the surprisingly short history of heterosexuality

The 'Science' of Mutual Heterosexual Orgasm (And no, that date's not a typo: 1981.)ģ. In overturning 'head and master' laws that gave husbands a legal upper hand over financial decision making within marriages, this decision finally made it illegal for a husband like Louisianan Joan Feenstra's, awaiting trial for sexually molesting his daughter, to decide to do something classy like mortgage the house for which his wife had paid in order to pay his legal bills. Married American women didn't gain full legal control over their own financial assets until after this landmark U.S. Technically speaking, before that fateful Wednesday, it was impossible for anyone in the world to be either a heterosexual or a homosexual, because the words didn't exist yet.

The words 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' were coined on this day in a letter written by Austro-Hungarian journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny to the German legal eagle and proto-gay rights crusader Karl Ulrichs. The following are 10 of my personal favorites. Not only does the history of heterosexuality offer up surprises that make you rethink what 'heterosexual' is and means, it also makes you realize how little we really know about this thing about which most of us assume we already know everything we need to. The history of heterosexuality is actually a motherlode of remarkable and sometimes deeply strange stuff, from the broad-brush conceptual to the kinds of tidbits you add to your cocktail-party repertoire. Surely, they thought, it would all be very straightforward, very vanilla, very Leave It to Beaver, and if there were anything in there they didn't already know about, they'd be surprised.Īs it turned out, this was far from true. When I began work on my book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, I often got teased by friends who wondered whether, in working on the history of something so commonplace, I was going to come across anything that wasn't already common knowledge. This post originally appeared at Huffington Post. Blank is a writer, historian, and public speaker whose work has been featured everywhere from Out to Penthouse. An independent scholar, she is the author of Virgin: The Untouched History and seven other books that explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, the body, and culture. Today's post is from Hanne Blank, author of Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality.

The surprisingly short history of heterosexuality