Phoebe Maltz Bovy is the opinion editor of the Canadian Jewish News, co-host (with previous show guest Kat Rosenfield) of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and author of The Perils of “Privilege” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). Her second book, The Last Straight Woman, arrives in May from Penguin Random House Canada. She holds a PhD in French from NYU, writes cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, and was a signatory of the infamous 2020 Harper’s letter on justice and open debate. Her substack, Close-Reading the Reruns, covers the clothes, interiors, and cultural politics of TV shows that are very much not of the moment.
We talked about leaving academia, the book publishing grind, the Shitty Media Men list, MeToo’s overcorrections, heteropessimism, the new Gallup data on bisexual identification, female sexual fluidity, and whether ethical non-monogamy is just old-fashioned caddishness with woke branding.
On Book Publishing and Timing
Bovy’s first book sold modestly, partly because it arrived before everyone was using the word “woke” as a cultural organizing principle.
“It was too niche. It was too much about the Internet. The Internet I’m talking about was like Twitter entered into it a bit, but I was thinking about blog comments, things that seem very, you know, like newspaper comments. It wasn’t the Internet of certainly 2026. It wasn’t even entirely the Internet of 2017.”
“The word ‘woke’ — maybe I referenced it once, but this was not a thing. This was not anything. And then it all exploded around 2020, 2021.”
The second book has had the opposite timing problem.
“The pace of getting this published has been like glacial doesn’t even cover it. I could have had this thing ready in 2020. I was already working on this project before there was that New Inquiry essay on heteropessimism, and that was 2019. I’d already written for the New Republic about straight women in 2016. I was already addressing this topic.”
“While my ego’s like, oh no, I’m gonna be late to this thing — I know what’s bad about being early to a topic because of what happened with my first book, where basically nobody knew what I was talking about.”
She fought hard for the cover design.
“I sent my editor a mood board, basically, and also like half a book’s worth of what I didn’t want on the cover. I had all these images in my head of what could be on the cover of something like this — a wedding cake, a woman looking sexy. I was like, no, no, it’s not that.”
“One of the images I sent was Amy Klobuchar1 at the Minnesota State Fair surrounded by very nicely built firemen. They found a way to work with that.”
On Leaving Academia
Bovy got a PhD in French from NYU but never wanted a professorship.
“I was good at the thinking-things-through-and-writing-a-long-thing-about-it type work, but not the conjugating-a-French-verb-accurately part of it. And what they expected me to do for the teaching part was teach French language classes. And that was never going to happen. I was never going to be good enough at the thing that I was worst at to do the thing that I was actually good at.”
The pressure to achieve native-level French produced some memorable faculty interactions.
“One was a professor who was like, are you independently wealthy such that you can go live in France to improve your French? And I was like, no. And that kind of ended that.”
“The funnier story was where a professor who himself was French was telling me how amazing the French was of a classmate of mine who was a French speaker from France. An aristocrat, with one of these long aristocratic French names. And he was telling me what good French this person has. What am I supposed to do with this information? Short of being reborn as an aristocratic Frenchman, this just does not make any sense.”
She doesn’t regret leaving, and never understood the people who martyred themselves for the title.
“I am fascinated by the people who are dead set on thinking of themselves as academics and they will do anything that it takes, who will be paid peanuts just so that they can say that they are professors. I find that mysterious.”
NYU now lists her as a departmental placement as the opinion editor of the Canadian Jewish News.
“To what extent did the NYU French department place me in a job that I started in 2022, when I got the degree in 2013 and did all sorts of things thereafter — you know what I mean? There’s a whole zigzag explanation of how I ended up doing what I’m doing.”
On the Harper’s Letter
Bovy signed the 2020 Harper’s letter without knowing it would become a cultural lightning rod.
“I was asked whether I wanted to sign a letter about free expression and given a list of a few people who had already agreed to sign, who were academics and intellectuals.”
“I was home in a pandemic with a baby with like no career prospects at that point. And then suddenly people would discuss me as if I was sitting in a room with all of these luminaries because of this weird letter.”
“To give another example, I regularly get these messages as if I have the ear of Bari Weiss and can make her do things. I’m like, I don’t have her email address. She doesn’t know what I’m doing.”
She noted Jeet Heer‘s recent entanglement with his own signatory status (he’s truly everywhere!), after he posted a thread on Bluesky trying to connect Weiss to Epstein and someone replied with a “this you?” about the letter.
On the Shitty Media Men List and #MeToo
Bovy sees MeToo as a mixed legacy. The good part: ending the normalization of sexualizing very young women.
“It was this thing where it was considered better when the 15 year old looks 11. You know what I mean? That is the thing that I think is kind of memory-holed about that pre-MeToo era.”
“When a fashion model would be 18, she was like old for the runway. And that was considered very normal.”
The bad part: the Shitty Media Men list and its blurring of categories.
“My favorite example from this is that one of the men on it was gay. And it wasn’t that he was accused of having harassed a man. It was that he was accused of being obnoxious.”
“The whole idea that a gay man could be on a list about women being sexually harassed at work was already a bit iffy. But I remember that it was like — the guy was indeed annoying to work with. And it’s like, okay, some people are annoying to work with.”2
On the Stephen Elliott / Epstein connection and why Epstein might have had some stake in all of that naughtiness:
“It made Epstein look good to lump himself in with falsely accused men, with men who are accused of nothing serious. Because MeToo was about all the bad men and included men who were a little bit too forward on a date, a little clumsy. And then if there’s a man who’s an actual predator, of course he’s going to want to make it seem like he’s the same as all these men who are accused of nothing.”
On the Book Market and Rejections
“The things that succeed, you see. The things that fail, you don’t. It’s easy to imagine, and maybe rightly, that you know why it’s a no. But the answer is it’s almost always no. And different euphemisms are given.”
On whether the “white men not hot right now” catalog rejections of the mid-2010s were political or commercial:
“How much was winds shifting politically and how much was that, quite literally, in a very capitalistic sense, white men were not hot right now?”
On the limited career value of having written a book:
“You can say you’ve written a book, which I think is very overstated, how much anybody cares. People really do not care.”3
On Bisexual Identification and the Gallup Data
The latest Gallup survey puts LGBTQ+ identification at 9% of U.S. adults, with bisexual women driving most of the increase. Bovy wrote about this for the Globe and Mail.
“Some of this has to do with what people mean by that. For some women, I think it means that if they woke up one day and were attracted to a woman, they wouldn’t be upset about it.”
“If you’re talking about somebody who’s literally only had relationships with men, who’s lived in a society where they could have had relationships with women, who’s lived in environments where they could have had relationships with women and they just never did at any level…you’ve got to wonder how strongly felt this is.”
“Anybody can call themselves anything, but are you oppressed on the basis of one out of every thousand sexual thoughts you have being about another woman? Is that a category with any kind of meaning? Seems a little dicey.”
She was careful to note that bisexuality itself is real and probably understated among men.
“I think if anything, it’s probably understated among men because there is so much of the sense that it’s one drop for men and then they’re gay. There are absolutely bisexual men. That’s a thing in the world.”
“It used to mean that you’re having relationships with both, and now it means this kind of openness to possibility that might not be rooted in any really passionate desire to do the thing. It’s more like, I wouldn’t be against it. It kind of almost veers over into: I’m not a homophobe.”
On Female Sexual Fluidity
Bovy’s book addresses the research behind the “female sexual fluidity” hypothesis, and she’s skeptical.
“It’s on less solid footing than one might think. It’s based on this idea that if you put electrodes on people, you can know their sexual orientation. Some of it is that women react to everything because women’s bodies are sort of preparing for the worst. It’s not the same as being aroused, as in actively wanting something.”
“The other fluidity hypothesis comes out of a study mainly of women who aren’t straight that had like 10 token straight women included, and is basically about a bunch of women in a gender studies class in college. It’s not as scientific as it all sounds.”
“Most women are not one nice lady away from lesbianism. That’s just not how sexual orientation works.”
On Heteropessimism and Women Still Wanting Men
The core argument of the new book: women are still interested in men, and feminism that tells them otherwise is a form of conversion therapy.
“I think women are still interested in men. Most women are straight. If you include bisexual women who are like 2% interested in women, virtually all women are straight or straight-ish.”
“If social conservatives say women shouldn’t have premarital sex, you get liberals saying that’s sexist, that’s slut-shaming. But the minute it’s presented in these pseudo-feminist terms — oh yeah, well, women have transcended any need for men. But demonstrably women do have that interest.”
“Conversion therapy doesn’t work on gay people and it doesn’t work on straight people, done for different reasons. You can’t will yourself to a different sexual orientation.”
On Ethical Non-Monogamy
“This idea that this is progressive and is going to be good for women…I think that’s more doubtful than the party line likes to present. Historically this does not go well for women.”
“You get some men out there using the whole ethical non-monogamy thing as a cover to basically be cads.”
“There’s this idea that something magical happens the minute you give something the leftist progressive language for it. When the actual structure could just be one man with a lot of girlfriends who are not allowed to have a lot of boyfriends. That’s sort of what it always was.”
On the PhD and Getting Talked Down To
Bovy doesn’t put “Dr.” in her bio, and — like “ya boi” here — owns the consequences.
“I get people who — and they might be very adamant about their own title, whatever it is — as far as they’re concerned, I’m some 20-year-old intern who knows nothing. They talk to me in an email where it’s like, you obviously think I’m somebody very different than the person I am.”
“It’s in those moments that I understand the temptation. Because it’s like…I’ll get talked to like I know absolutely nothing about the world and I’m 20, and I’m like, hey, I got ‘distinction’ on my doctoral dissertation. But I don’t actually say it. I’m just sitting there thinking it.”
On the Gender Discourse and Why It Won’t End
“When people talk about the Substack gender slop, these are posts where you have to either say men and women are exactly the same or completely different. The reality is somewhere between the two. And it’s not super catchy to say that!”
On Getting Paid in Early Digital Media
“I wrote about this for the Atlantic’s website, for which I was paid I believe $100.”
“I remember once telling my brother-in-law, who’s a corporate lawyer in Belgium, what I got paid for articles back then. And I think I may have horrified him.”
“My worst freelancing attempt in terms of getting paid came after I wrote for the Washington Post. It took many, many months of pestering a lot of people.”
The beloved Minnesota senator and all-around “Klobuchamp” — who once earned the NYT’s endorsement for president, don’t forget! — certainly has a distinctive look (that link takes you to the image PMB is referencing).
The Mitchell Sunderland story I mentioned can be read here. What a time to have been alive!
It’s true, it’s true!
