Are the straights ok? I don’t mean Hormuz, where Donald Trump is currently doing his best to fully recapitalize Hezbollah. I mean the heterosexuals, and the answer is: manifestly not.
“I’m a man and the sight of other men topless in the heat offends me deeply” writes iNews opinion columnist Will Gore. I’m making an assumption about Gore’s sexual identity here, but he has also written recently about hating the beach and never having been to a gym so he’s either openly straight or an extremely closeted straight man trying to pass. Airmail’s Ashley Baker reported that Jen Rubio, Slack billionaire Stewart Butterfield’s opposite-sex wife and the cofounder of toxic girlboss luggage company Away, despite owning a ranch in New Mexico, a West Village double-wide, a house in Aspen, a beach cottage in the Hamptons, enough high-end art to comfortably decorate them all, and a standing Met Gala invite, seems determined to become an influencer anyway. Why? "This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," the straights holler as they overturn their uncle's barbeque grill and turn the Month of Pride into the Month of Shit.
Like white people every February, we straights simply cannot abide a single month that isn’t dedicated to us so we’ve somehow made this June a referendum on straight culture, such as it is, starting with Playboy editor Magdalene J. Taylor’s Pride Month-eve New York Times guessay “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men.”
Hmmm.
Straight discourse really popped off this weekend though, with an excerpt in The Walrus from Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s new book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men which asked “Are There Any Straight Women Left?” This vapid titular question is answered in the piece—only “7.2 percent of the overall population” identifies as non-heterosexual so yes, there are several left—but Bovy goes on to raise other questions, such as:
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?
A social role held by… what now? Slightly more than one third of the excerpt is devoted to analyzing The Barbie Movie as a sort of Rosetta Stone that lays bare the secrets of heterosexuality to the average heterosexual person who has been very straight for her entire life. “Every night in Barbie World is girls’ night not because the Barbies are lesbians but because they live in blissful non-sexuality,” writes Bovy. Look, I wouldn’t presume to make assumptions about anyone’s sexual identity (except for Will Gore), but if this piece had been written by a deeply closeted lesbian I can’t think of a single way it would be different.
Anyway let’s check the patriarchy-o-meter!
Wrapped in scare quotes in the context of criticism of The Barbie Movie, but this is still our “mentions of patriarchy” high score today.
IT’S WAR!!
The Straights are at WAR and a crisis is no time for paywalls, so today’s entire post is free. But if you value Tabs’s critical reporting from the front lines, please become a paid subscriber. If you upgrade now you are entitled to claim one (1) official Queer Identity. I checked with the LGBTQIA+ Supreme Command and they approved it. But this offer won’t last, so don’t delay! Subscribe to Tabs and get gay today!
Samantha Hancox-Li reviewed Bovy’s book in Liberal Currents within the context of this cycle of discourse that seems perversely determined to talk about relations between men and women without ever using the word “patriarchy”—a trend which I guess we’re supposed to call “heteropessimism.”
Bovy's positive thesis can be stated rather briefly: female heterosexuality is a lot like male heterosexuality is thought to be: it's about fucking the opposite sex…
Yet instead of asking questions like "how is this going, for the most part," Bovy spends endless pages arguing that queer girls aren't really queer, or something, or maybe they are but that doesn't make them cool or anything (Chapter 5). Or something.
Interesting! “I wouldn’t presume to make assumptions” etc., but louder. Hancox-Li’s piece concludes, correctly:
The greatest threat to heterosexuality today is not queer theorists gently reminding straight women that better things are possible. It is men who can't get out of their own way. Who are too afraid of looking girly to learn the quadratic formula. Too afraid of failure to bring themselves to try to succeed. Too afraid of being thought unmanly by weird chuds on their phone screens to respect the flesh and blood women who want to date them. Too tied up in what imaginary chads in their heads might think of them to bring themselves to be reliable partners in equal relationships.
If we want to save heterosexuality, we must save it from heterosexualism.
“Heterosexualism?” Is there another word for that?
I guess not.
Also Today in Straights: Patricia Lockwood went to a tradcath wedding and lightly roasted her entire family in the London Review of Books. Even if I wanted to, I can’t imagine how I would go about trying to critique a Patricia Lockwood essay. Her logic is the logic of dreams and her structure is observational Soviet Montage. Lockwood generates poetry the way the Hoover Dam generates power, and it would be equally fruitless to try to affect either one with literary criticism. So instead of any commentary, here are my seven favorite sentences from it:
7. “Mountain-top philosopher remains the same as the day he was born; I must assume I do as well.”
6. “One thing about men: they will maintain a slight air of superiority even when you catch them sleepwalking at 2 a.m., very carefully peeing into their Pride trainers.”
5. “Belief, or past belief, is a kind of biomarker, like grief or perversion or having studied magic.”
4. “But I suppose things are perfect before they are born.”
3. “New saints will arise in a new land and be doubted in the old; new Ladies will appear to local children.”
2. “If you have enough nieces and nephews, you understand that people are just themselves; they come out that way.”
1. “[I]f you’re pushing it that far, if extremity is its own end, why not go the rest of the way and roast an ox up there? Replace communion wine with pruno. Flavour-blast the body of Christ. Make Jesus, for promotional purposes, go on Hot Ones.”
Ok, number one is four sentences. I’m not sorry. This wasn’t even half of the sentences I originally selected, just the ones that work best without context, so I hope that convinces you to go read it.
Today in Other News: Keir Starmer has resigned; Caitlin Moran’s current fruitiness level is not yet known. Objectivist and amateur clarinetist Alan Greenspan died. He is remembered for once having been startled to encounter a poor person. Someone at the Times assigned Stephen Marche to review Cory Doctorow’s book about A.I., and I simply will not read that. You can’t make me. Graduating high school kids able to find the logical conclusion to a chain of reasoning that goes: “terrible people have all the money, so if you want to have money you will have to deal with terrible people.” Hallie Bateman also figured it out, and the answer is: “JEFF BEZOS CAN KISS MY ASS.”
Today’s Song: Ramshackle Glory, “Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist”
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