Livre d'Or

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.