What Untrue Is Willing to Say Out Loud

Wednesday Martin's book on female desire says the quiet part at volume — and the discomfort that follows is the point.

The Argument, Before the Objections

Wednesday Martin did not write Untrue to be agreeable. The book — subtitled Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free — arrives with the energy of someone who has spent a long time watching a wrong idea go unchallenged and finally decided to stop being polite about it. The central claim is not especially subtle: the story we tell about female sexuality, in which women are naturally monogamous, low-desire creatures who trade sex for security, is not biology. It is ideology dressed up as biology, and the difference matters.

Martin draws on primatology, anthropology, and sexology to make this case. She profiles researchers — among them Meredith Chivers, whose work on women's genital and subjective arousal discordance is genuinely startling — and takes the reader into fieldwork on bonobo societies, research on the sexuality of women in long-term partnerships, and cross-cultural studies of female infidelity. The accumulating evidence is that women's sexuality is not the tame, relational, low-urgency thing that medicine, evolutionary psychology, and culture have long insisted it is. It is labile, context-dependent, novelty-seeking, and — here is where things get interesting — rather poorly served by the institution of monogamous marriage.

The Discomfort Is Structural, Not Incidental

A certain kind of reader will want to argue with Martin's sources. That is a fair response. She is synthesising across disciplines, and the popular science book form always risks smoothing over methodological friction that specialists would flag. But the more interesting discomfort is not about the research. It is about what the research is used to say.

It is not hard to find reviewers who found Martin too strident, or the framing too polemical, or the science too selectively deployed.

Martin is not writing a neutral survey. She is writing a corrective — and the corrective is aimed at a specific cultural target: the belief that when women cheat, desire without love, or find monogamy genuinely difficult, they are aberrant, damaged, or morally compromised. Untrue wants to relocate that experience from the margins to the mainstream of female life, and to insist that the shame attached to it is a construction with a history, not a verdict from nature.

This is where the book earns its friction. It is not hard to find reviewers who found Martin too strident, or the framing too polemical, or the science too selectively deployed. What is harder to find is a sustained engagement with what she is actually arguing: that the received wisdom about women and desire does real harm — in clinical settings, in legal ones, in marriages where women conclude that something is wrong with them — and that a correction this long overdue cannot afford to whisper.

There is a class dimension worth naming, even though Martin does not dwell on it. The freedoms she discusses — ethical non-monogamy, the luxury of researching one's own desires, the option to leave or redesign a relationship — are not equally available. For readers who have spent time with Sarah Smarsh's work on women and financial precarity, Martin's more expansive possibilities can read as implicitly middle-class in their reach. That is a limit of the book, not an invalidation of it.

What Gets Released by Saying It Plainly

The thing Untrue does that is genuinely useful is refuse to hedge. Other books about women and sexuality find ways to soften the conclusion — to note that of course monogamy works for many women, that context is everything, that we must not overgeneralise. All of that is true. Martin knows it is true. But there is something that happens when a book decides to lead with the finding rather than the caveat. Space opens up. A reader who has felt quietly wrong about her own desire for most of her adult life gets, perhaps for the first time, a version of the science that does not require her to be an exception.

That is not a small thing. It is, arguably, exactly what a polemic is for — not to settle the science, but to shift the ground enough that the science can be heard. Untrue is imperfect and combative and occasionally overstated, and it is trying to do something that the quieter version of this argument has not managed to do. For that, it deserves a serious read, not a politely dismissive one.