Heterosexuality Strikes Back

Slutwalk. Gamergate. Third Wave. Fourth Wave? Women's March. Pussy Hat. Weinstein. #MeToo. Trump II.

It's been a long fifteen years since that first march in Toronto. Feminist activism brewed in subcultures, broke out into the mainstream, churned out an astounding slate of new ideas, marched by the millions, and now—it feels—has subsided, been subsumed or subverted or defeated, depending on your perspective.

Not resolved, though. The crisis of gender relations seems, if anything, more intractable than ever. Men and women are scrolling apart, diverging politically, economically, socially, or so we are told. Birthrates are in the toilet and we're all going the way of the dodo, or so we are told. Women are too educated, men not educated enough; we have to tariff the whole world to bring men's jobs back. Men are trash, and we should just ban them. Or something.

The straights strike back. Phone screens fill with tradwives and manfluencers. Puffed-up buffoons rant about the sperm count of the American teenager. Would-be left-populists celebrate the end of "smoothgroin" politicians. The New York Times argues "There's Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men."

Now is the time of thinkpieces—or, more charitably, retrospectives; I've written some myself. Into this breach steps Phoebe Maltz Bovy, her sally titled The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men. Prior to publication I had been eager to read it. I'm hardly alone in thinking that there seems to be something broken in the world today. Just by the numbers, society kind of needs men and women to get along. Fixing our society seems to require, in some respect, fixing heterosexuality. (Or abandoning it altogether, some would argue—more on this momentarily). So I welcomed a straight woman's attempt at heterosexual repair.

Bovy's positive thesis can be stated rather briefly: female heterosexuality is a lot like male heterosexuality is thought to be: it's about fucking the opposite sex (pp. 138, 157, 186, 231). Women are not passive receivers in the game of straights (130). They are not eternally sexually fluid (141). They are not more concerned with wanting to be wanted than with wanting (133). They are not trading the undesired (sex) for the desired (the ring, stability, protection) (125). They are, in a phrase, things in and for themselves, and one of the things they want for themselves is to fuck men.

Yet instead of asking questions like "how is this going, for the most part," Bovy spends endless pages arguing that queer girls aren't really queer, or something, or maybe they are but that doesn't make them cool or anything (Chapter 5). Or something.

The Last Straight Woman bills itself as a reality check yet is bizarrely divorced from reality. Bovy operates almost entirely in the world of elite discourse: New York Times Vows columns, chatter in the graduate student lounge, decades-old Twitter beefs. She plays all the hits: Cat Person! Aziz Ansari! Emily Ratajkowski! Heteropessimism! Are you a millennial who is still mad about something someone said online about one of these people ten years ago? This book is for you.

After reading The Last Straight Woman you might be forgiven for concluding that the greatest threat to heterosexuality today is not political polarization, the housing crisis, or too many goddamn phones, but rather queer theorists being condescending to Bovy personally (90). She even spends some time throwing brickbats at a 1977 compendium of political lesbian tracts, something that is very important and no one has thought of doing before (98).

"A part of me has always liked the idea that I might be different from the other straight girls, a bit more like a gay man. Gay men have said this about me, unprompted, and whenever they have, I've thought, smugly, yes, I suppose I am. But when I stop and think about what it is about this that I find flattering, I realize it's my fear of being a basic straight lady. Which is wrong on my part. The straight woman who sees herself as the protagonist, who experiences genuine desire for men, who has fantasies that go behind a romantic dinner, is not an exception to the rule, let alone a creature so confusing that she needs to be defined as something other than a straight woman," (200).

This is contrasted with an interview subject from Lucy Neville's Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, who

"...believes that 'though only engaging in heterosexual sex with a male-identified partner' she identifies as 'queer, and by queer I mean what I have just talked about: humanness,'" (187, citing Neville p. 232).

An annoying thing to be told, if you aren't queer! Bovy is right about that much. And yet. Let us step away from all this elite discourse, all these status games of Brooklyn elites, all this parsing of who is queerer and who is just faking it for clout, and start instead from some real material facts about the state of heterosexuality today.

For all the handwringing, elite women—yes, like Bovy, who with bylines in the The Atlantic, The Forward, The New Republic, and a Substack that "relates contemporary North American issues to 1990s British sitcoms" (dust jacket) certainly counts as a top-1% world discourse elite—are mostly doing all right at this heterosexuality thing. They may evince a sighing heteropessimism. The right wing may be panicking about how low birthrates mean we should ban women from grad school. But the actual reality—yes, actual measurable reality—tells a rather different story.

We must therefore ask: are the straights okay? We must therefore ask, being good social scientists: how does one operationalize such a question? Rather than turning to ethnographic studies, as Jane Ward does in her The Tragedy of Heterosexuality—the "heterosexual repair" literature, pickup-artist seminars—let us measure what is measurable. If we want to know about romance we might want to study dating, but unfortunately most of the organizations with the largest datasets here—dating apps like Hinge or Tindr—are also highly motivated to tilt the reported results.

So I will instead focus on a simple metric for which we have good data, collected and released by government agencies: marriage. (We gays can get married now too, but marriage remains an overwhelmingly heterosexual institution—in 2019 a mere 3.7% of marriages were same-sex—and thus I will use overall marriage rates as a proxy for heterosexual marriage rates.)

Heterosexuality may be about fucking but it is also about love, and—as has been the case in many though hardly all societies across history—in contemporary America the most aspirational result of such love is marriage. Obviously there are other partnership arrangements, such as cohabitation without marriage, but while the acceptability of this arrangement has increased, it is still less satisfying to most than marriage and also typically seen as a stepping-stone to marriage. 

So what do marriage rates tell us about the state of heterosexuality? Nothing good. Marriage rates have declined steadily since 1980. Now these days it is common enough for conservatives to complain about how overeducated women are getting out of the game of heterosexuality. What is striking from the data is that the reverse appears to be true. The decline in marriage rates is largest among the lower class and quite small among the upper class—here, the top two income quintiles, aka the top 40% of the population.

In other words, elite women, like Bovy herself has, continue to couple, marry, and have children at more or less the same rate they have for decades. They are getting married later—often, after both partners have completed substantial education and found some degree of career stability—but yes. Elite men and women fall in love, form stable partnerships, and live in increasingly equitable relationships. Sure, sometimes taking the groceries home while tending to a two year old is a grind. No one is denying this. But the straights mostly seem to be okay, at the elite level at least.

The trouble appears as one climbs down the income ladder. Rates of marriage decrease steadily. It is worth noting that this gap is new. In the 1970s, there were almost no differences in marriage rates by income. Explaining this trend is somewhat tricky, and numerous hypotheses are offered in various thinkpieces.

To return to an above remark: cohabitation is substantially more common among low-income Americans. This is not because they have read too much queer theory: far and away the most common reason is that they do not feel secure. Meanwhile, the well-off just get married instead of cohabiting—and, for that matter, divorce less.

One might thus tell a certain story about these events: "When a man marries an unemployed woman, he gets a live-in maid. When a woman marries an unemployed man, she gets a live-in gamer." Lower class women have not thrown off men because queer theorists brainwashed them into thinking their sexuality is inherently fluid. Lower class women have not thrown off men because of some culture of sexual prudishness. By and large these women want men. They want children. They want a partner. The trouble is that while men are easy enough to find, reliability has substantially decreased not among men generally but among lower-class men specifically. And this is in no small part because the economic conditions no longer enable these men to fit themselves into what they imagine masculinity requires of them: the superior position in any heterosexual relationship, the paterfamilias and breadwinner and master of the house.

If we want to locate a crisis of heterosexuality, it is not to be found amidst graduate students complaining about how Cat Person does or doesn't represent the true disappointment of heterosexuality (and then nevertheless finding, dating, marrying, and settling down with decent, reliable men of similar social status).

Sure. The dating scene is fraught. The dating scene has always been fraught. That is rather the point. To confess to wanting someone is to reveal a deep truth in oneself. A vulnerability. This is why the essence of flirting is deniability: to somehow make one's interest clear while reserving the right to laugh it off if unreciprocated. If romance were easy we wouldn't write so many goddamn books about it.

The problem, I will allege, is not merely the timeless anxieties of knowing and being known, but something cracked in the noosphere. Bovy seems to think this is women who fuck and love men but desire to call themselves something other than heterosexual. Bovy seems to think this is primarily a status game, a way of claiming a coolness they haven't earned. Yet personally I do not begrudge others using such signs and symbols as others may have left to navigate the half-known wilderness of identity and desire. These women are expressing a feeling, and that feeling is heterosexuality is a prison.

Are they wrong? There are so many expectations larded on to this thing we call heterosexuality. HE-MAN BRINGS MEAT TO WIFE-SLAVE. I dunno. The trouble, it seems—and this takes us back to Jane Ward, and the clear thrust of her The Tragedy of Heterosexuality—is not with women who don't know that they're straight, but rather men who have taken their own heterosexuality and twisted it into something warped and cruel.

To twist Bovy a bit here, you can just like women. You don't have to make it into this insane contest with some amalgam of Darth Vader and Andrew Tate crawling out from between the frames of a 3am doomscroll and telling you you're not a real man unless you've met the 6-6-6 rule. You can just like women. You can just love women.

Instead men have trapped themselves in dreamland. Bovy rather inexplicably remarks that men cannot choose to dress sexy, that height and broad shoulders cannot be chosen (241); this would I assume be news to today's looksmaxxing influencers, obsessed as they are with controlled doses of testosterone and human growth hormone, gym workouts scientifically calibrated to maximize pectoral hypertrophy, and of course the notorious "bonesmashing," a pseudoscientific kissing-cousin to the very real height extension surgery popular among this particular crowd.

As (sighs) the chad-off involving Clavicular and Androgenic reveals, these techniques are superficially aimed at attracting women—"Your average woman, controlled by her loins, controlled by her primal impulses, she would crawl on hands and knees, bloodied and bashed, on fire, for miles to have a chance with a 6-foot-5 genetically superior male," Nick Fuentes tells us—but are in fact primarily a dominance game these men are playing with each other. The point is to impress other men.

Bovy is right that women can, at times, play the same game, making their own sexuality primarily a status game amongst each other (or perhaps society generally) rather than an honest expression of their desire for another—as Bovy highlights, in the insistence of Emily Ratajkowski that she, unlike Lena Dunham, is "a woman who is sexual" (228). Ratajkowski's sexualness consists in her 'objective social desirability,' not her desire.

To counter this, Bovy lingers on her frumpy-but-horny archetype (Conclusion). The key feature, she explains, is that it's about wanting men without making this into some status game. This is a step in the right direction, but I must quibble. One key feature of the frumpy but horny character is that they are the comic relief, and not meant to be aspirational. I speak from experience: one wants to be wanted back, and indeed wanted for yourself and not for—some other feature of your identity you may disdain.

What one must distinguish, I believe, is between wanting your partner to want you in return—a reciprocal relationship of equals—in other words, love—and turning one's sexuality into an endless status game, where the partner is not even the point, merely a way of keeping score with one's competitors. In the vision of antediluvian masculinity, women are a way of keeping score with other men, or perhaps chess pieces moved around in a miserable game of dynastic inheritances and political alliances, or merely economic assets to be controlled and exploited.

Philosophers since Rousseau have lamented this aspect of the human soul—our tendency to live in the eyes of others—even as they have failed utterly in extirpating it, even in themselves (Rousseau's entire professional life is consumed by his obsession with what other people thought of him). And that's fine. It is normal to want to be wanted. It is understandable to want to love someone who loves you back. It is even normal to want to excel, to succeed, to win, to achieve and be recognized for your achievements.

Yet as with most desires, this can become dysfunctional if you let it consume you.

The greatest threat to heterosexuality today is not queer theorists gently reminding straight women that better things are possible. It is men who can't get out of their own way. Who are too afraid of looking girly to learn the quadratic formula. Too afraid of failure to bring themselves to try to succeed. Too afraid of being thought unmanly by weird chuds on their phone screens to respect the flesh and blood women who want to date them. Too tied up in what imaginary chads in their heads might think of them to bring themselves to be reliable partners in equal relationships.

If we want to save heterosexuality, we must save it from heterosexualism.

Featured image is Flirting in the Park of the Villa Borghese, by Frédéric Soulacroix