The Invention of Heterosexuality

The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Ned Katz

Challenging the Ahistorical View of Heterosexuality

Common assumptions perceive heterosexuality as an age-old, universal, unchanging, and essential aspect of human nature. It is often presumed that historical figures like Adam and Eve experienced and understood their sexuality in the same way as modern heterosexuals. However, this understanding is flawed. The concept of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating back to the late nineteenth century. It represents a specific and historically contingent way of perceiving, categorizing, and imagining the social relations between the sexes.

Heterosexuality, with its claim to eternity, has held a pivotal place in the social universe of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a position it did not occupy earlier. By neglecting the historical context of heterosexuality, analyses of sex, both gay and straight, have inadvertently privileged the "normal" and "natural" at the expense of the "abnormal" and "unnatural." This privileging reinforces the dominance of the norm and protects it from scrutiny. Examining the history of heterosexuality allows us to challenge basic preconceptions and reveal the changing definitions of the heterosexual, the normal, and the natural, undermining its assumed power.

Historical Diversity in Sexual Organization

Past societies, including those in America, organized bodies, desires, and sexual interactions in ways radically different from our current understanding. To comprehend this vast sexual diversity, it's crucial to avoid projecting our own hetero and homo arrangements onto the past. While lip-service is often paid to the distorting effects of such conceptual imperialism, heterosexuality continues to be applied uncritically as a universal analytical tool. Recognizing the time-bound and culturally specific nature of heterosexuality allows us to work toward a thoroughly historical view of sex.

Early Victorian True Love (1820-1860)

During the early nineteenth century in the United States (approximately 1820-1860), the concept of the heterosexual did not exist. Middle-class white Americans idealized "True Womanhood," "True Manhood," and "True Love," all characterized by "purity" - freedom from sensuality. This "True Love," primarily depicted in literary and religious texts, was a refined romance devoid of lascivious expressions.

This ideal contrasts sharply with the late nineteenth and twentieth-century American emphasis on heterosexuality. Early Victorian "True Love" was realized within the confines of marriage, the legal institution for procreation and producing gender-conforming individuals. The focus was on proper womanhood, manhood, and progeny rather than eroticism. Individuals were identified as manly men, womanly women, and procreators rather than erotic beings or heterosexuals. Eros was not central to a heterosexual identity shared by both men and women. "True Women" were defined by their distance from lust, while "True Men," though perceived as closer to carnality, aspired to the same freedom from concupiscence.

Natural desire was considered legitimate only within the context of procreation and proper gender roles. Heteroerotic desire was not believed to be directed exclusively and naturally toward the opposite sex, as lust in men was considered indiscriminate. The human body was viewed as a means to procreation and production, with the penis and vagina seen as instruments of reproduction rather than pleasure. Human energy, regarded as a limited resource, was to be conserved for producing children and engaging in work, not wasted on libidinous pleasures.

The setting for this procreative labor was the home of "True Love," the domain of the "True Woman" and "True Man," a sanctuary of purity threatened by the "monster masturbator," a prominent figure representing illicit lust. This home was a world apart from the erotic ghetto occupied by the prostitute, another archetypal Victorian erotic monster.

Late Victorian Sex-Love (1860-1892)

The concepts of "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" did not emerge suddenly in the 1890s; rather, they were in development from the 1860s onward. During the late Victorian era in America and Germany (approximately 1860-1892), the modern idea of an eroticized universe began to take shape, and the experience of heterolust was increasingly documented and named.

Several social factors converged in the late nineteenth-century United States to eroticize consciousness, behavior, emotion, and identity, which became characteristic of the twentieth-century Western middle class. The transformation of the family from a producer to a consumer unit altered family members' relationship with their bodies; from being primarily instruments of work, bodies were integrated into a new economy and perceived as sources of consumption and pleasure. Historians have begun to examine how the biological human body is integrated into changing modes of production, procreation, engendering, and pleasure, radically altering the identity, activity, and experience of the body.

The growth of a consumer economy also fostered a new pleasure ethic that challenged the early Victorian work ethic, ultimately leading to a major transformation of values. While the early Victorian work ethic emphasized economic production and the procreation ethic extolled human reproduction, the late Victorian economic ethic promoted consuming, and its sex ethic praised an erotic pleasure principle for men and women.

The erotic became the raw material for a new consumer culture in the late nineteenth century. Newspapers, books, plays, and films dealing with sex, both "normal" and "abnormal," became commercially available. Restaurants, bars, and baths opened, catering to sexual consumers with cash. Late Victorian entrepreneurs of desire fueled the proliferation of a new eroticism, a commoditized culture of pleasure.

The rise in power and prestige of medical doctors during this period enabled them to prescribe a healthy new sexuality. In the name of science, doctors defined a new ideal of male-female relationships that included an essential, necessary, and normal eroticism for both women and men. Doctors, who had previously labeled sex-enjoying women as "nymphomaniacs," now began to consider a lack of sexual pleasure in women as a mental disturbance, criticizing female "frigidity" and "anesthesia."

By the 1880s, the increasing influence of doctors as a professional group facilitated the rise of a new medical model of "Normal Love," complete with sexuality. The new "Normal Woman" and "Man" were endowed with a healthy libido. This new theory of "Normal Love" served as a modern medical alternative to the old "Cult of True Love." Doctors prescribed a new sexual ethic, presenting it as a morally neutral, medical description of health. The creation of the new "Normal Sexual" corresponded with the invention of the late Victorian "Sexual Pervert." The attention given to the sexual abnormal necessitated naming the sexual normal to distinguish the average person from the deviant.

Heterosexuality: The First Years (1892-1900)

The period from 1892 to 1900 represents the initial and tentative formulation of the ideas of the heterosexual and homosexual by U.S. doctors. The earliest known American use of the word "heterosexual" appears in a medical journal article by Dr. James G. Kiernan of Chicago, presented on March 7, 1892, and published in May.

Kiernan's heterosexuals were not exemplars of normality but were defined by a mental condition called "psychical hermaphroditism," characterized by inclinations to both sexes and to "abnormal methods of gratification" (pleasure without procreation). These "heterodox sexuals" demonstrated "traces of the normal sexual appetite" (procreative desire). Kiernan implicitly defined normal sexuals by a monolithic other-sex inclination and procreative aim. They still lacked a specific name.

Kiernan's article also included one of the earliest known uses of the word "homosexual" in American English, defining "Pure homosexuals" as persons whose "general mental state is that of the opposite sex." Kiernan defined homosexuals by their deviance from a gender norm, while his heterosexuals displayed a double deviance from both gender and procreative norms.

Though Kiernan used the new words heterosexual and homosexual, an old procreative standard and a new gender norm coexisted uneasily in his thought. His word heterosexual defined a mixed person and compound urge, abnormal because they wantonly included procreative and non-procreative objectives, as well as same-sex and different-sex attractions.

In 1892, Dr. Krafft-Ebing's influential Psychopathia Sexualis was first translated and published in the United States. Krafft-Ebing used "hetero-sexual" in the modern sense to refer to an erotic feeling for a different sex, and "homo-sexual" to refer to an erotic feeling for the same sex. Unlike Kiernan, Krafft-Ebing clearly distinguished these terms from "psycho-sexual hermaphroditism," defined by impulses toward both sexes.

Krafft-Ebing hypothesized that there was an inborn "sexual instinct" for relations with the "opposite sex," the inherent "purpose" of which was to foster procreation. While his erotic drive was still a reproductive instinct, his clear focus on different-sex versus same-sex sexuality constituted a historic move from an absolute procreative standard of normality toward a new norm.

The German's mode of labeling was radical in referring to the biological sex, masculinity or femininity, and the pleasure of actors (along with the procreant purpose of acts). Krafft-Ebing's heterosexual offered the modern world a new norm that came to dominate our idea of the sexual universe, helping to change it from a mode of human reproduction and engendering to a mode of pleasure. The heterosexual category provided the basis for a move from a production-oriented, procreative imperative to a consumerist pleasure principle-an institutionalized pursuit of happiness.

Only gradually did doctors agree that heterosexual referred to a normal, "other-sex" eros. This new standard-model heterosex provided the pivotal term for the modern regularization of eros that paralleled similar attempts to standardize masculinity and femininity, intelligence, and manufacturing. The idea of heterosexuality as the master sex from which all others deviated was deeply authoritarian. The doctors' normalization of a sex that was hetero proclaimed a new heterosexual separatism-an erotic apartheid that forcefully segregated the sex normals from the sex perverts. The new, strict boundaries made the emerging erotic world less polymorphous-safer for sex normals. However, the idea of such creatures as heterosexuals and homosexuals emerged from the narrow world of medicine to become a commonly accepted notion only in the early twentieth century. In 1901, in the comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, "heterosexual" and "homosexual" had not yet made it.

The Distribution of the Heterosexual Mystique: 1900-1930

In the early years of this heterosexual century, the tentative hetero hypothesis was stabilized, fixed, and widely distributed as the ruling sexual orthodoxy: The Heterosexual Mystique. Starting among pleasure-affirming urban working-class youths, southern blacks, and Greenwich-Village bohemians as defensive subculture, heterosex soon triumphed as dominant culture.

In its earliest version, the twentieth-century heterosexual imperative usually continued to associate heterosexuality with a supposed human “need,” “drive,” or "instinct” for propagation, a procreant urge linked inexorably with carnal lust as it had not been earlier. In the early twentieth century, the falling birth rate, rising divorce rate, and "war of the sexes" of the middle class were matters of increasing public concern. Giving vent to heteroerotic emotions was thus praised as enhancing baby-making capacity, marital intimacy, and family stability. (Only many years later, in the mid-1960s, would heteroeroticism be distinguished completely, in practice and theory, from procreativity and male-female pleasure sex justified in its own name.)

The first part of the new sex norm-hetero-referred to a basic gender divergence. The "oppositeness" of the sexes was alleged to be the basis for a universal, normal, erotic attraction between males and females. The stress on the sexes' "oppositeness," which harked back to the early nineteenth century, by no means simply registered biological differences of females and males. The early twentieth-century focus on physiological and gender dimorphism reflected the deep anxieties of men about the shifting work, social roles, and power of men over women, and about the ideals of womanhood and manhood. That gender anxiety is documented, for example, in 1897, in The New York Times' publication of the Reverend Charles Parkhurst's diatribe against female “andromaniacs,