Straight: A Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality by Hanne Blank (review)

The myths, fantasies, and narratives of heterosexual love are among the most powerful Western society has ever produced. Anyone who grew up watching Disney fairy tales or reading the novels of Jane Austen can be excused for thinking that heterosexuality is and always has been a fundamental fact of human interaction. That heterosexuality exists seems to be so transparently obvious and unremarkable as to be unworthy of serious scholarly analysis. Of course it is the case that men desire women, so this logic goes, because it is a basic element of biological survival. It is this premise that Hanne Blank takes as her point of departure in Straight. The givenness of heterosexuality, despite its ambiguous and “surprisingly short” history, is what Blank historicizes, analyzes and, ultimately, assails.

While scholars have spilled no small amount of ink tracing the origins of homosexuality and various other sexual “unorthodoxies,” heterosexuality has largely escaped such close scrutiny. The influence of Michel Foucault’s A History of Sexuality to a generation of social and cultural historians interested in the growth of a modern conception of sexual behavior, cannot be underestimated, and has produced a rich literature examining the legacy of Victorian ideas about sex.¹

Surprisingly, given its constitutive place in the consolidation of sexual orthodoxy, the heterosexual as a “species,” to use a Foucauldian concept, has not been subject to the same intensity of interest. Of course, a handful of influential scholars have analyzed heterosexuality’s history, and Blank is heavily indebted to scholars such as Jonathan Ned Katz, the preeminent chronicler of heterosexuality.² Blank’s history lacks Katz’s academic rigor, but makes up for it in breezy readability and effective personal reflections on the political and philosophical problems of our current system of understanding sexuality in binary terms.

The basic premise of the book—one familiar to any scholar of the history of sexuality—is that heterosexuality, like homosexuality, began its life in the mid-nineteenth century. It was the product of the explosion of work documenting, analyzing, defending and condemning sexual “deviance” in socio-scientific terms. First used in a letter between two Germans protesting the infamous Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code of April 14, 1851 that made homosexual activity illegal, the term slowly made its way through sexological studies from Richard von Krafft-Ebing to Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. In line with the categorical imperatives of Victorian science, the term emerged as a way of describing sexual behavior as a biological constant; “natural, inborn, unchangeable” (16).

Heterosexuality quickly became the code word for “normal” sexuality against which all deviations could be judged. Blank argues that its emergence as a descriptive category was rooted in a categorical imperative to make sense of all of the messiness associated with the human desire for sex, and to mark certain, limited behaviors (vaginally penetrative male/female reproductive intercourse) as scientifically, medically and morally correct. There was something dialectical in its creation, reflecting a constitutive pull between a desire for order and a nagging recognition of sexual deviation everywhere one looked. Blank suggests, “What generated this sensibility in the mainstream was the increasingly common experience of looking in the mirror to see if a deviant or degenerate looked back” (49).

At its most ambitious, Blank’s study offers an abbreviated history of a vast cross-section of Western thought and history—tracking the rise of the concept of the individual, secularization, and the development of companionate marriage, just to name the most salient. From the scientific impulse to name biological species deriving from Linnaeus to the development of the novel and the legal fight for equality in marriage, the book covers a huge amount of territory in a rather short 167 pages. By examining these various and discrepant texts, Blank investigates how the “doxa”—an anthropological term for, in short, the commonly held assumptions of a given culture—of heterosexuality was forged. While it may have started in the relatively obscure and arcane journals and letters of psychologists...