why the "sad girl" can't be a lesbian
Let me tell you about the new literary novel I’m reading.
It follows a young woman who is disillusioned with her life. Despite being conventionally attractive, financially stable, and capable of living an enviable life in a major city, she feels that there is something missing that keeps her existence from being meaningful. She is unhappy with her job, which keeps her from pursuing a deeper passion. She views her friends with a mixture of resentment and jealousy. She attempts to escape her loneliness by pursuing unsatisfying and often deeply harmful relationships with men. She is the classic literary sad girl, as seen in novels like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Ottessa Mosfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.
I have read a number of sad girl books recently, as I am writing a novel about a sad girl of my own. My protagonist is a young woman living in New York City, working an uninteresting job and attending social gatherings made up of people she doesn’t especially like, secretly hoping for something more from her life.
She is also a lesbian.
This, it turns out, is practically unheard of in the world of sad girl literature. The more of these novels I read, the more it seems that a key part of being a sad girl is pursuing unfulfilling relationships with men.
Don’t get me wrong, these protagonists aren’t all part of some straight-people-only club. The sad girl can be bisexual. Perhaps the best-known sad girl author of all, Sally Rooney, has included bisexual protagonists in both Conversations with Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You? Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times spends a significant portion of the novel exploring protagonist Ava’s relationship with another woman, Edith. The protagonist of Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl develops an obsession with another woman that eventually turns romantic. But all of these protagonists, despite their clear attraction to women, also engage in significant, novel-relevant relationships with men. The part of lesbianism that is seemingly incompatible with being a sad girl isn’t attraction to women—it’s a lack of attraction to men.
Why is that?
More than anything else, the sad girl must be relatable. That is why readers are able to sympathize with her, despite the fact that she is often considered “unlikable.” She is allowed to struggle, but only with issues that the vast majority of women have experienced. Because the sad girl isn’t an individual, or at least not just that. She’s a symbol for the modern woman as a whole.
I mentioned before that the sad girl often has a stable, enviable, aesthetic life. Why, then, is she sad? Because she is a woman. But why is being a woman explanation enough for her sadness?
In Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, the recently published sequel to The Idiot, protagonist Selin concludes that women are more affected by heartbreak than men, expressing frustration that many men in literature break women’s hearts by prioritizing their own needs and desires, while the only literary woman she'd read about who broke a man’s heart had done so not for herself but for her family. Later in the novel, after having questioned whether things would be easier if she could date girls, she says, “Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive” (117).
Here, Selin has observed what makes sad girls sad: the pain and difficulty of love, and the selfishness of the men they pursue. In cases of failed love, women are always portrayed as the ones who cared too much, never too little. They are the victims of men, and that makes them sad, and that makes them sympathetic.
When fictional women are less involved with men, their sadness often lessens as well. Ava, the protagonist of Exciting Times, is shown as deeply insecure in her relationship with a man, and becomes much more confident and even happy when she gets involved with another woman. In the TV show Fleabag, an example of a sad girl in another medium, the titular protagonist becomes much more mentally stable once she stops engaging in casual sex with men. Selin concludes that she can’t be a lesbian because it would be too fun, too easy, implying that women can’t hurt other women the way men can. That women are incapable of inspiring the overwhelming sadness that characterizes so many literary protagonists.
In an interview discussing Either/Or, Elif Batuman mentioned her own relationship with a lesbian partner, the idea of compulsory heterosexuality, and how being anything other than a straight woman felt out of the question when she was in her twenties.
Compulsory heterosexuality is a topic I frequently wish more fiction would address, as many protagonists seem to be unknowingly experiencing it. While every sad girl involves herself with men, this rarely brings anything positive into their lives. Why, then, do they keep doing it? To feel better about themselves? To relate to other women? To give themselves an excuse for feeling sad? After reading pages and pages of a woman's angst and insecurity about dating men, something she didn't even seem to enjoy, I found myself wondering, why doesn't she just stop?
But of course, she can’t. If the sad girl was a lesbian, she couldn’t experience what many authors seem to view as the most widespread, most “relatable” form of female suffering.