There is once again acknowledgment that most women are straight, and want obvious things like faithful husbands, as well as less-obvious ones like TV shows about gay male hockey players, writes Phoebe Maltz Bovy.PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCES: GETTY IMAGES
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and author of the new book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men.
As you may have heard, Lindy West published a new memoir, Adult Braces, in March. Ms. West is a talented writer and a mildly famous feminist activist. Her previous memoir Shrill, a bestseller, was turned into a television show of the same name. Adult Braces is a briskly told, voice-y narrative of one woman’s introspective road trip across America. It contains what might be literature’s most vivid description of an unappetizing sandwich. (Something calling itself an avocado toast under false pretenses.) None of this explains the hold this story would come to have on the news cycle.
Ms. West’s love life was a trending topic for weeks. It was dissected in major publications, on social media, and oh, in group chats. This was not because Adult Braces offered spicy depictions of unconventional sexual arrangements. If only! Rather, it was the jarring contrast between the feminist marketing of the book and how patriarchal the actual text felt.
Adult Braces lays out Ms. West’s journey from spouse mad at philandering husband (the musician Ahamefule J. Oluo, called Aham in the book) to happy participant in a throuple with Aham and Roya, one of the women he’d been cheating on his wife with. How all the best love stories begin.
In theory, Ms. West’s pivot to ethical non-monogamy might have been received as the ode to rejecting societal expectations it seems to want to be. In practice, too many people read the book, which gives rather a different impression, for that interpretation to catch on. Still more people did not actually read the book, but may have noticed that its cover was an image of Ms. West, in tears.
For all its on-paper modernity – Roya is queer-identified; Aham uses he/they pronouns; they refer to the set-up as polyamory and not sister-wives – Adult Braces reads as the tale of a manipulative man who’d found two women to look after him. The superficial trappings of the menage – the geography (Seattle and environs), the aesthetics (piercings, tattoos, artsy haircuts) – serve only to mask the material facts on the ground. What comes through is not just that sexism exists even among progressives. It’s that it reads like the story of a woman convinced liberation is in abandoning the quest for “monogamous heterosexual true love” – something that feminist discourse of the past decade had, after all, drilled into its audience.
Ms. West at one point seems on the cusp of insight, asking, “Was I actually attracted to Roya, or was I just relieved to find a loophole that let me stay … because I was too scared to be alone?” Excellent question. “Was I strong or pathetic? Straight or queer?” I don’t know, Lindy, you tell me!
Adult Braces mentions “threesomes” but does not address what transpires between the women, or at whose behest. To a point, it’s nobody’s business. But without some broad strokes, so to speak, it’s not clear what we’re looking at. Is this a newly-out queer woman, or a straight one plugging her ears while her husband and his mistress are audibly amorous? Ms. West has harsh words for those who’d judge her arrangement as “sexually deviant.” But the reaction was more one of pity for a woman who is, by her own account, often sleeping alone, but happy to be, she explains, because the antidepressants she’s on have impacted her libido. Strangely, readers did not uniformly interpret this as uplifting.
The meta-story here, “progressive woman self-sabotages,” was bait for conservatives and heterodox sorts. Parts of the memoir read like right-wing satire, such as when Ms. West, who is white, recalls Aham, who is biracial, suggesting to her that demanding monogamy is racist. What surprised me was how Ms. West’s life choices were received in friendlier quarters:
Laurie Penny, a non-binary polyamorous British writer, responded to the saga with a newsletter post entitled, “Straight Men Are Now Banned From Polyamory,” describing “this individual, who uses he/they pronouns” as “a bounder and a cad, a weasel and scoundrel, a rotter, a blighter.” In her newsletter, philosopher Kate Manne used the saga as a jumping-off point to state, “Straight men who are lousy partners – in being mean, lazy, negligent, exploitative, or worse – are unfortunately common.”
Seeing these critiques and similar, from writers at least as progressive as Ms. West herself, I realized the tide had turned. Turned away, that is, not from accepting that some women are gay or bi, including ones who’d previously identified as straight, but rather from attributing straight women’s problems to heterosexuality itself. Here is a woman who’d extricated herself from the clutches of straightness, but to what end?
Having been pointing out for years that straight women abandoning heterosexuality was not a feminist panacea, I didn’t need persuading. But it was strange to see these as points one could make and not be classified as problematic or right-wing. Why was everyone suddenly so … commonsensical?
There’s no one-sentence explanation for the strange place straight womanhood has found itself in. Going by the essays memoirs, memes, and even stats ("nearly 30% of Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ“) from recent years, one would think female heterosexuality was on the verge of extinction. Yet men continue to appeal to most women, a fact you’d only know if you read between the lines (or logged off and looked around).
Instead of looking for ways to make gender relations more egalitarian, the progressive party line was women are done with men and good riddance. This offended plenty of men, who didn’t appreciate being called trash, but wasn’t productive for women, either. The post-MeToo years were not an overcorrection against patriarchy but a misdirected adjustment, as though the underlying problem were not sexism but the sexual orientation of virtually all womankind. The mood of the era is best summed up by the headline of a personal essay from 2024: “I Decentered Men. Decentering Desire for Men Is Harder.”
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The population share of straight women kept tumbling, particularly among younger women, even if a closer look suggested many were leading functionally hetero lives, meaning they were generally bisexuals with male partners. Most women remained straight-identified, but the more plugged-in ones knew to use the word regrettably. Declining marriage rates in Canada and the U.S. fuelled commentary about how men and women had gone off pairing off – and mainly at women’s behest. Women dating men was so last season.
Straight womanhood itself had not vanished, but fashionable sorts knew to speak of it as though its demise was imminent. A 2023 New York Times Magazine feature about the dearth of men at U.S. colleges and its negative impact on women students’ romantic lives includes, as an aside, that this issue “may seem somewhat dated given that so many students now have a wider and more fluid understanding of gender and sexual orientation.” Yet the young women were trying to date men; thus the article.
Media whose core purpose was covering the straight female experience suddenly found itself accused of irrelevance. Sex and the City (1998-2004) was, memorably, about glamorous women dating men. And Just Like That, the 2021-2025 reboot, came across as atonement for the original series. Gone was enthusiastic Samantha, extolling the delights of hot sex with beautiful men. In her place, a series of eat-your-vegetables lessons in nonbinary pronouns and late-in-life lesbianism.
Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie, left, and Kristin Davis as Charlotte in Sex and the City.CRAIG BLANKENHORN/HBO via AP
Along similar lines, the style website Man Repeller began in 2010 as Leandra Medine Cohen’s celebration of eccentric styling choices that put off your average straight guy. When the site folded in 2020, this was said to be in part because “‘the idea of deflecting the male gaze seem[ed] so antiquated.’” Cool young women had transcended such considerations, perhaps even womanhood itself. In the same blog-obit, a former employee of the site lamented, “‘It could have been a space for nonbinary fashion.’”
Demanding straight-lady fashion blogs morph into queer zines was silly but very of its moment. Shortly prior, as my friend Kat Rosenfield has pointed out, Playboy magazine “abandoned its straight-male-skewed content in favor of interviews with politician Pete Buttigieg and MeToo founder Tarana Burke.”
All heterosexuality was problematic now. But the problematizing of straightness played out differently for men and women. It was still taken for granted that most men desired women. If anything, the idea was that men no longer needed Playboy because far smuttier content was a click away. Straight women, however, were imagined to be free at last from going through the motions of liking men. After a 1990s and early 2000s of gender-neutral sex positivity, of progressive insistence that men and women alike enjoyed casual sex, we’d arrived at it being common knowledge that men were pigs (the subtext of MeToo) and women interested mainly in being left alone.
It was therefore confusing, for the discourse, whenever women dropped hints that we did in fact find men sexually attractive. Thus the spate of think-pieces about what women could possibly be getting from Heated Rivalry, a show where beautiful men have sex with each other. It couldn’t just be the equivalent of men watching “lesbian” entertainment. There had to be a think-zebras-not-horses explanation. One mustn’t make heteronormative assumptions about women whose predilection is … hot naked men.
Hudson Williams, Sophie Nelisse, Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova and Connor Storrie in a scene from Heated Rivalry, the Canadian series based on a series of romance novels.HO/The Canadian Press
With each high-profile, protest-too-much pronouncement that female heterosexuality was kaput, my own work of conveying why I’d thought to write a book about straight womanhood at a crossroads became easier. Something I had picked up on enough to be publishing on it a decade ago – the discomfort some straight women feel with their own heterosexuality – had broken through, and no longer required explanation. Heteropessimism had gone from obscure neologism to the sentiment behind “Dump Him” merch at Target.
But as anyone who follows fashion knows, by the time a trend hits the big-box stores, it’s on the wane amongst the cutting-edge. When I tongue-in-cheek declare myself the last straight woman, I gesture at my status as a holdover, stuck in my y2k coming-of-age. Hanging onto the stale identity of a straight woman feels like keeping an old pair of flared leggings. (Guilty.) Everything has a way of cycling back into fashion.
It’s clear that the post-hetero moment is over. What’s less clear is whether this is a wholly positive development.
Donald Trump won a second United States presidential term, and with this came a shift away from 2010s-style progressivism, including regarding gender and sexuality, in the U.S. and beyond. There’s some evidence that transgender and non-binary identification is now decreasing, along with all non-hetero identities, in particular bisexuality among young women. Is this about a trend waning or authoritarian suppression? These are not mutually exclusive.
Heated Rivalry’s creators on why their horny hockey hit scores with both women and gay men
In a 2025 article, “On ‘bi-non-practising,’” Brown University undergraduate Ivy Rockmore cast a curious if skeptical glance at the people, typically women, who present themselves as bisexual for political or aesthetic reasons, not because this describes their relationships or attractions. Ms. Rockmore, herself a transgender woman, empathized with the testing of boundaries, but argued the phenomenon “complicate[d] the dating scene for ‘practising’ bisexuals or gay and lesbian people, who are looking for partners but must navigate bi non-practising people who ‘flirt for the bit’ or feel a need to uphold their label as visually queer.”
This year, Ms. Rockmore wrote a follow-up story, checking in on the non-practising bisexuals. Together, the articles are a glimpse at what is by Ms. Rockmore’s own admission an unusual population. What these students are up to offers a glimpse at how it goes where young adults are the hippest, most privileged, and most free.
What she found was that a rightward shift already in the air in 2025 had gained force. Per one classmate: “The progression has been to get more and more conventionally within your gender binary. And what that means is that bisexuality, any kind of fluidity, falls away – because that’s risky now. It’s not a point of coolness.”
A woman who referred to herself as “bi non-practising” made this startling assertion: “‘I think if Kamala had won, I would be dating a woman right now.’”
Is this a woman who might have gone in for bisexuality if that were on-trend, but who is now free to be her straight self? Or is she a re-closeted bisexual?
On the plus side, there is once again acknowledgment that most women are straight, and want obvious things like faithful husbands, as well as less-obvious ones like TV shows about gay male hockey players. Feminism can have this as a starting point, rather than glibly advising hetero women to deprogram ourselves.
The not-good part is that faux-queerness and performative misandry went out of style not just because they’re annoying (which they are) but also because actual queerness and feminism are themselves under attack, and those who want to turn back the clock can’t tell the difference. The accurate and at times necessary message that it’s okay to be straight too often comes bundled with the cruel message that straight is the only way to be.