Book: Straight

[liv]

Author: Hanne Blank

Details: (c) 2012 Hanne Blank; Pub Beacon Press 2012; ISBN 978-0-8070-4459-9

Verdict: Straight has some interesting ideas but overall is a bit rambly and anecdotal.

Reasons for reading it: I've been a fan of Hanne Blank's various online incarnations for some years now (though her current blog is nothing like as outstanding as her old LJ and a couple of other defunct projects), and I really loved her previous popular history of sexuality, Virgin. Plus I am definitely interested in the topic of a history of heterosexuality.

How it came into my hands: Bought new. I ended up getting it from Amazon because no non-Amazon shops were selling it in any sensible way.

I'm not quite sure what I was hoping for from Straight, but I didn't quite get it. There's some very lively writing; Blank certainly lives up to her previous talents for delightfully zingy sentences and making potentially dry historical topics seem readable and exciting. And Straight is pretty much at the level I want from popular history, it's doing a lot of synthesis of disparate historical ideas which contribute to an interesting overall argument. I really like the way Blank draws together ideas about industrialization and the rise of the middle class, with ideas about scientific positivism and early psychoanalysis, and there's some good if fairly basic stuff about the twentieth century and the sexual revolution.

The problem is that it all just seems bitty and doesn't really fit together, and there's a bunch of odd polemic about the fact that Blank used to date an intersex individual and because it was somewhat ambiguous whether or not he counted as "male" [I follow Blank's use of male pronouns for her ex-partner] it therefore was also ambiguous whether she counted as "straight". This is a perfectly reasonable point to make, but it doesn't quite match with the rest of the book; it seems as if Blank can't really decide whether she's ranting about the fact that you can't divide humans neatly into male and female based on the rough shape of their genitals at birth, or whether she's actually giving a popular account of the development of heterosexuality as an identity category.

Although Blank carefully cites her sources, the account she gives in the main text is very simplified and even though I have only the most basic of lay understandings of the bits of history she's dealing with, I spotted several places where she repeats misinformation and factoids to make a rhetorical point. Would I have wanted the book to be more technical and less accessible? Possibly not, I might have struggled to get through it. But I could have done with more coherent. By the standards of internet polemic it's pretty good, by the standards of professionally published non-fiction, eh.

I think part of what put me off is that Blank rather talks down to her audience through a lot of the book. She introduces the idea of doxa as

Stuff everyone knows [...] from the Greek for "common knowledge" [...] the understanding we absorb from our native culture that we use to make sense of the world [...] the stuff that "goes without saying," the assumptions and presumptions and "common sense" ideas we have about our world and how it works.

Which is totally fair enough as a way of introducing a technical term from anthropology, but throughout the rest of the book she sort of anthropomorphizes "doxa" as some kind of misinformation monster. Whenever she makes a controversial point, instead of backing it up with concrete evidence, she simply states breezily that the only reason people don't accept her conclusions is because doxa are making them think wrongly about sex and sexuality. There's also a lot of ranting about natural sciences; I'm completely on board with the idea that if you want to study human behaviour and human societies, you really need to be using social sciences rather than trying to shoehorn everything into physics. But Straight seems to argue that not only is biology completely useless for understanding anything about sexuality, anyone who thinks they can get any useful information out of natural science is risibly misguided.

Honestly, I'm not sure who the intended audience is for Straight. It's pretty simplistic for anyone who's already familiar with the complex interactions between sex, gender and sexuality; for example, Blank seems to expect her audience will find it a great revelation that intersex and other non-binary people exist. At the same time, I can't imagine that people who are completely gender essentialist and think "God created Adam and Eve" is some kind of eternal verity about human gender and relationships are going to pick up an overtly feminist book titled Straight: The surprisingly short history of heterosexuality. And if they did, they'd be unlikely to be convinced by a book that repeatedly goes on about how dumb they must be to believe such obviously ridiculous doxa.

Unfortunately, I think Straight may be one of those books where the title is rather cooler than the actual content. There's some good stuff in Straight, I did learn something, but I feel pretty unsatisfied overall. I think my best bet is going to be to read some of the sources in the (pleasantly extensive) bibliography, particularly Jonathan Katz' The invention of heterosexuality which Blank acknowledges as a major influence.

Comments

[ptc24]

Pedantry: I think the title has at least one presupposition that I disagree with.

"The suprisingly short history of heterosexuality". This could be read two ways:

"The surprisingly short history of the concept of heterosexuality" and
"The surprisingly short history of the referent of 'heterosexuality'"

I think, on the first reading, the history isn't suprisingly short, it's unsurprisingly short (well, it might be a surprise to someone). On the second reading, the[1] history isn't surprisingly short, in fact, I don't think it's short at all.

If you've asked yourself the question "Am I straight or bi?" then it's clear that this question doesn't refer to membership of some social group or self-identity or anything like that. Furthermore there's no good reason not to project those concepts back in time, just like there's no problem in saying that dinosaur blood was probably red.

[1] You could write "a surprisingly short history of heterosexuality", starting in 1993 and ending in 1994, the title would be just fine.

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I think Blank would actually contend that there really were no heterosexuals before about the middle of the nineteenth century, not just no word for "heterosexual". I think for her, it's not like dinosaurs having red blood in the absence of any human observers with a concept of "red", it's like arguing about whether there were communists centuries before Marx and Engels.

I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced, but if a heterosexual is someone who has some kind of quasi-innate "orientation" towards members of the opposite sex exclusively, then heterosexuality may be at least partly a social group or identity rather than a fact independent of social context. I think Blank's definition of "heterosexual" is quite specific; she seems to include things like the expectation of being able to choose partners companionate relationships with one's approximate social equals, and having a concept of good sex which is mutually pleasurable and leads to orgasms as part of the modern understanding of heterosexuality, and it's probably fair to say that that sort of relationship is at least as much a twentieth century invention as sexual orientation is. Though I am not sure whether I would go so far as to say that a man and woman in an arranged marriage where strong emotional attachments are frowned on can usefully be considered not heterosexual.

The position Blank is arguing against is, well, not exactly a straw man because I'm sure there are some people who believe that everybody in the world was straight until 1969 and marriage has always been a union of one man and one woman since the garden of Eden, but I felt vaguely offended by being lectured at as if I were assumed to hold this position. But I think she also kind of hints at rejecting modern ideas about sexual orientation as proposed by the gay rights movement, though she's more circumspect about criticizing LGBT activists than gender essentialists.

[ptc24]

I think Blank's definition of "heterosexual" is quite specific;

Whereas I'm perfectly happy with the idea of straight, gay, etc. monks based on what sacrifices they're making, what temptations of the flesh they're fighting against, etc.

I think there's a point here about denotation and connotation, another (possibly the same?) point about the truth conditions for counting someone as straight versus the inferences you can get away with drawing about someone based on them counting as straight.

To a certain extent it sounds like it's coming from the same place that "love was invented in the Middle Ages by troubadours" comes from, to which my usual mental reply is "so what were Aphrodite and Eros all about then?"

I looked up Jonathan Katz on wikipedia - it turns out there are two of them in the relevant area. It looks like social constructionism is relevant here. It feels like something I ought to know more about, if only in a "know what you're arguing against" way. One problem is, I think, that when I get too close to social constructionism it seems like I'm entering a weird parallel universe where words don't mean what I'm used to them meaning and I can hardly move for concepts that presuppose something you deeply disagree with and find utterly alien. Which in some ways is a shame, as I'm sure there's a lot that's interesting to be said about the modern categories and concepts.

[liv]

Yup, I definitely sympathize with your reaction to this. The whole field of Medical Education is a whole lot about trying to get by as a positivist in a constructivist / constructionist (I am not completely clear on the difference, even) world. Some of it does feel useful, like for example I'm supposed to be teaching the med students how to be "professionals" and I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that the quality of professionalism is almost entirely a social construct. But yes, there is a massive mountain of technical vocabulary which doesn't sound like technical vocabulary, it sounds like normal everyday words used in a completely different way from their natural sense.

I think whether or not one accepts Blank's philosophical underpinnings, it's interesting to learn about some of the historical factors which contributed to modern ideas about sexual orientation and romance and gender categories and stuff. I don't think it matters very much whether pre-twentieth century people were really "straight" on a philosophical level.