Looking at popular discourse around heterosexual dating and relationships, you might be forgiven for thinking that relations between the sexes have never been worse. Online communities of incels and radical feminists alike write off the other gender as irredeemable, while dating apps seem to be breeding resentment and disgust more than romance. The concept of “heteropessimism” has fittingly gained currency as a description of this gender zeitgeist. Meanwhile — reflecting a similar pessimistic impulse on the theoretical level — far-left academics have increasingly advocated family abolition, arguing that the nuclear family is instrumental in reproducing capitalism and holding back emancipatory alternatives.

Evelina Johansson Wilén is an associate professor of gender studies at Örebro University in Sweden; she serves on the editorial board of the Marxist theoretical journal Röda Rummet and is the author of a forthcoming book on family abolition. Her writing has appeared in Jacobin, including articles on contemporary dating, incels, and feminist theory and strategy.

Jacobin’s Meagan Day recently spoke with Johansson Wilén to get help unpacking today’s vexed gender politics. They discussed the limits of a family abolition framework, the difference between status politics and class politics, why women’s struggles for equality require efforts at redistribution, the hardening “wall of empathy” between the sexes, and what she makes of the new frontiers of online gender pessimism.