Zohran Mamdani wants to make sure that all of his constituents have affordable housing, universal child care and boyfriends who don’t make them cringe.
The mayor-elect of New York City made an appearance on Liz Plank’s “Boy Problems” podcast Tuesday and was asked about a recent Vogue article that asked whether straight women find it “embarrassing” to have a boyfriend nowadays.
“The women who were interviewed in the piece,” Plank informed Mamdani, “said that having a boyfriend felt almost like, Republican. That somehow he’s going to humiliate you. If you have a boyfriend, you shouldn’t be posting him on IG.”
Plank then asked Mamdani if he agrees with the sentiment that having a boyfriend is mortifying.
“No,” Mamdani said, before offering some sound advice. “But, if you’re worried if your boyfriend will embarrass you, you should probably get a new boyfriend.”
He later added: “Another thing that would be embarrassing is if your boyfriend doesn’t go out and vote.”
The Vogue piece Plank was referring to wonders whether straight women nowadays are subscribing to the idea of “heterofatalism,” a term coined by academic Asa Seresin in 2019 that describes the resigned belief that heterosexual relationships are emotionally unfulfilling. Seresin notes that this is “expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” An example of this “performative disaffiliation with heterosexuality” according to a piece in New York Times Magazine, is a straight woman complaining to her female friend that a relationship with a man didn’t work out and wishing she were gay so she could date the female friend in whom she’s confiding.
Earlier in her interview, Plank asked Mamdani for his take on the “male loneliness crisis” and noted that many women who reach out to her podcast say that the discourse surrounding the term makes them feel like it’s somehow “up to women to resolve this issue of young men feeling more isolated.”
Plank asked Mamdani if he would implement any policies to try to resolve it.
“I think, first of all, it is absolutely not women’s responsibility to resolve this crisis,” he said. “I think that is a crisis that’s born out of more systemic forces, and a lot of them have to do with just this greater sense of alienation in today’s world as things are becoming more and more expensive for people to afford, and the connections between people are fraying.”
He noted that a lot of New Yorkers who got involved in his campaign made friends simply through canvassing.
“And I think that that’s also something I’m really interested in as the next mayor of the city is — how do we create more third spaces? How do we create more places where people can hang out? People can just be themselves without this constant pressure of having to spend money through every single interaction they have?”
