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Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality Hardcover – January 31, 2012

4.3 out of 5 stars 15 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 264 pages
  • Publisher: Beacon Press (January 31, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0807044431
  • ISBN-13: 978-0807044438
  • Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1 x 9.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #552,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By Jeremy Colton on March 26, 2012
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
I'm putting this book on my very short list of works, including "The Selfish Gene" The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author, Davies' "Deptford" Trilogy The Deptford Trilogy, and "The Nurture Assumption" The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated, that have fundamentally changed the way I view the world. It really doesn't matter whether one agrees completely with Blank or not as to the historical reason the term and concept came into our culture; those are interesting opinions. The incontrovertible fact is that "heterosexual" has a specific meaning, a meaning that changes over time, and a meaning that impacts ones understanding of all other aspects of gender and sex identity. The life-changing aspect of this book is, in other words, not so much Blanks specific explanation of what heterosexuality is and means but rather the underlying concept that its meaning is not self-obvious and is important to understand. From this point of view Blank's ideas become data in a personal analysis of an entire area of thought that had never occurred to me before.

Another reviewer likens "Heterosexual" to post-modern "everything is a social construct" fallacy. I think seeing it that way completely misses the point.
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Format: Paperback
This new look at sexual orientation by the erudite and versatile Hanne Blank is not the first of its kind. Blank acknowledges her debt to Jonathan Katz' The Invention of Heterosexuality as a forerunner of this study. However, the evidence that "heterosexuality" was invented, not discovered--and quite recently at that--bears repeating. As Blank points out, if "the attribute we now call `heterosexuality' were a prerequisite for people to engage in sex acts or to procreate, chances are excellent that we would not have waited until the late nineteenth century to figure out that it was there."

It is Blank's contention that the parallel terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual" were coined, not in a scientific or medical context, as is generally assumed today, but in a quasi-legal context. To be "homosexual" was to have a particular sexual identity. When used by opponents of a drastic German law that criminalized sexual "deviance" in 1851, the term implied that legally persecuting "homosexuals" was irrational, since they were not sinners (as under earlier canon law) but were simply expressing unusual desires that were natural for them. Although Blank is not the first historian to discuss the development of the concept of sexual orientation, her explanation of the social context is intriguing. As she shows, medieval Christian definitions of sexual sin (non-reproductive or non-marital sex) had a great influence on later conceptions of "abnormal" erotic attraction, which could only be understood in contrast with the "normal" kind.

Richard von Kraft-Ebbing's 1890 book, Psychopathia Sexualis, aimed to be a scientific study of abnormal expressions of sexual behavior, ones that generally appeared in cities, where they were harder to control than in insular villages.
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Format: Kindle Edition
From my perspective, though much of the material is fairly interesting, I find the book to be overly verbose and repetitive. I feel it also runs far afield of its stated topic. Much is about the stereotypical relationships that have existed over the years between men and women, but little about historical sexuality that would support the concept of heterosexuality as an artificial construct.
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Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
I read this with mixed thoughts. Was I trying to confirm my heterosexual status? Maybe! I have always thought yes, but I have often been annoyed that others thought otherwise. Now I think, why should I really care? I am what I am.
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Format: Paperback
This excellently written book looks into the history of "heterosexuality" as a Thing in and of itself. In so doing, Blank touches on may related issues, such as theories of male and female sexuality, the history of marriage, and many more. While I suppose these could be considered tangential, they also enrich and inform the overall points, and for me have put many things into a context of which I was previously unaware.

It is not exclusively about "straight"; in exploring how this concept came to be, and to be accepted, Blank touches on many other sexual realms; none would be possible without the others.

Do read the footnotes; while some are just cites, others have additional enriching commentary.

Very recommended, for anyone interested in how our cultural narrative of sex came to be, and how it can impact us.
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Format: Paperback
I'm not someone who has to be convinced of Hanne's central thesis - I teach workshops on similar topics myself. So there are no surprises there. But, even as a longtime fan, I continue to be surprised and delighted by the crisp intelligence of her writing. Straight is erudite but not stuffy, knowledgeable but refreshingly free of academic-speak, objective but with enough personal insight to keep us aware of the author's (and, by extension, many other people's) stake in the material. I will add this book to the "essential reading" list for all future gender-related workshops I teach.
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