Can This Woman Save Heterosexuality?

How a BlueSky hate-mob inspired me to buy a Canadian feminist's book

Canadian author Phoebe Maltz Bovy

BlueSky is on fire, because a woman has dared to defend heterosexuality. If you don’t know what BlueSky is, congratulations. But let me explain that, in 2022, after Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, a bunch of liberals flounced (to use circa 2007 Internet lingo), announcing their departure from the Musk-owned Twitter (subsequently renamed X) and flocked en masse to BlueSky, where Trump supporters were persona non grata.

What has ensued is basically an online version of Kampuchea in Year Zero, as the ultra-leftist hive mind on BlueSky has relentlessly vilified and purged anyone who dissents from the collective revolutionary Will to Power. Many entirely sincere progressives, weary of the constant tone-policing and litmus-testing, have since sheepishly come crawling back onto X, finding it easier to endure the unfiltered hostility of their MAGA enemies than to survive inside the steel-cage ideological death-match environment created by their left-wing “friends” on BlueSky. Now that you know what BlueSky is, care to guess how they reacted when they learned about Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s new book, The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men?

Like I said, it’s Kampuchea in Year Zero over there, and Phoebe has exhibited bourgeois tendencies, so welcome to the Killing Fields, ma’am. The reaction was universally negative, including the “during Pride Month?” response: How dare this woman jeopardize Third Wave queer feminism by defending heterosexuality?

The BlueSky firestorm over the excerpt from Ms. Maltz Bovy’s book was sufficient to cause me to order a copy from Amazon. If the purple-haired weirdos automatically hate it, on the basis of a 23-paragraph excerpt, then surely it must be wonderful. So I paid $23.07 for a hardbound copy which I intend to review as soon as it arrives. Meanwhile, permit me to mansplain my own encounter with this issue.

“Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It” — that was the essential message of my 2016 book, Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature. What I mean by “totalitarian” is that feminism is a movement that seeks absolute power, desiring to silence all opposition or criticism, and to punish anyone who does not cooperate with its agenda. There can be no compromise with a feminist. The choice is surrender or be destroyed (but if you happen to be male, surrender might not save from from destruction anyway).

During the two years that I spent researching the subject, I read more than enough feminist literature to qualify for a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly — all the important Second Wave feminists of the 1960s and ’70s, and many lesser-known authors whose works were cited in the footnotes and bibliographies of subsequent feminist writers. Among other things, I obtained a rare copy of the 1975 book Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, published by The Furies collective. Why would I do that? In part because the founder and de facto leader of The Furies was Charlotte Bunch, an important ally of Hillary Clinton, but also because this slender 104-page volume (more pamphlet than book, really) had been cited by other feminists in academia. Bunch’s 1972 manifesto, “Lesbians in Revolt” essentially declared universal lesbianism as the end goal of feminism:

Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal, and economic basis of male supremacy. The Lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women’s “innate” need for men. ...

Our rejection of heterosexual sex challenges male domination in its most individual and common form. We offer all women something better than submission to personal oppression. We offer the beginning of the end of collective and individual male supremacy.

This argument was expanded in the 1975 essay collection Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement by Margaret Small in “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” which was cited in such later books as Separatism and Women’s Community by Dana Shugar and The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. In 2015, while researching my own book, I summarized Margaret Small’s argument:

[Small] offered a Marxist interpretation of “lesbian consciousness” as part of a “revolutionary struggle” to end women’s “oppression” in the “relationship of slavery,” as she called marriage. ...

Invoking the historical theories of Friedrich Engels (colleague of Karl Marx and co-author of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”), Small declared: “Class society arose because of the oppression of women. . . . The exploitation of all women by all men made possible the exploitation of some men by other men. The more exploitative the relationship between men and women becomes, the stronger and more vital become the institutions of male supremacy.” ...

“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” Small wrote. “In order for men to have a justification for exploiting women and an ability to enforce that exploitation, heterosexuality has to become, not merely an act in relation to impregnation, but the dominant ideology.”

Under male supremacy, Small asserted, women “become defined as appendages to men” in a system “which maintains the ideological power of men over women.”

Marriage is slavery, “heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” and if you don’t believe that, can you really call yourself a feminist? The point — and I hope that Phoebe Maltz Bovy catches the subtlety here — is that I do not actually disagree with radical feminists on this point. If you stipulate the premise of the feminist syllogism, that the condition of women is one of intolerable oppression, of which men are the perpetrators and beneficiaries, so that a revolutionary destruction of the status quo is necessary, then of course heterosexuality is incompatible with feminism. This idea was expanded by Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and given clarity by Marilyn Frye in her 1990 essay, “Willful Virgin or Do You Have to Be a Lesbian to Be a Feminist?” Then, in 1994, it was expanded into a comprehensive theory by Dee L.R. Graham in Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence and Women’s Lives. This theory was explained by Daphne Patai:

Dee Graham . . . claims to be able to explain the very existence of heterosexuality in women by invoking what she calls the “Societal Stockholm Syndrome.” In a 1994 book entitled Loving to Survive, Graham expounds her theory in minute detail. As in the famous Stockholm bank-hostage episode in 1973, in which four hostages bonded with their captors and came to see the police as their common enemy, women — so the argument goes — are eternally held hostage to men. . . . The point of all male behavior is domination . . . Heterosexual behavior thus becomes a “survival strategy” for women, as do “feminine” characteristics, which result from women’s need to ingratiate themselves with their “captors.” . . .
Graham’s thesis makes it impossible to distinguish in a meaningful way between situations of genuine abuse and the ordinary life of heterosexual women. And that is precisely the point. Men are women’s captors. Women are men’s hostages. Heterosexuality is the form of their subjugation.

Whenever I quote this stuff, I anticipate the objections of women who wish to think of themselves feminists and yet reject these arguments. Yet I must point out that Dee Graham was for decades a professor at the University of Cincinnati and Marilyn Frye was a professor at Michigan State University. There is scarcely any anthology assigned in introductory Women’s Studies courses that doesn’t include (or at least cite) Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” and as for Charlotte Bunch, she might well have been the most influential feminist in the world in the 1990s. These exponents of anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology aren’t “fringe” feminists, but rather they are the core of the movement as it exists in academia, where young acolytes to the movement are indoctrinated in Women’s Studies/Gender Studies programs.

May 1970: Lesbian feminists announce themselves as the ‘Lavender Menace.‘

Feminism is a belief system incompatible with heterosexuality, and any woman attempting to be both a feminist and a heterosexual will ultimately be forced to reckon with this inherent conflict. As a conservative Christian heterosexual man, I frankly do not care what happens to women who choose the feminist path. They have not sought my advice, or else not heeded it, and whatever misery befalls them on that particular Road to Hell is entirely their problem. My conscience is clear.

The story of how I went down the rabbit hole of radical feminism in 2014 begins with a blog post by an anonymous feminist called “Radical Wind” or “Witch Wind,” who in December 2013 flatly declared: “PIV is always rape, ok?” In case you didn’t know it, “PIV” stands for penis-in-vagina, which is to say, heterosexual intercourse and, as it turned out, “Radical Wind” got this idea from the aforementioned Dee Graham. As much laughter as her blog post inspired (“Was she dropped on her head?”), the point is that “Radical Wind” was expressing a perspective that is by no means unusual among the professors who act as academic priestesses of the feminist cult. Consider this quote from Diane Richardson of England’s Newcastle University:

“The view that heterosexuality is a key site of male power is widely accepted within feminism. Within most feminist accounts, heterosexuality is seen not as an individual preference, something we are born like or gradually develop into, but as a socially constructed institution which structures and maintains male domination, in particular through the way it channels women into marriage and motherhood.”

Feminism is a movement against “male power” and “male domination,” and if “heterosexuality is a key site … which structures and maintains” this oppressive power, how can a woman be both feminist and heterosexual? The logic is clear.

It should be unnecessary for me to say that I reject this anti-heterosexual dogma, but this is not my problem, it’s a feminist problem. If the logic of a political movement leads to an undesirable outcome, then you must oppose, rather than support, that movement, and yet the siren song of identity politics convinces many women that they must support feminism, no matter how much the movement’s goals may negatively affect their own lives. Witness how Phoebe Maltz Bovy struggles:

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. ...

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.

Might as well say, “We need to be looking for Nazi approaches to Jewish identity.”

Exactly why would any feminist, as Phoebe Maltz Bovy asserts herself to be, desire to justify or defend heterosexuality, given that feminism rests upon the belief that (a) all men are oppressors, and (b) all women are victims of male oppression? Feminists constantly denounce men for anything and everything, and hence the question: What is it about men — any man — that a feminist should find desirable? It’s impossible.

The problem, you see, is that many women wish to claim “feminist” as some sort of honorific, a credential that qualifies them to speak on behalf of “feminism,” without bothering to define the term in any meaningful way. But this obfuscatory method ignores all the work done by the acknowledged leaders of the feminist movement in terms of developing a theoretical concept of women’s oppression.

Was Charlotte Bunch wrong? Was Adrienne Rich mistaken? Were all these eminent feminist intellectuals so stupid as to overlook a “feminist approach to heterosexuality” that Phoebe Maltz Bovy has belatedly discovered? Or is it the case, as I believe, that no such “feminist approach” is possible? If you want to be a feminist, fine — go be a feminist — but why would you expect any man to participate in a political project which labels him as an oppressor and calls for his destruction?

What sort of weird sado-masochistic dynamic exists between heterosexual feminists and the men whose companionship they crave? The heterosexual feminist woman in the role of Bitch-Goddess Dominatrix with her whimpering submissive “male feminist” pet? Or is it the other way around — the allegedly empowered feminist woman tearfully begging, “oppress me, you brute”? Either way, it’s sick and kinky.

“The personal is political,” Second Wave feminists declared, but why does the personal have to be so confused and pathetic? As I wait for Amazon to deliver my copy of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s book, I hope it includes an answer to that question.