Straight (8 page)

Freud was simultaneously a simplistic and a highly critical thinker when it came to heterosexuality. More than once he admitted that the “exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based on an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature,”[
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] and acknowledged, in an equally radical insight, that heterosexuality required just as much restriction in its choice of object as homosexuality. But at the same time as he made these incisive observations about the complexity of sexual desires, he also accepted without reservation that heterosexuality existed. Freud's belief that heterosexuality was a genuine human phenomenon and a normative characteristic of human behavior is reflected throughout his work. It was this large-scale Freudianism—and not the nuanced asides—that made Freud's name in the English-speaking world, especially in America.

Freudian theories on sex began to percolate through the European and American intelligentsia in the 1910s and '20s, gaining momentum and visibility to the point where they more or less ruled the psychological roost well into the second half of the twentieth century. Freud's premise that adult sexuality was developed via a long succession of social interactions that began in infancy was particularly popular and influential. Every person, Freud argued, was born with an intrinsic sexual capacity as part of their physical and psychological makeup. What became of this innate sexual potential was dependent on a devilishly complicated equation with a terrifying number of shadowy and often lurid variables that could as easily go wrong as right.

Being a properly constituted heterosexual thus became an achievement. In Freud's world it was not merely nature or God's will that made a person sexually “normal.” Upbringing and family were murky, treacherous waters that had to be navigated correctly to arrive at adult heterosexuality's safe harbor. Freudian theory implicated the middle-class nuclear household and the world of relatives, friends, school, and strangers as well in the creation of adult sexual personae. Parent-child relationships were particularly important, and woe betide the parent who unwittingly failed a child at any point in this fraught endeavor.

The result of achieving a proper sexual trajectory, from a Freudian point of view, was not only that a person would feel sexual desire for a partner of the “correct” biological sex but that he or she would arrive at adulthood with a whole array of specific desires, propensities, and awareness. Men would have learned to divert their Oedipal longings for their mothers onto other women, as well as to channel their rampant progenitive desires into more socially acceptable forms of creativity such as architecture and farming. They would desire sex for sex's sake, themselves, but instinctively know how to classify women on the Madonna/whore continuum.[
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] As for women, they would have overcome their childhood desires to sleep with their own mothers . . . and their own fathers . . . and learned how to desire sex with their husbands in the name of a subconscious desire for children. A woman would also develop the magical (and automatic) ability to imprint on the man to whom she lost her virginity, an experience that would forever color her relationship both to that man and to the sexual act.

The transformation of the polymorphously perverse child into a properly functioning heterosexual adult was exceedingly complicated, making “normal” heterosexuality dependent on the success of many delicate and entwined operations. Few psychologists still subscribe to such literal Freudian theories of sexuality formation, but their influence lingers in the public imagination. Even today, people often assume that non-heterosexuality has to do with a person's parents or upbringing, some kind of sexual trauma, or some condition of arrested psychological development.

After Freud, as Jonathan Ned Katz puts it, it was clear that “heterosexuals were
made,
not born.” But even Freud did not simply reach
down and bestow this sensibility upon us like some grandiose god. He couldn't have. Even in Freud's heyday, relatively few people actually read his works. Freud's influence on us is due to what amounts to a gigantic, culture-wide game of Telephone. Authors of marriage manuals and sexual self-help titles were particularly prone to leaning on, if not always leaping aboard, the Freudian bandwagon.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, for instance, British women's reproductive-health crusader Marie Stopes was among the authoritative voices repeating Freudian notions such as the idea that the way a woman loses her virginity will automatically and permanently color her attitudes toward sex. Freud had given this notion his scholarly and medical imprimatur in his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
in 1905. Stopes reinforced it in 1918 in her best-selling
Married Love,
explaining that husbands who were too eager and selfish to be tender on their wedding nights were creating wives who would always dislike sex and resent their husbands' imposition.

The depth of Freud's influence shows all the more clearly when it emerges in the work of writers like the influential Theodor van de Velde, who ordinarily steered clear of psychology in favor of physiological verities. Van de Velde's 1926
Ideal Marriage
was the
Joy of Sex
of its day, going through forty-six printings in its original edition before being reissued in 1965. (
The Joy of Sex
dates from 1972.) In its pages, van de Velde calmly endorsed Freudian claims that “the longing for maternity” was a primary motivator of sexual interest “in the majority of women,” as well as passing along other Freudian shibboleths, such as warning of the dangers of sexual neurosis and “psychic impotence” among men who were “brain workers.”

Through such repetition Freud's theories became truisms, and the truisms, echoed over and over, read by thousands and discussed by thousands more, gradually became incorporated into our thinking on a grand scale. Before long, they emerged as doxa. The process was doubtless hastened both by the internal logic of Freud's theoretical framework and by the fact that Freud's theories were invented as clinical observations made of people's recollections of their experiences. Particularly in the large outlines in which popular sources typically handed them down, they were easily adapted for self-analytical use.[
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] Because psychoanalysis and self-analysis were automatically transactional and participatory, Freud's theories on sexuality were uniquely
available to the public conversation. By the time of World War II, a basically Freudian understanding of sexuality had become a cultural commonplace, a sex doxa that has contributed not only to the now-laughable notion that comic books turn young people into juvenile delinquents and sexual deviants, but which continues to influence the ideology of American government-mandated “abstinence-only” sex education.[
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]

At this point, Freud's presence in our sexuality doxa often seems weirdly indirect, diffuse, almost homeopathic. This is precisely the point: when ideas thoroughly permeate a culture they emerge as doxa. The widespread and dramatic simplification of Freudian ideas is what gave them their power to shape thought and action. Freud never set out to influence millions of people who never read a word he wrote. He never could have. Repetition and diffusion, on the other hand, did a dandy job of making his ideas into integral parts of what “everyone knows” about sex.

THE OPPOSITE OF SLUT

Another way doxa gets shaped, transmitted, and put into practice is through language. Consider, for example, the word “slut.” Calling a woman a slut singles her out. It labels her as not just doing something wrong, but doing quite a bit of it. She breaks the rules, runs right over the boundaries of sexual propriety, goes overboard in a direction a respectable woman isn't supposed to admit to. “Slut” is clearly part of the doxa of sex, in that it informs us of a boundary in regard to how sexual a person, specifically a woman, is supposed to be.

But if a “slut” is the exception, what is the rule? What is the opposite of “slut”? “Slut” is an example of what social scientists call a “marked category,” meaning a term that signifies something that transgresses or contradicts the expected or the doxic.[
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] The differences between “nurse” and “male nurse” or “bishop” and “female bishop” are the modifiers that mark the differences between the typical and the atypical, the expected and the startling. We see the same effect at work in words like “disabled” and “disfigured,” and indeed in “retarded,” all of which imply the existence of some comparatively better or more perfect state that the person or thing in question has deviated from or failed to achieve.

Through these implied or direct comparisons, marked categories
clearly indicate what is considered foundational, the baseline from which everything else is a divergence. Consider the phrase “people of color.” This might be considered a politically correct phrase these days, but what is its unmarked equivalent? It should be “colorless people,” but it isn't: there is no such thing as a colorless person. “People who are not ‘of color'” are the baseline, the default, the unexceptional, the normal. The unmarked category against which “people of color” are tacitly opposed are “not-colored” people; in other words, whites.

Marked categories are, we quickly apprehend, a particularly efficient way to communicate doxa. Marked categories like “people of color,” with no clearly defined corresponding unmarked category, tend to be the most socially potent of all. When the unmarked, expected, normative “default” category is unnamed and invisible, all the focus falls on the marked category: there is nothing that is opposite and equal. What
do
we call people who are at the other end of the spectrum from sluts? Prudes, perhaps. But “prude” too is a marked category, the extreme at the other end of the bell curve. There is no meaningful word for the middle of that bell curve, the space that fits comfortably inside the boundaries of doxa, the space that most people occupy most of the time. Nameless and characterless, the space we can loosely characterize as “normal” is almost completely undefined.

This is why “slut” and “prude,” “pervert” and “deviant” all work so well as insults and as ways to police the boundaries of sex doxa. The labels are effortless to deploy and hard, even impossible, to defend against. As any woman who has been the subject of slut-shaming knows all too well—and about two out of three American women deal with this while they are still in high school, according to a 1993 study done by the American Association of University Women—the victim has no traction.[
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] The facts of her sexual existence are immaterial, all that matters is that she has been painted in the bright Technicolor of the marked category and cannot disappear into the amorphous invisibility of “normal.” The opposite of “slut” is
someone who has not been labeled a slut,
someone who has never been charged with violating doxa. The opposite of “pervert” is exactly the same:
someone who has never been charged with being one.

This makes it doubly fascinating, and doubly relevant, that the word “heterosexual” exists. For many thousands of years, as you recall,
there was no word for it, illustrating how things that are doxic and typical are usually not singled out with names; they just
are.
Kertbeny coined “heterosexual” and “homosexual” as a pair on purpose: having two marked categories instead of only one generates a certain amount of equality, which was precisely his point. The paired words suggest that both “homo” and “hetero” are marked categories whose specialization sets them off from the unmarked human universal, the undifferentiated “sexual.” The idea of a primitive, undifferentiated sexuality that developed into a more structured and bounded sexual persona was central to Freud's theory of sexuality, and a belief in this developmental process has become part of our doxa. Yet at the same time, there is a great deal about “heterosexual” that remains amorphous and undefined until we cross a line and become a prude, a pervert, a deviant, or a slut. Marked language gives us our sexuality doxa not by carefully defining what is expected of us, what will be accepted by our families and friends, but by marking out—with the linguistic equivalent of a scarlet letter—what will not.

IT'S ONLY NATURAL

Nature, the physical universe, is the baseline of our reality. It encompasses everything that exists that is not made by human hands, and it encompasses the humans—and their hands—as well. All the physical forces that cause natural phenomena to happen are also nature, from the weak nuclear force that helps hold atoms together to the mysterious spark that makes the difference between life and death. Nature exists spontaneously, without our having to do anything; it was here when we got here and it will be here when we leave. This is precisely why people so often attempt to rationalize doxa, their expectations and assumptions regarding human behavior, based on what exists or fails to exist in nature.

This is particularly true when it comes to sex, and nature arguments in regard to sexual activity between men and women in particular have been around for a very long time. Reproduction is a particularly dramatic and impressive natural phenomenon, and doubly impressive because it is what perpetuates the species. For early Christians, it was the only thing sufficiently important to justify either sexual desire or sexual activity. Every sexual behavior and every
sexual desire that could not lead directly to conception soon became labeled with the fateful phrase
contra naturam,
against nature. The sexes of the participants were not the limiting factor in whether a sex act was “against nature,” the potential for reproduction was. Even for a duly married man and woman, any time “someone obtains or consents that semen be spilled elsewhere than in the place deputed by nature,” as medieval cleric William Peraldus put it, the Church labeled it
contra naturam.
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