The invention of heterosexuality 72z9

O Dorland Medical Dictionary 1901 defined heterosexuality as an “abnormal or perverted appetite for the opposite sex”. More than two decades later, in 1923, the Merriam Webster Dictionary similarly defined it as “a morbid sexual ion for another of the opposite sex”. It was not until 1934 that heterosexuality was accorded the meaning we are familiar with today: “manifestation of sexual ion for another of the opposite sex; normal sexuality”. 6k6324

Every time I tell people this, they respond with dramatic disbelief. This can't be right! Well definitely not seems sure. Looks that heterosexuality has always “been there”.

A few years ago, the video “man in the street” began to circulate, in which the creator asked people if they thought homosexuals were born with their sexual orientation. Responses were mixed, with most saying things like "it's a combination of nature and nurture". The interviewer then asked the next question, crucial to the experiment: “When did you choose to be straight?”. Most were disconcerted, shyly confessing that they had never thought about it. Feeling that their prejudices had been exposed, they ended up giving in to the cameraman's obvious point: gays are born gay as straight people are born straight.

The video's approach suggests that all of our sexualities are simply there; that we don't need an explanation for homosexuality any more than we need one for heterosexuality. It doesn't seem to occur to those who produced the video, or the millions who shared it, that we actually need an explanation for both.

Many good works have been produced, both erudite and popular, on the social construction of homosexual desire and identity. As a result, few would be surprised to witness a conversation about “the rise of the homosexual” – indeed, many of us have learned that homosexual identity came into being at a specific point in human history. What we have not been taught, however, is that the similar phenomenon brought heterosexuality into existence.

There are many reasons for this educational omission, including religious bias and other types of homophobia. But the biggest reason we don't interrogate the origins of heterosexuality is probably because it seems so…well, natural. You don't have to ask something that "just is there".

But heterosexuality was not “always there”. And there's no reason to imagine that it always will be.

When heterosexuality was abnormal 22fn

The first rebuttal to the claim that heterosexuality was invented usually involves an appeal to reproduction: it seems obvious that intercourse of different genitalia has been around for as long as humans have lived – in fact, we would not have survived without it. But this rebuttal assumes that heterosexuality is the same thing as reproductive intercourse. And it's not.

“Sex has no history”, writes the theorist queer David Halperin na University of Michigan, because it is “grounded in the functioning of the body”. Sexuality, on the other hand, precisely because it is “a cultural production”, has a history. In other words, while sex is something that seems programmed in most species, naming and categorizing these acts, and those who perform them, is a historical phenomenon, and can and should be studied as such.

To put it another way: there have always been sexual instincts in the animal world (sex). But at a specific point in history, humans gave meaning to these instincts (sexuality). When humans talk about heterosexuality, we're talking about the second thing.

Hannah Blank offers a useful way to enter this discussion in the book “Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality”, with a natural history analogy. In 2007, the International Institute for the Exploration of Species (IISE) listed the fish electrolux addisoni as one of the “Top 10 new species”. But of course, the species didn't suddenly come into existence 10 years ago - it was only when it was discovered and scientifically named. As Blank concludes: “Written documentation of a specific kind, by an authority figure in a specific field, is what has transformed the Electrolux in the thing that only was... in the thing that became known."

Something remarkably similar happened with heterosexuals, who, until the end of the 1868th century, went from merely existing to being recognized. “Before XNUMX, there were no heterosexuals,” writes Blank. Just as there were no homosexuals. Humans had not yet realized that they could be "differentiated from one another by the types of love or sexual desire they experienced." behaviors of course, have been identified and cataloged and often banned. But the emphasis has always been on the act, not the agent.

What has changed? The language.

In the late 1860s, the Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kerbeny coined four to describe sexual experiences: heterosexual, homosexual, and two now-forgotten to describe masturbation and “bestiality”, which were monosexual and heterogeneous. Kertbeny used the term "heterosexual" a decade after he was asked to write a chapter in a book advocating discrimination against homosexuality. the editor, Gustav Jager, decided not to publish it, but he ended up using his new term in a book he published later, in 1880.

The next time the word was published was in 1889, when the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing included it in “Psychopathia Sexualis”, a catalog of sexual disorders. But at nearly 500 pages, the word “heterosexual” is only used 24 times, and it's not even indexed. This is because Krafft-Ebing is more interested in “contrary sexual instincts” (“perversions”) than “sexual instinct”, which would later come to be for him the “normal” sexual desire of humans.

“Normal” is a loaded word, of course, and it has been misused throughout history. Hierarchical ordering leading to slavery was once accepted as normal, as was geocentric cosmology. Just questioning the foundations of what was consensus that the phenomenon of “normal” was dethroned from its privileged positions.

For Krafft-Ebing, normal sexual desire was situated in a broad context of procreational utility, an idea that was in line with dominant sexual theories in the West. In the Western world, long before sexual acts were separated into hetero/homo categories, there was a dominant binary: procreative or non-procreative. The Bible, for example, condemns homosexual intercourse for the same reason that it condemns masturbation: because the life-giving seed is dropped in the act. While this ethic was widely taught, maintained, and enforced by the Catholic Church and later by other branches of Christianity, it is important to note that the ethic is primarily not from Jewish or Christian scriptures, but from Stoicism—a doctrine characterized by rigidity of moral principles and extirpation. of human ions.

How Catholic ethics Margaret Farley indicates, Stoicism “had strong opinions about the power of the human will to regulate emotions and about the desirability of such regulation for the sake of inner peace”. Musonius Rufus, for example, defended the “On Sexual Indulgence” that individuals should protect themselves from self-indulgence, including sexual excesses. To curb this sexual indulgence, notes the theologian Todd Salzman, Rufus and other Stoics tried to place it “in a broad context of human meaning” – arguing that sex could only be moral in the pursuit of procreation. Early Christian theologians adopted this conjugal-reproductive ethic, and by the time of The, reproductive sex was the only normal sex.

While Krafft-Ebing takes this procreative sexual ethic for granted, he opens it up significantly. “In sexual love, the real purpose of the instinct, the propagation of the species, does not enter consciousness,” he writes.

In other words, the sex drive contains something like a programmed reproductive goal – a goal that is present even if people involved in “normal” sex don't realize it. Jonathan Ned KatzOn “The Invention of Heterosexuality”, notes the impact of the Krafft-Ebing move. “By placing the reproductive side in the unconscious, Krafft-Ebing created a small, obscure space in which a new norm of pleasure began to grow.”

The importance of this shift – from reproductive instinct to erotic desire – cannot be overstated, because it is crucial to modern notions of sexuality. When most people today think of heterosexuality, they might think something like this: Billy understands from a very young age that he is erotically attracted to girls. One day he focuses this erotic energy on Suzy and he woos her. The pair fall in love and they express their erotic desire sexually. And they live happily ever after.

Without Krafft-Ebing's work, this narrative might never have become "normal". There is no mention, however implicit, of procreation. Defining the normal sexual instinct in of erotic desire was a fundamental revolution in thinking about sex. Krafft-Ebing's work laid the groundwork for the cultural shift that took place from defining heterosexuality as "morbid" in 1923 to defining it as "normal" in 1934.

Sex and the City mc2n

Ideas and words are usually products of their time. This is certainly true of heterosexuality, which came from a time when American life was becoming more regulated. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds to the rise of the middle class.

At the end of the 1900th century, populations in European and North American cities began to skyrocket. In 3,4, for example, New York had 56 million residents – XNUMX times its population in the previous century. As people moved to urban centers, they brought their sexual “perversions” – prostitution, same-sex erotica – with them. Or, at the same time, it seemed. “Compared to rural towns and villages,” writes Blank, “the cities seemed the nest of misconduct and excess.” When the urban population was smaller, Blank says, this kind of behavior was easier to control, just as it was easier to control when it happened in smaller rural areas, where friendly familiarity was the norm. Small-town gossip can be a profound motivator.

Because of increasing public awareness of these sexual practices paralleling the affluence of the lower classes in cities, “urban sexual misconduct was typically, if not inaccurately, attributed” to the working class poor, says Blank. This was important for the emerging middle class to differentiate itself from so much excess. Bourgeois families needed a way to protect their "from aristocratic decadence on the one hand and the horrors of seething cities on the other." “Universally applicable and reproducible systems that could be implemented on a large scale for social maintenance” were needed.

In the past, these systems could be based on religion, but “the new secular state required a secular justification for its laws,” says Blank. Among sex experts like Krafft-Ebing, who wrote in the introduction to the first edition of "Psychopathia" that his work was designed to "reduce [humans] to their rightful conditions." In fact, the preface continues, the present study “exerts a beneficial influence on legislation and jurisprudence”.

Krafft-Ebing's work detailing sexual irregularity made it clear that the growing middle class could not treat deviations from normal (straight) sexuality merely as sin, but as moral degeneracy – one of the worst labels a person could receive. “Call a man 'each [man who is aware of social conduct, a gentleman] and you will have established your social status," wrote Williams James in 1895. "Call him 'degenerate' and you have grouped him with the most loathsome species of mankind." As Blank points out, degeneration has become a criterion for evaluating someone.”

Degeneration, after all, was the reverse process of Darwinism. If procreative sex was critical to the continued evolution of the species, deviating from the norm was a threat to the entire social fabric. Luckily, a deviation like this could be reversed, if it was noticed in advance, experts thought.

The formation of “sexual inversion” occurred, for Krafft-Ebing, during several stages, and was curable in the first. In the course of his work, he writes Ralph M. Lack, Author of “Sexual Life”, “Krafft-Ebing sent a clarion call against degeneration and perversion. All civic people should have their turn in the social watchtower.” And that was certainly a civic issue: most colonial officials came from the middle class, which was large and growing.

Although some non-professionals were familiar with Krafft-Ebing's work, it was Freud who gave the public scientific ways of thinking about sexuality. While it was difficult to reduce medical theories to a few sentences, his most enduring legacy is his theory of psychosexual development, which says that children develop their sexuality from an elaborate psychological dance of parents.

For Freud, heterosexuals were not born that way, they became that way. As Katz points out, heterosexuality for Freud was an achievement; those who did successfully navigated their childhood development without being thrown out of morality.

And yet, as Katz notes, it takes a huge imagination to frame this navigation in of normality:

According to Freud, the normal route to heterosexual normality is paved by the boy and girl's incestuous greed for the other-sex relative, their desire to kill the same-sex relative and exterminate any sibling rivals. The road to heterosexuality is paved by bloodlust… The invention of heterosexuality, in Freud's view, is a deeply disturbed production.

That such an Oedipal view has been ed for so long as an explanation for normal sexuality is “another great irony in the history of heterosexuality,” he says.

Still, Freud's explanation seemed to satisfy most of the public, who, continuing their obsession with standardizing all aspects of life, happily accepted the new science as normal. Such attitudes found additional scientific justification in the work of Alfred Kinsey, whose 1948 study “Sexual Behavior in Human Male” sought to classify men's sexuality on a scale from zero (exclusively heterosexual) to six (exclusively homosexual). His findings led him to conclude that a large part, if not most, "of the male population has at least one homosexual experience between adolescence and adulthood." While Kinsey's study opened up the homo/straight categories to allow for some sexual continuity, it also "emphatically reaffirmed the idea that sexuality is divided between" the two poles, Katz notes.

The future of heterosexuality t2hn

And these categories have remained to this day. “No one knows exactly why heterosexuals and homosexuals have to be different,” he wrote. Wendell Ricketts, author of the study “Biological Research on Homosexuality”, 1984. The best answer we have is something of a tautology: “heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups based on the belief that they can be divided into two groups”.

While the straight/homo divide seems eternal, an indestructible fact of nature, it just isn't. It is merely a recent grammar that humans have invented to talk about what sex means to us.

Heterosexuality, argues Katz, “is invented as discourse as something that is outside of discourse. It is fabricated in a particular discourse as what is universal… as what is timeless”. Therefore, it is a construction, but pretends not to be. As every French philosopher or child with Legos would tell you, anything that has been built can be deconstructed in the same way. If heterosexuality did not exist in the past, then it need not exist in the future.

I was recently taken aback by Jane Ward, Author of “Not Gay”, who, during an interview for an article I wrote about sexual orientation, asked me to think about the future of sexuality. "What would it mean to think about people's ability to cultivate their own sexual desires in the same way that we might cultivate our taste for food?" While some may be wary of allowing for the possibility of sexual fluidity, it is important to realize that various arguments of "Born This Way" are not accepted by the latest science. Researchers aren't sure what the "causes" of homosexuality are, and they certainly reject any theory that posits a simple origin, like the "gay gene." It is my opinion that sexual desires, like all other desires, change and are reoriented throughout our lives, and as they do, they often suggest new identities to us. And if that's true, then Ward's suggestion that we can cultivate sexual preferences fits. (For more scientific evidence behind this argument, read “I am gay – but I wasn’t born this way”, BBC Future).

In addition to Ward's question, there is a subtle challenge: if we are uncomfortable considering whether and how much power we have over our sexuality, why is this the case? Similarly, why are we uncomfortable questioning the belief that homosexuality, and by extension heterosexuality, are eternal truths of nature?

In an interview with the journalist Richard Goldstein, novelist and playwright James Baldwin itted to having good and bad fantasies for the future. One of the good ones was that “no one will have to call themselves gay,” a term that Baldwin itted he had no patience for. “It responds to a false argument, a false accusation”.

And what is she?

“That you have no right to be here, that you have to prove your right to be here. I'm saying I have nothing to prove. The world belongs to me too.”

Once upon a time, heterosexuality was necessary because modern humans needed to prove who they were and why they were, and they needed to defend the right to be where they were. As time goes on, though, the label actually seems to limit the myriad ways we humans understand our desires, loves, and fears. Perhaps this is one reason that a recent British survey found less than half of 18-24 year olds identify as "100% heterosexual". This is not to suggest that most of these respondents regularly practice bisexuality or homosexuality; rather, it shows that they do not seem to have the same need for the word heterosexual as their XNUMXth century ancestors.

Debates about sexual orientation have tended to focus on the ill-defined concept of nature. Because sexual intercourse between different sexes usually results in the propagation of the species, we grant it a higher moral status. But “nature” does not reveal our moral obligations – we are responsible for determining them, even if we are unaware of it. Jumping from an observation of how nature é for the prescription than nature be, as noted by the philosopher David Hume, is to commit to a logical fallacy.

Why judge what is natural and ethical for human beings by their animal nature? Many of the things that humans value, like medicine and art, are blatantly unnatural. At the same time, humans detest many things that are eminently natural, such as disease and death. If we consider some naturally occurring phenomena ethical and others unethical, it means that our minds (the things that see) are determining what to make of nature (the things that are being looked at). Nature doesn't exist somewhere out there independently of us – we are always interpreting it from the inside.

Up until this point in our history on Earth, the human species has been favored by sexual intercourse of different sexes. About a century ago, we attached meaning to this kind of sexual relationship, partly because we wanted to encourage it. But now our world is very different from what it was before. Technologies like preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilization (IVF) are only getting better. In 2013, more than 63 babies were conceived via IVF. In fact, more than 5 million children have been born through assisted reproductive technologies. Granted, that number still keeps this kind of reproduction in the minority, but all technological advancements start with the numbers against them.

Socially, too, heterosexuality is losing its “high point,” so to speak. If there was a time when homosexual indiscretions were scandals of the day, we've already moved into another world, full of heterosexual affairs from politicians and celebrities, full photos, text messages, and more than a few video recordings. Popular culture is filled with images of dysfunctional heterosexual relationships and marriages. Furthermore, between 1960 and 1980, Katz notes, divorce rates rose by 90%. And while it has dropped considerably in the last three decades, it still hasn't recovered so much that one can claim that "unstable relationships" are unique to homosexuality, as Katz shrewdly notes.

The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality isn't just blurry, as some of Kinsey's research implies – it's a fabrication, a myth, and it's outdated. Men and women will continue to have sex with each other until the human species ceases to be. But heterosexuality – as a social marker, as a lifestyle, as an identity – may well die before that.

Translation of text de Brandon Ambrosino, originally published by with the BBC.