Thank you to all those who tuned in yesterday, and for those who didn’t get to: Phoebe Maltz Bovy has earned herself the title of public heterosexual intellectual for her smart and funny new book, The Last Straight Woman.
Phoebe’s book advances two ideas that some may find controversial: 1) Some women only desire men, no fluidity involved; 2) Feminism that prioritizes normal-looking women desiring men — including very handsome men — is a cutting-edge feminism in our post-#MeToo, post-vibe shift era.
Straight as I’m not, I found Phoebe’s book excellently argued and highly resonant. I hope you’ll listen in and buy a copy if you haven’t already. (And then check out her Britcom writing - who knew Fawlty Towers was the exact text we needed to best understand the strange condition of HORNY, IN ‘70S, & WOMAN?)
A couple of my own entries into the Straightness Studies canon, and a preview of this Sunday’s essay:
“The (Wo)manosphere”
(A review of Freya India’s Girls® and Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere)
The undeniably straight and gender-conforming emerged from the 2010s in a funk of anxiety: heterosexuality was bad, dangerous, and retrograde; true beauty was either just a little lip filler away or else rapidly fleeting. But the rest of us were in our own funk, too. Sure, the future may be queer, but would we ever get there with all the climate destruction and late stage capitalism going on? What about the oppressors who were trying to kill us, or the gender dysphoria that might kill us first if we didn’t do something about it?
Like characters in a Sally Rooney novel bemoaning their inability to make pro-social life decisions and fix the great material problems of the world, we all swung on a mental pendulum between “acute distress” and “one small choice I can make right now to soothe that distress.” And it was within that split second of urgently needing to choose that our anxious minds were at their most porous, their most rockbottomed-out, and therefore most available to be pitched to, manipulated, seduced. We sought external loci of control, and the world was ready to provide them to us.
