Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Are There Any Straight Women Left?

We live in a time where desiring men makes you reactionary, prudish, conventional, or even ick

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........

© The Walrus