The Times reported that Magdalene Taylor’s opinion piece, “Being Straight Is Great, Actually,” hit the internet on May 31st, just as Pride Month began, and the timing was everything. Her essay was a direct address to a very specific kind of heterosexual woman, one gripped by a loathing that has, in Taylor’s words, “rotted her heart.” This woman is smart, enraged by the recession of gender equality, appalled by the rise of Andrew Tate, and alarmed by the proliferation of the trad wife. She may have deleted the dating apps and sworn off men, yet she still wants them, or at least the idea of them. It is a profound and modern contradiction.
The Sickness Called Heteropessimism
This persistent cultural malaise, what Taylor calls a “bad mood,” has a name: heteropessimism. The term was first coined and explored by writer and scholar Asa Seresin in The New Inquiry back in 2019. Seresin used the framework of Afropessimism—the idea that antiblackness is a transhistorical structuring force of the world—to understand a new internet-era ennui. He described it as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” The coinage took off. It launched a million confessionals, but with a frustrating effect: it narrowed the questions about desire, both political and romantic, instead of opening them up. Instead of a conversation, it became a cage.
After the initial blowback, The Times softened the title to “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men.” This permissiveness, the simple permission to desire, is a central theme in the new film “Wicker.” Directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, the movie is a romp that feels both ancient and contemporary. Its essence is Chaucerian, with a taut, jaunty pacing and a twinkling score by Anna Meredith. It drops us into a medieval village where men are defined by their work—the Tailor (Nabhaan Rizwan), the Bottle Washer (Gustav Lindh)—and women are defined by their husband’s name: the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), the Bottle Washer’s Wife (Marli Siu). The film delights in the slippage between satire and historical accuracy, presenting a wheat-colored, barely civilized civilization where lewdness is the law and ritual is life.
The Fisherwoman Scoffs at a Wedding Feast
The men in this world are boors; the women are sour. At marriage, a maiden bends her head to joyfully receive a collar, a collar being this universe’s version of a ring. The union is solemnly pronounced “man and his wife.” At one such wedding feast, for the Bottle Washer and his new wife, the whole town spills out to celebrate. Everyone, that is, but the Fisherwoman, played by Olivia Colman. She looks on scoffingly, but not without interest. She is an outcast, living on the outskirts by the water, where she expertly guts fish, shelters in a modest hut, and pisses in a bucket by her bed. The townswomen ridicule her for the fish stench, a smell that is also the smell of being unchosen.
The film, based on a short story by Ursula Wills titled “The Wicker Husband,” tees up a proto-feminist refusal. When her bullies sarcastically ask if she has yet to catch a lover, the Fisherwoman replies, “Love seems more a burden than a prize.” What do they know of love? This question is the film’s engine. Is she truly content to be alone, a kind of sister to Chaucer’s famously five-times-married Alison, the first sovereign woman of English literature? The film, a hybrid of comedy, horror, and romance, sustains itself on a single, brilliant pun: that of hard wood. The joke, its recombinations, never gets old. Soon enough, the familiar beat arrives. The Fisherwoman, weary of loneliness, appeals to the Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage), a fellow outcast, to make her a wicker husband.
This is where the film’s modern resonance becomes impossible to ignore. It’s a direct answer to the heteropessimistic woman’s dilemma. The Fisherwoman rejects the town’s sour, joyless view of love and marriage, but she also rejects a life of total solitude. Instead, she carves out her own desire. She doesn’t wait for a man to choose her; she commissions a partner, a husband of her own making. It is an act of radical self-sufficiency, a refusal to be defined by either the collar or the bucket. She is not rejecting men, but rather the system that reduces them to boors and women to sour, unchosen wives. She is choosing her own form of companionship, one she can control.
This is not a simple fantasy. The Fisherwoman’s wicker husband is an escape from this entire ecosystem.
The film’s title, “Wicker,” is a masterstroke.
