Straight (10 page)

This isn't too surprising. We haven't been looking. No dedicated neurologist has ever hunched over microscope slides of brain tissue teasing out telltale details that make a “heterosexual brain” heterosexual. Endocrinologists cannot give us the hormonal recipe for the biochemical cocktail that makes a person straight, nor have geneticists even tried to locate such a thing as a “straight gene,” except insofar as they often assume that genes are “straight” unless they are something else. Sociobiologists have yet to register any definitive statements on questions like whether being the firstborn, or perhaps having a lot of older sisters, or maybe being an only child, increase one's odds of growing up to be heterosexual. Dozens, even hundreds of scientists have made careers, sometimes quite influential and lucrative ones, in attempting to answer exactly these and similar questions where homosexuality
is concerned. But somehow heterosexuality seems always to be left out in the cold, with no one to show the slightest concern for its nature or workings.

Interestingly enough, science has yet to prove that heterosexuality—or indeed any sexuality—exists in any way that is relevant to material science. For this to be the case, heterosexuality would have to be demonstrated to have a physical and objective existence. It would have to be quantifiable, in grams or nanometers or angstroms or amperes or joules or milliliters. And it would have to be measurable in some way not dependent on having a human being, with human biases, be the judge of whether or not it exists—that is, it would register a weight on a scale, produce a chemical reaction in a test tube, give off light or heat, and so on.

This is the nature of the searching that lies behind much of the research that looks for things like “gay genes” or “gay hormones.” The theory is that if physical scientific evidence of homosexuality could be found, it would provide an objective foundation for sexual orientation, making it a legitimate object for the empirical sciences.

The same should be true of heterosexuality. After all, in order for there to be the marked category “gay brain,” there must be an opposed unmarked non-gay brain. The confirmation of the existence of the marked category would simultaneously have to confirm the existence of the unmarked one. Neither one, however, has yet been confirmed to exist.

This is not for lack of trying. Many scientists have claimed to find evidence of homosexuality in the body, in anatomy and genetics and hormones, but none has so far held up to scrutiny: when we look for proof that our “gay” bit of the body is genuinely different from a default “straight” model, the evidence tends to fall apart. In the face of more than a century of failing to find an empirical basis for sexual orientation, the depth of the faith scientists continue to maintain that they will find such a thing is almost touching. It is also very telling: there are a lot of people out there who very badly want the doxa of sexual orientation, in which we all have an enormous social investment, to have a physical, demonstrable existence. But the fact remains that scientists often look for evidence of non-heterosexuality, what we consider the exception to the rule, while assuming that the heterosexual rule itself requires no evidence. Scientifically speaking, this is
precisely backwards. In science, it should technically not be possible to even begin considering whether there might be exceptions to a rule until you have proven that the rule exists.

The fact that researchers have repeatedly assumed a material scientific validity for heterosexuality without seeking verification is simultaneously problematic and completely unsurprising. That heterosexuality exists is doxa: “everyone knows” that heterosexuality is real. But what is real from the standpoint of culture is not always or necessarily real from the standpoint of physical science, as the example of phlogiston eloquently attests. Phlogiston was the name given in 1703 to something that learned scientific men had long assumed had to exist for the world to function as it did: a colorless, odorless, tasteless, insubstantial substance that was capable of burning. Anything that could be burnt, it followed, contained phlogiston, and anything that contained phlogiston could have its phlogiston removed by burning off the phlogiston. It was not until the 1780s that experiments by the French chemist Anton Lavoisier proved that phlogiston did not and in fact could not exist.[
1
] Nevertheless, some very fine scientists, notably Joseph Priestley, the man who discovered oxygen, continued to cling to the phlogiston theory for the very good reason that it was familiar, consistent, and explained lots of things that scientists had observed in experiments.

It is possible that, from the perspective of the physical sciences, including biomedicine, “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” may be rather like phlogiston. No matter how formal the name sounds, heterosexuality was not, after all, developed as a scientific concept or according to anything like scientific principles. As we recall, the idea of something called the “heterosexual” was developed by non-scientists, specifically for use in the non-scientific milieu of the law. From its very inception, “heterosexual” was about people as social entities, participating in social and sexual interactions with one another, in the larger context of their society and their nations and national legal codes. There is nothing about the concept of heterosexuality that suggests, or has ever suggested, that it must of necessity be an objective physical quality with a measurable physical existence.

When “heterosexual” caught on in the sciences, it was through psychiatry, the branch of medical science to which the social is of maximum importance. Early psychiatry in particular was essentially
non-biological in its orientation. Its practitioners did study medicine, but as we know from the work of Freud and his contemporaries, the state of the psychiatric art of that day had to do with memories and repression, dreams and the unconscious. The sorts of sophisticated biomedical models we use today in talking about mental and behavioral medicine—neuroanatomy, biochemistry, neuropharmacology—simply did not yet exist. At the time when “heterosexual” was in its infancy, the existence of hormones was just being deduced (the word “hormone” dates from 1905), and the earth-shattering news from the world of brain anatomy was the discovery of the location of the Broca's (1868) and Wernicke's (1874) areas, two of the regions in the brain responsible for language. The application of even the crudest physical biomedical experimentation to the problem of sexual response would not happen until after 1910.

Early psychiatry was part of the material-science field of biomedicine by convention and because its practitioners had studied medicine, not because the actual practice of early psychiatry had much to do with biomedical physical science. “Heterosexual,” coined by a layman who was just trying to articulate a protest against an unjust law, became “scientific” and “medical” because it was adopted and used by men who had scientific educations, not because it had been revealed or proven by experimentation and research.

As a psychiatric inheritance, “heterosexual” was promptly enshrined in medical practice as a standard of normalcy and proper function. There it has remained. The overwhelming assumption, among natural scientists who work on sexual orientation, appears to be that heterosexuality simply must exist as a physical-science reality. Were it not, the myriad attempts to explain homosexuality on biomedical grounds would not make much sense. But the truth is, no one has yet established—or, to my knowledge, attempted to establish—that a quality called heterosexuality exists not as a social phenomenon among humans, but as a spontaneously appearing material entity in nature. They only behave as if they had.

THE DEGENERATE IN THE MIRROR

The early days of “heterosexual” were also the early days of sexual science. As nineteenth-century race, gender, and class insecurity found
a point of focus in sexual deviance, it came to seem imperative that “degenerates” be managed, lest they place the upright and respectable at risk of falling pell-mell down the crumbling rungs of the evolutionary ladder. A vast body of what can be described as medico-legal and medico-moral literature began to appear, including
Psychopathia Sexualis.
Such texts were intended to help doctors, lawyers, and other specialists understand and deal with these dangerous deviants.

Out of these writings emerged two major subtexts that reflected not only on the deviant few, but also on the “normal-sexual” many: conformity with gender role, and conformity with the principle of procreativity. Two additional concepts, the notion of a sexual orientation and the more subjective notion of a sexual identity, both grew out of the obsession with determining the parameters of deviance.

Procreativity was a fairly straightforward standard. For early sexology, as it was for the Catholic Church, the only defensible sexual act was a potentially procreative sexual act. The further that sexual activity took one from the potential for procreation, the less defensible and more “perverse” it was. Acts between same-sex partners fell clearly and decisively into the nonprocreative category. But so too did the use of contraception, which was widely viewed as morally wrong despite its growing popularity behind closed doors.

Newly named dynamics like masochism, sadism, and fetishism, however suspect they might have been, were not automatically beyond the pale. A certain masochistic tendency was considered psychologically normal in women and a corresponding sadistic tendency normal in men. Early British sexologist Havelock Ellis claimed this was a legacy of a fundamental, less complicated pre-civilization sexuality in which males seized women for sex, and women accepted such aggression. In modern people, he thought, such aggression and submission were quite normal as long as they were not excessive. Freud held a similar view, taking the fairly liberal tack that an act had to turn completely away from procreation before it became a perversion. But most people, and most writers, seem not to have been so tolerant as Freud or Ellis. Virtually all of what we would today term “foreplay”—another concept for which we must thank Freud—could be and often was considered too nonprocreative to be widely accepted. As late as 1920, sex advisors like Walter Robie had to vigorously reassure
couples that it was all right to do noncoital things that generated mutual pleasure, cheerleading husbands to such outré lengths as to “Kiss without shame, for she desires it!”[
2
]

Nonprocreative sex was seen as problematic not only because it was sterile. It also defied, or appeared to defy, gender norms. According to the doctrine of sexual complementarity, developed in the late Enlightenment, the male was to be active to the female's passive, desiring to the female's desired, pleasure-seeking to women's maternity-seeking, and so on. A woman who submitted passively to intercourse with her husband was normal, while a woman who took an active role, like getting on top, was not. Neither, for that matter, was a husband who willingly tolerated such things. Any man who voluntarily took on a sexual role other than what Angus McLaren has characterized as “the impenetrable penetrator” was considered at least suspect, if not outright deviant. Men who performed oral sex on their female partners, for instance, were considered passive and effeminate. The women who allowed or, worse, requested such a thing, remarkably enough, might be credited with sadism. Many early sexologists and their colleagues believed such dangerous cross-gendered behavior could represent the beginning of a slippery slope: once he became inclined to the “passivist” act of performing oral sex on women, a man might continue to become more and more passive until he became the lowest of the low, a fellator of other men.

By far the era's favorite phantasm of deviance and ruin was spermatorrhea, or the “excessive” loss of semen. This fictitious disease was usually blamed on masturbation, the ultimate in nonreproductive sexual activity. Avoiding and preventing masturbation became a pervasive and urgently felt concern, giving rise to numerous books, pamphlets, treatment regimes, and a few lucrative careers. In addition to well-known preventatives like Bible study, cold-water baths, dietary fiber, and Boy Scouting, other remedies like chastity belts, tying children's hands to the bedposts, and hard manual labor were indicated to assist the masturbator in conquering his addiction to self-abuse. The masturbator who could or would not refrain courted consequences ranging from nervous exhaustion, insanity, syphilis, bed-wetting, impotence, sterility, effeminacy, loss of vitality, homosexuality, and perhaps even death.[
3
]

Anything and everything, it seemed, could spur one to the dissipating, morally degenerate, vitality-sapping practice of self-stimulation. Reading novels was considered a high-risk activity, encouraging fantasy and laziness. Constipation was judged to excite the nerves of the pelvis and encourage insalubrious behavior; both Sylvester Graham's eponymous cracker and John Kellogg's breakfast cereals were part of the effort to ensure regular, healthy bowel movements that would not cause undue stimulation to sensitive bits of the anatomy. Some believed the use of the vaginal speculum by gynecologists would make women sex-mad and lead not just to masturbation but nymphomania—associated with unseemly “masculine” levels of sexual interest—and perhaps even to prostitution. Even thumbsucking was an enemy of sexual propriety and was vilified in high scientific medico-moral style in pediatric literature from the 1870s until the 1950s as encouraging masturbation and causing an ugly, telltale dental deformity to boot.[
4
]

Most dangerous was the foreskin of the penis. Merely to have one could rouse a man to deviant thoughts and actions as the foreskin moved over the head of the penis during everyday movements. To prevent this, doctors sometimes pierced the foreskin and infibulated it, holding it closed with loops of wire. Much more often the foreskin was simply removed.[
5
] The routine circumcision of baby boys at birth, championed heavily in the United States by pioneering pediatrician Abraham Jacobi, was viewed as a reasonable precaution against masturbation and its destructive effects on health, morals, and the ability to have a normal married life. The practice continues today in US hospitals, its original aims swept discreetly under the rug, justified now by controversial claims that it improves genital hygiene and may lessen risks of certain infections.[
6
]