Straight (5 page)

At the same time as Darwin's theories were enthusiastically seized upon by eugenicists, “social Darwinists,” and other champions of the hierarchy of life encapsulated in the Great Chain of Being, they also helped to facilitate a wholesale questioning of the whole notion of a fixed human hierarchy. Egalitarianism and universal human rights were relatively new concepts at the turn of the nineteenth century, brought to the attention of most as a result of the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century. At the time of the rise of the monster cities of the West, these progressive ideas by no means dominated the scene. The idea that birth was worth, and that one's place in the Great Chain was not really something one could change, was still common even as people began to simultaneously entertain the notions that perhaps this should not matter and that a civil society might have an interest in behaving as if it mattered less, or perhaps not at all.

As the cities grew, the pragmatic value of civil egalitarianism became increasingly evident. Whether a country was headed by a king or a president, whether it maintained a formal aristocracy or insisted upon equality of citizenship, the intense population pressure of the cities made it increasingly apparent that the masses required some sort of management. Merely asserting old hierarchies of class was not
going to get the job done either, because in the new industrial economy hierarchies of class were changing, too. What was required were systematic, reproducible, universally applicable systems for social management that could be implemented on a large scale.

It is no coincidence that we first see this happening with regard to sex in early Napoleonic France. Beginning as early as 1802, when the French government began regulating and registering Parisian prostitutes via the Bureau des Moeurs (Bureau of Morals) and Bureau Sanitaire (Bureau of Health), the policing of the sexual activity of the general public increasingly became a problem for the state. Many efforts focused on specific problem behaviors like prostitution, or health problems like venereal diseases. In England, the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts (enacted in 1864) attempted to stem the tide of the latter by rigidly controlling the former, complete with compulsory gynecological exams. Other early attempts at managing the sexuality of the masses were more philosophical in nature, such as the campaign to raise the age of consent that became such a hot-button issue in the English 1870s.[
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The law was integral to this effort to impose greater control over the sexual behavior of citizens. Central to this legal effort, in turn, was the process of creating a body of work that helped to support the law and aid it in doing its managerial work. The new secular state required secular justification for its laws, and professionals in many fields began to apply themselves to the task of providing it. Physicians like Richard von Krafft-Ebing would do this in a particular and distinctive way. Drawing on an Enlightenment legacy of scientific naming, a variety of sexual behaviors and characteristics were suddenly made both “new” and “known” thanks to Krafft-Ebing's classification and assignment of scholarly names. Krafft-Ebing's book
Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886) was a pioneering, and highly problematic, index to disorders of the “sexual instinct” and the human types subject to them.

As with the ornate sleeper ray that became
Electrolux addisoni
in 2007, none of the actual behaviors Krafft-Ebing catalogued were new to the annals of human experience. Krafft-Ebing no more “discovered” the various sexual peccadilloes of the human race than he could've “discovered” his own grandfather. But he did apply a formal taxonomy to the sexual actions and actors he described. Although he
was not the one who coined the word, his taxonomic vocabulary also included the word “heterosexual,” its first adoption in the medical literature.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

Naming and cataloging can be real and powerful science. They can also be real and powerful cultural magic. This is precisely why we have to be wary of who is in charge of naming and cataloging things, what their motivations are in doing so, and how they go about doing it. If the right person with the right qualifications names a thing or a phenomenon in the right way, chances are excellent that other people will accept unquestioningly that that thing or phenomenon is a real scientific (which is to say objective and material) entity. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the word “heterosexual” was first coined—in a letter written May 6, 1868, by a writer named Karl Maria Kertbeny—scientific naming was a ritual that had the weight of more than a hundred years of authority behind it. But the process of scientific naming was not always as objective, or as material, as we often suppose.

Science is at root a social effort. As a discipline, material science—whether physical or biological—is a collective effort carried out by a large, loosely affiliated group of people for the greater good, and it is subject to a certain amount of human bias no matter what we do. We are simply not capable of omniscience, and so we must choose what we will pay attention to at any given instant, what qualities of an object we will decide are important enough to observe, characterize, and record. This alone is enough to show our hand.

The history of taxonomy bears this out to a degree that is frankly astonishing, and which hints at some of the human prejudice to come later in the cataloging and naming of human sexuality. Carolus Linnaeus, the brilliant Swedish father of scientific naming and self-anointed “prince of botanists,” was an ardently Christian academic who wrote lengthy compendiums in scholarly Latin. He was also a bit of a sexual obsessive. Once Linnaeus had finished with them, all plants known to him had been classed according to the number and function of their sex organs, and many of them had been named for genitals as well. With a decided knack for the unsavory image, he named a stinkhorn fungus
Phallus daemonicum,
and a perfectly innocuous
North American shrub commonly called the Jamaica caper became
Capparis cynophallophora
—the caper that bears a dog's penis. Even during his lifetime, Linnaeus's relentless sexualizing of his subject matter often raised critical eyebrows and occasionally inspired tirades in print. Linnaeus, in turn, immortalized his critics by naming ugly or noxious plants after them. The most famous example of this is the unattractive little relative of the aster called
Siegesbeckia,
named for Johann Siegesbeck, an academic who took strong exception to the “loathsome harlotry” of Linnaeus's work.

We can perhaps understand why others might've been frustrated. Linnaeus's system was more than a little offbeat and decidedly arbitrary in what it chose to describe: the
nuptiae plantarum,
or marriages of plants. He did not mean this as a euphemism. A world of human social and sexual expectations was encoded in his categories.
Monandria
were one-husbanded plants, tidily monogamous, with a single pistil (female sex organ) and a single stamen (male sex organ) in a given flower.
Dodecandria,
on the other hand, had a disturbingly numerous twelve “husbands” per bloom. Linnaeus's assumption was that all plants “married.” He did not presume that plants like mosses, whose “weddings” he could not observe, were simply not the “marrying type”; it would take later observers to realize that many mosses actually reproduce asexually. Linnaeus could not bear the thought of it and so consigned them to the class of
cryptogamia,
those who married in secret.

Linnaeus and his sex-obsessed work would almost be laughable if they hadn't been so influential. Linnaeus's taxonomic principles—if not necessarily his sexual focus in applying them—became the basis for a breathtakingly prolific discipline. The 1735 first edition of Linnaeus's
Systema Naturae
was a mere eleven pages, but by the thirteenth and last edition in 1767, the book had grown to over three thousand pages. (Currently, the Species 2000 initiative database project based at University of Reading is working toward a valid checklist of all known species of organism, and their rolls included, as of 2009, more than one million species.)

The cataloging of known things, and the establishment of names for those things, remains a central project of science. The fact that it is a profoundly human endeavor, saturated with human values and prejudices,
is one of science's open secrets, betrayed in the very language that is used to name things. Dead languages cannot remove human fingerprints. “Phallus daemonicum” is as overt a cultural reference as “Electrolux.”[
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Cataloging and naming human characteristics is but an extension of the principle of cataloging and naming natural objects and phenomena. When nineteenth-century culture began to perceive a need to manage sexual behavior on a civic level, it also had to devise language and concepts with which to talk about them. The language that already existed for doing this lay mostly within the realm of religion—the syntax of sin and sinners, virtue and saints. Neither that language nor the Church authority on which it rested were terribly desirable to the new secular state. The practice of scientific naming provided a logical place to turn. The physical and biological sciences (including medicine) could claim a politically valuable neutrality: the objects that science investigated were not the works of man but the works of nature. Scientists could claim that they merely looked at what
was.
It was the right tool at the right time. But as we have seen, much might depend on what was chosen for observation and by whom.

It can scarcely come as a surprise that much of what was chosen for observation, when human sexuality became the object of study, was chosen because it was perceived as troublesome. Nor can it come as a surprise that those who decided to take upon themselves the task of cataloging and naming these troublesome sexual behaviors had very strong opinions about the objects of their investigation, opinions that influenced their work. Sexuality had, after all, become a pressing public issue, and it wanted effective handling by people who understood just how serious an issue it was. Nothing less than the fate of the family—and even the nation—was at stake.

FOCUS ON THE FAMILY

If the morally grey, sexually suspect world of the working-class city was the realm of public concern and state regulation, the private and eminently respectable realm of the middle-class family was one of the primary things all that regulation was intended to protect. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a new “focus on the family” emerged as a primary concern for the newly fledged middle classes whose reach,
ranks, and social power were on the rise.

Unlike inherited aristocratic wealth, middle-class money came from work in the professions, from trade, or, increasingly, from ownership and management of industry. Just as with the aristocracy, tight control over marriages, families, and children was key to protecting and increasing this wealth and security. But the middle classes did this in their own distinctive ways. Where the aristocracy (or indeed a traditional rural working household) would base its ideas of family and lineage on the management of hereditary rank and property, the middle classes, as historian Lawrence Stone has explained, organized themselves around four central and distinctively modern features: intense emotional bonds, a brash new emphasis on personal autonomy, an unprecedented interest in privacy, and an intensified interest in sex.[
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This last point may seem surprising, but it shouldn't. The stereotypical Victorian prude, and the Victorian lady of scrupulous sexual ignorance and passivity, did exist—their modern-day analogues do too—but there was far more to Victorian sexuality than this. Victorians, including women, talked more and in greater detail about sexual issues than any previous generation we know of.

It was an era of wide-ranging and often extreme opinions on all aspects of sex. Some Victorians were indeed sex-phobic, misogynist, and prudish, even priggish. Physicians like William Acton famously made statements like “the majority of women are (happily for them) not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind,” and British gynecologist Isaac Baker Brown did advocate, and perform, surgical removal of the clitoris as a cure for female masturbation.[
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] But even among his colleagues, Acton was known as an illogical extremist, and Baker Brown was eventually drummed out of the profession.

Other Victorians' views of sex were quite progressive. Political publisher Richard Carlile professed a belief that women “had an almost constant desire for copulation,” and only social constraints kept them from acting on it. Wishful thinking, perhaps, given the lack of both social approval and reliable contraception, but others were similarly bold about giving sexuality pride of place in human affairs. “Sexual matters,” wrote the popular physician and advisor Henry
Guernsey, “are so thoroughly interwoven with the highest destinies of the human race, physically, mentally, and spiritually, there is scarcely any function of higher import.”[
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Most nineteenth-century middle-class individuals struggled to find a sexual middle ground—not as negative and harsh as the views of Acton or Baker Brown, but probably not as openly enthusiastic as those of Carlile or Guernsey either—where they could feel comfortable, respectable, and safe. This was no small task. The bourgeois family, with its hothouse emotions and its pigeon-hole privacies, was supposed to be a fortress and a shield, providing a buffer zone of respectability that protected its members from aristocratic decadence on the one side and the horrors of the teeming city on the other. The purpose of this family was the generation and formation of people—specifically men—who would form an unassailable backbone for the state.

The deliberate formation of a solid, respectable, and powerful middle-class culture was more than a reaction against the aristocracy or, in the New World, an effort to embody the “more perfect union” envisioned by America's founding fathers. It was also an effort to create a strong national core that could survive increasing exposure to the world. By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States, Great Britain, and nearly all of the European states had extended their reach, as well as their armies and economies, to the far corners of the globe. Whether in British India, the Belgian Congo, German East Africa, French Cambodia, or any of the legion other European or American appropriations, successful empires required adept management of far-flung possessions inconveniently populated by vast numbers of people who didn't look, think, or act like their colonial overlords. “Natives” were often thought of as primitive or childlike, in dire need of the civilizing influence of the superior European. (Fear of a brown planet is, in other words, nothing new. Nor is the racist, paternalistic sentiment well summarized as “what these people need is a honky.”) But the elite and the aristocracy did not have the numbers to provide more than the uppermost layer of top brass. The majority of colonial personnel came out of the middle classes. A powerful middle class allowed European and European-descended whites to maintain their
sense of themselves as standard-bearers, those whose “fitness to rule” equipped them for empire.