Are There Any Straight Women Left?

Consensus has formed, in recent years, that womanhood consists of fending off suitors. Resentful men, perhaps hearing one narrative after the next of how to be a woman is to be drooled over, see this as a form of female privilege. “Any young woman who is even moderately attractive,” wrote critic William Deresiewicz in a 2023 Tablet essay, “will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men.”

It was an entertainingly written essay, but one that bore no relation to how I experienced my twenties. Where were these flirtation-based promotions? William, I wanted to tell him (if he would register my middle-aged presence), what you are describing is not how it goes for young women, but what it is to be Emily Ratajkowski. The misconception is not unique to Deresiewicz. If anything, he gets points for at least specifying that he meant young women—and past a certain attractiveness threshold.

Female heterosexuality has been understood almost exclusively as the experiences of women who may be nominally straight, but whose relations with men are mainly about deflecting their advances. Yes, there are a handful of women—Naomi Campbell, Isabelle Huppert, Helen Mirren—who spend a half century turning heads. Most do not. A typical straight female life cycle goes surprisingly quickly from an awkward youth unsure if any of the boys you like will ever reciprocate to an adulthood where men compare you unfavourably with eighteen-year-olds. Life expectancy for Canadian women is over eighty. This means, of approximately seventy man-liking years, a woman may spend ten in love-interest mode herself.

Most women—most people—are not remarkable-looking, in either direction, but are, as the kids say, mid. The women whose physical presence screams female sexuality, whose physiques are referenced by the expression sex sells, are the exception. Yet very few women are asexual. Contrary to the images the expression a sexual woman might summon, most female sexuality is happening in the minds and bodies not of lingerie models but of women whose general-interest sex appeal is nil. I’m here to make the case for a concept of straight womanhood that includes, even prioritizes, women whose interest in men is stronger than their interest to men, rather than the other way around.

There is a long-standing myth: that men possess a general lust for life that includes sexual appetites, whereas women choose between ambition and romance. Underpinning the divergence is this notion that male sexuality is a natural and near-unstoppable force, whereas women can take it or leave it—and will, if serious people, do the latter. Straight women’s need for men is not understood as a mirror image of straight men’s need for women but rather as an entirely different category of requirement.

So here I am, reclaiming man-needing as a feminist pursuit. Women are people, after all, people who want. Maybe we shouldn’t like men, but on the whole, we do. That needs to be our starting point.

Straight women today are at a crossroads. Not obsolete, exactly, but on the decline. Straight women are, going by survey data, a smaller percentage of the population than ever before. A 2022 Gallup polling of more than 10,000 adult Americans shows that 19.7 percent of Gen Z identifies as “something other than heterosexual,” compared with 7.2 percent of the overall population, and women are more likely than men to identify as bisexual.

What is female heterosexuality, anyway? Is it a gender and sexual orientation combo like any other? Or is it a social role, one held by women with no great interest in men but who lack the courage or sense of adventure for other paths? At a moment when women are succeeding like never before in education and professional life, do men still hold any interest for women? Would all women be gay if they could, and if they say they can’t, what’s stopping them? Isn’t female sexuality fluid? Didn’t they do that study where women were equally aroused by hetero porn, lesbian porn, and monkey sex? Do women even desire men, or have we merely been socialized over millennia to put up with them?

Some theorize that women are inherently sexually fluid, capable of sexual and romantic feelings for men and women, and that binary sexual orientation is a man thing. Moreover, “women” is itself a category in some degree of flux and sometimes deemed exclusionary. People assigned female at birth are now more likely than those assigned male to medically transition as adolescents. And more people—in Gen Z, mainly uterus-having sorts—now identify as nonbinary. Together, this means that there are fewer people inhabiting that bit of the Venn diagram where “straight” meets “woman.”

Much of this shift can be attributed to people feeling freer to come out than in previous generations. But there is also a sense, in some quarters, that straight woman is a bit ick as an identity, that it sounds reactionary or conventional, that it comes across as staid or unadventurous. ...

Is it men that women have gone off or just the confining role of boring straight lady? It would seem, at least from the countless magazine and newspaper features on gender and sexual politics, that straight women are passé. In the world of actual people, this indifference has yet to manifest, at least in the aggregate. Well-intended efforts to counter the assumption that all women are straight give the equally misleading impression that it’s a fifty-fifty shot whether any given woman will like men, something even the Gen Z stats don’t claim. Young women are approximately as into men as ever before but less into the whole straight thing than in previous generations. [...]

My aim here is not to insist that heteroflexible women with husbands, or assigned-female-at-birth non-binary people with high heels and boyfriends, are in some definitive sense straight women in denial about their true selves. If, in an everyday situation, a woman tells you she’s queer, and then introduces her male partner, no gotcha is in order. Maybe, if she expanded upon what she meant by “queer,” you wouldn’t think she was, but politeness dictates nodding along respectfully. If you feel moved to call her a straight woman who thinks she’s interesting, have the decency to wait until she’s left the room. But I’d also urge some sympathy for the spicy straights. If you get some straight women claiming to be queer, this is because . . . straight women have internalized the idea that straight womanhood is a bit ridiculous.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Pavel Danilyuk (Pexels) / iStock / Alana Enahoro