Straight (30 page)
Authors: Hanne Blank
1.
Lavoisier's proof lay in demonstrating that, in the absence of a specific gas (oxygen), whose presence could be measured by weight, combustible items would not burn and oxidizable items would not rust. Thus it was revealed that combustion was an interaction between a substance and the gases in proximity to it, and not an interaction between the essential matter of a substance and the phlogiston also contained in the same substance.
2.
Robie,
Sex and Life,
p. 359.
3.
A fine brief review of the available history on masturbation and its “cures” is Darby, “The Masturbation Taboo and the Rise of Routine Male Circumcision.”
4.
Gillis, “Bad Habits and Pernicious Results.” Small children often self-soothe by touching their genitals, as well as by thumb-sucking, sometimes simultaneously. One does not cause the other, and neither is typically considered to pose medical problems. Currently, the American Dental Association asserts that thumb-sucking may cause issues for dental development if it is still going on at the time that the permanent teeth are coming in, but that most children spontaneously stop thumb-sucking well before this point.
5.
Clitoridectomy, or the surgical excision of the clitoris, enjoyed a mercifully brief vogue in the 1860s as a masturbation preventative. More hay has been made of this than is perhaps warranted, as it was never a mainstream practice and was hotly controversial even in its era. Although both this form of genital cutting and the many other forms of female genital cutting practiced indigenously in various cultures around the world constitute
efforts to control female sexual behavior, there is no known direct relationship between Victorian clitoridectomy and other forms of female genital cutting.
6.
Across the Atlantic, where routine circumcision never particularly caught on, eminent surgeon Sir Jonathan Hutchinson wrote an influential article, “On Circumcision as a Preventative of Masturbation,” recommending the same and saying that “measures more radical than circumcision would, if public opinion permitted their adoption, be a true kindness to many parents of both sexes.”
7.
Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
(1871).
8.
Greenspan, “Courtship in
Drosophila.
”.
9.
Haumann, “Homosexuality, Biology, and Ideology,” p. 69.
10.
The same critics pointed out that, for similar reasons, the usefulness of “homosexual” was likewise suspect.
11.
For example, see Ordover,
American Eugenics
.
12.
To say nothing of the persistent belief in the hymen and its putative meanings. See my
Virgin: The Untouched History.
13.
Montegazza is quoted in Herrn, “On the History of Biological Theories of Homosexuality,” p. 41.
14.
The possibility that a researcher's opinion might introduce bias was, it seems, not entertained.
15.
Masculinized femaleness was also a problem, but was both seen and acknowledged more rarely than its obverse.
16.
From Stein,
The Mismeasure of Desire,
p. 234.
17.
Darwin,
On the Origin of Species,
p. 57.
18.
Schiebinger,
Nature's Body
.
19.
Russett,
Sexual Science,
p. 27.
20.
Ricketts, “Biological Research on Homosexuality,” p. 90.
21.
Stein, “Deconstructing Sexual Orientation,” pp. 84â85.
1.
The
Satyr
is discussed at some length in Lanser, “Singular Politics,” pp. 297â324.
2.
Hill,
Women Alone,
especially chapter 9.
3.
Cotton,
A Meet Help,
pp. 14â15.
4.
I don't specify that this applies only to different-sex relationships here because it doesn't. This is something we tend to believe is true of all romantic and sexual relationships, regardless of the sexes or genders of the participants.
5.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a revision; the original read “life, liberty, and property.” A telling difference.
6.
Porter,
Flesh in the Age of Reason,
p. 9.
7.
Astell, “Some Reflections Upon Marriage.”
8.
The notion that Christianity would be better served by a priesthood of all believers rather than by tiers of increasingly powerful clergy topped by an infallible Supreme Pontiff is very like the notion that nations would be better off with a government of their own citizenry rather than layers of increasingly powerful hereditary aristocrats atop whom perched an emperor or king.
9.
Proof that a marriage was unconsummated would do the trick, as would proof that a marriage was in some degree incestuous or that one's spouse was a heretic.
10.
Jewish marriage, then and now, is highly contractual in nature and centers around the writing and signing of a ketubah, or marriage contract, which specifies, among other things, the settlement a woman may expect to receive if her husband divorces her.
11.
There are still some holdout localities that do not permit no-fault divorce, and indeed there are some, like the island nation of Malta, that do not permit divorce at all.
Caveat nupturus.
12.
Kirchberg v. Feenstra, 450 U.S. 455 (1981).
13.
Gay,
The Education of the Senses,
p. 193.
14.
Smith-Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct,
p. 253.
15.
See US Department of Labor website,
http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/main. htm
.
16.
See UN website,
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/women/women96.htm#labour
.
17.
Quoted in Moscucci,
The Science of Woman,
p. 28.
18.
Ellis, “The Psychic State in Pregnancy,” p. 229.
19.
What Russell meant by this was that couples might have sexual intercourse without being married and only needed to concern themselves with marriage if the woman became pregnant.
20.
The Quiverfull movement is an originally American movement within fundamentalist Protestantism that eschews all forms of contraception and family planning and has a strong focus on large family sizes as a gift from God. The name comes from Psalm 127, where having a large number of children is compared to having a quiver full of arrows. For a critical overview, see Joyce,
Quiverfull
.
21.
Gillis,
A World of Their Own Making,
p. 153.
22.
Stone,
The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England,
p. 64.
23.
Hall,
Conceiving Parenthood,
pp. 123â211.
24.
Cited in Reed,
From Private Vice to Public Virtue,
p. 426. Moore later contributed materially to the passage of family-planning legislation under the Nixon administration whose eugenic underpinnings were quite plain: the intended end-users of the family-planning funding that the bill provided were to be the mentally ill, the indigent, Cuban refugees, migrant workers, and Native Americans.
25.
In British mill towns, Malthusian and socialist activists were also running direct educational efforts; Ittmann notes that some towns were known for the quantity of family-planning pamphlets to be found decorating the walls of the communal privies. Ittmann, “Family Limitation and Family Economy.”
26.
Marks,
Sexual Chemistry,
p. 35.
27.
Watkins,
On the Pill,
p. 50.
28.
Cook,
The Long Sexual Revolution,
p. 88; Office for National Statistics, “Rise in UK Fertility Continues,”
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget. asp?ID=951
, viewed on March 17, 2010.
29.
“Births: Preliminary Data for 2007,” National Vital Statistics Reports 57, no. 12 (March 18, 2009), US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System. Released as file nvsr57_12.pdf from
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/births.htm
.
30.
Goodwin, “Who Marries and When?”
1.
The use of music to deliver these themes, in Disney, makes them all the more powerful and memorable. “Someday My Prince Will Come” was listed, in 2004, as nineteenth in the American Film Institute's TV special
100 Years . . . 100 Songs,
which presented a ranking of the best songs from the history of film.
2.
These figures have undoubtedly risen. My statistics come from Walt Disney World's publicly released data at
http://wdwnews.com/viewpressrelease.aspx?pressreleaseid=99882&siteid=1
(access date April 2010).
3.
Huet,
The History of Romances,
pp. 3â4.
4.
Ibid., p. 129.
5.
Ibid., p. 145.
6.
Ibid., pp. 142â43.
7.
Stone,
The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England,
p. 284.
8.
Government programs have generously made
The Ogilvies
and many
other novels of the period available for free reading online. They make for an interesting and illuminating reading experience. A list of available texts is at the Literary Heritage (UK) website,
http://www3.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/eauthors.htm
.
9.
In Gay,
The Tender Passion,
p. 142.
10.
Bloch, “Changing Conceptions of Sexuality and Romance in Eighteenth-Century America,” p. 22.
11.
From Thomas Shepard,
The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied
(1656). Quoted in Winship, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!”
12.
Berend, “ âThe Best Or None!'” p. 937.
13.
Farrar (writing as “A Lady”),
The Young Lady's Friend.
14.
Albertine, “Heart's Expression”; Eustace, “ âThe Cornerstone of a Copious Work.'”
15.
Kingsley, letter to Grenfell, October 1, 1843, quoted in Gay,
The Tender Passion,
p. 307.
16.
Kingsley, letter to Grenfell, October 4, 1843, quoted in ibid., p. 308.
17.
Weld,
Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke
.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Brown, “The Action for Alienation of Affections,” p. 472. Alienation of affections, as a tort, is no longer recognized by most American states. No-fault divorce superseded it.
20.
The term “date” starts appearing in print referring to a courtship context around this time, according to Marilyn Yalom,
A History of the Wife.
21.
Rothman, “Sex and Self-Control.”
22.
See Jacobson's brilliant
Whiteness of a Different Color
for more on this process.
23.
The trope of the “beauty secret” persists to this day. Women are not supposed to betray the fact that beauty very often requires quite a bit of work, as well as expense.
24.
Public houses, taverns, bars, and so on were still mostly male preserves, although that was to change in time.
25.
Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat,
p. 28.
26.
Ibid., p. 23.
27.
Royden,
Sex and Common-Sense
, pp. 54â55.
28.
Rothman, “Sex and Self-Control.”
29.
Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat.
30.
From Alison Neilans,
Changes in Sex Morality
(1936), pp. 223â24, quoted in Hall,
Outspoken Women
, p. 202.
31.
Hall borrowed the concept of Sturm und Drang from the late eighteenth-century
early Romantic movement of the same name.
32.
Hall,
Adolescence
, p. 97.
33.
Hall knew Freud, with whose theories on adolescence Hall's have considerable overlap, and brought him to speak at Clark University, where Hall was president from 1889 to 1920.
34.
Hall,
Adolescence
, p. 579.
35.
Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat,
p. 26.
36.
Ibid., p. 48.
37.
Kornitzer,
The Modern Woman and Herself
(1932), p. 77, quoted in Hall,
Outspoken Women,
p. 191.
38.
Indeed, for the more conservative, going steady without romantic love was likewise a moral pitfall.
39.
Cicely Hamilton,
Marriage as a Trade.
40.
Atkinson,
Amazon Odyssey,
p. 105.
41.
Shelley, “Lesbianism and the Women's Liberation Movement.”
42.
To which radicals like writer Joanna Russ replied, “
But what is so dreadful about abandoning men to their own resources?
Haven't they got any? Men as a group at every class level have relatively more disposable income than women, more command over institutions, more leisure, more immunity from sexual violence, and more control over community resources than women.” (Russ, “For Women Only, Or, What Is That Man Doing under My Seat?,” p. 92.) The schism between mainstream and separatist feminisms continues to this day.
1.
Mondaini, “Sildenafil Does Not Improve Sexual Function in Men.”
2.
Joby Warrick, “Little Blue Pills Among the Ways CIA Wins Friends in Afghanistan,”
Washington Post,
December 26, 2008,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/25/AR2008122500931.html
(access date June 1, 2010).
3.
Sales figures are Pfizer's, from Viagra.com (accessed May 2010).
4.
PDE5 drugs do have another clinical indication, but it is by far less common. They are used to treat the disorder known as pulmonary hypertension. Sildenafil, the same drug marketed as Viagra, is also marketed for pulmonary treatment use under a different name (Revatio) and at a far lower price.
5.
Karras,
Sexuality in Medieval Europe,
p. 4.
6.
Ibid., p. 69.
7.
Laqueur,
Making Sex,
p. 44.
8.
Stopes,
Enduring Passion,
p. 52. Stopes also expressed the hope that unmarried women who suffered from unsatisfied “hunger” of this sort could be helped by supplements of glandular extracts (hormones).
9.
Men were in part genuinely afraid of what might happen if they found themselves overtaxed in such a way; the humoral medical understanding of the body common at the time held that serious depletions caused serious problems. But at the same time one gets the impression that the fear was a way of masking a certain delight at the subversive idea of being “forced” to submit to sex.
10.
Cavender, “White-Livered Widders and Bad-Blooded Men.”
11.
Hanchett,
Sexual Health,
p. 62.
12.
Hollick,
The Marriage Guide,
p. 356.
13.
Ellis,
Analysis of the Sexual Impulse,
p. 189.
14.
Ellis,
Sex in Relation to Society,
p. 531.
15.
Robie,
Sex Histories,
pp. 15â16.
16.
Ellis,
Little Essays of Love and Virtue,
p. 125.
17.
Laipson, “ âKiss without Shame,'” p. 517; Holtzman, “The Pursuit of Married Love,” p. 46.
18.
Stockham's 1897 book,
Karezza,
instructed the reader in a form of quasitantric, prolonged sensual play without orgasm that went by the same name.
19.
Katz,
Invention of Heterosexuality,
p. 66.
20.
Jane Gerhard, “Revisiting âThe Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,'” p. 457.
21.
It is instructive that the fact that 50 percent of Kinsey's male subjectsâtwice as many as the womenâhad also reported extramarital sex did not raise the same furor.
22.
Much hay has been made of Mosher's surveys since Carl Degler discovered them, not least by Degler. As late as 2010, popular geek-culture website BoingBoing.net stumbled upon coverage of the Mosher papers and proclaimed them, as many had done before, as proof positive that the Victorians weren't prudes. True enough, as far as it goes, since Mosher's data does indicate that most of the women who answered her questions seem to have felt positively about sexual relations and experienced orgasms at least sometimes. However, forty-six surveys representing forty-five respondents, all patients of the same doctor, can hardly be claimed to represent the whole of Victorian womanhood. The Mosher papers are certainly tantalizing, but in the end, only a tease.
23.
D'Emilio,
Intimate Matters,
p. 337.
24.
Densmore, quoted in Gerhard, “Revisiting âThe Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,'”
p. 468.
25.
These competing feminist approaches to sexuality would come to a head at a conference, “The Scholar and the Feminist,” held at Barnard College in 1982, where many years of feminist factional tension turned into open conflict. The ensuing “sex wars” in feminist and lesbian-feminist communities lasted for the better part of another decade.
26.
This observation is made by award-winning director Kimberly Peirce in Kirby Dick's 2006 documentary
This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated
. Peirce's
Boys Don't Cry
(1999), based on the 1993 murder of transgendered man Brandon Teena, depicts the vicious rape and graphic murder of its protagonist, yet the MPAA's initial NC-17 rating was due to the film's depiction of a lengthy, smiling, and thoroughly consensual female orgasm.
27.
As the horrific rape and murder of Brandon Teena certainly demonstrates.
28.
See, for instance, Remez, “Oral Sex among Adolescents.”
29.
Whether this can possibly be anything more than placebo-effect snake oil is debatable. The G-spot's role in female pleasure is not particularly well understood, to the point that its very existence is still under biomedical debate. It is furthermore unknown whether size has anything to do with its functioning. In any event, collagen injected into the body is slowly dispersed and eventually eliminated over the course of several months, so any effects of such a procedure would be temporary at best.
30.
Flibanserin was originally developed and tested as an antidepressant, and affects norepinephrine and dopamine levels while decreasing serotonin. Its mechanism is therefore quite different to that of vasodilators like Viagra. The difference in mechanism follows the hoary old supposition that men's sexuality is mechanical and bodily while women's is dependent on emotion and psychology. This is only one of the many criticisms being leveled at the drug.
31.
Katz,
Invention of Heterosexuality,
p. 181.
