The Myth Of HeterosexualityÂ
The beauty of language is that it adapts and evolves to introduce or change terminology as new things are discovered and accepted â we see it all the time, even with argot and different dialects. We, the people, change language to suit our needs and accommodate our obsession with sticking labels on everything. This does mean that older words or definitions get cut out of everyday use and slowly die out altogether {I am trying to make âalasâ a thing again}.
What is interesting â at least to me anyway â is how drastic and quick these changes can be. For example, just only one hundred years ago, the word âheterosexualâ had a completely different meaning and association as what we think of it today.
 The 1901 Dorlandâs Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an âabnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.â In 1923, Merriam Websterâs Dictionary similarly defined it as âmorbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.â It wasnât until 1934 that heterosexuality was given the definition that we know today: âmanifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.â
 {I have added the exaggerations in bold to help yâall comprehend the somewhat ridiculousness of this}
 However, it does disprove the assumption that heteronormativity has always âbeen thereâ. No-one asks: âwhen did you choose to be straight?â â as there are prejudices within people, it is widely assumed that an explanation is needed to be gay or queer but not straight.
While heterosexual sex is clearly as old as humanity, the concept of heterosexuality as an identity is a very recent invention.
It would seem that heterosexuality as an identity is a very recent invention â and there are a lot of reasons why this notion has escaped literature and general education â homophobia, religion and because it just seems normal and natural.
 When heterosexuality was abnormal
 The mythic nature of being straight can be seen is the idea of reproduction: it has just been assumed that different-genital intercourse has been around for as long as humanity â but it is important to remember that heterosexuality is not the same thing as reproductive intercourse.
Queer theorist, David Halperin, writes âsex has no history grounded in the functioning of the body.â However, sexuality does because it is a âcultural productionâ â whilst sex seems to be instinctive for most species, the naming and categorising of those acts and those who practice them is a historical invention and so should be studied as such.
In her book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, Hanne Blank denotes a useful analogy to help understanding:
In 2007, the International Institute for Species Exploration listed the fishElectrolux addisoni as one of the yearâs âtop 10 new species.â But of course, the species didnât suddenly spring into existence 10 years ago â thatâs just when it was discovered and scientifically named.
As Blank concludes: âWritten documentation of a particular kind, by an authority figure of a particular kind, was what turned Electrolux from a thing that just was ⌠into a thing that was known.â
Oscar Wilde's trial for 'gross indecency' is often considered a pivotal moment in the formation of the gay identityÂ
A similar thing happened with heterosexuality: at the end of the 19th century, Â it went from being there to being known. âPrior to 1868, there were no heterosexuals,â writes Blank. Neither were there homosexuals. It hadnât yet occurred to humans that they might be âdifferentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced.â Of course, sexual behaviour was identified, and often forbidden â but it was always the act that was emphasised, not the agent.
And then, the language changed. In the1860s, Karl Maria Kertbeny â a Hungarian journalist â came up with four terms to describe sexual experiences: heterosexual, homosexual, and two now forgotten terms to describe masturbation and bestiality â sexual intercourse between a person and animal; namely, monosexual and heterogenit.
He used the term âheterosexualâ a decade later when he was asked to write a book chapter arguing for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The editor, Gustav Jager, decided not to publish it, but he ended up using the word in a book he later published in 1880.
The next time the word was published was in 1889, when Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing included the word in Psychopathia Sexualis, a record of sexual disorders â however, in almost 500 pages, the word is used only 24 times, and isnât even indexed. Thatâs because Krafft-Ebing was writing about sexual pervasion rather than instinct., the latter being for him the ânormalâ sexual desire of humans.
âNormalâ is a controversial word, of course. Geocentric cosmology and slavery were once considered normal. In modern times, it is seen as normal to have children.
The importance of sexual reproduction was originally emphasised by stoicism â not from religious scriptures.For Krafft-Ebing, normal sexual desire was positioned in the bigger picture of bearing offspring; there was a clear binary of procreative or non-procreative long before the hetero/homo one â and this was the dominant theory of sexuality in the West.
Karl Maria Kertbeny created the label 'heterosexual"Â
As Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley points out, Stoics âheld strong views on the power of the human will to regulate emotion and on the desirability of such regulation for the sake of inner peaceâ - Musonius Rufus, for example, argued in On Sexual Indulgence that individuals must protect themselves against self-indulgence, including sexual excess.
To curb this sexual indulgence, Stoics tried to situate it âin a larger context of human meaningâ â arguing that sex could only be moral if it resulted in offspring.
While Krafft-Ebing takes this procreative sexual ethic for granted, he does open it up in a major way. âIn sexual love the real purpose of the instinct, the propagation of the species, does not enter into consciousness,â he writes.
Jonathan Ned Katz, in The Invention of Heterosexuality, notes the impact Krafft-Ebing had. âPlacing the reproductive aside in the unconscious, Krafft-Ebing created a small, obscure space in which a new pleasure norm began to grow.â
This shift - from reproductive instinct to erotic desire âis crutialcrucial to modern notions of sexuality. When most people today think of heterosexuality, they might think of something like this: Billy understands from a very young age he is erotically attracted to girls. One day he focuses that erotic energy on Suzy, and he woos her. The pair fall in love, and give physical sexual expression to their erotic desire. And they live happily ever after.
It was only at the turn of the 20th Century that thinkers began to divorce sexual desire {depicted here in Rodin's The Kiss} from reproduction
Without Krafft-Ebingâs work, this situation might not have ever become thought of as the norm. It is interesting to see how the modern view of the term has no mention of reproduction. It seems that defining normal sexual instinct according to erotic desire was a fundamental revolution in thinking about sex.
Language also depends on situational factors â this was definitely true for heterosexuality which was normalized when American life was becoming more regularized. The invention of heterosexuality coincided with the rise of the middle class
By 1900, New York City had 3.4 million residents â 53 times the population just 100 years earlier.. As people moved to urban centres, they brought their sexual âperversionsâ â prostitution, same-sex eroticism â with them. âBy comparison to rural towns and villages,â Blank writes, âthe cities seemed like hotbeds of sexual misconduct and excess.â
When city populations were smaller, says Blank, it was easier to control such behaviour, just as it was easier to control when it took place in smaller, rural areas where neighbourly familiarity was a norm. Small-town gossip can be a profound motivator.
The anonymity of city life in the 19th Century was often blamed for freer - and more 'immoral' - sexual behaviour
Because the increasing public awareness of these sexual practices paralleled the influx of lower classes into cities, âurban sexual misconduct was typically, if inaccurately, blamedâ on the working class and poor, says Blank - Â it was important for an emerging middle class to differentiate itself from such activities. The bourgeois family needed a way to protect its members âfrom aristocratic decadence on the one side and the horrors of the teeming city on the otherâ. They required a âsystematic, reproducible, universally applicable systems for social management that could be implemented on a large scaleâ.
In the past, these systems could be based on religion, but âthe new secular state required secular justification for its laws,â says Blank.
The moddle class could no longer treat deviation from heterosexuality as a sin, but as moral degeneracy â a detrimental label for a person to acquire.
âCall a man a âcadâ and youâve settled his social status,â wrote Williams James in 1895. âCall him a âdegenerateâ and youâve grouped him with the most loathsome specimens of the human race.â
It was Freud who gave the public scientific ways to think about sexuality - his most enduring theory is his psychosexual theory of development, which held that children develop their own sexualities via elaborate psychological parental expressions.
For Freud, heterosexuals werenât born this way, but made this way. Heterosexuality for Freud was an achievement; those who attained it successfully navigated their childhood development successfully.
According to Freud, the normal road to heterosexual normality is paved with the incestuous lust of boy and girl for parent of the other sex, with boyâs and girlâs desire to murder their same-sex parent-rival, and their wish to exterminate any little sibling-rivals. The road to heterosexuality is paved with blood-lusts⌠{yah, Freud wasâŚinteresting}.
Alfred Kinsey {centre} may have relaxed the taboo around sex, but his reports reaffirmed the existing categories of homosexual and heterosexual behaviour
Still, Freudâs explanation seemed to satisfy the majority of the public who happily accepted the new science of normal. Such attitudes found further scientific justification in the work of Alfred Kinsey, whose landmark 1948 study Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male rated the sexuality of men on a scale of zero {exclusively heterosexual} to six {exclusively homosexual}. His findings led him to conclude that a large âportion of the male population has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old ageâ. While Kinseyâs study did open up the categories homo/hetero to allow for a certain sexual continuum, it also âemphatically reaffirmed the idea of a sexuality divided betweenâ the two poles.
The future of heterosexuality
Of course, the divide still exists today: âNo one knows exactly why heterosexuals and homosexuals ought to be different,â wrote Wendell Ricketts, author of the 1984 study Biological Research on Homosexuality. The best answer weâve got is something of a tautology: âheterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups.â
Heterosexuality, argues Katz, âis invented within discourse as that which is outside discourse. Itâs manufactured in a particular discourse as that which is universal⌠as that which is outside time.â That is, itâs a construction, but it pretends it isnât. Even a child with a Lego set will tell you that anything thatâs been constructed can be deconstructed as well. If heterosexuality didnât exist in the past, then it doesnât need to exist in the future.
In an interview with the journalist Richard Goldstein, the novelist and playwright James Baldwin admitted to having good and bad fantasies of the future. One of them was that âNo one will have to call themselves gay,â a term Baldwin admits to having no patience for. âIt answers a false argument, a false accusation, which is that you have no right to be here, that you have to prove your right to be here. Iâm saying I have nothing to prove. The world also belongs to me.â
In the past, heterosexuality was necessary because people needed to prove who and why they were â as time runs on though, people require more or different labels to express the plethora of ways in which humans understand themselves and their desires. Although, less and less people consider themselves heteronormative, that does not mean that they identify as bi or gay, but rather they donât have the same need of the word âheterosexualâ as people depended on in the past.
Debates centred on sexual orientation have focused on a badly defined concept of ânature.â Because different sex intercourse generally results in the propagation of the species, we award it a special immoral status. But ânatureâ doesnât reveal to us our moral obligations â we are responsible for determining those, even when we arenât aware weâre doing so. To leap from an observation of how nature is to a prescription of nature ought to be is, as philosopher David Hume noted, to commit a logical fallacy.
Why judge what is natural and ethical to a human being by his or her animal nature? Many of the things human beings value, such as medicine and art, are egregiously unnatural. At the same time, humans detest many things that actually are eminently natural, like disease and death. If we consider some naturally occurring phenomena ethical and others unethical, that means our minds {the things looking} are determining what to make of nature {the things being looked at}. Nature doesnât exist somewhere âout there,â independently of us â weâre always already interpreting it from the inside.
The writer James Baldwin balked at defining people as straight or gay, arguing that "it answers a false argument, a false accusation
Until this point in our Earthâs history, the human species has been furthered by different-sex reproductive intercourse. About a century ago, we attached specific meanings to this kind of intercourse, mainly because we wanted to encourage it. But our world is very different now than what it was. Technological advances like preimplantation genetic diagnosis {PGD} and in vitro fertilisation {IVF} are only getting better,
Socially, too, heterosexuality is losing its status. If there was a time when homosexual acts were scandalous, weâve since advanced on to another world, one connotated with the heterosexual affairs of various celebrities. Popular culture is replete with images of dysfunctional straight relationships and marriages. Further, between 1960 and 1980, Katz notes, the divorce rate rose 90%. And while itâs dropped considerably over the past three decades, it hasnât recovered so much that anyone can claim ârelationship instabilityâ is something exclusive to homosexuality, as Katz shrewdly notes.
As gay rights are increasingly recognised, many people also describe their sexual desires as lying on a spectrum
The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality isnât just blurry â itâs an invention, a myth, and an outdated one. People will continue to have different-genital sex with each other until the human species is no more. But heterosexuality â as a social marker, as a way of life, as an identity â may well die out long before then.
