Is it sexist for men to get The Ick?

Liam still winces remembering the moment. He was at his local pub with the woman he’d been seeing. Though they had only been dating for a few months, things were moving fast, accelerated by lockdown. They had gone on holiday together and met each other’s friends. Then, that afternoon, she pulled out her phone to show him her Instagram and her recent pivot to video in which she addressed her followers about her 30-day fitness challenge. 

“You could have heard a pin drop,” says Liam, now 34. As much as he would have liked to, he was unable to conceal his honest response. “She was a lovely girl, a good laugh – but I was like, this is a turn-off,” he says. “I’m not really of the generation who speak into the camera. It just made me cringe.” His date read as much on his face, Liam says. “She was absolutely mortified, my reaction was so easily interpreted as horror.”

His date tried to play down her aspirations towards Insta-fame, but it was too late. Within a few weeks, Liam had called it off: he had got his first-ever ick.

You may have felt it yourself: that sudden, seemingly superficial turn-off that often proves terminal for a nascent flirtation or even a relationship. Though only popularised last year by Love Island, the term “the ick” (as in “I got the…” or “it gave me an…”) has become an accepted shorthand for an unexpected end to attraction.

For Ben, it was finding out that a girl he’d been dating kept a can of Coke by her bedside and drank from it every few hours. Tim called it off with one woman after she referred to her father as “daddy” in conversation – and with another when, on his first time at her house, she produced her pet hamster. “As hamsters go, it was very cute,” he says. “But I knew that was it.” For Xavier, it was learning over dinner that his date did not know how to use chopsticks. The restaurant was just nice enough to render the request embarrassing, he recalls, “I never felt the same after that.”

The ick can be shallow or deep; it can come on abruptly, or be a slow burn. In the recent season two of BBC series Industry, it strikes Harper not even mid-hookup but “somewhere between the cab and the front door”. Either way, it is thought to be nigh-on impossible to recover from. According to a recent survey by dating app Badoo, 82 per cent of users said they had gotten the ick and 78 per cent had ended a relationship because of it. But though we might talk about the ick as something that’s consistent and widely shared, the concept is poorly defined – and highly individual. Jordan Dixon, a clinical psychotherapist, says it is a reflection of our own “erotic blueprint”. “We all have a wonderful array of different things that turn us on – the same applies to what turns us off, and our icks.” That said, she adds: “Disgust doesn’t usually come out of nowhere.”

For men and women alike, the ick can be a trustworthy signal of a lack of connection or even incompatibility. Today Liam understands his visceral reaction as indicative of a deeper disconnect that would have inevitably become apparent in time. “Looking back, I just wasn’t quite connecting with her in a partner sense,” he says. “As we spent more time together that growth wasn’t happening, and then I didn’t really want it to. With that, came the ick. It was just a sharp moment in a bunch of other softer moments of me thinking: ‘This isn’t quite right’.” At the time, Liam admits, he was so unsettled by the sharp reversal in his feeling, he turned to Google to try to make sense of it. “It was so odd to me: I’d fallen out of fancying someone.” 

Liam's confusion perhaps highlights the underlying disparities present in the discourse surrounding the ick. Men and women both feel turn-ons and turn-offs, but they are not equally free to express them (TikTok videos about the ick, which are shared widely, are overwhelmingly made by women). “When women get the ick, it’s normal, but when men get the ick, it’s sexism,” says Ebba, 30. “I don’t make the rules.” She’s half-joking, but it masks a relevant point. Among straight women, the ick is readily understood and unquestioned. For straight men, it can be thornier to unpack. 

Michael, 32, describes having his desire instantly dissipate after his date talked all the way through the film they were watching (Palm Springs, with Andy Samberg: “a solid picture”, he says). Though they had not yet slept together, Michael had felt a strong connection on their earlier dates, and says they had planned this night at his house “knowing what it would likely lead to”. But at the woman’s “loud, incessant” commentary on the film, Michael says: “I shut down. She stayed over, but we didn’t so much as kiss in the night.” When she pressed him the next day about what had gone wrong, “I told her she was lovely but I wasn’t feeling it,” Michael says. “Really, it was the movie chatter that did it.” He was just grateful that they weren’t at the cinema, he adds.

More than some essential list of turn-offs in either men or women, the ick may be best understood as an indicator of clashing sensibilities or values. Paul, 36, remembers being instantly turned off by a woman who otherwise “ticked all the boxes” after she exploded at bar staff over their bill. “It turned out she’d misunderstood the parameters of happy hour – but the unexpected rudeness took the wind out of my sails.” Ned, 29, likewise lost interest in a colleague before their second date had even got underway when she was dismissive to a homeless man on their way to the cinema. 

Even seemingly innocuous icks can reveal fundamental differences in attitude or approach, which could be challenging to overcome in a relationship. Singer and presenter Jack Remmington, 27, has been soliciting stories about icks from his Instagram followers for a year, and draws a parallel with dating app profiles. “The straight men posing with fish: as much as I want to say we should be able to look past that, I certainly can’t,” he says. (Remmington himself is gay.)

The source of our individual turn-ons and turn-offs is not always easy to pinpoint in a culture that is so prescriptive about them. A straight man who gets the ick over astrology, for instance – or pop music, or Instagram eyebrows: anything considered stereotypically feminine — may set feminist alarm bells ringing. Women, meanwhile, are generally extended the benefit of the doubt, though their icks may be just as shallow. Remmington can be sent as many as 2,000 icks in response to his weekly callout, mostly from straight women – and mostly daft. “One was ‘when he orders soup of the day’,” he laughs. But, among the weird and whimsical examples, Remmington has noticed a persistent strand of women crying “ick” over perceived shortcomings of masculinity. He gives the example of women being turned off by men ordering a cocktail, or driving a “girly” car. “It can definitely veer into shaming of feminine traits.”

From Sex and the City to Married at First Sight to most contemporary discussions of dating and parenting, straight women’s frank and fulsome discussion of turn-offs is accepted and even applauded. Of course, this is a reflection of historic and enduring power inequities: when mainstream understanding of heterosexuality is overwhelmingly informed by straight men, women are starting at a disadvantage. At the same time, it is hard to think of a forum where men can be as outspoken or vulnerable about their attraction – at least one that is not riddled with misogyny, such as those in the online “manosphere”.

It feels more callous for a straight man to reject a woman for superficial or arbitrary reasons, says Harry, 39, even if the ick itself is not gender-specific, “for the obvious reason that it plays into patriarchal double standards”. But the eye-rolling discussion of the ick among straight women often assumes that men don’t feel it too, he says. Harry recalls getting the ick with his partner when they were curled up together, watching a film, and she mockingly prodded an exposed bit of his stomach. “It suddenly made me realise that I’d completely normalised her constant criticism of my appearance,” he says. “If the gender roles had been reversed, the resulting ick would have been visible from outer space.”

The reason why the ick caught on is that it articulates the inarticulable about desire. We may genuinely not understand what caused the attraction to dry up, or the repulsion may not gel with our politics or what we say we want in a partner. To writer and theorist Asa Seresin, it may be part of a broader ambivalence, even breakdown, in heterosexual relationships. In 2019, Seresin wrote about “heteropessimism” and the trend of straight women performatively disavowing their attraction to men, later explored by authors such as Amia Srinivasan and Shon Faye.

Seresin sees the ick as a manifestation of the push-and-pull that underpins straight attraction. Even the term evokes primary school-age children “talking about boys being gross and having germs”, he points out. “There’s a kind of fundamental antagonism built into heterosexuality, from both directions. Quite weirdly, it’s how it works, as well as how it doesn’t work. This edge of desire as it tips into disgust is such a big trope.”

With increasing freedoms for women, fewer marriages and babies and the breakdown of the gender binary, centuries-old heterosexual norms are being renegotiated and challenged. Through this flux, Seresin suggests, the ick can function as self-protection, offering a way out when what we actually want eludes us. “It can feel like desire disappears in an instant, but I don’t think we’ve ever been so able to act on it,” he says. “That is part of the crisis, ‘the ick’ is often standing in for something else that maybe we don’t consciously know.”

But men and women alike can feel the ick, and opt to soldier on. “I’ve felt it, but it’s never stopped me trying with a girl, even if I’m basically repulsed – by her jelly sandals, or her telling me her Harry Potter house, or the Disney Princess merchandise in her room,” says Louis, 32. And similarly, desire can take us by surprise just as swiftly as disgust. “If you like someone enough, all the other things go out the window,” Remmington admits. “I once fancied someone with objectively so many bad traits – like bad fingernails. But I fancied him so much. Honestly? He could have had no fingernails.”

The technology-driven pace of modern dating means we may be more likely to rule out attraction preemptively than we are to allow it to build. By giving a limited view of an individual and the illusion of unlimited alternatives, dating apps may have made us over-prescriptive or unrealistic in the search for love. Now we can be turned off from afar, and for people we haven’t even met on the basis of a few photos and prompts. Spelling mistakes and poor grammar, for example, have been singled out in surveys of online daters as sufficient cause to left-swipe.

This has been exacerbated by a broader culture of dating-by-committee on social media, where people seek input from friends, strangers, or both on prospective partners and possible deal breakers. Like “Am I The Asshole?” and “Hot or Not”, dangling a tidy decisive ruling of something that’s hard to articulate, the ick is as much an online phenomenon as a social one. The recent “He’s a 10, but” TikTok trend this summer likewise saw (mostly straight, female) users share traits that would knock points off an otherwise “perfect” partner.

But as much as this crowdsourcing can help us to clarify our desires, it can also make us more self-conscious. Nearly half (45 per cent) of singles surveyed by Badoo said trends like “He’s a 10, but” were making them second-guess their connections; while 35 per cent agreed that the ick was a form of self-sabotage when someone seemed too good to be true or they feared getting hurt. It would be simplistic to say that social media chatter about “icks” and “buts” prevents us from forming meaningful attachments – but it seems unlikely that it helps. The same can be said about reductive ideas of sexuality and gender that emphasise the differences between men and women, at the expense of their similarities.

“I can’t help but wonder whether a fuller understanding of men’s ability to get the ick, and by extension our interior lives, might create space for all of us to be more empathetic, and lead to fewer icks on all sides,” says Harry. But the path through demands communication and compassion, a readiness to sit with discomfort and disregard our desire for social approval – from women, as well as men. “I think the whole notion of the ick involves a lot of projecting and an inability to confront or communicate, instead of accepting that humans are messy,” says Jono, 31. “Culturally, we place a lot of value on how others perceive us, so when someone does something that cringes you out, there’s that anxiety that you could potentially be cringey too.” 

Jono is not immune to getting the ick himself, he says – “but I try not to pay it much mind”.

A healthier response than disengaging, he suggests, would be to “actually have a conversation, like: ‘Hey, this thing you do haha, I hate it lol – but where does it come from?’” Approached with openness and curiosity, the ick could be a learning opportunity that steers us toward both self-awareness and stronger connections. It is clear from Liam’s wincing recollection of his ick that it is still a painful memory, even now that he is in a happy relationship. But looking back it also brought him and his date onto the same page. “It was a very honest moment: we both knew exactly what had happened.”

*Names and some identifying details have been changed