Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Invention of Heterosexuality

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Sexuality is a funny thing. It's a social construct just as much as, say, virginity is.We use words like heterosexuality and homosexuality because they are convenient, more than because they're wholly accurate.What roots do these words have in 19th century Germany? How did the word 'straight' come from the gay community? And what is the future of sexuality and its terms?Joining Kate today is the fantastic Hanne Blank, author of Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality.This episode was edited by Teän Stewart-Murray. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovelyest of betwixters. How fabulous to have you here once again. But before we get going, I think you know what has to come your way first. And if you're new here, then buckle up. You're going to be hearing a lot of these. Because at the start of each show, we have to issue you with a warning.

A fair do's warning. To let you know that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects. and you should be an adult too. And once you've listened to all that lot, if you will persevere in listening to this and you happen to get offended, well, tough tits don't come crying to us because fair dudes, you were warned. It is a warm summer's evening in 1867,

and we are inside Munich's Odian theatre, where a lawyer named Carl Ulrichs is taking to the stage in front of some 500 people. Ulrichs is opposing anti-gay laws, which the newly formed German nation are instating. And he's doing this in 1867, and what he's doing in this theatre will be called the first gay rights protest.

During this time, he is writing and sharing pamphlets that is arguing for the validity and the rights of a queer identity, as well as the emancipation of them as an oppressed group. Months later, the Austrian writer, Karl Hurt Benny, exchanges letters with Ulrich on matters of sexual identity, and it's here that we have the first recorded use of the terms homosexual and heterosexual. And at this point, two identities, as we know them today, are created. But what does that mean, Kate? Surely there have always been homosexual and heterosexual people?

Well, yes and no. Humans have always fancied an infinite array of whatever was on offer, but the idea that your sexuality was something that you were, it was who you are, it was something you identified as, that came about in the work of Carl Ulrichs and others like him. And as we all find out today, socially constructed sexualities can be manipulated and interpreted in all manner of ways. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my mind. by just turning a knob and pushing the body. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel no time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. Social constructs are a funny part of the human experience, aren't they?

Especially when it comes to sex. They change all the time. Things that we think are okay, one minute are suddenly taboo the next and vice versa. I mean, take virginity, for example. What does that even mean, really? We all think we know what it means. We'd all be willing to take a punt on what that means. It's a penetrative act, but what actually is lost? Is anything lost?

Does it have to be penetrative for someone to have lost their virginity? What about all other sex acts? Does a penis have to be present for it? What if you don't like penises? If you're a woman who's been having sex with other women for her entire life, are you a virgin? See, it all gets very, very, very. very messy and slippery and difficult to define.

Similarly, the idea that someone is heterosexual or homosexual largely hangs on an old, oversimplified notion of sexual attraction. Does it actually mean what we think it means when we start to poke it and prod it about a little bit? Well, today I am joined by the fantastic Honour Blank, author of Straight, the surprisingly short history of heterosexuality, and we are going to examine and dismantle these notions

of sexuality. I am ready to get straight, a wig-wink, straight into it if you are Betwixters. Hello and welcome to Betwixta Sheets. Is Only Honour Blank, how are you doing? I'm well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's more than a pleasure to have you here. I love your work. I thought your book on virginity was absolutely wonderful. So when they told me you'd agree to come on the show, I was having a proper fan girl. Oh, well, thank you. That's lovely. We are here. here to talk about, I want to say it's a surprising history, but that's sort of the point is it's not a surprising history, but you wrote a book, surprisingly, a short history of heterosexuality, which was published in 2012. My first question, before we get to the, why should it be surprising,

is what made you want to write this book? Well, as you mentioned, I wrote a book about virginity. And as I'm writing this book about virginity, not only am I, was I struck by the fact that only putting penises in vaginas seems to be much, but also that it seems to be this very straight affair all in all. And, you know, I'm queer identified myself and I started asking around and asking people how they had felt other queer friends and asking how they had felt about losing their virginity or how they felt that had happened and trying to get some sort of sense on whether or not that was even a going concern amongst, you know, folks that I knew in the queer community. And everyone had a different answer. And so here I am looking at this phenomenon that's supposed

to be universal and supposed to be so important and so influential and so form conferring and all of the everything. And half the people I knew were like, I have no idea how I lost my virginity or what that even meant in my context. And nobody seemed to know. And I thought, well, this is really interesting. So now I have. really need to go spend some time trying to figure out how straight people think about themselves. Because hell if I know, and everybody else acts like they do. Yes, yeah, they do. That's true. If everybody else is so darn sure that they know how this works, then surely I should be able

to find some sort of answer. Turned out it was a bit more complicated than I first thought it would be. So you wanted to look at the history of heterosexuality, which is really interesting, because when I first read that title, I was like, oh wow, that's, okay, I didn't even think that that had a history, but that's the problem, isn't it? Because there are so many books out there about the history of homosexuality, the history of transgender, the history of feminism, history of lesbianism. Why wouldn't heterosexuality? What is it that's made me think that that would even be a strange history to write? Well, there are two. big things happening. One is that people tend to equate heterosexuality and reproduction.

And since we've always reproduced as a species, or we wouldn't be here to talk about it, right? People assume that, obviously, heterosexuality has always existed because we've always managed to reproduce more humans. That's based on a false assumption. You don't have to be heterosexual to have a baby. Biology will do all kinds of magical things if you just let it. But the other part of it is that we have all been told that heterosexuality just is. It's always been the same. You know, men and women have always met. They've always married.

They've always formed families. What history is there to tell if something has always been there and it's always been like that? And so that's why we don't believe that there is a history until, you know, someone like me gets nosy and starts saying, surely there must be more to it than that. It's so true. You know, I teach a class on sexuality studies at university, and I started the first class ever, and I always ask them the same questions.

It's a really mean one, because I've never worked out the answer either, and the question is ridiculously simple, what is sex? What is it? And then immediately they'll go, pittance of vagina, and then you kind of have to go,

whoa, whoa, really? Really? So, like, they're there straight away, because that's the programming. But when you actually try and break that down, it's actually incredibly difficult to define what sex is. It suddenly has no definition at all. It has no definition at all.

The definition is as limited as your imagination. And it's this way with so much of human behavior. You know, we assume that this thing that we have canonized and say this is normal and regular and healthy and okay, that's sort of where it starts and ends. And everything else, all these edge cases, all of these exceptions, That's what we have to explain. Right.

We don't have to explain the normal stuff that everybody does. We just assume that it's normal because I think was it Dorothy Parker who said that heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common? Yeah, exactly so. I always like to quote there was American mathematician and philosopher named Charles Pierce who said it's easy to be certain you only have to be sufficiently vague. Maybe I am sufficiently vaguely heterosexual. I'll kind of like that. Maybe that would be a really good category to introduce. I like to think of myself as reluctantly heterosexual. I'm just like, oh, God, I'm quite a number of women who would file themselves into that category.

Like, I fancy them, but God, they're idiots, that kind of thing. Sorry, fellas. So the concept of being heterosexual, which has become our default. And when people talk about living in a heteronormative society, that's what they mean, is it's the default, the idea that you would even have a history because that it just is. It's like the history of air, but that would also have a history. But when did the concept of that you could be heterosexual as opposed to homosexual or queer, when did that even come about? I mean, would there have been cavemen wandering around going, I'm straight, you're gay? Or would, like, when did this idea turn up?

I think cavemen were more wondering around going, what is there to eat and is that thing going to kill me? This really didn't come up as a question until the mid-19th century. Wow. You know, so we're in the 1860s. And really what spurs this conversation is the movement on behalf of so many European countries to, you know, sort of shrug off the power of the monarchy and shrug off empire and form either Democratic or Republican-style governments, representative governments,

and that are not beholden to an idea of the aristocracy, that are not beholden to the church in order to supply sort of the backbone of the legal system. And when you decide to not use the backbone of the legal system that your nation has been using for the last, you know, however many hundred years, you come up against this problem. So how are you going to create a legal system and what's going to go into it? How are you going to decide what laws are suitable for a modern nation that is made up of citizens rather than subjects? So, that's where we start to run into problems. Who makes the rules? What rules do we make? And how do we decide on which rules we're going to follow and enforce? And so we start having conversations about

sexual crime. Right. Not just morality, but also crime. Because we've always had that category of some types of sex are criminal. Rape is criminal. Are other kinds of sexual conduct criminal? Should they be? How do we want to regulate sexuality from a legal perspective in our nation. Wow. And so that's where we start having this conversation, because we've inherited, and in specific Germany has inherited a whole bunch of laws that are essentially canon law. It's essentially Catholic Church law, which says, no, no, naughty, naughty, naughty, sodomy is bad. That's not only a sin, but it's a crime. Off you go, Oscar Wilde, off your

pop, off to Redding Jail. Then we have people who are looking at this thing, but wait, wait, wait, I thought we weren't going to be using these church codes anymore. How do we know that this is legit, that this is a type of love we should have? And this is where the conversation starts, as people who are watching this conversation happen in Germany in the 1850s, 1840s, 50s and 60s, who start to try and figure out how do we talk about sexuality and what is okay and not okay and who does what to whom and how we should think about it. Foucault, the big sex history theorist who either love him or hate him, but he's there,

he famously argued that the identity of the homosexual was invented in the 19th century, which, and again, when I say it to the students, they go, oh, don't be stupid, people have been gay for forever. And I'm like, no, it's not quite what he means. Like the idea that it was a person. Is the concept of being heterosexual? Did that arise in reaction to that? Is that sort of like in order to say that someone is homosexual, we then have to be able to define what a heterosexual person is? Well, in order to define an exception to the rule, you have to have a rule.

Right. That's really where we are. I mean, the terms homosexual and heterosexual, we don't have to use those terms. We could have used any terms and not just some sort of frank and word made out of bits of Greek and Latin smashed together willy-nilly by someone who didn't know either language very well. But here we are with those terms. those are the terms that have made it into our vernacular and first, you know, first into law, then into medicine and then to us. But that's really the principle is that in order to define what the exception is, you have to have some sense, however vague, of what the rule is supposed to be.

There is a tendency to look at sexuality in the ancient world and hold it up as a much more gender-fluid, sexually fluid, time. And I think sometimes, we can be guilty of doing that because it sort of appeals to a very pre-Christian pre-colonization idea that we were living in a sexual Eden. But is there evidence that in, let's say, ancient Greece or ancient Rome, for example, the idea of being heterosexual really wasn't a thing and neither was being homosexual, that they had very different attitudes to this? What there is evidence of is that men with power have gotten away with doing a lot of things. And, And that society in general tends to look at men who are in positions of power and say,

oh, you like to do this thing, marvelous. And that's true all over the world. I mean, if we look at Chinese history as well, if we look at Japanese history as well, we find a period of the past where it was considered fairly normal for men with great amounts of power and privilege to have relationships with boys and younger men or other men, where it wasn't frowned upon and was often smiled upon, not because of what was being done, but because of who was doing it.

Uh-huh, right. And how much power you have, how much sort of cultural capital you have, and whether or not you've got a willy has really been the determining factor. On the flip side, women have often been able to get away with having sex with other women

and nobody really noticing or caring because who notices or cares what women do. Right. I mean, so much of this seems to come, down to that act of penetration. It's like so, like, how we culturally understand that, because if you're looking at same-sex relationships in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, there was shame attached to it, but more in being what we'd now call the bottom. That was considered, like, the more passive role, and that if you would be the more active and masculine, manly men,

be in the one that's topping, presumably the richer person. Or the older person. Yeah. Or both. Yeah, there is a certain, and I'm not an expert on the ancient world, so I don't want to speak out a turn. But even now, in many parts of the world, it's not so much that you're having sex with somebody who has the same genitalia as you, but what role are you taking? He's the go. And who has to give it up, basically, is that appears to be the salient question. I'm not entirely sure why that is. I mean, that has a lot to do with the problem. of patriarchy, Ritlar. I'm currently working on a book called Penises or Magic and died to the

patriarchy for those who've never consented to it. That's amazing. And I'm not trying to answer the question of where did patriarchy come from because greater minds than mine have looked at that question many times and come up with absolutely nothing, or at least nothing that wasn't pure speculation. But I'm trying to take a look at what does patriarchy do and how does it do it? And how do we come up with this idea that the doings of penises, whatever they may be, are so important. So important. It's endlessly fascinating to me is why has men having sex with men been subject to so much more punishment, stigma, scrutiny, legal condemnation than women having sex with women? These poor boogers are being like executed, left right, etc. And still in places

around the world that happens, whereas lesbians just kind of fly under the radar of just like, like, oh, it's just jolly jakes or something, or like they're just having a go at it. And the only thing I can think of the difference is there isn't a penis involved. And that act of penetration seems to become so important. And in your book on the history of virginity, through one of the prefaces that you're wrestling with all the time, is, what the hell does that even mean? You know, like, when I ask my students what sex, they all think that they know. And in the same way you think you know what losing your virginity is. But it's the same thing, isn't it?

It's like, well, then if it's penis and vagina sex, Is that like in everything else is a technicality then? Yeah. Well, and, you know, and there have been a lot of arguments about that, you know, academically. Right. As I'm sure you know, and also politically and religiously. And, you know, what counts. It's, you know, and it's depended in some measure on how we've understood reproduction to work.

But there has been, since the ancient world, there has been at least some understanding that if you don't have both a penis and, of a person with a vagina together, then babies don't happen. So clearly, something is being produced along the way, and we're pretty sure it comes out of penises because they produce something that we can see with our actual eyes. The fact that female reproductive anatomy is internal means that we don't see it. It means that we have no idea whether the female body is producing something that contribute to that process or what it might be. And we don't start to find that out until the 19th century. We really don't have a good idea of what is going on in there in this secret little hidden pocket until we start being able to look at ovaries and eggs and look at gametes separately.

And that happens fairly late in the game. And so as a result, we have this idea that, okay, we can see this stuff coming out of penises at ejaculation. We can see semen. It must be doing something. What is it doing? Well, obviously, this is the spark. This is the spark of life. You know, the ancient Greeks believed and taught in their medical corpus that semen was basically distilled breath. It was the air that gives us life distilled into this liquid form.

And it would go into the body of a woman and there it would give life. It would give that force of air, that humor into her body and it would create life. And this is rigorously logical. It's wrong as far as we now understand the body to work, but it is rigorously logical. And so if that's your logic as far as how babies get made, then, wow, this is a fantastic trick that only penises can do. Only the penis can do it, right? And my take on it is that that's really, that's the point of origin for a lot of

this belief that what penises do is so important. I agree with you 100%. And you can still see this playing out. Like occasionally, you find young people or religious people who think that they're still virgins on a technicality because they've been having anal sex. It's just like I don't understand how this, like the idea that this is the only thing that counts

as losing your virginity. It's completely bonkers and really entrenched. It is, but again, it's really entrenched. I mean, we have generations and generations of that being taught to people. And, of course, part of the reason that it's taught to people is because it is much more difficult to get pregnant that way. So we've got two things going on here. It's not only is this about when do you, quote, unquote, have sex for the first time, whatever that happens to be, but also women not wanting to get pregnant out of wedlock.

And women's families not wanting them to be pregnant out of wedlock. and the really dire consequences that awaited women who had babies out of wet lung. So this is not just connected to biology or conceptions of biology, but also to ideas about who is supposed to control economics, who has control over things like who can work and how much money they can make and whether they can support themselves doing it. You've got all of these other variables in there as well that play a role. And if I had been, or you had been born at a time when having a child out of wedlock

could have meant a life of misery and poverty to say nothing of being socially ostracized, you might have decided that you could have a lot of men of sex too. Gone to fifth base. Yeah, I reckon I would, actually. I think that that sounds perfectly reasonable. The logic is there, you know. Most people often behave in ways that are very logical, whether or not it's reasonable, whether or not it's fair, whether or not it's ethical.

People are pretty good about figuring out a logical way to avoid bad consequences. They absolutely are. I'll be back with Hannah after this short break. Let's talk about how the phrase heterosexual was even brought into our language. And if memory serves, it was Carl Ulrichs, a very early campaigner for gay rights in in Germany to the point where this quite amazing little fellow marched into the German law courts and tried to demand rights for gay men in the 19th century. It's bonkers. But was it him? Was it him that coined that word heterosexual? It was his friend. Oh, it was close.

Ramalia Kurt Bani, who was an Austro-Hungarian, journalist and man about town who was following these debates with some interest, and he struck up a correspondence with Ulrichs in which he suggested well, maybe it's not that, you know, we have sodomites and people who aren't Sotomites. Maybe we just have two different flavors of people who, you know, some people like to have sex with people of their own sex, and some people like to have sex with people of a different sex. So maybe we can call them, I don't know, heterosexuals and homosexuals, different sexuals and same sexuals. That's really what he was grasping at. But he was suggesting, not that these were different kinds of people. You know, it's not some of sexual. You know, it's not some

intrinsic difference to the self. But, you know, this is just, you know, I really like strawberries and you really like, you know, raspberries. And this, again, is in this legal context of trying to figure out how do we organize law around sex and how do we make, you know, how do we put boundaries into place in order to protect people? If we have two categories that are essentially the same, homosexual and heterosexual, there's no real reason to make either one of those legal or illegal. No. I'm always fascinated by that, the line by the linguist Ferdinand Sasser, I'm paraphrasing, but he said language doesn't record the world around as it creates it. And I think that the labeling of sexual behavior into homosexual and heterosexual is a perfect

example of it, because obviously this behavior has always existed, but now it's a thing. Now it's an identity. Now people are going, I am homosexual, I am heterosexual, and they take on characteristics and they become types of people as opposed to behavior, don't they? One of the ways that it has also been thought about, just to give a parallel case, because I think that's important to be able to compare them, is that under church law, you could be a sodomite or not. And a sodomite was not a type of person. A sodomite was someone who engaged in the sin of Sodom.

Right. And anybody could be a sodomite. Any time that the code says, semen is deposited in a place not made, for it by nature, i.e. it's not going into a vagina where, you know, potentially conception can take place. Anyone could be a sodomite. True. You know, masturbate could make you a sodomite. Oral sex could make you a sodomite. Anytime semen went anywhere that was not inside a vagina, bingo, there you are, sodomite. Congratulations. Here's your 25 laps around the rosary and your

penance and you need to go pray this off, you naughty, naughty boy. But it could literally, literally be anyone. Yeah. And so sodomy is basically temptation unsuccessfully resisted, as opposed to your nature or who you are or some part of the real you and the ways that we like to conceive of homosexuality now. So we don't get to this idea that sexuality is part of who we are and sort of our psyche, our interior landscape, until, first the Catholic Church has to lose its grip.

on controlling the culture. And secondly, we have to have a secular culture in which we are juxtaposing people who do it right, correct, legal, healthy, normal, all of those words with people who are doing it wrong. It's no longer about sin, it's about rightness and wrongness. And it's about what is it in you that is compelling you to choose doing this wrongness?

versus doing the right thing. You do still see that, that sort of the two things working in parallel with one another. Like, I have a loads of conversations with friends, and I won't name them here, but they will say, I'm not gay, I'm straight, but then they're, like, owned having loads of same-sex experiences. And it's that same thing of, like, the act itself, they view as,

that's just a thing that I did. It's not who I am, and we still have that state of cognitive dissidents that you can still say, I am straight, but I have had same-sex interactions. No, I think that that actually points to the fact that what we're dealing with actually is we're dealing with a cultural creation. We're not dealing with something about our innate natures. We're certainly not dealing with some automaticity about what we do with our genitals or any other part of our body.

We're dealing with a culture. You know, I have many people that I know in my life who are bisexual. and who identify as queer, who have been part of the queer community for a long time, who have, for one reason or another, ended up in a long-term relationship, either with someone of their own sex or gender or with someone of a different sex or gender. And sometimes it has come down for them to, you know, making sure, what world do I want to live in? What culture do I want to be part of?

And for some of the women that I know, queer women, who are in relationships with men, it's really difficult because, of course, everyone presumes they're straight. They're not straight. They don't feel themselves to be straight. They've been part of queer culture all their life. And the fact that they live with or are married to somebody who has a factory and stole penis doesn't change that. And on the flip side, I have a very dear friend who has always been out as a gay man.

And he has a very, very good straight woman friend who they made a pact when they were in their 20s, that neither of them were in a long-term serious relationship. By the time they were 35, they would get together and have children because they both wanted children. And they've arranged their relationship in a way that suits them both. It's an open relationship. They have sex with other people. But the world looks at them and sees a straight couple. And that's because we have this cultural default that everybody is straight until proven otherwise. But it's simply not the case. A, it's simply not the case. And B, you can choose to go opt in or out of straight culture.

And people do all the time. In fact, that's where the word straight comes from. Really? It comes from mostly queer men, gay men, who for one reason or another, someone would drop out of their community. Maybe they were, you know, being blackmailed, or maybe they had a parent, say, I'm going to disinherit you if you continue to carry on with your dissolute lifestyle or what have you. and they would go straight. Go straight.

Right. And when I was in college and, you know, queer friends of mine and I were waiting on having our dormitory rooms inspected, we would take all of our very blatantly queer books and turn them spines towards the wall so that it wouldn't be immediately obvious to the dorm supervisors that our dorm rooms were full of all kinds of things. And we would call it straightening up. Wow. straightening up. What role did science play in all of this? I mean, I'm thinking of the Victorians

who, God love them, they did a lot of stuff, but science was an exploding field. And as you said earlier, is it's all very logical, but it's often based on crap. That's the problem. So they're trying very hard to make scientific studies out of things, but they don't have a firm foundation in it yet. Sexuality is definitely one of those areas with Freud running around saying all kinds of mad crap. like women are envious of penises and things like that. But did that play a role in this idea of normalizing heterosexuality? Did it become a medical issue? Absolutely.

And it still does. I should preface what I'm going to say by saying, we still don't know that heterosexuality is in any way scientifically or biologically, quote unquote, normal or default. True. That has yet to be established. We don't look for a straight gene, do we? We don't.

We assume that all genes are straight until proven. gay. Same with brains and hormones and the length of your fingers and the pattern of the hair growth on your head and all of the other things that people have ever looked at. The assumption has been that the human body is categorically a heterosexual body and looking for departures. Rather than, I mean, I think one of the best things that Freud, and I have many things to say about Freud, most of them very uncomplimentary, but one of the best things that he ever came up with was that he acknowledged that human beings at root as very small children are what he called polymorphously perverse, that children, all of those sort of patterns and ideas about what's right and what's right

haven't formed yet. And so if you really want to see what human beings are capable of and, you know, sort of what the organism can do, look at a small child. Yeah. And anyone who's ever spent time around small children will know that, you know, they just shove their hands down their pants, they don't care. They do. They don't give us stuff, no. You know, and why would they? Right, you have to learn that. You have to learn that that's shameful. Right. You have to be thought that, you know, we don't do that, you know, at least when other people are around and if we do, we lie about it. So there's this notion within the biological world, which is where most of the science on sexuality has sort of had its home, the body is heterosexual.

It just occurred to me that you don't come out as heterosexual. Like, I've never known anybody to sit their parents down and be like, I've been experimenting with heterosexuality. I need to talk to you. That doesn't happen. Exactly. And so because we assume that heterosexuality is default, we assume that that must be what our bodies just do.

that must be just how we're built, how we're wired, whatever metaphor you want to use. And as a result, we end up trying to find scientific proof for something that may or may not actually exist at all for anybody, which is this idea that the body somehow holds sexuality in it. There are attributes of the body that in which we can really, somebody's sexuality. It may still be out there somewhere. I am not a bench scientist and I am going to be, I'm not going to be the person who says this will never be located. But as far as we know now, with the science that we have and have had, we have not located this. No. Do you think that there is even such a thing as heterosexuality? It's a convenient label. But now again, I'm not completely

up on all of the latest scientific research on this. But the last time I checked in, the scientists were leaning towards, look, nobody's 100% straight or gay. We're all kind of just out here, just doing our own thing. You might be a couple of glasses of pino-grisio away. That's all. The old saying is that, you know, women are a lot like linguine. They're all straight till they get wet. I've never heard that before. That's amazing. But really, I do think that that's in some ways true. human beings will usually, most human beings will do what is expected of them until something happens and for some reason they feel strongly enough about doing something that is not expected of them, that they'll go do that instead. It's neither nature nor nurture. It's a combination of both.

A lot of what we're taught to think is sexy, a lot of what we're taught to desire is profoundly cultural. And we know this simply because you can go around the world at any given moment in history or right now and look at different cultures and look at what they find sexy. And it's not the same from place to place. So we know that this is a profoundly cultural phenomenon. And we also know that in places where it is considered relatively acceptable for people to say, you know, sometimes have sex with people of the same sex and sometimes have people with, you know, sex with, you know, sex with people of another sex, that more people do that. So I really, I find it very hard to look at actual human beings and what human beings do and have done and make some kind of claim that

there's a thing. It's a natural state. It's not a natural state. It's not a specific attribute. It's a convenient label that we have developed. I mean, I think the reason that we didn't have it until, you know, the 1860s, 1870s, was because we didn't have a cultural need for it until that point in time. And that's one of the big arguments of my book is that this is the word we use right now to help us organize the way we think about sex. It doesn't mean that this is some undying eternal truth that has been, you know, carved in the firmament of the universe. It's a convenience. Final question. When I talked to my students about, we have a loads of conversations about this stuff. And I've noticed even in the 10 years I've been teaching

university students, their attitudes to sexuality has shifted noticeably, even in those 10 years. Now, well, a lot of them, they don't even need labels. They're just kind of flowy and floaty. And like sometimes they have girlfriends and sometimes they have boyfriends and sometimes they they have more than one boyfriend. And it's very kind of, it's amazing to see it. And it's just the attitudes that shift. And it's clearly because, as you rarely said, we needed that label for a long time. You can't fight for gay rights unless you've got that label and then therefore there have to be a heterosexual too. Maybe it's on its way out. Could you see a future where those labels heterosexual, homosexual, kind of outdated. We don't even talk about that anymore.

Like people just do stuff. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I know, if I squint real hard, I can see it from here. I also see that there are a lot of social conservatives who are terrified of that. And so that's one of the ways that you know that the culture is changing is when people get scared that the culture is changing. And when people really get angry that the culture is changing and oh my God. And even the terms that you just used to talk about this fluidity and say it's kind of floaty and it's either neither here nor there, that's because we don't have a positive framework. for saying it's not fixed, so what? Yeah.

And my approach to it has basically been, for years, has been, don't tell me what you are, tell me what you do. I love that. Tell me what you do. Which people tend to regard as a challenge because we don't talk about what we do sexually. That's a no-no. But while we have developed this vocabulary that we can say, well, here is what I am, and that is our proxy for talking.

about what we do. Hannah, you have been amazing to talk to today. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. If people want to know more about you and your work, and they should do, where can they find you? Well, you can find my books wherever it is that you buy books. That's the easiest thing to do. And just look it up. It's Hannah, H-A-N-N-E, blank, B-L-A-N-K. I do have a website out there floating around. It's not particularly regularly updated. I'm not much on social media, I'm afraid. Fair. Yes, so yeah, look for the books, is what I say.

Look for the books and the website. Hannah, thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been an absolute treat. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Hannah for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along,

wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just want to say hi, you can now email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We have got episodes on everything from the Kennedy Curse to the history of swearing, all marching your way. This podcast was edited by Tiam Stewart Murray and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contained music rom, Epidemic Sound.