Could 'Magic Mike XXL' Cure Our Heterofatalism?

As Sabrina Carpenter bemoans manchildren, a 10-year-old popcorn flick shows us a better way.

(Warner Bros.)

Sabrina Carpenter’s newest single, “Manchild,” isn’t just a catchy song—it’s a political moment. In it, she bemoans her attraction to guys who are “stupid,” “useless,” and “incompetent.” (The words “fuck my li-iiiiiiife” never sounded as beautiful as they do in her signature sweet tone.) Every bit of the song is gold, really, Carpenter reaching an apex of humor, saltiness, and irritation with the men she chooses. Remember, this is a woman who had a song called “Dumb & Poetic” on her last album and sang “I beg you don’t embarrass me, motherfucker” on her hit “Please Please Please.”

My favorite verse of “Manchild” goes like this:

Why so sexy if so dumb?
And how survive the Earth so long?
If I'm not there, it won't get done
I choose to blame your mom

For this effort, sex writer

Tracy Clark-Flory

has astutely declared Carpenter a “heterofatalist princess.”

Heteropessimism has been building for the last five years or so. The term, coined by Asa Seresin in a 2019 article in The New Inquiry, means exactly what it sounds like—profound disillusionment with straight relationships. But on social media lately, it has been most often applied specifically in one direction, to women’s feelings about men. The feeling seems to have intensified particularly in the wake of the pandemic, during which the gender disparity in housework and childcare became more glaring for many couples; the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and, finally, the re-election of Donald Trump, thanks largely to male voters of all ages (though the blame can certainly be spread around). Carpenter and her fellow pop phenomenon Chappell Roan have picked up on this vibe in their work, with Roan countering Carpenter’s heteropessimism by offering persuasive arguments for women choosing women (who “get the job done”) instead.

Clark-Flory says we’ve now gone one step further, from heteropessimism to heterofatalism. She even recently launched a podcast about this phenomenon with feminist writer Amanda Montei called Dire Straights. (Let’s all take a moment to appreciate that pun.)

This shift might actually be a good sign, a tiny hint that patriarchy’s grip is ever-so-slightly slipping, that women are realizing that they’re better off alone than beholden to terrible men. But it’s not great for relationships, or the survival of the species, so we probably need to do better. Ten years ago this week, the culture offered up what could now be seen as the perfect antidote that we didn’t, at the time, know we needed so badly: Magic Mike XXL.

This film remains singularly focused on one thing throughout its one hour and 55 minutes: pleasing straight women. Not gay men, though there are plenty of moments for them to enjoy. Women’s desire, specifically, is the glue that holds it together. It is striking to watch as a heterosexual woman. It feels embarrassing and strange, like a missive from another (sexy) planet. At first, you might struggle to place what’s so odd. Yes, it’s corny. Yes, it’s only interested in being a crowd-pleaser, a road-trip movie about male strippers trying to get to a big stripping convention (I have so many questions about this alone) for one final performance together.

But there’s something else: It is so rare to see female desire placed squarely and unapologetically at the center of any piece of media, particularly one that is technically about men.

We have rarely, or possibly never, seen its like before. It’s like the inverse of the Bechdel Test: It is men constantly talking to each other about women, and specifically about pleasing women. The only times they talk about anything else, it’s their small-business plans—their drive, their dreams, the things that make them the opposite of Sabrina’s manchildren.

We got this strange product via some singular alchemy. The Magic Mike franchise began with the more serious and gritty original film in 2012. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, it’s a tale of backstage drugs and greed, based loosely on star Channing Tatum’s own experiences as a stripper in Tampa, Florida, before he rose to fame. It has his title character trying to get out of the business to start his own furniture-making enterprise, and desperately striving to avoid the grimy underworld along the way.

Three years later, Mike was back on our screens with a new understanding of what had made him a surprise box office hit: the abs, the pecs, and the dancing, not the hardscrabble storyline. Magic Mike’s opening weekend audience was 73 percent female and 43 percent over 35. Why not make a study of what these women wanted? Magic Mike XXL—directed by Soderbergh’s longtime assistant director Gregory Jacobs, and shot and edited by Soderbergh under pseudonyms—is not subtle on this front. It is a direct and clear rejoinder to Freud. Two of the strippers, played by Donald Glover and Matt Bomer, talk at one point about why they’re so good at the job—because, they say, they ask women what they want. The implication being that, like Freud, other men don’t, and, in fact, that women are suffering en masse from this. “We’re healers,” Glover says earnestly.

Instead of giving us stripper angst, Magic Mike XXL leans into the guys’ love of their job, sending them on a picaresque journey through female desire as they make their way from Tampa to this stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The plot, as much as there is one, is ignited by the franchise’s most memorable dance sequence from Tatum: As Mike is working late one night in the woodshop he once dreamed of building, Ginuwine’s erotic hip-hop masterpiece “Pony” comes on, and suddenly Mike is moved to dance again. Yes, it’s stripper camp—you can do a lot of suggestive stuff with the equipment in a woodshop—but Tatum is a beautiful and brilliant dancer whose skill transcends the silliness. The movie wants us to know that strippers are artists, the kind whose muse cannot be easily extinguished. Mike is a stripper who does it for the joy, not (just) the money. And it’s no coincidence that this allows us to enjoy his work all the more.

Just watch as he tries to resist the urge to dance, then finally gives in, ending his dance in a haze of pleasure.

Because of this film’s unique combination of elements—the sexy guys, the shedding of clothes, the insistence that stripping can be an art, and the interest in pleasing women whose desires have gone ignored or even violated—the film slips past any criticism that it objectifies men in the same ways that women have been objectified to their detriment. These men are very much consenting. And they want your consent, too, girl.

The central group of characters is constructed like another pop cultural institution dedicated to female pleasure, a boy band, with five distinctive types. There’s the main guy, Mike (Tatum); the pretty-boy Reiki healer, Ken (Bomer); the hunky romantic, Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello); the hard-bitten Desert Storm vet with an artistic streak, Tarzan (Kevin Nash); and the aspiring frozen yogurt entrepreneur, Tito (Adam Rodriguez). In fact, in the film’s second most memorable scene, Richie pays tribute to the boy band by spontaneously performing a routine to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” at a gas station convenience store, a moment of revelation for him as he sheds stripper clichés like firefighters to honor his own kind of artistry.

In another standout sequence, the guys stop by a mansion in Savannah owned by the mother of a young woman one of the guys recently flirted with. Mom Nancy (Andie MacDowell) and her fellow middle-aged friends are deep into the wine when the guys arrive, and soon the women are revealing the massive shortcomings in their long-term hetero sex lives. Nancy has only ever slept with one man, her ex-husband, whom she suspects of being gay. Another woman’s husband insists on keeping the lights off when they have sex. “If he’s not gonna worship you,” Ken tells her, “there’s a lot of guys who will.” She mentions that back when she and her husband were first falling in love in college, they would listen to the Bryan Adams ballad “Heaven.” Ken proceeds to perform an a cappella version of “Heaven” to her while caressing her. We understand that he’s not so much seducing her as reigniting her own understanding of her desirability. If this were a service one could order via Uber Eats, it would do killer business.

From there, the movie just keeps wooing its audience shamelessly: When Nancy says she wishes she’d known these guys back in her day, Richie returns, with a meaningful stare, “I’d say it’s still your day.” He tells the guys he’s been looking for the woman who fits him perfectly, his “glass slipper,” without a hint of apology for making himself the Cinderella in this scenario. And yes, Nancy, twenty years his senior, turns out to be it. Even in smaller moments, Magic Mike XXL never lets up. When Mike is bantering with his surly, artsy love interest Zoe (Amber Heard), he mentions that his god is female. I appreciate the sentiment, but at this point in the film, the statement is redundant. Magic Mike XXL has been worshipping the female this whole time.

Reviews at the time ranged from baffled to baffled-but-on-board. I have a soft spot for the powerful male critics who understood the assignment. Matt Zoller Seitz, writing on RogerEbert.com, got it: “I wish there were a word for ‘experimental fluff,’ because that’s what Magic Mike XXL is. It’s a new kind of critic-proof movie. You could rightly describe it as ‘two hours of Channing Tatum and other hunky guys bonding, flirting with women, and doing bump-and-grind dance routines’ and not be wrong, and yet it’s made with such aesthetic playfulness that I expect it to generate graduate theses with titles like, ‘Breakaway Pantomimes: Magic Mike and Commodified Desire.’”

Also on board was critics’ critic A.O. Scott, who wrote in The New York Times: “The audience is transported to a realm of sexual intrigue that feels as safe and wholesome as a child’s birthday party,” he wrote. He meant this as a compliment, and I’d like to underscore it here: These fantasy men are offering a safe space for women, where women can express desire without inviting violation. It reminds me of flirting with gay men, a unique experience in which a woman can feel safe vamping it up, admiring men’s beauty, and being appreciated in return.

Indeed, from the vantage point of 2025, this film looks downright political. These guys would blow Sabrina Carpenter’s mind with their competence. They get the job done like Chappell Roan. If only straight men were watching and taking notes, we might not be in this heterofatalist era. Instead, “your body, my choice” has become a catchphrase among young men, and conservative female influencers are cheering for “less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” Mike and his friends wouldn’t even recognize our current world.

A few years ago, I got to experience the Magic Mike ethos in person, at the live show in Vegas that serves as a franchise extension. Like the movies, and particularly XXL, it’s a little embarrassing at first, then, if you simply surrender to the camp, turns into an absolute blast of an evening invested solely in worshipping female pleasure. There’s a fascinating bait-and-switch at the opening in which (spoiler alert!) it acts like the trashiest strip-club act emceed by a gross guy and full of ejaculating fireman types—I didn’t know it was a joke at first, so I felt genuinely alarmed at what was in store.

Then it switched over to a female emcee who made it clear that this show was different, not meant to dominate us with its sexuality but to seduce and charm us to whatever extent we felt comfortable. She emphasized to the almost entirely female audience that they were in charge, asking, “Do you feel powerful tonight?” What followed was a hilariously (and comfortingly) accurate set list of common female fantasies: Yes, there was some basic semi-nude flexing, but we also got a number in which the guys were dressed up in suits and touting their earning power, one where they played a rock band (and brought an enthusiastic volunteer from the audience onstage to sit on the drummer’s lap), a bit where a guy just sings a ballad, and a few quite beautiful and sexy acrobatic numbers. It was conceived and directed by Tatum, who knows what he’s doing by now.

Like XXL, the show did not let up in its seduction of the audience, its attention to our needs. The production provided fake money to throw at dancers, which also served as a kind of consent system: to flash a few of these Magic Mike bucks is to indicate your interest in a dancer coming over to pay you some special attention. I did not, so I did not get this treatment, much to my relief. I did happen to sit at the end of a row near where the dancers were often entering and exiting, which allowed a special vantage point. They never let the magic drop, but it was a liminal space of casualness. They would often run their hands over my shoulders as the entered or exited, which I didn’t mind a bit. I began to let my boundaries go, just a smidge, and had more fun for it.

One time, a guy was awaiting his entrance cue and, I assume as part of the schtick, made a little flirty small talk with me. He asked what my friends and I were in town for. At this point, my two female friends, who are a couple (and whose idea it was to come to this, I swear to you), were openly holding hands. They had an extra force field beyond not flashing Monopoly money. I nodded toward my friends and told him we were there on a climbing trip—Vegas has some of the greatest climbing in the world. “Do any of you climb?” I asked him. “It appears you’d be great at it.” I had thought of this during part of the show when they were basically doing pull-ups from the ceiling.

“Nah, we can’t,” he said. I could see that we’d switched into “friend” mode—no Monopoly money here—and I liked it. “It would fuck up our bodies too much.” Then he rushed to hit his cue.

What an odd combination of sexy, vulnerable, truthful, and sympathetic, I thought. Of course they can’t. They’d get too many bruises and scrapes. For once, I, the woman, could afford blemishes on my body in the name of sport and fun, and it was the man before me who couldn’t. I suddenly understood what it was like to live in Magic Mike XXL.

I am certain I have not experienced any such thing since.

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