Straight Lady Theory with Phoebe Maltz Bovy
Why thinking about straight women is gay and NOT "at least a little bit bi"
Blake and I have a new episode of the pod out today talking with Phoebe Maltz Bovy about gay men and straight women. We’re putting the full episode video on Substack for the first time, and as usual have the audio version on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere.
Phoebe is a fellow ex-French historian who is a model of how to write about pop culture and online discourse in a smart, revealing way. I’ve been reading her 2017 book, The Perils of “Privilege,” which was a critique of how the concept of privilege ended up dramatizing and reinforcing privilege rather than challenging it. What I especially like about it that she is able to reconstruct arcane online debates in a way that somehow isn’t tedious to read and to draw out the logical structures underneath them. It’s an argument but never a polemic; her measured, wry tone and touch for letting other people’s hot takes hang themselves is one of the pleasures of reading her.
She brings that same sensibility to her new book, The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men, which is a kind of “state of the straight woman in contemporary discourse” that she assembles through close readings of old sitcoms and 2010s articles alike. One of the overarching themes of the book is how we’ve gotten to a point discursively, in the arc from Me Too to heteropessimism and sexual fluidity, where a seemingly very obvious fact—that straight women are horny for men—has been discoursed out of existence. You might be tempted to imagine, But no one thinks straight women don’t exist! Having read Phoebe’s book, which marshals a vast trove of empirical evidence, I assure you they do.
On the pod we talk about some of the themes in her chapter “Are Straight Women Gay Men?” which uses all of the various discourses about straight women and gay men—about them being platonic friends, about what girls who go on Grindr or to gay bars are actually up to—to illustrate this strange figure of the straight woman as a merely responsive, non-desiring entity, or (things in discourse world do not have to make sense) whose desires are kind of always-already queer. A thought Phoebe entertains in the book and that comes up in our conversation is: if sex itself is now “queer” or things straight people are doing is now queer, what have we gotten ourselves into?
You might also wonder why we’re talking about this on a gay-man podcast, or perhaps more likely, since my readers seem to hate me writing about gay subjects, Thank god that annoying gay podcast is talking about something not-gay. The subliterate hordes seem to think Phoebe’s subject is decidedly not-gay, since they are mad about her releasing it in any month adjoining Pride month. But I would submit that it is, while not a work of queer theory or really intended to theorize gay people, at least queer theory adjacent in that carefully examines how we use categories and descriptors about our sexual identities, and also the weird situations that happen when those categories take on a kind of online-esoteric double life that is divorced from what most people do in the real world most of the time.
We throw some cold water on sexual fluidity and bisexuality discourse, not to deny that either of those things exist but to question whether they have perhaps become, uh, discursively expansive in a way that is unhelpful for making sense of a lot of people’s experience. To that end I talk more than I have publicly about how I interpreted my own sexuality whilst married to a woman and how some of the notions that now pass for “queer” were actually, in my case, rationalizations or defense mechanisms that kept me from what I wanted. (I’m working on a longer piece about that, hopefully coming soon.)
