All the Straight Ladies

Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s new book is an affectionate tribute to women’s unrequited desire.

Police hold back Beatles fans in London on Oct. 26, 1965. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

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In the face of persistent cultural commentary warning that relations between men and women are hurtling toward disaster, a new book pushes back against all the hand-wringing. “The Last Straight Woman,” by cultural critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy, argues for an apolitical understanding of female desire. It’s the rare gender-relations book that neither frames men as terribly broken nor urges young people to pair up and settle down as quickly as possible. Instead, Ms. Maltz Bovy simply wants gender warriors to remember that heterosexual women are indeed attracted to men.

“Straight women objectify men,” she writes. “We do this not because we’re out to get even with men for objectifying us, but because we cannot help it.” While this point seems obvious, Ms. Maltz Bovy argues that popular culture often assumes that straight females are less attracted to men than attractive to them.

This presumption, to Ms. Maltz Bovy, is a kind of sexism, one that both the traditionalist right and heteropessimist left can fall into: “Everyone gets that most men want, need, women,” and yet the assumption is often that “Straight women merely put up with men’s advances because we don’t want them to murder us, or because we rely on them for a roof over our heads, or maybe because they seem nice and this is our way of saying thank you.”

This idea leads to a series of unhelpful readings of straight womanhood; namely, that the typical woman is the constant object of unwelcome male desire, and that a rational response to this treatment is to forego men entirely, embracing either celibacy or romantic relationships with other women. The problem with the latter view, as Ms. Maltz Bovy sees it, is that an inherent part of being a heterosexual woman is that you’re exclusively attracted to men. Giving them up—or trying to change what team you bat for—is both futile and the kind of suggestion we rightly recognize as offensive when applied to sexual minorities.

Further, Ms. Maltz Bovy argues that the former idea ignores the way most straight women experience the world. To put it bluntly, most women aren’t smokeshows, and yet much of the post-#MeToo discussion of gender relations assumes that it’s simply the lot of all women to be constantly fending off aggressive male attention. Look at how supermodel Emily Ratajkowski’s memoir was often praised by reviewers as a chilling portrait of the kind of sexism all women can relate to. While well-intentioned, this “amounts to feminism embracing the same definition of ‘woman’ as does the proverbial incel,” Ms. Maltz Bovy writes, “the sort who insists that no woman would have him, but if you press him on this, by ‘woman’ he means a category limited to head cheerleaders, prom queens, and women in his preferred porn.”

Ms. Maltz Bovy isn’t resentful, simply stating the facts. If you want to talk about relationships between men and women honestly, you ought to start from the assumption that most people, regardless of sex, aren’t swimming in romantic attention. This isn’t necessarily tragic. There’s plenty of delight in being the one doing the yearning. Indeed, the book is at its best when it focuses on the women, fictional and nonfictional, who desire without expectation of return.

Often, these examples are more silly than sexy, such as the time Sen. Amy Klobuchar posted a picture of herself surrounded by shirtless, impossibly beefy firefighters at the Minnesota State Fair, captioned, “State Fair pro tip: You don’t want to miss the Minnesota firefighters.” Ms. Maltz Bovy also makes liberal reference to the various randy spinsters of 20th-century sitcoms. She writes affectionately for those women who “[lust] in ways that are awkward and strange . . . in ways that cause a man to grimace uncomfortably and try to leave the room.”

In this way, “The Last Straight Woman” is an ode to the everywoman: the frump, the pimply teenager, the “mid,” the once-beautiful woman rendered invisible by age. In short, Ms. Maltz Bovy seeks to give some dignity to the kind of woman whose experience of her sexuality involves a lot more ogling than being ogled at—a fate experienced by all heterosexual women, should they live long enough not to “age gracefully” but simply to age. In a way, it’s a bid to assume women’s experiences have the same complexity and diversity as men’s—that we are capable of more than simply being desired.

Ms. Camp is senior newsletter editor at Free Expression.