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As Lily Allen’s scathing account of marital infidelity resonates so broadly, it’s clear women are detaching from outdated ideals that their value can only ever truly be found within men.
Maybe it’s because I’m a single woman in her late twenties – but something feels different lately. A change in energy, if you will.
That shift has crystallised in two cultural moments that landed almost simultaneously: Lily Allen’s new album West End Girl and Chanté Joseph’s viral Vogue essay, ‘Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?’. Together, they capture a mood that feels impossible to ignore – a collective exhale from women who have had enough.
‘There are certain women whose emotional turbulence feels like a public service,’ wrote Hushmag. ‘And Lily is one of them.’
Allen described the record as ‘a mixture of fact and fiction… a reminder of how stoic yet frail we humans can be.’ Poorna Bell observed that the album captures both ‘the heartbreak that comes when a man wrongs us’ and ‘the beautiful magma of fury that emerges when a woman realises what has been done to her, and what she has allowed to happen.’
It’s a record that’s been met with widespread acclaim – NME called it ‘vicious, vulnerable and victorious,’ while The Guardian noted how it ‘chronicles marital dissatisfaction, infidelity, and emotional disconnection.’ Yet what’s most striking isn’t just its critical success but how viscerally it’s landed with women.
On social media, women are weeping, laughing, raging, and relating – often all in the same post – to lyrics that articulate pain many of us haven’t personally lived, yet instinctively recognise. There’s something deeply cultural about that resonance. In 2025, a melodic takedown of a husband’s emotional negligence has become a viral feminist touchstone.
And perhaps it’s no coincidence that this collective swoon over Allen’s emotional exorcism arrived in the same week Vogue asked: ‘Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?’ Joseph’s piece – part sociological dispatch, part dating confession – struck a nerve. My own TikTok feed became a confessional of women gleefully admitting their exhaustion with modern heterosexuality.
We’re collectively disengaging from the story we were raised on: that fulfilment lies in romantic partnership with a man.
Joseph names links this cultural fatigue to heterofatalism – the creeping sense that straight relationships, as they currently exist, are doomed to disappoint.
As Jean Garnett put it in her New York Times Magazine essay, the straight man has become ‘embarrassing,’ not because women despise men en masse, but because the social script itself has failed. When Garnett asks a friend when men became so anxious about desire, another replies: ‘It was when they were put on notice that they can’t just get drunk and grope us.’ Sexuality scholar Ada Seresin coined heteropessimism – later refined as heterofatalism – to describe the self-aware disillusionment of straight women who remain attracted to men despite knowing better.
