Feminists and Their Problems : The Other McCain

Posted on | June 24, 2026 | No Comments

The 1979 psychological thriller When a Stranger Calls is a cult classic, famous for one line: “The call is coming from inside the house.”

That line came to mind Tuesday night after I learned about an interesting controversy on BlueSky, the left-wing echo chamber where many Trump-haters fled after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. A Canadian feminist, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, recently published a book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men. A website published a 23-paragraph excerpt of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s book and, when this excerpt was promoted on BlueSky, the book’s theme and its author were angrily denounced.

Of course, I immediately ordered the book from Amazon. Anything that sends the BlueSky crowd into paroxysms of apoplectic rage must be good. After skimming through the excerpt of The Last Straight Woman, however, I quickly located the nexus of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s problem, specifically in the sentence when she declares “we need to be looking for feminist approaches to female heterosexuality.”

“Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the Long Shadow of the ‘Lavender Menace’,” first posted here in July 2014, became the first chapter of my 2016 book Sex Trouble. What most people don’t understand about feminism is that, almost from the very beginning of the so-called “Women’s Liberation Movement” in the late 1960s, lesbians were influential in the movement’s policies and rhetoric. Lesbians were involved in the creation of the first Women’s Studies programs at colleges and universities, and the curriculum in such programs has always reflected the anti-male/anti-heterosexual bias of the lesbian faculty.

Anyone who cares to research the biography of Charlotte Bunch can understand this. Prior to becoming involved in the feminist movement, Bunch had a husband, but in 1971 she got divorced, came out as a lesbian and founded a radical commune/cult called The Furies. From there, Bunch went on to become a professor at Rutgers University and an adviser to Hillary Clinton. The incompatibility of heterosexuality with women’s liberation was the essence of Bunch’s feminist ideology:

Bunch’s 1972 manifesto, “Lesbians in Revolt” essentially declared universal lesbianism as the end goal of feminism:

Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal, and economic basis of male supremacy. The Lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women’s “innate” need for men. …
Our rejection of heterosexual sex challenges male domination in its most individual and common form. We offer all women something better than submission to personal oppression. We offer the beginning of the end of collective and individual male supremacy.

This argument was expanded . . . by Margaret Small in “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” which was cited in such later books as Separatism and Women’s Community by Dana Shugar and The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. In 2015, while researching my own book, I summarized Margaret Small’s argument:

[Small] offered a Marxist interpretation of “lesbian consciousness” as part of a “revolutionary struggle” to end women’s “oppression” in the “relationship of slavery,” as she called marriage. …
Invoking the historical theories of Friedrich Engels (colleague of Karl Marx and co-author of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto”), Small declared: “Class society arose because of the oppression of women. . . . The exploitation of all women by all men made possible the exploitation of some men by other men. The more exploitative the relationship between men and women becomes, the stronger and more vital become the institutions of male supremacy.” …
“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” Small wrote. “In order for men to have a justification for exploiting women and an ability to enforce that exploitation, heterosexuality has to become, not merely an act in relation to impregnation, but the dominant ideology.”
Under male supremacy, Small asserted, women “become defined as appendages to men” in a system “which maintains the ideological power of men over women.”

Marriage is slavery, “heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy,” and if you don’t believe that, can you really call yourself a feminist? . . .

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