Heterosexuality

• 1. Introduction

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  Heterosexuality was, for most of human history, a thing without a name. The word did not exist until Karl Maria Kertbeny coined it in 1869, alongside the word homosexual. There was no need to name the average him and her until there was a deviant it to set them against. When the term first appeared in a major American dictionary in 1923, it was filed under pathology, defined as a morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex. Eleven years later the same dictionary reversed itself entirely, calling the very same word a manifestation of normal sexuality. How does a single word travel from disease to default in just over a decade? Why did a pattern of attraction so common that it underwrites human reproduction need a label at all? And what does it mean that the most ordinary thing in the world had to wait until the late 19th century to be spoken aloud?

• 2. Naming The Normal

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  Hetero- comes from the Greek word héteros, meaning other party or another, used in science as a prefix for different. Joined to the Latin word for sex, it produced a clinical-sounding compound that took decades to settle into everyday speech. Kertbeny's coinage from 1869 went quiet for a generation. Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll reintroduced the term around 1890, and the noun only crept into wider use from the early 1920s. Common usage waited until the 1960s. The abstract noun heterosexuality is first recorded in 1900. The colloquial shortening hetero is attested from 1933. The word straight took a stranger path to the same meaning. It began as mid-20th century gay slang for heterosexuals, drawn from the phrase to go straight, as in the straight and narrow, meaning to stop engaging in homosexual sex. Author G. W. Henry used it this way in 1941, in a book of conversations with homosexual males, applied to people identified as ex-gays. Some object to the term straight, because if one path is straight, the others are implied to be crooked. A related hyponym, heteroflexible, names something narrower still.

• 3. Counting Everyone

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  Several major studies report that between 89% and 98% of people have had only heterosexual contact within their lifetime. That figure drops to 79 to 84% once same-sex attraction or behavior is counted as well, which shows how much the answer depends on whether you measure what people do or how they identify. A 1992 study found 93.9% of males in Britain reported only heterosexual experience, against 95.9% in France. A 2008 poll put the share of Britons with only opposite-sex contact at 85%, while 94% identified as heterosexual. The UK Office for National Statistics found in 2010 that 95% of Britons identified as heterosexual, 1.5% as homosexual or bisexual, and 3.5% gave vaguer answers or none at all. In the United States, a Williams Institute report in April 2011 placed the heterosexual share at 96%, roughly 250 million adults. An October 2012 Gallup poll reached 96.6%, with a margin of error of plus or minus one percent. That poll also broke the numbers down by age and gender, finding women aged 18 to 29 the least likely to call themselves completely heterosexual, at 88%. By 2016, Bailey and colleagues summarized recent Western surveys as showing about 93% of men and 87% of women identifying as completely heterosexual, with another 4% of men and 10% of women describing themselves as mostly heterosexual.

• 4. The Biology Question

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  Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, and they do not regard it as a choice. They lean toward biology, because there is considerably more evidence for nonsocial, biological causes than for social ones, especially in males. The factors most often named are genes, prenatal hormones, and brain structure, working in concert with the environment. The masculinization of the brain is one of the better-understood pieces. Estradiol and testosterone, the latter converted by the enzyme 5-alpha-reductase into dihydrotestosterone, act on androgen receptors in the brain. When those receptors are scarce, as in androgen insensitivity syndrome, or when androgen runs high, as in females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, physical and psychological effects follow. Heterosexuality in females has been linked to a lower degree of masculinization than is seen in lesbian females. The picture for heterosexual males is murkier, with studies pointing toward both higher and lower masculinization than in homosexual males. No single, simple determinant has ever been conclusively demonstrated.

• 5. Fluid And Fixed

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  Sexual orientation is stable and unlikely to change for the vast majority of people, yet the word vast hides real movement at the edges. The American Psychological Association draws a line between sexual orientation, an innate attraction, and sexual orientation identity, which may shift at any point in a person's life. A 2012 study of 2,560 adults found that 2% reported a change in sexual orientation identity over a 10-year span. Among men, change occurred in 0.78% who had identified as heterosexual, 9.52% of homosexuals, and 47% of bisexuals. Among women the figures ran higher: 1.36% of heterosexuals, 63.6% of lesbians, and 64.7% of bisexuals. Change of this kind is more likely for women than for men. Behavior and identity do not always match either. Some women identify as heterosexual and bisexual at once, and self-identified straight people of both sexes sometimes have sex with people of the same sex. Heteroflexibility names a mostly heterosexual orientation with minimal same-sex activity, described simply as mostly straight. Efforts to change orientation outright, aimed at converting homosexual and bisexual people, have no studies of adequate scientific rigor showing they work.

• 6. Inventing The Erotic

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  Jonathan Ned Katz dates the modern definition of heterosexuality to the late 19th century, and argues the concept could not exist before the economy that produced it. In the Victorian era, he writes, sex was a means to reproduction, and relations between the sexes were not thought of as overtly sexual. The body was a tool for procreation. Human energy, imagined as a closed and severely limited system, was meant for producing children and for work, not wasted in libidinous pleasures. Katz traces a change in America and Germany as the family shifted from producer to consumer. The old work ethic gave way, pleasure rose in value, and a market for the erotic took shape. As pleasure was commoditized, medical doctors gained power and built a model of normal love, in which healthy men and women enjoyed sex as an essential, necessary, normal eroticism. That model needed a shadow, the Victorian Sex Pervert, anyone who failed the norm. As Katz puts it, the attention paid the sexual abnormal created a need to name the sexual normal, the better to distinguish the average him and her from the deviant it.

• 7. Faith And Symbol

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  The Book of Genesis supplies some of the oldest scriptural ground for heterosexual union, declaring it is not good that the man should be alone, and that a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. Most religious traditions reserve marriage to heterosexual unions, though there are exceptions, including certain Buddhist and Hindu traditions, Unitarian Universalists, the Metropolitan Community Church, some Anglican dioceses, and some Quaker, United Church of Canada, and Reform and Conservative Jewish congregations. A few faiths treat all sexual relations as sinful and promote celibacy, among them the Shakers, the Harmony Society, and the Ephrata Cloister. The Catholic Church requires celibacy of its priests while holding heterosexual marriage to be sacred and necessary. The symbolism runs back even further than the scripture. Heterosexual imagery appears in the earliest artifacts of humanity, in gender symbols, ritual fertility carvings, and primitive art, and later in fertility rites and polytheistic worship, such as the lingam in Hinduism. One modern emblem fuses the symbol of Mars, the Roman god of war, with that of Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, encoded today as the unicode character at U plus 26A4.

• 8. The Norm As Politics

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  Heteronormativity is the world view that treats heterosexuality as the normal or preferred orientation, often handing strict gender roles to males and females. Michael Warner popularized the term in 1991. The feminist Adrienne Rich pushed the idea further with compulsory heterosexuality, the continual reassertion of heterosexual norms, which she folds into the larger pattern of heterosexism. In Rich's account, female heterosexuality is both assumed and enforced by a patriarchal society, recast as natural inclination or obligation, so that anyone who differs is judged deviant or abhorrent. Heterosexism itself is bias or discrimination favoring opposite-sex sexuality and relationships, including the simple assumption that everyone is heterosexual, and discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, heteroflexible people, and transgender or non-binary individuals. Against this backdrop arose straight pride, a slogan from the late 1980s and early 1990s used mainly by social conservative groups as a political stance, framed as a response to the gay pride that LGBTQ groups had adopted in the early 1970s.