Reclaiming Heterosexual Female Desire

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.