Writer and tech worker Sophie Vershbow cannot be credited with inventing the humblebrag, but she has provided one of the finest examples I’ve seen in a social media post about her romantic life: “I haven’t decided how to write about this yet but 1 year into making 6-figures and I am consistently smacked in the face by how much earning a decent salary has affected my relationship to men and dating as a cis heterosexual woman.”
She finished the thought with a nod to relatability. “I cannot be alone in this.”
Vershbow presented “earning a decent salary” as an unfortunate thing that had happened to her, a violence even (“smacked in the face”), versus the enviable situation it was. Downthread, she explained that she was still hoping to find a male partner, but due to her own financial successes did not require this to lead a comfortable life.
Vershbow’s trajectory, as she describes it, is in some sense a proxy for female heterosexuality of the past half-century. It’s still around but no longer the only game in town.
Women used to need men in ways that, objectively speaking, we no longer do. Women earn more than we used to, get more degrees, and have more professional opportunities. On the whole, if you are not in Iran, and you’re a woman, you can kind of just go about your life in a way that wasn’t possible a couple generations ago.
Compulsory heterosexuality — the requirement of women to get husbands, not (just) to be into men — isn’t what it used to be.
And yet there are all these women around, with husbands and boyfriends and such. Why? Historically, at least since society embraced the idea of marrying for love, a woman’s social and material need for a husband has been mixed up with her intimate need for a man.
Erica Jong has a lot about this in her 1973 classic feminist novel “Fear of Flying,” the way women’s lust intermingles with being socialized into husband-seeking. The “zipless f—-” — an anonymous-sex fantasy the protagonist has — is a vision of lust without that baggage. But in the world of actual people, at least actual straight people, decoupling pleasure from responsibility in this way remains elusive.
Much like dieting in recent years (before Ozempic) being referred to euphemistically as wellness when women had salads for dinner, man-needing has not disappeared so much as gone underground. It’s become gauche to request a skim cappuccino in the hopes of going down a dress size. So, too, to be open about wanting a boyfriend or husband.
The receding of compulsory heterosexuality has some positive implications even for straight women. Indeed, its measurable impact is almost certainly greatest on members of the sexual majority. In these enlightened, post–“Sex and the City” times, it’s no longer done to treat single women as tragic spinsters. The social norm, outside more traditionalist environments, is to assume they’re leading the lives they want.
Yes, individual women’s relatives still nag them to get married, and yes, there are far-right trolls online holding forth about cat ladies, but the tide has shifted toward it not being a big deal if a woman doesn’t have a man.
In the days of you need a husband, lady!, women were forced to pretend to be sad about not having something they didn’t necessarily want in the first place. The “Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970–77) is remembered — not wrongly — for showcasing the new, pill-liberated single career gal. It still had Rhoda and Mary balancing their happily single reality with these periodic nods to how they were, on some level, waiting for the right man.
There’s Roz, on “Frasier” (1993–2004), presenting herself as on a quest for a husband, while acting in ways that make clear she has other goals in mind, namely sleeping with Seattle.
The 2004–05 British crime drama “Murder in Suburbia” largely consists of two female cops — so refreshing, when the cops on these shows are almost always men! — driving around discussing their need for boyfriends and the eligibility of whichever men cross their path.
You might imagine that “The Golden Girls,” that 1980s-into-1990s icon of women embracing the chosen family, would pass the Bechdel test and be full of women talking about things other than men. Not even a little bit.
In a 1991 episode, “Never Yell Fire in a Crowded Retirement Home: Part 2,” Blanche has been holding forth about muscular men, as usual, prompting Dorothy to say, “I just cannot believe how much you think about men.” Blanche goes on the defensive. “Men are an important part of my life. Not just my life, they’re an important part of all our lives.”
The scene fades out to a flashback of the 80-something Sophia recalling having put cash in the G-string of a stripper calling himself (in a little prelude to SATC) “Mr. Big.” Blanche of course knows the gentleman in question and quips that this is merely a “stage name.” But it could have just as easily segued to any number of discussions of boyfriends or marriage proposals.
The lewd hilarity intermingles with the ever-looming possibility that one of the “girls” will remarry, thereby dismantling their household. Putting female friendship before the prospect of the right male partner is never on the table.
These days, women no longer need to ritualistically claim to be looking for male partners when this isn’t what they want. There is the inconvenient fact, however, that most women do in fact want this, even now.
Most people want sex and companionship. Most adults realize (or should realize) that commitment requires compromise, and deem some of those worth sucking up in exchange for the joys of life with another person. But in an overcorrection for the need-a-husband era, we’ve reached a point where the only allowable stories of female heterosexuality are ones where the woman is miserable. Where it seems as if a woman is there under duress, or at least, where she has gotten the worse deal.
Excerpted from The Last Straight Woman by Phoebe Maltz Bovy. Copyright © 2026 Phoebe Maltz Bovy. Published by McClelland and Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
