Who’s the main character in your sex life?
“Main character energy” began trending in 2020 after a TikTok-er posted a viral video with the message: “You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character. Because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by.” The trend quickly became an excuse for flaunting inconsiderate or narcissistic behavior. Now, the 1.3 million-member online community r/ImTheMainCharacter is devoted to mocking “videos/photos of people acting like they are the center of the world.”
One of the most popular posts in the forum, for example, shows a social media influencer at a commercial gym ranting about some other customers who had accidentally walked in front of her camera. In the comments section, a viewer sums up the influencer’s attitude: “I was only there for 15 minutes in a shared space….how dare someone go about their business.” That’s the essence of the main character: to interpret the world as if her own goals and desires are the only ones that count.
The extremes of the men’s and women’s rights movements display a similar mindset. Both have given up seeing members of the opposite sex as moral agents with their own griefs, triumphs, and fears. Each extreme prefers to see itself as the only one who, when pricked, bleeds.
Since the November 2024 election, 4B, a South Korean feminist movement, has gained traction in the United States, at least on social media, if not in actual practice. Evoking the 1970’s lesbian separatist movement, 4B calls for women to renounce men, refusing romance, sex, and childbirth. At the same time, the “manosphere” subculture, which began proliferating in American internet forums in the 2010’s, has come into prominence in the 2020’s with the rise of internet personalities like Nick Fuentes and Pearl Davis. This movement generally presses men to “take the red pill,” teaching them how to psychologically manipulate women in order to get both sex and power.
Both movements leverage victim narratives to justify treating the opposite sex as less than human.
Men and Women Need Each Other
Identity-oriented alliances—based upon sex, race, class, or age—can help us feel like we belong, but, if they are our only alliances, they can isolate and harm us. As a 25-year-old zoomer, I need my 38-year-old millennial mentor. As a biracial child of educated elites, I need my “white trash” husband (and I’m darn proud of his hard-earned success). The benefits of these relationships are often quite subjective. I would be diminished were I to limit my society to biracial Zoomer kids of educated elites, but it’s hard to explain exactly how without waxing sentimental.
A society-wide rejection of heterosexual love, on the other hand, would have a very concrete impact: human extinction.
But if you are the main character, letting someone else into your life proves deeply threatening. Nick Fuentes provoked much mockery in 2022 when he claimed that all sex was gay. His sputterings, though inchoate, were telling. “Some people call me gay because I’ve never had a girlfriend,” Fuentes said. “If we’re really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual because honestly, dating women is gay,” Fuentes continued. ‘“What’s gayer than being ‘I like cuddles, I need kisses’?”
The “gayness” of sex, for Fuentes, has nothing to do with homosexuality. Instead, he uses “gay” as a synonym for “weak.” Having sex, he says, is always weak, because it demonstrates your need for another human being. (It’s especially weak, for someone like Fuentes, when that being is a woman.)
The neediness of healthy sexuality is indeed terrifying. It makes us vulnerable in all sorts of ways—physical, financial, emotional—and open to exploitation. In her viral Substack essay “The Age of Abandonment,” Freya India draws attention to how watching their parents’ marriages fall apart has taught Gen Z to hold themselves back from love. “When young women rage against marriage and motherhood so viscerally,” she writes, “what I’m really hearing is it’s not safe to marry.”
This fear, I believe, comes from viewing sex as a narcissistic battle for power. Like Hegel’s parable of the Master and Slave, in this battle, there’s always a winner and a loser. The winner becomes the Master, and the loser becomes his Slave. While the Master is free to self-actualize, the Slave becomes a mere thing: an object that exists only to satisfy the appetite of the Master.
The brand of feminism inspiring 4B calls the Master “Patriarchy.” The manosphere calls her “Feminism.” Both accuse the other sex of benefiting from their dehumanization. Both have their lists of grievances. Proponents of 4B cite childcare imbalances, the gender pay gap, and domestic abuse, while members of the manosphere cite high rates of suicide, discrimination in family law, and, similarly, domestic abuse. In claiming to be objectified, each ends up objectifying the other. In the worlds of 4B and the Manosphere, one sex is always victimized and always right—in other words, the main character—while the other sex is programmed by both society and nature to seek domination.
This way of seeing the world does reflect the reality of human beings’ base desire for power, but it doesn’t account for the complexity of human relationships—or human beings’ capacity for love. Like the Internet, it boils everything down to the blackest of blacks and the whitest of whites, losing the gray areas that give our lived experience its three dimensionality.
Men and women may fight fiercely, but, as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata wisely shows, our sexuality is the very thing that tends to bring us back together.
Sex, Submission, and Power
Philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s idea of an intersubjective world offers a much better characterization of sex, one in which power is still present, but in such a way that, instead of dividing, it unifies.
As a phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty’s starting point was not the individual’s quest for recognition, but the intersubjective world—a complex and mysterious ecosystem above and beyond every person. In a discussion, for example, Merleau-Ponty writes that thought is “a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator.” Rather, our ideas are “inter-woven into a single fabric.” A similar point was made by the writer C.S. Lewis: “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.” Like elements combined in a chemical reaction to create something new, consciousnesses combine in conversation to create a momentary new being. In contrast to the adversarial world of identity politics, Merleau-Ponty offers up a world of intersubjectivity—where it’s hard to conclusively measure where you leave off and I begin.
Sex is an especially good example of how this world works. When a man and woman begin to flirt, the shared nature of the operation makes it hard to tell who, if anyone, is masterminding the moment.
In a chapter of Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The Body in its Sexual Being,” Merleau-Ponty analyses what happens when flirting proceeds to undressing. I might reveal my body, he writes, either “nervously or with an intention to fascinate.” The dynamic of sexual desire makes it impossible to tell whether my nakedness is a weakness or a weapon.
On one hand, the body can be, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person.” When Marilyn Monroe suggestively bares her thigh and smiles seductively, she invites the male gaze, which seizes her existence and reduces her to the service of a man’s lust. She is sexually objectified. But on the other hand, the body can “deliver the other person up to [her], defenceless.” What Marilyn Monroe is really doing by exposing her thigh, from this perspective, is enslaving the man. In the moment that she bares her body, his existence becomes defined by her desirability. He lusts, not because he wants to lust, but because she inspires it. Marilyn Monroe is thus neither just femme fatale nor bimbo. She is both. Once she becomes the object of desire, she both enslaves the man by her fascination and is enslaved by his gaze. The very thing that empowers her also makes her vulnerable, and vice versa.
What I see in this picture is an acknowledgement of power, but also an acknowledgement of how healthy sexuality subverts such power. The dance of desire prevents any way to positively identify a Master or a Slave. Enthralled by desire, we are always both and neither. Rather than dividing us in a struggle for autonomy, sex can also seal us together in mutual need.
The Dance of Desire
4B and the manosphere exist for a reason. If the balance of sexual desire always lived up to the intersubjective ideal, we wouldn’t be fighting. The issue with these movements isn’t that they fail to identify problems in sex and marriage, but that, only seeing the problems that harm one sex, they dismiss sex as a rigged game. By contrast, if we are able to see sexual desire as a force that, by deconstructing rigid power dynamics, promotes equality and mutual satisfaction, then our policies become not about protecting one sex from the other, but preventing the weaponization of sex by bad actors on both sides.
Of course, it’s not possible to ensure that sex is never weaponized. The dance is ambiguous and complex, the leader and follower are constantly swapping roles, and both parties will frequently get their toes trodden on. Merleau-Ponty acknowledges this danger when he writes that we place significance in sex not primarily for its ability to give us pleasure but for its ability to show us the human condition “in its most general aspects of autonomy and dependence.” Autonomy and dependence attract us for mutually exclusive reasons. We can’t have both at once. As Merleau-Ponty ends the chapter: “No one is saved, and no one is totally lost.”
The choice is before us. Should we, like Fuentes, refuse coexistence? Or should we jump into the dance?
Either way, we will lose something that we prize. If we opt out, we lose the chance to discover the intimacy of mutual dependence. If we do choose to dance, what we lose is our position at the center of the world. We will no longer be the main character. I am now not only the subject, but the object of desire. And above us both, summoned by our wills, but remaining long after our wills cease to function, Eros, hitherto an ambiguous atmosphere of the world, manifests in our bodies.