By Sarah Murnane
In October 2025, Vouge published an article, “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing?”. It gained a fair amount of traction and critique online with multiple responses appearing in The Guardian, Vice and throughout the internet.
In the article, Chante Joseph outlines that in current popular media having a boyfriend is associated with a bland, beige and boring personality. She paints men as a commodity in women’s lives; people only share their relationships to brag or gain monetary value from their online presence. The content produced by women on the internet pre-boyfriend as opposed to post-boyfriend marks a stark difference in tone, with the latter being less engaging. The article ends with Joseph taking the hard line that until men “do better” women should refrain from entering into relationships.
Is this not the same tired old second wave feminist argument we have been hearing for decades repackaged? I can’t help but wonder if Germaine Greer was sat in the corner with a gun to the writers head as she wrote. The best way to undercut this argument is a simple one: men post their girlfriends all the time on the internet, and no one is telling them it’s bad. It is old, overdone and not getting to the important part of the problem.
I do not believe this is a jealousy debate, it is more a judgement debate. It feels like occasionally women coming from a place of feminism feel the need to beat the feminism stick at other women. Telling them what they should or should not be doing, and imbuing this sense of guilt into our behaviour.
The saddest, and arguably most interesting, part of the article is a quote from an online content creator Sophie Milner who stated “Being single gives you this ultimate freedom to say and do what you want”. Has no one thought to ask the question why do you feel like you cannot do what you want? Instead of focusing on the role of men in a women’s life, I wish that the online feminists would turn inwards and consider why some women still feel that they are unable to construct their life’s through their own choices.
I think it is ultimately a sexist proposition that a woman only holds value when she is celibate or employs rampant, unemotional, promiscuity without consequence. The subtext of having an embarrassing boyfriend is that a woman has failed in her choice of partner. The statement feels like the blame is on the men, but in reality yet another problem is being put upon women to choose ‘correctly’ and further than that the choice is within itself a poor one.
My boyfriend agrees too.