A Review of The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, 288 pages, Penguin Random House (May 2026)

The central premise of Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s new book is that female heterosexuality has been misunderstood and needlessly politicised by theorists—many of them lesbians—who seem to underestimate the extent to which women find it exciting and rewarding to be around men they find attractive. At its most extreme, such commentators depict women’s motivations for seeking heterosexual relationships as purely the needs for companionship, security, or social validation. Women, in this view, don’t care about men’s looks much at all; men are the sexual sex. “My aim with The Last Straight Woman,” writes Maltz Bovy, “is to shift the focus onto what female heterosexuality is at its core: wanting men.” When baldly stated, this might seem obvious, but the book is full of examples showing how and why this gets forgotten. According to the author, people are still asking Sigmund Freud’s question, “What do women want?” And their answers are wrong in all kinds of ways.  

Heterosexuality implies complementarity, opposites attracting, and frequently requires compromises between men’s and women’s different preferences. In some quarters, where human personality is viewed as almost infinitely socially malleable and sex is seen as easily changeable, straight females are viewed as outmoded. But while it’s possible to get female heterosexuality wrong because you underestimate the differences between men’s and women’s sexual motivations, it’s also possible to get it wrong because you overestimate those sex differences, erasing the fact of straight women’s attraction to men. It is this second error that Maltz Bovy focuses on throughout The Last Straight Woman. 

The book juxtaposes the mostly academic, politicised, feminist and often highbrow portrayals of female heterosexuality, which often gloss over the crucial element of wanting men, with the raunchier, more unabashedly libidinous female characters of popular culture. On the one hand, there are the scholars and activists, the feminist theoreticians and the New York Times columnists, the navel-gazers and the gender studies students. On the other, there is a bevy of dowdy but randy women from old TV shows whom Maltz Bovy characterises as the “frumpy but horny.” Old sitcoms and television dramas are Maltz Bovy’s passion and the focus of her Substack newsletter, Close-reading the reruns. 

The Last Straight Woman

Senior Writer and Podcast Producer Iona Italia talks to writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy about her latest book: ‘The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men.’

QuilletteIona Italia

Among the progressives who make up most of the first group: the activists and theorists, stereotyped sex differences that favour men—e.g., that women are more neurotic or worse at maths—have fallen out of favour, but those that seemingly favour women have proven more resilient. Among these is the idea that women are less superficial, more likely to judge a person on their deeper atributes. In some circles, this has mutated into a belief that women don’t care about a man’s physical appearance at all, that women are simply not driven by sexual desire. This strange view, Maltz Bovy argues, is the result of a cultural shift from sex-positive feminism to the more censorious atmosphere that arose, especially at universities, in the wake of #MeToo. She writes: