even though human history is filled with nothing but limitations on justice. So those working from that conception see those asserting the impossibility of the just outcome as an impediment to achieving it, rather than as someone making good-faith arguments about the constraints that are placed on all of our lives by our nature and by circumstance. For the millionth time in this newsletter, I present the is/ought distinction.

You Bust Loose From Heaven And Now Your Life Starts*

Which brings me to Miranda July and the micro-movement she’s spawned with her book All Fours: convincing aging women that they should leave their long-term partners, or stop looking for one, and just spend the rest of their lives cycling through one lover after another, enjoying a pleasantly hedonistic existence unbound by the restrictions of conventional morality - and, it seems, by mortality and time, which have conspicuously little presence in all of this. July’s book is a novel and does not advocate for a specific path for women, but her extremely successful newsletter more or less does, and the large online movement July has sparked certainly prefers to embrace the ethos of Just Dump Your Husband Already. This has all been aided by a massive amount of attention from media, both traditional and new - very large presence of Lady Podcasts, mentions in Emily Gould’s newsletter for the Cut, a profound fixation in the New York Times. Here’s Marie Solis with the initial worshipful profile, here’s Alyson Krueger with that classic indicator of social importance, an NYT Style-section trend piece, here’ss Mirielle Silcoff with a charming little bit of football-spiking, protesting against depictions of aging women that make them appear unfulfilled or sexless. (Protesting, perhaps, too much.) We could get into the whole phenomenon here of people being moved to explicitly explain and justify their happiness to others, in the pages of the New York Times no less; you can’t help but wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince. Still, if your wife writes thinkpieces for the Times you might want to keep a close eye on her Pinterest.

As I wrote recently, what media sells in 2025 is permission; that is our product. Apparently a lot of women were waiting for a particular kind of permission that Miranda July has provided. What’s remarkable about all of this cheering on of July in our most elite publications is not just its sheer volume, but also how untouched it is by skepticism or pushback. It’s not just that a certain kind of person at a certain kind of publication wants this story told; they also don’t want to hear anyone object to it. And I think this is the “Can women have it all?” phenomenon again, where saying that a particular kind of happiness for women is genuinely unattainable is too easily represented as saying that you don’t want them to attain it.

Well, the news is good: they already had permission. Most of the Western, educated, liberal women who are devouring this #content have in fact had the ability to avoid or escape monogamy for their entire lives. This is why these pieces so often reference NORMS and SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS and STOCKHOLM SYNDROME over and over again, because they need to create the impression that women had no choice until this new liberatory philosophy came along. And, you know, that kind of social pressure can indeed be coercive and is certainly unfortunate. Well, look: of course women have the right to end their marriages when they want to. Of course they have the right to pursue multiple partners, serially or at once. Of course they have the right to put their physical pleasure and fulfillment first. Monogamy certainly isn’t for everyone - although, if I’m being honest with you, my observations suggest that polyamory is for even fewer people. I have no doubt at all that traditional gender roles have trapped a lot of women in unhappy lives, that this is an explicitly gendered phenomenon, that sexism and misogyny conspire to turn conventional monogamy into a trap for a slice of women within it, and that some women would be happier outside of their current marriages. You had and have permission to leave your husband.

But, again, is/ought. The question is not whether women have permission to forego longstanding marriages and relationships to pursue a regular churn of sexual and romantic partners, in an effort to achieve real satisfaction and happiness. The answer to that was already yes. The more relevant question is, will the women who attempt this actually achieve satisfaction and happiness? And I’m profoundly skeptical. Because life doesn’t work that way. We live mundane lives in a boring existence on a finite planet. We negotiate little bits of happiness where we can find them. We never, ever get everything that we want, and we are remarkably consistent in no longer wanting what we want once we get it. For those of us who are lucky enough not to face poverty or disability or abuse or addiction, a vague-but-tolerable disappointment is something like the most common state of human life. And I think Miranda July and all of these ruling class thinkpiece peddlers are selling a lot of impressionable women on a fantasy, no different from the kid hawking crypto to gullible people eager to believe that they can get rich quick. What comes next, sooner or later, is the rug pull.

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The trouble, as I see it, includes

1. Human beings arranged themselves into families and similar mutual-support units because we have periods of infirmity at both the beginning and the end of our lives, and while modern societies make at least some affordances for people who need that support, when it comes only from society that support is almost always insufficient and rather sad. You don’t want to be living in a state-sponsored assisted living facility with no familial support. And while women who have kids from long-term marriages that they leave may enjoy the help of those children, women who forego marriage for the Miranda July I’ll-just-fuck-different-people-for-the-rest-of-my-life plan will be out of luck. I had major surgery a few years ago and would have been hopeless without my wife; she’s 8 months pregnant now and I have to assist her constantly. Human beings need each other and short-term connections based on convenience and immediate pleasure don’t produce support of that kind.

2. We get old. After 45 years old comes 65 years old. That doesn’t have to be insulting; it doesn’t even have to be negative. But it should come with at least some basic understanding that a generic condition of human existence is that over time we get less and less attractive. Correspondingly, we have fewer and fewer available partners who we want to have sex with and who want to have sex with us. Yes, there are some very lucky among us who are sufficiently attractive that this event horizon of fuckability is pushed further back, but eventually we all get there. Sex between seniors can be fun and enjoyable and mutually pleasurable and that’s great; still, so much of this stuff is predicated on an utterly fanciful projection of our own desirability. When you read these endless essays, you’re not hearing women say “It’s true that the guys I’ll be able to bag in twenty years are going to have aging spots and balls that hang down to their knees, but girl, I’ll be liberated!” All of this is part of a far broader denial of aging and death in our culture; it’s incredible, the degree to which generally functional and successful people have completely cut off the inevitability of their advancing age from their conscious minds.

3. There are all manner of lifestyles that are built around the pursuit of endless novelty, such as those centered on drug use, sadomasochism, extreme sports, endless travel…. And what happens, very very very often, is that the pursuit of new experiences becomes in and of itself the boring slog that all of the rest of us experience too. Says July, “Novelty helps women stay very alive which is part of our very important purpose here on Earth. Doesn't mean you have to slut it up constantly, but the idea of one person forever was...probably not something women came up with.” I find it kind of remarkable to say this without letting the other shoe drop: notoriously, after enough time pursuing it, novelty itself ceases to be novel. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked with people who have just spent like three or five years straight traveling, “walking the earth,” etc. For self-defensive purposes, they’ll usually assert how it was life-changing etc etc, and it probably was. But if you dig deeper, they will very often admit that they came to find it all enervating, a grind, that over time the novelty had a directly counterproductive impact to the point that it ended up dulling sensations rather than burnishing them. Meta-experience, as well as experience, is entirely capable of becoming just another grind.

4. There’s also what I call the Chuck problem, that is, the fact that to make the fantasy reality, the theoretical pool of imaginary dudes must eventually give way to the actual dudes that you’ll actually meet, and they will remind you of all of the problems you had with dudes in the first place. To quote myself: you go looking for endless flings, the next thing you know, you’re on a date with a guy named Chuck who’s too old for you and who you don’t find very attractive but he was the only guy you found on Bumble for drinks that night and you meet and go “oof” and he smells like fish but you really wanted to do this empowering Miranda July thing so you end up having sex with him anyway and when you were texting on Bumble it was really hot and you talked about wanting to be tied up, but now it’s just really awkward and the pantyhose tied around your ankles is giving you a rash and Chuck isn’t really doing it for you, at all, but you talked about getting breakfast the next morning and then maybe doing it again in his car or something, but now it’s finally over and you’ve got a headache and he wants you to spend the night in this creepy Red Roof Inn and you say you’ve got an early morning and have to go so he calls you an ugly old slut and, well…. And while the particular problems of the male dating pool won’t be found in the same proportions in the female dating pool, there will still be problems because people, unlike fantasies, are flawed.

5. The romantic ideal is good. It’s deeply imperfect but worth fighting for. There’s a reason people come back to it, again and again, despite all the frustration. I suspect a lot of people who consider lifelong serial partnering are doing so while quietly wanting the romantic ideal, one person for life, but the pain of looking for it has driven them into rejecting it as a form of self-defense, rationalizing unhappiness.

You’ll notice that none of my objections are “it’s mean to dudes.” This is what the movement I’m talking about always wants to be the objection, because it’s so easily dismissed - “Oh, the shitty husband has the sads? [drinks from Male Tears mug].” Modern feminism, I’m sorry to say, is built to do nothing so enthusiastically as to laugh off appeals that are based on protecting the feelings of men. And, indeed, I don’t expect any women to form an opinion on all of this based on the abstract feelings of men. I do think that if you have a husband, you necessarily have a moral duty to his feelings, though of course that duty does not extend so far as to prevent you from leaving him. But, in general, no, it’s got nothing to do with being nice to dudes. Everything I’m talking about here is fundamentally about self-interest. And so the trick is, can you force yourself to be absolutely unsparingly realistic about what’s actually best for you?

Says July,

The one person I know who regrets blowing up her long marriage did it very abruptly, with no conversation before, no couples therapy, no period of questioning. She was trying to be a good person: she had fallen in love with someone new and did not want to cheat. The new love did not ultimately work out and the whole thing seemed like madness in retrospect. But when I ask her if she wishes she was still with her long-time partner she says, Not usually.

I mean, this is a way you can go about doing this - just asserting that regret isn’t going to happen, or happen very often. But of course regret is going to happen. Regret is the water in which humans swim, even content ones. I’m not trying to be overly dramatic or to sound like I’m speaking in Morrissey lyrics here. What I’m saying is that as this thing spreads further and further and sees more and more women talk themselves into a fantasy, regret will spread too. Some women are going to do this and, in the long run, find themselves devastated. Some won’t! There will be women who try this and end up more or less content. But it’s a real roll of the dice, and again, for complex reasons our media insists on only discussing the idealized fantasy version. I just think that’s dangerous.

Part of what’s at issue here is a basic question: what really constitutes an overly romantic belief about our lives? The anti-monogamists constantly insist that monogamy is just too romantic to build a life on, that it’s contrary to human nature. But what could possibly be more romantic, in the most childish sense, than the belief that you’ll stay attractive and romantically desirable for your entire life? That you’ll simply cycle endlessly between willing partners who you find attractive and who feel the same about you and who you’ll happily let go of as soon as you’re bored, and you’ll keep doing that in a state of bliss until you die? You’d call that, what, realistic? And all stamped with the seal of approval because it’s, like, feminist or whatever. Not only do I think this is all a profoundly childish and unrealistic thing to think about the world - and, I’m sorry, about your own desirability - it also calls to mind one of the greatest Onion headlines.

So, here’s the question I’d ask Miranda July and her many middle-aged women acolytes: do you honestly think that the last decades of your life are going to consist of moving on from fucking one hunky pool boy to the other, without trouble, disappointment, or a slowly and inevitably draining sense of satisfaction with it all? Do you think that, even if you can always reliably find a new partner who you’re attracted to and who is attracted to you, life will prove to be reliably satisfying, given that ultimately it’s just another attempt to ring permanent pleasure out of transitory experience? I’m biased, yes, I’m a romantic, I believe in love, one person. Acknowledging that bias, I just have to tell you - this all looks like the definition of being trapped in samsara to me, trading one form of attachment for an equal and opposite form of attachment. I know what you want it to be true, that you can simply choose to live a life of permanent novelty and support without commitment. I’m asking what you actually believe will be true, in the most jaundiced, hard-hearted, and self-critical way possible. We make big decisions from the cradle to the grave, but I’ve learned this about middle age: the bad ones matter more when we’re all always running out of time.

Solis says of All Fours, “The existential quandary raised in the book — Can the world accommodate the idea of an ever-changing self?”

The answer, of course, is no. How fucking old are you people?