Whenever I tell this to people, they respond with dramatic incredulity. It seems not to have occurred to those who made the video, or the millions who shared it, that we actually need an explanation for both. View image of Credit: There are many reasons for this educational omission, including religious bias and other types of homophobia.
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The first rebuttal to the claim that heterosexuality was invented usually involves an appeal to reproduction: But this rebuttal assumes that heterosexuality is the same thing as reproductive intercourse. In other words, while sex is something that appears hardwired into most species, the naming and categorising of those acts, and those who practise those acts, is a historical phenomenon, and can and should be studied as such. Or put another way: But at a specific point in time, humans attached meaning to these instincts sexuality.
Hanne Blank offers a helpful way into this discussion in her book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality with an analogy from natural history. Something remarkably similar happened with heterosexuals, who, at the end of the 19th Century, went from merely being there to being known.
Neither were there homosexuals. But the emphasis was always on the act, not the agent.
In the late s, Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined four terms to describe sexual experiences: The next time the word was published was in , when Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing included the word in Psychopathia Sexualis, a catalogue of sexual disorders. Hierarchical ordering leading to slavery was at one time accepted as normal, as was a geocentric cosmology.
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The emphasis on procreation comes not primarily from Jewish or Christian Scriptures, but from Stoicism. For Krafft-Ebing, normal sexual desire was situated within a larger context of procreative utility, an idea that was in keeping with the dominant sexual theories of the West.
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The Bible, for instance, condemns homosexual intercourse for the same reason it condemns masturbation: Musonius Rufus, for example, argued in On Sexual Indulgence that individuals must protect themselves against self-indulgence, including sexual excess. Early Christian theologians took up this conjugal-reproductive ethic, and by the time of Augustine, reproductive sex was the only normal sex.
While Krafft-Ebing takes this procreative sexual ethic for granted, he does open it up in a major way. 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.
The invention of ‘heterosexuality’
Defining normal sexual instinct according to erotic desire was a fundamental revolution in thinking about sex. Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class. In the late 19th Century, populations in European and North American cities began to explode.
By , for example, New York City had 3.
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As people moved to urban centres, they brought their sexual perversions — prostitution, same-sex eroticism — with them. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. A step by step practical guide to implementing stoic philosophy and face the modern life challenges with joy and wisdom. How much easier would your life be if you could think quicker and learn faster? The Science of Getting Ripped: You'll do good, you'll start feeling good, you'll start looking good.
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