Are There Any Straight Women Left?

A 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. Prudish. In her 2022 memoir Bad Sex, writer Nona Willis Aronowitz recounts coming to terms with her own heterosexuality—but only after a valiant effort at being the sexually omnivorous person she felt she ought to be. She gave other demographics a go and found “cis men” were the only ones who did it for her after all. Realizing she was straight, she writes, “made me feel shamed. Exposed and uncool.”

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.

There is now a plethora of ways to identify into queerness that don’t require such drastic measures as having sex with women or transitioning to become a man. A woman doesn’t even need to claim bi-curiosity to find her way under the LGBTQIA umbrella, when the “q” is right there. The amorphous, all-encompassing term “queer,” the reclaimed slur, allows people to gesture at being sexual minorities without specifying which sort. Someone who’s by all accounts straight can correct the record and insist she’s “queer” without anyone asking her what she means by this, lest they be accused of nosiness or gatekeeping. Or rather, people (often, gay people) do have some questions, but the polite thing is to take people at their word when they assert their queerness. Even if there is much private, back-channel discussion of how we all know that lady with a husband is as queer as Hugh Hefner. (A derisive term exists for this: spicy straights.)

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.

But it does not make a woman frivolous or conventional to like men. To land on that idea via progressive ideology is to sort of horseshoe-theory yourself into a regressive misogyny wherein you’re only a full human being if you’re male and if you’re attracted to women. It is commonplace to be a straight woman, this I’ll grant, but it’s no more basic than any of the other ways a person can be. There are boring people of all genders and sexual orientations. Do we imagine the people with fifty identity-signalling emojis in a social media bio are the world’s most captivating? (It’s a matter of taste, I suppose, but I for one do not.) All straight women have inner lives, because everyone’s got one of those. That you’re a straight woman and unique doesn’t make you queer; it makes you like everyone else, of every gender and sexual orientation.

Women who continue to partner with men can be dismissed as out-of-it conservatives or simply as fools. Man-wanting can be viewed as a weakness to be overcome, an inability to resist social conditioning. If, however, we accept that the thing once called female heterosexuality remains by far the predominant experience among the population feminism occupies itself with, then we need to be looking for feminist approaches to female heterosexuality.

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The Barbie movie ostensibly offered up a feminist message. After all, it got conservatives hot and bothered, with its girl-power messaging and talk of “patriarchy.” And it did embody what has come of feminism but not in a way I’d celebrate.

Much is made, in Barbie, about the dolls’ noted absence of genitals. But Barbie World isn’t a romance-free zone. The main Ken’s unrequited love for the main Barbie (played convincingly by Margot Robbie) announces itself early on, before there’s any talk of dolls entering the real world.

For all the script-flipping—women presidents! women authors, even, can you imagine?!—it’s striking that Barbie World permits only men to experience sexual or romantic desire. Early in the film, Ken asks Barbie to spend the night with him. This prompts some knowing humour about these dolls’ anatomical deficiencies, but the fact remains that he does want this. When Barbie and Ken enter the real world, she responds to catcallers at a construction site by pointing out that she doesn’t have a vagina, that neither of them has anything going on downstairs, while Ken anxiously fibs that actually he does have genitals. A man—even a doll that vaguely represents one—has his pride. Also: a clichéd construction worker harassment scene serves as shorthand for how it goes for women in the real world. Barbie goes from a land where she’s admired by a chivalrous Ken to one where she’s objectified for looking like, well, Barbie. In neither universe does Barbie herself appear to like-like anybody.

Robbie’s Barbie is hyperfeminine but—or, more accurately, and therefore—without any discernable sexual orientation. Men either respectfully worship her or ogle her, or they pretend not to like her because they actually love her. She views men first with disdain and, eventually chaste affection, like a sea of bratty little brothers.

Every night in Barbie World is girls’ night not because the Barbies are lesbians but because they live in blissful non-sexuality. They, with their smooth Barbie-doll crotches, never get distracted by boys. Whose fantasy is this? Because there are women who seek out all-female environments, but—with all due respect to queer femmes— the aesthetic overlap between the Playboy Mansion and a womyn’s music festival is minimal. This sort of “girls’ night” is only feminist in the sense that sorority houses are feminist, announcing, as they do, that a given society allows women to gather and enjoy themselves. But the movie can’t make Barbie World a fully unsexed universe, because we need to understand that the Barbies are hot. Stereotypical Barbie in particular. And how would we know this were it not for Ken courting her?

Men, even anthropomorphized Ken dolls, are inconceivable except as testosterone-fuelled desirers. Where the testosterone comes from, anatomically speaking, is not addressed. But only Ken gets to yearn. When Barbie does wind up opting for womanhood over Barbiedom, this manifests itself as her going for a gynecologist’s appointment. It’s a funny ending (the way she’s dressed, you imagine she’s headed for a job interview) but so . . . clinical. She’s having her bits examined before she’s even had a chance to do anything with them.

At first, Barbie-as-feminism seemed like a strange throwback to five–ten years prior. To the so-unfashionable-these-days liberal, capitalist, girlboss feminism. The sort associated with Hillary Clinton or Amy Schumer and mocked with the expression yas queen. But then I realized that, no, Barbie picked her moment. She is the bimbo, reclaimed, like in all those think pieces and posts about women reclaiming “bimbo” in the name of feminism. A girly girl who is intentionally embracing a performance of frivolity. The bimbo is an unbothered, inadvertent tormentor of men. The bimbo, at least in her 2.0 form, is not catering to the male gaze but rather manipulating it. She’s all hair, heels, and cleavage but as a power move. She is playing with femininity, not a conventionally feminine woman mindlessly being herself or doing anything so pathetic as trying to get a boyfriend. It’s all really subversive and very possibly—because what isn’t?—queer. Of course Barbie is aloof where Ken’s concerned. She is too cool for man-liking and too hot to ever find herself, even for a millisecond, in the role of desirer.

As someone whose idea of feminism is women getting to look like crap while admiring good-looking men, I cannot say that bimbo feminism—Barbie feminism—speaks to me. I did however enjoy watching Simu Liu as one of the Kens. What Barbie gets wrong is that we need to be taking women’s desire for men as a given—as no less real than any other deeply ingrained urge—and working with that, rather than wishing it away. We need to be doing this even if the numbers are shrinking. Even if there’s just the one straight woman left.

Excerpted from The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men by Phoebe Maltz Bovy. Copyright © 2026 Phoebe Maltz Bovy. Published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.