Off Christopher Street

In this episode we talk about gay men and women: friendships, commonalities, and the often overlooked sexual tensions. We’re joined by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who deals with some of these issues in her book, The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men, from bachelorettes at gays bars to straight girls on Grindr to the women who fall in love with their gay besties. We talk about how some of these themes appeared in the past, in Christopher Street, and also how Phoebe uses them in her book to think about our cultural understandings of gender and desire. We talk about some famous intellectual straight women who were problematically horny for gay men and some gay men who were oblivious to the fact that their women friends were horny for them. We recover the core commonality that gay men and straight women have—being horny for men—and note how new cultural ideas about sexual fluidity and queerness mistakenly suggest that gender doesn’t matter in who we desire, leading to discourses that are strangely detached from reality.

Chapters
(00:00) Introducing the last straight woman
(08:40) Being bloggers and bad grad students
(12:39) Gay men and straight women in Christopher Street
(20:55) The fake lesbian straight woman who got Me Tooed
(24:18) Are straight women and gay men really platonic friends?
(31:39) How we came to think all women are queer
(37:34) Phoebe’s concept of “frumpy but horny”
(43:02) Are that many people really bisexual?
(59:38) You can’t figure out your identity online

Follow Off Christopher Street on Instagram for video clips from our episodes and subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and bonus content.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is an editor at the Canadian Jewish News and a columnist for the Globe and Mail. She co-hosts the podcast Feminine Chaos with Kat Rosenfield and writes on Substack. Her new book, The Last Straight Woman, was released in May 2026.

Mentioned

Creators and Guests

Host
Blake Smith
Blake Smith is a historian, writer, and translator. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, American Affairs, Tablet, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.
Host
David Sessions
David Sessions is a historian and journalist. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Point, Dissent, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others.
Guest
Phoebe Maltz Bovy

What is Off Christopher Street?

Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip through the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (00:00.118)
There is this way that people talk about like the post-labels future and how wouldn't it be great if we were beyond labels? And also the whole sort of isn't everybody just a little bit bi? And I think that maybe one reason that my writing on this topic, book included, has had a disproportionately positive reception from gay and lesbian readers, is that I'm saying, no, some people just ha are monosexuals.

And, you know, even if they can find within themselves the slightest glimmer of fluidity, which not all even can, monosexuals are real and that the minute you start saying th that you start doing all this sort of like post label stuff, it's not just that you're saying that straight people can have same sex experiences or desires. You're saying basically that gay people don't exist and you horseshoeed yourself into something not so great.

David Sessions (00:53.774)
This is Off Christopher Street, the podcast about the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I'm David Sessions and I am joined as always by my co-host and fellow historian Blake Smith. In this episode, we talk about gay men and straight women.

Friendships, commonalities, and the often overlooked sexual tensions. We have the perfect guest for this topic, our friend Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who deals with some of these issues in her very smart and funny new book, "The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men", from bachelorettes at gay bars to straight girls on Grindr to the women who fall in love with their gay besties. We talk about how some of these themes appeared in the past in Christopher Street and also how Phoebe uses them in her book to think about our cultural understandings of gender and desire.

Phoebe shows how what she calls the "Ban Men" feminism of the Me Too era curdled into heteropessimism and cultural assumptions that women never really sexually desire men, either because they're somewhat asexual or because they're all latently queer. We talk about how these new cultural ideas about sexual fluidity and queerness mistakenly suggest that gender doesn't matter in who we desire, and lead to discourses that are strangely detached from reality. Before we get started,

A reminder to follow us on Instagram at @ChristopherStreetMag, where we're now posting video clips from our episodes if you want to see our handsome faces. We are also for the first time posting a full video version of this episode on YouTube and Substack, which we'll link to in the show notes. You can also subscribe to our newsletter at ChristopherStreetMag.com where you get our essays and commentary that accompany the episode. And don't forget to hit the plus button or whatever it looks like on your podcast app so that you get new episodes.

right on your home screen as soon as they drop. So with that out of the way, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Phoebe Maltz Bovy about the girls and the gays.

David Sessions (03:30.552)
All right, we are back. Blake is here.

Blake Smith (03:33.24)
Hello listeners. Hello, David.

David Sessions (03:35.34)
We are getting in one last episode before Pride Month ends, so we'll have three total. We have talked about all the important subjects. We have talked about love. We have talked about politics and parades. And we have one important topic left, which is

Blake Smith (03:50.372)
David, where are the women?

David Sessions (03:53.25)
We ha which is straight girls. And to help us out with that, we have found a real live straight lady who happens to also be one of our favorites and an exciting guest in her own right, Phoebe Maltz Bovy. Welcome to the show.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (04:08.344)
Thanks so much for having me and during Pride Month at that.

David Sessions (04:11.65)
Well yes, too. I think Blake said in a in the earlier episode that we should talk about because Pride seemed like it was for straight girls or or single people and their straight girlfriends. so maybe it is maybe it is slightly a pride topic. We've we've been stretching the definition of Pride topics. But this is a first in a number of ways. Obviously, it is our first woman friend of the pod, is our first international correspondent.

Blake Smith (04:38.462)

David Sessions (04:40.184)
From from the country where we have the second most listeners, perhaps unsurprisingly, Canada, which congrats on Canada's first World Cup match victory ever yesterday. Are you...

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (04:54.978)
I take full responsibility for credit.

David Sessions (04:57.134)
Are you into that or is that just something that's like happening in the background?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (05:01.142)
I will watch soccer if it's happening in the background for the on brand reason of what the soccer players look like, but I'm not like a big sports person. But I'm happy for Canada.

David Sessions (05:13.164)
Same. I love I love the World Cup, but I am not normally a sports follower, I would say. But we just we just learned before we started recording that despite your Canadian inhabitants and jobs, you are not actually Canadian.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (05:26.712)
Well, I am Canadian, but that's recent. I am recently Canadian. So I'm from New York City originally, but moved to Canada because of my husband's work in twenty fifteen. So I'm not I can't even claim to be one of these fleeing Trump people. This was pre-Trump.

David Sessions (05:43.372)
Which that's fine. You don't want to be one of those.

Blake Smith (05:46.222)
Phoebe throughout her career has been sometimes to her disadvantage prescient. You know, she had this great twenty seventeen book, like critiquing the way that people self narrative like issues of privilege, which came out too early to be critical of wokeness. You know, she moved to Canada too early to resist. She critiqued wokeness too early, but she's here right on time.

David Sessions (06:10.382)
It is also also a first in the sense that for the first time we have not just two but three French PhD havers. Although you are you are literature, not history, right?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (06:22.178)
Well, mine is literature and French studies. 'Cause this was this thing at NYU. I applied to do history and French studies, but because my undergrad was in French literature, they only admitted me if I would go to literature, which

David Sessions (06:37.454)
That's right. I think I also maybe so I also went to NYU but for a masters program and and then I think I applied for the like history and French studies. I forgot they had those like joint programs there.

Blake Smith (06:49.206)
And and you did a very cultural history like dissertation. It was a very like you know, like for me like proper historical, like familiar sort of thing.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (06:57.298)
I was gonna say, like I had really wanted to do history and basically what I learned once I got there is through French studies I could pretty much do history. The only problem was that I had to then the job associated it with it was teaching French language classes, which nobody should have given me that job. That was not like what's a subjunctive? Like I know it when I see it, but that's yeah.

David Sessions (07:18.36)
Always wanted to teach a French language class just for the hell of it. I'm not sure I would have actually enjoyed it, but anyway, perhaps before we go any further, we should introduce you proper properly. Phoebe is one of our favorite Substack writers. She is the co-host of the podcast Feminine Chaos, which is you might see it think of as our straight lady sister podcast. So I wanted to say it in the episode so that it gets in the AI transcript and

Spotify links us together. So it will say, hopefully, when people go to their Spotify homepage, it will bring up your podcast and it will say for listeners of off Christopher Street and maybe your audio book too, which we've had it do that for other guests. Anyway, where was I? She is also opinion editor at the Canadian Jewish News, a columnist for the Globe and Mail, and most importantly for what we're talking about today, the author of the very smart and very funny and brand new book, The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men. So congrats on the book. I could not put it down. I I enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed like rereading parts of it for our conversation today.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (08:27.298)
Thank you so much. That's such a kind introduction. And I had the same thought actually listening to your podcast. I was thinking like, this is if Kat and I were gay men, basically. Yeah. Like I I feel like it felt familiar, but with that twist. Yeah.

Blake Smith (08:40.524)
I should I should just add my own little little plug. Like I don't want to overpraise Phoebe because then, you know, the the episode will perhaps not live up to the following promise. But I think like she's just w she's one of my favorite writers. Like I I love her prose style. And she's someone who somehow was not ruined by grad school, by like the academic training which teaches you how to write really badly and defensively and complicatedly. And like there's so much bad kind of blogging era

and more recent Substack era, like trying to be breezy, personal, fun writing about contemporary culture. But Phoebe is one of the very few people who I think actually does it in a cool, fun, smart way.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (09:21.934)
you. I was worried you would say that I wasn't breezy at all and that that's what I bring that's different, just lack of breeze.

David Sessions (09:30.112)
I'm curious though, like I was reading on one of your old posts, I think the other day, 'cause you linked to it. Why you know, how that came about? Like, was it was it because you were already blogging or already like writing, doing public writing before or during grad school? You know, I kind of see that divide where like people are, even if they're not bad writers, but like academics who want to do that, but they just kind of don't get the discourse or don't get like how to do it.

And for me it was a very obvious cause I worked in journalism and I just kept doing that the whole time I was in grad school. So so that made sense. But I was I'm curious how how that is for other people.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (10:05.388)
Yeah. well for me it was that I I started with opinion writing. I was a columnist and the opinion editor at the Chicago Maroon, at the University of Chicago's undergrad paper. And at that time I also started a blog and that was always just kind of going in parallel and was always the thing I was more interested in. So I got a PhD in French basically because doing so meant that I had a stipend and could live in New York and not worry about like

health insurance and a sort of pretty basic but not nothing salary, you know. So I could just write on top of that. And then the writing was always what I wanted to do. It just took a really long time to kind of fully switch over. So that was the only thing I was doing. But yeah, yeah. But I think it helped though in terms of just like close reading things, you know, even if what I'm close reading are a lot of TV shows and so forth. But yeah, during grad school I would do things like watch the Hills. You know what I mean? Like I wasn't necessarily the most

I may not have been the best grad student in that regard.

David Sessions (11:06.286)
I'm a huge believer in doing journalism first and then also in being a bad grad student. I think that makes the best kind of post the be the best like non academic PhD have her writer.

Blake Smith (11:17.848)
Phoebe in fact one of our great writers on TV. Like anytime you write about Frasier, I am there for it. And I was delighted David sent me something I I was supposed to get, but did not like the galleys for your book. So I've only read like, you know, the most relevant gay stuff that that David was sending me. But you have a recap of Natalie on The Facts of Life, which I hadn't thought about in years and years, but was so perfect. Like like even just a little paragraph on like Natalie and Blair's relationship on the facts of life.

And what becomes a real life, Natalie. Like the way that Phoebe writes about old TV, what happens to people from old TV is just delicious.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (11:56.494)
Thank you. And you can get a galley. I'm sorry. I don't know why I will follow up sometimes and I can just like email you also PDF. But yes, that's sorry, the galley thing is frustrating. But yes, Natalie from The Facts of Life, definitely not somebody I'd given that much thought to, and then suddenly for this book, I feel like I know everything about the character and the woman who portrays her.

Blake Smith (12:00.162)
No I also I

Blake Smith (12:18.968)
Somehow I think at least once a year about this wonderful episode where she accidentally buys a bunch of bongs. And this was like this was like eighty five, eighty six or something. This was like, you know, like Nancy Reagan had called up spiders and said, you need to address drugs. And poor Natalie got such a world of massive bong hits.

David Sessions (12:39.15)
Well, should we I want to talk about some of the stuff in Phoebe's book, but I wanna I don't wanna jump into it before we have people have any idea of like what it's about or what we're talking about. Blake, do you d I actually have come in deliberately not knowing when this essay was published that we're gonna talk about today. I know it's it looks like it's one of the 70s covers.

Blake Smith (13:00.928)
Yes, so we're we're here to talk about yet another PhD haver who branches into journalism, Seymour Kleinberg, who in the October-November 1979 issue of Christopher Street dared to ask, can women and straight women and gay men be friends? The answer is yes, kind of. So Kleinberg, we've talked about him before. he's born in 1933, so he's like middle-aged here, he's in his mid 40s. And

The cover has has gay men, has a gay guy, women in various, you know, stabbing each other in the back, hanging out, husband being sort of a third wheel, like all the scenarios. And then Kleinberg in the article is gonna walk us through like his own life and some experiences he's had with women. I was telling Phoebe this this really reminded me of the way that many "Sex & the City" episodes have this sort of mise en abime where Carrie is

both writing an essay about and addressing in her real life some bullshit question. Like I d I don't know what we should call these things, but like, can women in their thirties be friends with women in their twenties?

David Sessions (14:11.488)
You yeah, you're what you said in your what you said in your email, "the great nonsense questions." I liked that.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (14:16.822)
Well it always it's proceeded with the I couldn't help but wonder, right?

Blake Smith (14:20.62)
Yes, yes. I think I could not help but wonder Which is what they should have called this.

David Sessions (14:25.272)
So yes, we have talked about just for reference, we have talked about Seymour Kleinberg in the masculinity episode in the past. we were it's perhaps like relevant background that, you know, I don't think it comes out so this is more this is more at his p about his personal and psychological experience. But maybe one important thing to keep in mind from the past episode was that he's very he's very like

optimistic or his kind of vision of gay politics is an alliance between gay w gay men and women, which you know, perhaps all women are feminists, but he's very much and you you sort I think this essay kind of gives like a psychological dimension to like who he is as a person. He's like kind of a he he's not a really a liberated gay. He's kind of like still angsty about it and you know maybe

Blake Smith (15:19.884)
you who's been in psychoanalysis for many years so you know he can only be so relaxed.

David Sessions (15:25.58)
Yes, and so his you know, what he thinks and maybe the background of some of the what he says about about gay men and straight women is that that this kind of friendship is a you know, they're both oppressed by men. This is this is a possibility of this this kind of alliance. Or this is this is the way he seems to want to be a gay. He really hates the later on he really hates the macho, you know, gay clone culture.

And he wants he likes this kind of sixties androgynous ideal deal of going beyond gender and beyond gender roles and sees that as kind of a the basis of a possible political alliance between gay men and women. But we have already had a lot to say about you know what we think of Seymour Kleinberg as a writer and thinker. So Phoebe, I'm very curious to hear like just what was your first reaction to this, to reading this essay.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (16:20.15)
Well, I had no preconceived notions of who Seymour Kleinberg did I say this? Yeah, Seymour Kleinberg is or was I

David Sessions (16:31.502)
Which is great. We know we love that.

Blake Smith (16:33.316)
He passed in twenty twenty. He was a COVID guy.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (16:35.704)
COVID. Oh boy. Okay. Then I will assume I can speak without him listening. This yeah, I mean it it struck me the year was the first thing I noticed because so much has been said, written about, sort of commodified even about like the straight woman who has like the gay male friend as an accessory, the chihuahua handbag, sort of Paris Hilton era, like the whole like "my gays" phenomenon.

bachelorettes in gay bars, all of this would have come so much later, right? So this is it it was interesting just to see all of this unpacked when there wouldn't have been this pre-existing template for it. Because when I for my book was reading about, like there was this book that I write a bit about that I thought of well a lot while reading this essay, one of at least two books called Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. The book I'm thinking of is from 2007 and it

It's sort of even then it all felt kind of like a new topic. In the nineties it felt like kind of a new topic. So then to see this from even earlier sort of presented as like, imagine this as a thing to think about was interesting. And there were parts that resonated and seemed still true, and parts that just didn't seem at all relevant to the world we live in. Like I do think there that his analysis of there being some gay men who are just like happy that they never have to deal with a woman.

is extremely accurate. That is a type of person. There are straight men who would love to never have to deal with a woman. There are straight women who would love to never have to deal with a man. It's not like a gay men thing. It's just some people are like that. And if you're a gay man, you have the option, you know, more so of doing that. So I thought that the d divide between like gay men who want women in their lives and who don't seemed both accurate and not not in any way really specific to gay men.

The stuff about like the amount of secrecy he felt probably accurately in that context he had to have about his own life with his female friends didn't seem entirely of this mo it seemed more like of that moment, I would say. Like I think

David Sessions (18:50.966)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I actually think a lot of a lot of this is the timing of this, especially his no you know, so this comes out in '79 and Christopher Street, the book comes out in 1980. So that's a that's a little bit later. But the the friendship, the central female friendship that he's describing, his f he his friendship with Sonia, it was quite er you know, she dies in 1968, so she dies like before Stonewall. A lot of it seems to be happening in the 1950s, which is just a totally different vibe in terms of

you know, where people or the country is at with homosexuality. And I think so that I think plays into his, you know, that that relationship and and the way that he thinks about gay men and women. so it's it's almost dated even for the time that he's writing it, I I thought.

Blake Smith (19:38.06)
Right. So this is like in so he's born in the early thirties, goes to grad school in the fifties, has this really intense intellectual and kind of sublimated, erotic relationship with this Holocaust survivor, Sonia, which is like this feels very like, you know, a made for TV movie. And somehow he at least is constellating them as being somehow the same and like marked with a tragic singular destiny. it's very like he, you know, he has

The the Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice has not yet come out, but he's somehow, you know, projecting this onto her. There's kind of glamour of being this European person, this Holocaust survivor. If you would have ever read Randall Jarrell's "Pictures from an Institution," this like campus novel where like a young scholar is fascinated by Hannah Arendt, basically. Like Hannah Arendt is is a a professor at like this little college, and that like, she plays the piano.

And like knows multiple languages and the Holocaust. This is all somehow very it's very glamorous in this weird, like young gay boy fascinated by old like it's it's like "Auntie Mame" but tragic.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (20:45.666)
Yes. I was thinking it's it's like that. It's also like what maybe Avital Ronell would have liked to have been happening.

David Sessions (20:53.953)
Yeah.

Blake Smith (20:55.768)
So, okay, so oh my God, real talk. You know, I'm finishing this Michael Denneny book and the second book project is supposed to be looking at gay men and their relationships with certain powerful women who are like obsessed with gay men and homosexuality. And it's supposed to run Sontag to Ronell, and l'm trying to think about, like, how did Ronell ever get framed as a lesbian, because she is a very horny straight woman and has been since day one.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (21:28.462)
Okay.

David Sessions (21:29.806)
Yeah, so you don't know the whole lore? She like, dated Derrida's son.

Blake Smith (21:37.422)
She approached him as a grad student, she's like a Germanist, but she goes off to Paris for a while to get into Derrida's circle. She introduces Derrida to like contemporary German philosophy. Like she really hooks him on Heidegger. She introduces herself to him at a party as "Metaphysics." So it's very like mysterious woman. And then she starts having sex with his teenage son. She like picks him up from high school.

And Derrida doesn't know this. So she's like schtupping the son while courting the father.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (22:09.514)
This is very Emily in Paris, but also like the plot where Emily sleeps with like the teenage boy and doesn't realize it and

Blake Smith (22:18.188)
Ronell should sue the Emily in Paris people.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (22:20.694)
think she should do that. That would be a really good thing for her to do. I did not know this backstory. I just all I knew was the more recent bit where she just sees an attractive gay man and

David Sessions (22:32.318)
She has the dubious distinction of being one of the few women to be Me Too-ed.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (22:37.78)
Exactly. I mean I I think about the story and write about it a lot just 'cause it's so bonkers and the the cherry on top really is that she's a lesbian and it really does stretch the bounds of what lesbian can mean.

Blake Smith (22:50.944)
Right. I mean, so one, Nimrod Reitman, the guy she she Me Too'd, was hot. Like is still hot. And you know, I read some when I first like saw their emails, I didn't understand that Nimrod was a name that a contemporary Israeli might have, and I thought it was a weird, like sort of humiliating term of endearment. But his dissertation, which I I have not yet read, but this, you know, will be part of the is like on like maternal figures in German literature. So like there there's something happening here. There's something there's there's more to be said about the Ronell case and about what it means about fake lesbian straight women.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (23:32.098)
Yeah, I mean I think it says something about that. So the reason it was sort of in my mind when writing this book was like it's the fake lesbian thing, but then that gets very much taken seriously as if there's something queer happening. And that makes it therefore not the most garden-variety straight thing, except with the twist that it's the woman who's the harasser. But also I think there is something that comes up

in this essay and in that book that I mentioned and just in other sort of writing on this topic where you get like from a gay male perspective, this is a friendship with only maybe like some sort of ambiguous tensions and so forth. And then sometimes, but not always, from a woman's perspective, this is just a man, and sometimes a man she's interested in.

Blake Smith (24:18.594)
So one thing I love in general about like Phoebe's writing and perspective is that it's very normal in her writing and then she thus reminds us that somehow it's not very normal in our collective thinking that women are horny. That like straight women are horny and that like that's part of them being straight and is not actually weird and transgressive and complicated. And yeah, so in this relationship like Kleinberg and Sonia.

Kleinberg is imagining that they're both these like marginal he doesn't have access to the word queer, but sort of queer, singular, eccentric figures that like her Europeanness, her being a survivor, this makes her this like exceptional individual. He gets really disappointed later when she like marries and becomes a housefrau and has kids. Like this is less glamorous. And he doesn't seem to recognize that she's horny for him and like she tries a couple times to cure him of homosexuality by like, by fucking him.

Which, you know, in the fifties, sure, like maybe a woman, you know, she might think she could do today. And he like he only very intermittently and occasionally like has the thought that like, right, like she has a sexuality.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (25:30.22)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's really important. And also for like why does she marry? Is it like he seems to interpret it as like defecting to the squares, you know, as versus like I mean, I could give from my own life. When I was like early high school, I had a lot of crushes on the only boys in my school who would talk to girls. What did those boys have in common? I didn't get anywhere. I was also fourteen, fifteen. I wouldn't have known what to do if it had gotten anywhere by the time I was like sixteen, seventeen.

that did not interest me anymore. I was more for the ones who would potentially like me back. You know what I mean? And I think maybe on a different kind of timescale, that's what Sonia is experiencing. Like she realizes this is not gonna happen with this man. And then she goes for one it will happen with and it's not that she wants like a conventional life. It's that she wants to get laid. And that's yeah.

David Sessions (26:27.022)
Well, I'm glad you brought this with the I'm glad we brought this up first because I kind of thought that like so you say in in in the g chapter of your book that it's called very amusingly, "Are Straight Women Gay Men?", which is it's an amazing chapter. I loved it. Even the subtitles are fun funny. I love "Grindr and the Single Girl." but you say,

"The expected relationship between straight women and gay men is that of platonic friends. They are meant to be easy friendships, devoid of the competitiveness that can exist between female friends, but also of sexual tension." And I kind of thought, like one of the things I thought yes, I think that is that is true. Like if you ask most people today, they would just assume that this is kind of the the gay male male.

Straight woman relationship is just a kind of a natural fit. It's super easy and simple. It's just automatically, you know, platonic and non-sexual. But I kind of thought it was interesting that he doesn't assume that, or he does at least address kind of the possibility of sexual tension. And I wondered if I wonder if did you agree with that or did you because he says like right at the beginning, he says platonic friendships between men and women where sexual issues remain ambiguous and complicated.

And then later he gives this kind of like philosophical description where he says "in these friendships, once the relationship is matured, the erotic is transformed yet subtly retained. Presuming those involved are old enough or wise enough to refrain from experimentation for its own sake. The friendship then becomes imbued with a tenderness that is borrowed from romanticism, but purged of sexual tension by resignation, if not regret." So like resignation and

And regret are both, you know, not fun emotions. so it he he kind of at least to me, he kind of ad acknowledged that there was a you know, a potential there was something ling there could be something lingering there that is like could still be a bit painful or that there was always kind of a charge, which I thought that was different than what most people would say. so I was curious how you read that.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (28:29.4)
Well, I mean, I think that asymmetry still feels a little bit missing. And I think that that is just going back to like what Blake was saying, this kind of blind spot about in the culture, not just in this essay, but just sort of in the culture about women as desiring also. Because it just there's never like it's not that there's tension on both sides. It's that there's one person who could potentially. And I mean, I like the sort of zoomed out idea of like, can all these different groups be

you know, can all these different types of people be friends? It's a silly question because obviously, yes, people have all kinds of friendships. Not everybody wants to sleep with everybody of the sex or sexes they want to sleep with, right? You know what I mean? Like I don't really whatever, I don't find that such a complicated question, but I think wha it's it would be asymmetric if a woman is attracted to that particular man. I mean, you get this also with all this discourse about like

David Sessions (29:11.896)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (29:26.838)
Why are straight women in gay bars? Why are straight women doing anything involving like

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (29:36.554)
Yes. And I should say I don't think there are hordes of straight women on Grindr. To my knowledge personally never have been. It would have never occurred to me. But it's an interesting topic because like the question is, well, the ones who are, what are they doing there? And I think people sort of go out of their way to find either like asexual explanations, like it's about wanting to be safe. It's or or these kind of it's queer. Like the idea that it's queer when women watch heated rivalry.

David Sessions (29:41.39)
I don't either.

Blake Smith (30:06.188)
Which I I don't know.

David Sessions (30:07.448)
that's that's the way I've been like summarizing the argument of your book to other people is that that straight women have been discoursed out of existence into beating either asexual or latently queer. Is that is that a great like one sentence summary?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (30:21.506)
Better than I can do. I'm not very good at the one sentence summaries, so

Blake Smith (30:24.578)
I mean not not to be inordinately autobiographical, but this is making me think like, you know, my own liberal arts college days, which like in many ways liberal arts college is a poor setup for the rest of your life. Like my my life since has not had the sort of sexual and social dimensions that it did during those four years. But that was the only time that I slept with women, women who like knew of course that I was gay and were like, for whatever reason, like interested in me with like including that, and who like

you know, approached me and like like one girl at a party said I was I was her physical ideal and so then I felt like, okay, well, somehow that's the case. like no man has ever said that to me, like in in those words at least. And in none of these cases I think was the flattery can get you very far. So ladies, I don't know that with me it would work anymore and it won't be a great time, I can promise you. But in in part I was thinking in those days, like twenty twenty one,

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (31:09.496)
Flattery can get you far in life.

Blake Smith (31:23.678)
I'm doing something really queer and radical. This is really subversive. Like this is really like fucking with gender and sexual systems. This is so liberatory. And now looking back, I think I was just a guy having sex with a woman. So that really like that did not

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (31:39.776)
Okay, so I have to say something like this because there is this way that people talk about like the post labels future and how wouldn't it be great if we were beyond labels and also the whole sort of isn't everybody just a little bit bi? And I think that maybe one reason that my writing on this topic, book included, has had like a disproportionately positive reception from gay and lesbian readers.

is that I'm saying, no, some people just ha are monosexuals and, you know, even if they can find within themselves the slightest glimmer of, you know, fluidity, which like not all even can, monosexuals are real. And that the minute you start saying th that you start doing all this sort of like post-label stuff, it's not just that you're saying that straight people

can have same sex experiences or desires, you're saying basically that gay people don't exist and you've horseshoed yourself into something not so great.

David Sessions (32:41.716)
Yeah, that is that is exactly how I would was thinking in my head of kind of what's similar about what you're doing to what we're doing is that, you know, den not denying that the all the gradations exist or that maybe we should have words for them, but the or that that we should be able to talk about people who just have an identity based on being attracted to, you know, attracted to men, whether we're gay men or straight women, that that is probably most of us and you know, this trying to

get rid of all labels, it makes it difficult to discuss like things that we ought to discuss, which I think is like the same same question same issue that you're addressing. If we if we have to kind of stay in this discursive, you know, construction that is abstract from most people's experience.

Blake Smith (33:27.47)
Well, and and I don't know, to be sort of a like theory brain for a minute. We used to have like a dumb Freudian model where like sexuality and agency are masculine, and then like how women can have sexuality and be people is sort of a problem within like Freudian psychoanalysis. And, you know, more recently, like in the past thirty years, we have a a model where like sexuality itself becomes like sort of queer, transgressive, anti normative, which then raises the question of like

Well, what are straight people doing? like or are straight people queer somehow when they're horny, somehow becomes a question in the way that like are women somehow men when they're horny? And the answer has to be no to both, right? It has it has to be that like straight women exist and are horny.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (34:15.105)
Yeah, I mean there is this kind of baseline idea that a straight woman lacks an inner life and is just this kind of passive entity, right? And that's why I talked about this actually with Meghan Daum on her podcast because she's always had sort of more of an affinity for like lesbian culture. And she's she wrote an essay that got people mad at her a bunch of years ago called Honorary Dyke.

Where she even like has a relationship with a woman and it just like she's not attracted to women, but she just really, really wishes she were a lesbian. I can't apparently

David Sessions (34:48.13)
This is a huge thing, people just wishing they had a sexuality that they don't.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (34:52.15)
Well, apparently and in all directions. But yeah, so I've never had that. What I did have though, and sort of tried to explore in this book, is feeling like there's a description of what straight women are like, realizing that's not me, hearing women are not visual creatures, women don't have don't divide the world into "would" and "wouldn't" categories. That's the thing men do. And then thinking like, why do I

notice why do I know who's the hottest guy in the bus if that's the case? Like, am I not a woman? I don't ask this in a like genuine like but the thing is like I I don't feel like something other than a woman. So you know what I mean? Like the whole point is that that I am. But that's why that's kind of where that chapter in part came from.

Blake Smith (35:37.722)
This is also like you know, I felt a bit weird or guilty as I've been working on the Denneny book, speculating. So like he's not out in his twenties and has, I don't know, sort of a weird relationship with a couple of women in his life. So like one, he he starts this relationship with Arendt, is his PhD advisor, where she like kind of is flirting with him. He's her busboy at the faculty dining club and she starts like chatting him up and then begins going to lunch.

during his shifts so she can like keep talking to him. And, you know, Arendt, like we don't necessarily think of her as a very horny woman, but she did in fact have lots of affairs during her life. She was both like

David Sessions (36:19.54)
I do think I think of her as a horny woman. Like she was very

Blake Smith (36:22.36)
Okay, okay. I mean I think it's right on German TV with like the cigarette teeth, you know, and like

David Sessions (36:27.224)
I mean yeah, I mean she was like sleeping with Heidegger when she was a grad student, so like

Blake Smith (36:31.482)
she was sleeping with Heidegger. I mean she continued like throughout her her like you know forties, fifties. No, no, I mean not just hung up on Heidegger. She like having sex with a lot of people. And where was this going? But y you know, I don't think they like actually did it, but after like right after she dies, he writes an essay for the New York Review of Books that they you know publish about her as an erotic thinker, like comparing her to Socrates and talking about her like

David Sessions (36:36.118)
I never got over it. Yeah.

David Sessions (36:41.868)
Yes.

Blake Smith (37:01.248)
intensely erotic personal charge, which the New York Review of Books, I guess, was not ready for. And I'd been thinking about this in terms of like just like Denneny being taken by a powerful older woman and, you know, being like, you know, maybe swept up in this. But I hadn't thought about like, right, of course it's also very pleasurable if you're like, you know, a sixty year old woman, you can have like some twenty year old college guy fascinated by you. Like, of course, that's very exciting.

Yeah. And normal and not in fact queer.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (37:34.098)
Well what I was gonna say, so this also not to be that person bringing up her book a lot in a podcast, but I'm gonna do it. It's yeah, yeah. That's kind of where my concept of frumpy but horny enters into it, because not to call a sixty-year-old Hannah Arendt frumpy. I think it's fair. She I've from the photos I've seen, that seems fair. But there is this myth that

David Sessions (37:41.87)
It's about your book.

Blake Smith (37:54.533)
She's a frump.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (38:03.788)
Female sexuality, female heterosexuality is about fundamentally wanting to be perceived of as beautiful. And that that's what women get off on. That is it. That is the whole thing. It is a man finds you beautiful, wants to have sex with you. That is what turns you on. And then it makes it hard to explain these situations where you have a woman who is enjoying the presence of a man she finds attractive who she knows does not find her attractive. And

You see this a lot in a bunch of TV shows that I write about, probably more than anybody wants to hear about. Doesn't really bother me, unfortunately. But that scenario sounds kind of like

Blake Smith (38:43.534)
I I I've seen you thinking about, you know, the the young Lena Dunham and her weird sort of erotic self humiliation on the public stage, where it seemed like also maybe she's getting off on framing herself publicly as a horny, frumpy woman. But of course, men throughout time, you think of like Harvey Weinstein, you know, like part of the sexual pleasure on his end must be that he knows he's gross. And nevertheless, he's so powerful that you will

Yeah, cough in front of you or whatever.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (39:16.974)
Yeah, I mean that's supposed to be outside the bounds of the female experience. And I'm not like it's it's kind of a hard thing to write about because I'm not saying first of all, I'm not saying that that's what my own existence is. And I think that's a hard thing. When I've written about frumpy but horny, people are like, but why are you, you know, like a normal married lady who doesn't, you know, whatever, seduce busboys or something, you know, like and it's all like it's it's not that it's autobiography and also

It's not that I'm advising anyone to do something. You know what I'm I'm not saying that like the purest form of straight relationship is to be a really unattractive woman who's going after a man who either is a straight man who's not interested in you or a gay man who would never be intri whatever. I'm not saying that I'm saying that that's just a part of female sexuality too. That's all.

David Sessions (40:04.866)
Which I think you have like excavated as a cultural type from, you know, T V and and pop culture in a really like persuasive way that like this is a recurring, you know, thank you theme that comes up almost like unconsciously in a way like

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (40:18.222)
Just it's so hard to write about it though because people don't like I've gotten responses to the book that have been kind of like this one's for the ugly girls and it's like I mean maybe, but like that's not really the point. But yeah.

Blake Smith (40:32.334)
I mean, frumpy women are also getting I mean, Agnes Callard at our own I don't know if you have you've written about her, if she's written about you.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (40:40.672)
I I had a whole passage in my book that I had to just take out for a length basically and then I think ended up blogging at some point where I compared the New Yorker profiles of her and of Martha Nussbaum. Yes. Because

Blake Smith (40:53.71)
Shel Adeep is a brilliant terrorist. She

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (40:55.872)
Yes. Both are about these, you know, brilliant philosopher ladies at the University of Chicago who really love men. Both of them really, really love men. One of them with Martha Nussbaum, it's like about her Botox. It's about how she is so disciplined. She was like jogging while pregnant or something like this.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (41:19.866)
Cool. but then with Agnes Callard, I mean, she's, you know, clearly not somebody who's trying to look as much like Kim Kardashian as possible. And yet she is doing absolutely fine for herself. And she really just in her existence, from what I can observe of it from afar, she really decouples the whole being conventionally desirable. I feel bad. I feel because you can't talk about this also when with real people. That's another reason I I think I cut it from the book, was because

This is a lot easier to talk about with like TV characters 'cause you quickly run into the whole thing of like real T But maybe maybe this is as much like Kim Kardashian as she can look and that is in fact what she's going for. I can't know. I

Blake Smith (42:01.612)
I think it's mean so I mean most people are average looking and that's fine. And then also like her her visual style is unseduc I mean, she she it's it's like big weird frumpy sweaters, it's like asymmetrical, clashy, bright. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (42:17.238)
Merameco, a lot of Merameco. Yeah.

David Sessions (42:20.204)
It's like Cartoons Hate Her's amazing headline, "I dress for my personality and my personality is annoying."

Blake Smith (42:27.79)
But you know, there are lots of like disgusting middle aged professors like male who successful I mean, this is also this is the original Socrates, right? Socrates is famously ugly and turns that into a weird kind of reverse erotic charge, right? Like that means that I must be so smart to be attracted to this ugly person, right? There's a kind of weird seduction on the person who might be into you. Plus, like, you know, your students think you're brilliant.

Right? Like they're 'cause they're dumb. So that's an easy that's an easy win.

David Sessions (43:02.55)
One thing I wanted to say before we moved away from that topic that my as as usual my thoughts are like gathering, you know, in you know, belatedly is about the the kind of monosexual ident and categories thing is that like, you know, I was married to a woman for a long time. I had sex with my wife the you know the whole time. I like enjoyed it to a reasonable degree to the point that it like kind of made me wonder, like, maybe I'm not actually gay and be able to at least

plausibly convince myself I was bisexual and then once I or I kind of knew that that I had talked myself into that. And then once I came out, it was obvious that I didn't feel that way. Although like, you know, like you said, there are glimmers there. I could I could, you know, I have like lingering curiosity. Like I could probably do it if I wanted to.

But I still say like I've talked to people about this, like I still don't identify as bisexual to me because to me that would mean that would tell people like, I date men and women or I sleep with men

Blake Smith (44:02.732)
Tell people you're really annoying is what you're bisexual.

David Sessions (44:06.87)
And I don't do that, so I like identify with the category that makes the most sense. But if you say that on gay Reddit, it's like if you look at a vagina, then you're a bisexual. Or if you, you know, look they completely deny the, you know, the possibility of like there being guys who are actually straight, who kinda get this like side thing for like having their dicks upped or, you know, something like that. Which to me is like

That's still a straight guy. That doesn't mean he's like attracted to men or wants to have a relationship with them, which is why I still think like the categories are useful, or the monosexual categories are useful, or you know, that we don't necessarily need to say we're all bisexual, or even if it's it's you know, objectively in reality, there are a lot of gradations and we could all maybe do some things around the edges that we don't think we're into.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (45:00.012)
Yeah, I mean the bisexual thing, I've written about this a bunch actually since the book because there were these stats about how some huge percent of Gen Z women are bisexual now. And these women are often partnered with men for complicated reasons. It's not like that's not itself proof that they are not interested in women. It's easier to find male partners. But what I sort of find with this is you get instances where women especially will identify as bisexual.

To say something that's different from what I would think would be meant by that. So they're not saying that they're that they have in the past or currently have women who like they must be with and they'd be devastated if they couldn't be with that woman. What they're saying is like that they would be okay with it, mildly curious to okay with it. And to me, that just doesn't seem like a meaningful like people, if they want to call you can call yourself whatever you want to call yourself, but like what are you telling other people and like?

What message are you conveying that's productive if you're trying to find partners or just say who you are?

Blake Smith (46:04.546)
I think there's a wish, yeah, around like language of bisexuality or non-binariness or whatever. I'm sure people would be we're our people are working now in the laboratory on like the new way of signaling that you have some kind of psychic interiority. Right. Like, I'm with this person, or you might think I'm very normal and basic, but actually I have a wild inner life, I have multiple desires, I have a complicated erotic past, I could have a complicated erotic future, you know.

Okay. Like we should I think we should just sort of assume that any other human being contains multiples is a bit of masculine and feminine in them. Might have

David Sessions (46:42.242)
Yeah, and that can also not to like monologue about myself too much, but like that can be that was like my own I have a piece that I haven't finished where I kind of try to explain this like that I like invented my own kind of internal queer theory, like from first principles where, you know, here I am, like I did exactly what the you know, my religious family, exactly what the you know, the

ex gay people would want me to do. I married a woman, but and I developed this story for myself where I was doing something like I I did it knowingly. I did it knowing that I was gay. I happened to like this one woman. And so I was actually despite despite appearances, I was actually this like interesting person.

you know, singular individual who had kind of made my own choice and wasn't gonna be told, you know, what my sexuality was or that I was born this way. And actually all of that was just a rationalization of my, you know, unhappiness.

Blake Smith (47:38.082)
I mean, this is also very Gwyneth Paltrow and the Coldplay guy doing conscious uncoupling. They're not breaking up like regular dumb straight people. They're consciously uncoupling.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (47:48.632)
Yeah, I that yeah, that's why I had fun writing about these women in the book who like three different cases where Meghan Daum is actually one of the three who for different reasons decide that they're gonna get involved with other women intimately in different like hookups or relationships, whatever. And it just doesn't work. It's not that they like I I think whatever Kinsey spectrum, however you want to look at this.

This is not a situation I have ever found myself in because I think I'm somewhere else on this, like it just would not I I know this about myself that this would not have been for me. But these women are also straight. They just and and that only really became fully clear to them once they gave it a go. And I think what's interesting when you see all this discussion of female sexual fluidity is women in that circumstance get

kind of counted as fluid because look, they didn't vomit when they saw another woman's crotch, you know? And it's like neither do gynecologists, but you don't see that they're all sexually fluid.

Blake Smith (48:57.974)
And I mean, a way that you described it a few minutes ago, where it was like, like, would you actually wreck your life for someone of this sex? Like Denny has a reflection where he's like in his twenties when he's closeted, he's constantly annoyed by his straight male grad student friends who are chasing after towny bimbos, as he calls them. And he just doesn't understand because he has friendships and occasional, it seems like sexual relations with serious intellectual women. Like it's it's a kind of Sonia situation.

And then he comes out of the closet, moves to New York, he's like in his early thirties, and he starts like chasing after, as he puts it, like illiterate Puerto Rican boys, and he gets it. Suddenly it makes sense. Like, okay. And I feel like, yeah, this is the real test is like not could you under some circumstances make it work, but you know, would you wreck your life for some bimbo? And then like, okay, that's a then you're you're really compelled by this.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (49:52.244)
I like that language better than the language I used for it in my book. But yeah, I mean I think so. This is another thing that I write about, but like for very understandable reasons, the scholarly analysis of heterosexuality tends to come from people who are not straight because of like that's who invented studying sexual orientations. You know what I mean? And so my book owes a debt to that work, you know what I mean? Like all of this. It does mean though that there is this kind of blind spot in a lot of the work that's like

That just doesn't get the sort of the stupid bit, like you're saying, you know? And that doesn't get that when somebody is exhibiting their heterosexuality, they're not it's not always like the head cheerleader is being with the captain of the football team to make everybody around them happy. A lot of the times it is people doing things that are very they're liking the wrong person at the wrong time. What I find so strange though about this as a blind spot is just how much of literature is literally like star cross lovers.

Male and female. You know what I mean? Like you would think this would be something about human nature that would be more generally obvious.

Blake Smith (50:55.406)
Well, so I mean David and I have talked a little bit about like for me the really weird way that even within like gay male queer theory, it's as though there are no tops. Like bottoming is tremendously theorized, and I don't know if it's because the theorists are themselves bottoms, or it seems like that's that's problematic, that needs to be explained, like how someone could be into that. But putting your dick in a hole seems like not it seems like stupid, not interesting, like it goes without saying.

In the same way that somehow like, yeah, maybe straight people studying straightness, it doesn't feel like mysterious and complicated. But actually

David Sessions (51:32.514)
Yeah, I was wondering as as Phoebe was talking, is there is there a divide here between people are w and I th like I would say like you could s you could plot this divide on like between someone like Denneny and someone like Seymour Kleinberg, people who are willing willing to kind of go with the stupidity and irrationality of desire and kind of like

grant it and be like, that's just how it is and it's kind of fun and crazy and, you know, interesting, versus the people who have to like it has to be intellectualized and politicized in some way. Like I feel like that maybe that's a divide between like the way people analyze it.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (52:13.944)
Well, certainly a lot of the theory that's coming from women will be sort of the over theorized version of it. Where I think there's actually a very like I was thinking about this, I was listening to one of your episodes where you're talking about the the lesbian processing of relationships, and I feel like I am not a processor. Like I'm an overthinker about certain things, but like that sort of processing. But what I find in a lot of this analysis of heterosexuality coming from

women, the sort of like either earlier or more recent sort of lesbian separatist type writing is you get women who were always clearly sort of wired bisexual. You know what I mean? They always had that potential to like both. And they've decided they're only gonna be with women and they've retrofitted an explanation. And I think that's kind of true of all like that's why I'm very much against like like I do not address the question of why do I like men. I do not think that's an addressable question.

It just is you know what I mean?

David Sessions (53:13.548)
That's what I'm thinking. that's what I was talking about. Like and I think like a lot of people like refuse to treat that as an unanswerable question. Like that it has to be explained and and frameworked and politicized somehow.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (53:24.62)
And then argued against. I mean, I think the minute you start saying that there's a reason, first of all, I think those are false reasons. I think people just make things up. And I think and you see this because like I could I I've written and I'll say like I could explain certain traits and somebody could be like, Well, this woman has all those traits. And I'd be like, That's nice for her, but it doesn't matter. And you're getting into an argument. You know what I mean? You're suggesting that something that's a a fact about yourself is up for debate. And I think

I don't care if it's biological or not. That's not interesting to me. It's just like, is it up for debate or not?

Blake Smith (53:59.182)
That's it that sounds that sounds so I it it sounds so definitive that I hate to I hate to follow up with women are not up for debate. I mean in in some way I was thinking like, you know, we could we could circle back to like gay men's friendship with women because in part like Kleinberg is wanting also to impute like big kind of analytical reasons about why gay men and women might be friends. And then he has these vignettes of his friendships with specific women, which seem to fit very poorly

into these stories. and I think we're used to like

David Sessions (54:32.524)
Don't at best don't add in don't provide any evidence for his argument, his thesis.

Blake Smith (54:38.262)
Right. I there's the famous Montaigne line explaining why he's friends with like say bold or whoever it that like, you know, he was he and I was I. Like so there's just this mysterious, like one-to-one kind of attraction. But yet, like, I don't know, these friendships across groups, we want to explore like I'm drawn to the mother image, or gay men and women are like for political reasons friends, or you know, we're we're friends because we're both against men, or actually we're both attracted to men.

That there's some like broader cultural story that's at work in a particular friendship. and I don't know, like David and I have also like, I don't know if on the pod or just like in in private conversation, but recently been complaining a lot that there's this like real power that gender discourse and dating discourse like has over people where like we can all tell some story about the way the dating market is, the way that like men and women are, and yet

when it comes time to think about any particular relationship that we have, like why we're why we're with someone, why something didn't work out with someone, why we're friends with someone, those bigger narratives seem to like r really not connect. And but nevertheless they they remain out there and powerful and we appeal to them.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (55:54.324)
Yes, I think maybe you're talking a little bit about like and and I know you've podcasted about like slop, right? Like gender slop and all of this. And that's something that I find very frustrating now because like the types of themes that I address in this book are now everywhere, but often in this kind of slop form of this kind of it's great to be straight. It's okay to be straight at this kind of but like the slop version that also has sort of tapped onto it.

Men are like so, women are like so, each group is like this. And I mean, I think you can talk about categories without reducing individual relationships to them. And like, so I talk about all these different like in the book I talk about all these different kind of like subtypes on screen and off of like sort of how gay men and straight women relate to each other. And like I talk about all these things where there's like the woman who

likes the man who turns out to be gay and she's in denial about it, the woman who likes the man because he's gay. You know, all these different things, that really, really weird movie that from 2010 with Natalie from The Facts of Life. Yes. All of these different things, all of these different things. But then when I think about my own friendships, they are with people who have genders, they have sexual orientations. That is not something foremost in my mind in the friendship because it's like it's a specific person and I'm not thinking about

that 'cause I know them. You know what I mean? Like it's not it doesn't really matter.

David Sessions (57:19.542)
Yeah. I kind of did I did like a mental inventory of my like different close relationships. So with my, you know, good friends, you know, good straight male friends, my good, you know, gay male friends, my like closest women friends are probably my mom and sisters. And it just it just seemed like there was no pattern that had to do with like their gender. Like a lot of my friends were, you know, we we bonded over

ideas or our religious background or like processing our our religious background and then maybe we were in academia, most of the women that I've you know, like women acquaintances, like I got interested in them or like wanted to talk to them because they were good writers and I admired them or they were studying something that was related to what I was studying. And it I didn't seem to see any pattern to like, I'm drawn to this gender as a as a friend versus another.

I could see some like sociological reasons why like I might have been, you know, just we're all, you know, in sociological ruts or streams in in a society. And so that puts us, you know, that puts boys into, you know, probably being more often friends with other boys and things like that. And then there was the fact that I was like married very young in my twenties. So like I wasn't a single guy. I had like, you know, I was more likely it might would have been maybe a little weird to have like

single women friends. I had more couple friends or I was friends with the husband first or something like that. But yeah, like I didn't see this kind of I didn't see like gender being even my straight guy friends, like I related to them about issues or like our lives and jobs, but we never like talked about our wives in a, you know, like we were the guys talking about the women. Like that just was never the kind of relationship I had.

Blake Smith (59:09.752)
I I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for David's locker room talk.

David Sessions (59:13.678)
Yeah, I didn't do I never did locker room talk. And and that was maybe partly just because I was like a closeted person, you know, not a whole person and there was all this part of myself that I didn't talk to anyone about. So I I think that was definitely the case. And that maybe since then that has like made me like open up to women more or but I but I don't know. But but still like no no particular pattern it seems.

Blake Smith (59:38.018)
There's also something creepy. I mean, this sort of came up in our discussion of Neil and Philip in lovers, who are very into I mean, both doing lesbian processing, but also sort of archetypalizing the other, like you are being my mother right now, or you are really being like the leather clone, like toxic masculine, blah, blah, blah. You are actualizing like this broader social phenomenon. which seems like a really terrible way to relate to other people. And when we

When we catch people, like I, you know, I I do have like a strong memory in college of like a woman who was befriending me in a way that felt like a gay accessory. But you know, there's both like the feeling caught up in some like, you know, big social frame, but then also like when when you encounter people who th talk about their relationships in those terms, like it feels really creepy. Yeah, like the woman who talks about like her gays, who like can use those cultural scripts in

like an individual life, like that it feels really weird, right? Like the it it's like these are sort of somehow meant to only exist in the media sphere. And then when you try to use them to orient yourself practically, they're either useless or creepy.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:00:50.454)
Okay, so two thoughts about this. first of all, I think the whole thing of "my gays" and all of this, it was cringe, too offensive. I use past tense for a reason. I think it has kind of gone out because the whole ally concept has gone out and she is some sort of something, often queer type unspecified

Blake Smith (01:01:09.932)
Now that "my gays" woman is

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:01:16.888)
She's at the gay bar because she belongs there. She is a member of the same community. And there was this type of woman, or really a variety of types of women. And then I'm gonna about to like contradict myself and be against making people in types, whatever. But like there were women who would gravitate to these environments for different reasons. And there was no, like it was borderline erased the possibility that they might not be straight. It was just assumed they were straight, and probably a lot of time they weren't. But

Yeah. So that's one thing is that that sort of doesn't that seems to be on its way out. the other is actually sort of how Kat and I met. So Kat Rosenfield and I of Feminine Chaos, we like she did a teen advice column around like 2017 as she was doing it. but she did it for a long time. And one of the columns was about somebody, some teenager was trying to negotiate their relationship. And it was this whole like,

"As a this, this, this." They had all these categories, all these demographics, dating somebody who's all of these other demographics that are more privileged or whatever. And Kat's response was basically like you two are just like people. You know what I mean? Like you can't just you can't sort out what's going on in your relationship on the basis of like a an oppression hierarchy; that's not gonna be your answer. One of you likes the other more than the other, that's what's going on. And that's kind of how

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:02:41.908)
Yes. So that is really like where our sensibilities like suddenly like we met each other just online and we started a podcast when we met in person years later. But it was clear like in the twenty tens that's how people thought and we were like strange for not thinking that way.

David Sessions (01:02:59.762)
Yeah. I am I you know, one I think I feel like one of the great questions of our, you know, time is trying to understand the relationship between that sphere of discourse and like the way that people live. Like it's like both real, like the, you know, the w the discourse world is like it's real and it does impact how people think, but it's also like sometimes it just feels like it's totally if you look at real people, it seems totally fake. Like to me, like

I have my mom is single, she's in her, or she just turned 60. I have a single like sister who's 30. They've never heard of heteropessimism. They both really like men. They really like sex. Like they, you know, they have none of these thoughts in their head. And if you listen to Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, like I sometimes think like, what is the pop music saying? And the pop music is still, you know, starstruck for men in a in a lot of ways. Like

Blake Smith (01:03:56.392)
Obviously we've all forgotten about Gaylor, but that was a real and important thing according to the New York Times.

David Sessions (01:04:05.218)
but yeah, like a and and gay stuff too, like where it's you know, there are all these kind of, you know, slop therapy, sad dating discourses, but I just don't really see real people necessarily believing those.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:04:18.702)
Sorry. I mean, the thing with real people, I think what unfortunately happened starting with COVID and hasn't really reversed is just a lot of young people living their lives so much online that it changes how they even understand all of these concepts, like how they understand desire, how they understand their own identities. It's never tested like what their orientations are so they can kind of claim anything because they're never really in these physical spaces where it would become immediately apparent who they are and are not attracted to.

Perhaps. and I think when I would write about these topics earlier, like in the 2010s, people say, well, this is just stuff happening online. But the problem is you have so many young people who that's all they know. So you got like the straight young men who imagine that they could only ever find a woman if they have like eight pack abs and it's like launch. Yeah. And then you go outside and you

David Sessions (01:05:11.374)
Yes.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:05:15.49)
That's immediately obviously false, but if you don't go outside, then what?

Blake Smith (01:05:19.544)
Well, and even so, s still technically alive, supposedly working on a book, Camille Paglia is also somehow gonna be part of my fag hags project. And I've been trying to think recently about, you know, she is like hooked on archetypal discourse, right? Like a sort of Jungian and like Harold Bloomian, like the way that men and women are and these these powerful ahistorical images that circulate, she thinks, in like literature and also in pop culture.

And so I've been trying to figure out like who her actual friends are, like in her life. So like, you know, she has like some very strong thoughts about gay men and the way that like all gay men are, which maybe are derived from like her college friend Bruce Benderson, the this like transgressive writer and being friends with this drag queen Glenn Belvario. But like yeah, I would I would love to have some sort of, you know, thinking that allows us to connect like people's very strong claims about men, women, gay men, the dating world.

So like you mean like your ex? Like you mean like your sister?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:06:22.49)
You see this on Twitter sometimes, especially like the new Twitter, the really like slop new Twitter, where a man is giving his real like misogynist spiel and it's like, it's your ex wife like clearly like that's that's what we're talking about here.

Blake Smith (01:06:37.346)
This is also we I mean, I I have yet to really test this, but you know, David and I were talking like, you know, someone was going off, Garth Greenwell was like going off about like the alienating effect of like technology, but it like talking about iPads or something. But I think in general when people say like "technology" or "modernity," they mean that they're addicted to like weird internet porn. Like they they're like there's something really specific that's being referred to 'cause like when they say "technology," they don't mean hair dryers and toasters. You know?

David Sessions (01:07:05.446)
Yeah. Yeah. Or like I think, you know, for people who are like into kind of anti modern philosophy, like they just kind of import that tur those terms like ahistorically from a hundred from Heidegger a hundred years ago. Or they just have learned from and that's probably the case with Garth Garth Greenwell, like it's just this kind of superficial absorption of the discourse that I'm supposed to be against screens and, you know, phones and

Blake Smith (01:07:31.136)
Avital Ronell has this great book from the late eighties, The Telephone Book, which is about how Heidegger had the telephone put in his office once he took power as Nazi rector of the university. What does that tell us? Was he really so anti-technology? And then she goes on a whole spiel about how the phone is your mother in a way, like your mother is calling through the phone. They can't make me hate her. Should we what what should what should our final...

because Phoebe has a Pride parade to get to. So

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:08:02.902)
I do, I do, yes. It's very enlightened here in Canada, at least this bit of it.

David Sessions (01:08:07.84)
So we don't think that we don't think that friendships between gay men and women are the most moral type of friendship.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:08:16.877)
I don't think there is a most moral type of friendship.

Blake Smith (01:08:19.931)
Gay men can't be friends with women, but we still haven't answered whether they should.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:08:24.032)
Ha.

David Sessions (01:08:28.149)
Okay, well that seems like a good place to stop since since Phoebe has to get going. Thanks so much for joining us. This was super fun. It was fun to talk to you after reading the book. Everyone should go buy Phoebe's book, The Last Straight Woman. You will certainly enjoy it.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy (01:08:42.52)
Thank you so much. This was really great. I was really looking forward to this and it it came through. A lot of fun.

David Sessions (01:08:48.142)
We were, too. Bye everyone.

Blake Smith (01:08:51.074)
Bye.