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The Invention Of Heterosexuality
By Thomas Rogers
If you met Hanne Blank and her partner on the street, you might have a lot of trouble classifying them. While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.
Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, “Straight,” as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of “straightness” really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.
In an interview with Salon magazine, Blank talks about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the “bromance” is a very good thing.
Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a “history” of heterosexuality?
We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It’s really very similar.
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So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?
“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing.
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But the term took quite a while to catch on. How did it spread?
Thanks to psychiatrists in the 1880s and 1890s — a part of the medical profession that was deeply unscientific at that time. It meant that somebody with a medical degree and all of the authority it brings could stand up and start making value judgments using specialized medical vocabulary and pass it off as authoritative, and basically unquestionable.
Psychiatry is responsible for creating the heterosexual in largely the same way that it is responsible for creating the various categories of sexual deviance that we are familiar with and recognize and define ourselves in opposition to. The period lasting from the late Victorian era to the first 20 or 30 years of the 20th century was a time of tremendous socioeconomic change, and people desperately wanted to give themselves a valid identity in this new world order. One of the ways people did that was establish themselves as sexually normative. And it wasn’t the people who were running around thinking, “Oh, I’m a man and I like to sleep with other men, that makes me different,” who were creating this groundswell of change; it was the other people, the men who were running around going, “I’m not a degenerate, I don’t want to sleep with other men, I am this thing over here that is normative and acceptable and good and not pathological and right, that’s what I am. That’s what I need people to understand about me, because I need people to understand that I am a valid person and I need to be taken seriously.”
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This also has to do with the popularity of social Darwinism at the time.
Social Darwinism comes into play in a big way. It became important to prove that you were part of the solution and not part of the problem in this pell-mell, hurly-burly, crazy new social order [of the late 1800s and early 20th century].
So how did this change in terminology play itself out in the real world?
I actually talked to my grandmother about this. My grandmother is 88 and she came to consciousness in a world that didn’t have heterosexuals in it, where nobody knew that word, and certainly nobody used it to refer to themselves. And she associates this change with Freud, whom she’s never read but whom she’s heard a lot about. So there was this sort of culture-wide game of telephone, if you will, in which these authoritative medicalized ideas coming from very rarefied circles trickled down into the larger culture. I think that for people of my grandmother’s generation particularly, heterosexual simply became a synecdoche for normal. And that’s certainly the way Freud talks about it, that you know, you attain heterosexuality. There’s this process of attaining normality. When you manage to develop yourself, or to become developed, in the proper way, in an appropriate way, in the way that Freud says you’re supposed to, what you end up with is a heterosexual.
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In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?
Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.
As you point out in the book, for much of human history, marriage had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality or sex.
It’s more that marriage didn’t have a lot to do with desire. Marriage has always had to do with sex, and the ability to have marital sex and preferably procreate has always been central to marriage. But what was not so important was whether or not you necessarily wanted to have sex with that person. It was your duty, it was paying the marriage debt, and you were gonna do it, by golly, but this was a co-worker, this a partner in business enterprise — not a person you chose to satisfy your own personal whims and desires with. If you happen to also like them and think that they were swell or pretty or handsome then that’s great. But that’s not what you were in it for.
And now everything has changed, because we now prioritize attraction, desire, love, romance, over the strictly economic and community-building aspects of marriage. We live in a culture now where we find it very odd when women don’t support themselves, if somebody chooses to be a stay-at-home mother. That is a huge change, and that’s a huge change just in my lifetime. I’m in my early 40s and I know that when I was a very small child those discussions were not happening in the same way. The economic and legal enfranchisement of women has gone hand-in-hand with both women’s and men’s ability to choose marriage partners based on their own desire, desires for sex, love, companionship, all of those things, and to put that first.
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