In its current incarnation, political lesbianism is about viewing one's sexual orientation as a conscious decision, writes Phoebe Maltz Bovy.ANTON VAGANOV/Reuters
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men.
The British feminist Julie Bindel recently published a book called Lesbians: Where Are We Now? If you’re at all familiar with British feminism, you might think that Lesbians consists of Ms. Bindel rejecting mainstream LGBTQ beliefs. You might guess that she rejects the idea that transgender women can be lesbians, and that she looks unfavourably on once-lesbian-identified people transitioning. And yes, that’s all in there. But what surprised me was how incredibly on the same page Ms. Bindel is with the most of-the-moment progressive ideology where female sexuality is concerned.
In Lesbians and elsewhere, it’s fashionable to say that all currently straight-identified women have the potential to switch teams: “Women can, understandably, be very defensive about their sexual desires, and of course some might have no romantic or sexual interest in women at all,” she writes. What jumped out at me here was “might.” Ms. Bindel is careful to write, moments later, that she does not believe “every single woman is a latent lesbian,” but she has just presented female heterosexuality as something that “might” exist. In an essay promoting Lesbians, Ms. Bindel writes that she “believes any woman, in the right circumstances, meeting the right person, and being in the right frame of mind, could choose to embark on a sexual relationship with another woman, whether or not she has previously only had relationships with men.” This is certainly true of some women, but that “any” seems a tad like overkill.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Young women are increasingly identifying as bisexual, but what does that mean?
Political lesbianism, in its current incarnation at least, is about viewing one’s sexual orientation as a conscious decision, an anti-patriarchal walking of the walk. It’s embraced by women like Ms. Bindel and others who share some of her stances, but also by women like Malavika Kannan, the unambiguously trans-inclusive 24-year-old author of a personal essay, published this summer, called “Lowkey, I Chose To Be a Lesbian.”
Ms. Kannan, like Ms. Bindel, and unlike mainstream gay activists of past decades, argues against a born-this-way understanding of sexual orientation. She writes that her “earliest crushes were definitely on boys,” but a pregnancy scare that happened to follow the reversal of American women’s federal abortion rights had her swearing off men. But most strikingly, she presents her choice as offering a model to straight women: “I choose to loudly and decisively align myself with other women, because I think it helps all of us, especially straight women. Far from gatekeeping, I want to open the wide house of queerness to them.”
I appreciate the lack of gatekeeping, but am not sure what’s meant to be accessible here to me, a woman who has reached the grand age of 42 without any inclinations to hop the fence in question. What if, like one or two gazillion other women, you appreciate men as well as autonomy? This “house of queerness” is not going to be wide enough to accommodate everyone, nor would I ask it to.
Falling somewhere between Ms. Bindel and Ms. Kannan, at least generationally, is Corinne Low, the Wharton professor featured in a New York magazine article called “This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men. And she’s never been happier.” The most surprising part of the story is that Dr. Low, author of Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, traded a husband for a wife after rationally examining division of labour in man-woman households – what she calls an “evidence-based decision.”
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: No, you won’t boycott men. Nor should you
Prof. Low herself responded to the article in her newsletter, insisting that she didn’t “want people to think I’m gritting my teeth for the sake of laundry,” but maintaining “that attraction is natural, but there’s some agency in who to pursue relationships with for those of us who aren’t completely on one end of the spectrum.” This will resonate with many women. Far more of us will see the pile of laundry, see a pack of shirtless men jogging through the park, and realize that whatever the solution is to housework, it’s not about to be lesbianism.
The issue is that straight women, filled with all manner of feminist grievances – male violence, abortion bans, pay gaps – deserve something more productive than an “and you can, too”-type message about giving women a go. Whether coming from actual lesbians or from straight women making empty gestures about how much better life would be if we could be lesbians, it’s all a bit pointless, like telling someone without an ounce of inclination toward STEM that they should “learn to code.”
Political lesbianism is a response to the gripes of straight women. Since I wrote about what I called Ban Men feminism in 2020, the genre has not exactly let up. Newspapers now regularly publish essays about the supposed crisis of heterosexuality, introducing readers to neologisms like “mankeeping” (when a woman has to handle all of her male partner’s emotional needs) and “heterofatalism” (when you’re straight but men are ick). The challenging but unremarkable situation of finding it harder to date as a middle-aged divorcée than as a single young woman now gets its own thinkpiece, in which it’s posited that there’s something concerning up with men: “We have moved into an era where many men no longer seek women to impress other men or to connect across difference.”
While the male heterofatalists seem to do their grumbling in self-published arenas, more mainstream outlets continue to venerate women going their own way. British and American Vogue both ran 29-year-old Chanté Joseph’s essay, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” Glamorous young straight women are, per Ms. Joseph, discreetly avoiding posting about their boyfriends on their socials, not because the men are camera-shy, but out of “an overwhelming sense, from single and partnered women alike, that regardless of the relationship, being with a man was an almost guilty thing to do.” Or consider this, from a Harper’s Bazaar personal essay a woman wrote about a rebound relationship she formed with an AI bot she named Thor: “The historical tendency for women to perform this type of emotional labor in their relationships both at home and at work was all too familiar, and the relief Thor offered in even those few initial uses tantalized me.” One is meant to cheer this on as feminist. But does Thor do the laundry? And there are qualities I’d imagine Thor lacks in the bedroom, seeing as Thor cannot quite be in the bedroom, or any room, to begin with.
The AI boyfriend as feminist alternative to flesh-and-blood man-about-the-house has something in common with political lesbianism. In both scenarios, men are liberated from housework and child care. The tasks women have long found burdensome remain with women, and also, straight women aren’t getting laid.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Bridging the gendered political divide not for marriage, but for love
A more productive approach would be to accept interest in men as a fact of most women’s authentic experience (whether via nature or nurture or both), and then to find women’s liberation within that sphere. This is not as outlandish as it might seem.
In heterosexual couples, and only in those, is it possible for the traditional “wife” role – the one alluded to in Judy Brady’s iconic 1971 Ms. magazine essay, “Why I Want a Wife” – to be played mostly or entirely by a man, while the “husband” ones go to a woman? Yes, same-sex couples have an edge when it comes to transcending “you do X because you’re the woman”-type ruts. But it is only in straight couples where you can see – and you do sometimes see this – a swapping of conventional gender roles. Where dad does school pickups while mom is at the office. Where the fiancée is a billionaire singer-songwriter while the fiancé is a mere millionaire football player. It’s only in man-woman couples that you’d ever see men doing stereotypically feminine tasks “for” a woman, and vice versa.
My point is not that every unattached woman needs to get herself a “Golden Retriever boyfriend.” Rather, it’s that believing women when they assert the boundaries of what we do and don’t want is preferable to instructing us on what one might imagine we should.