Free Straight by Hanne Blank Page B

Freud’s premise that adult sexuality was developed via a long succession of social interactions that began in infancy was particularly popular and influential. Every person, Freud argued, was born with an intrinsic sexual capacity as part of their physical and psychological makeup. What became of this innate sexual potential was dependent on a devilishly complicated equation with a terrifying number of shadowy and often lurid variables that could as easily go wrong as right.
    Being a properly constituted heterosexual thus became an achievement. In Freud’s world it was not merely nature or God’s will that made a person sexually “normal.” Upbringing and family were murky, treacherous waters that had to be navigated correctly to arrive at adult heterosexuality’s safe harbor. Freudian theory implicated the middle-class nuclear household and the world of relatives, friends, school, and strangers as well in the creation of adult sexual personae. Parent-child relationships were particularly important, and woe betide the parent who unwittingly failed a child at any point in this fraught endeavor.
    The result of achieving a proper sexual trajectory, from a Freudian point of view, was not only that a person would feel sexual desire for a partner of the “correct” biological sex but that he or she would arrive at adulthood with a whole array of specific desires, propensities, and awareness. Men would have learned to divert their Oedipal longings for their mothers onto other women, as well as to channel their rampant progenitive desires into more socially acceptable forms of creativity such as architecture and farming. They would desire sex for sex’s sake, themselves, but instinctively know how to classify women on the Madonna/whore continuum.[ 6 ] As for women, they would have overcome their childhood desires to sleep with their own mothers . . . and their own fathers . . . and learned how to desire sex with their husbands in the name of a subconscious desire for children. A woman would also develop the magical (and automatic) ability to imprint on the man to whom she lost her virginity, an experience that would forever color her relationship both to that man and to the sexual act.
    The transformation of the polymorphously perverse child into a properly functioning heterosexual adult was exceedingly complicated, making “normal” heterosexuality dependent on the success of many delicate and entwined operations. Few psychologists still subscribe to such literal Freudian theories of sexuality formation, but their influence lingers in the public imagination. Even today, people often assume that non-heterosexuality has to do with a person’s parents or upbringing, some kind of sexual trauma, or some condition of arrested psychological development.
    After Freud, as Jonathan Ned Katz puts it, it was clear that “heterosexuals were
made,
not born.” But even Freud did not simply reachdown and bestow this sensibility upon us like some grandiose god. He couldn’t have. Even in Freud’s heyday, relatively few people actually read his works. Freud’s influence on us is due to what amounts to a gigantic, culture-wide game of Telephone. Authors of marriage manuals and sexual self-help titles were particularly prone to leaning on, if not always leaping aboard, the Freudian bandwagon.
    In the early decades of the twentieth century, for instance, British women’s reproductive-health crusader Marie Stopes was among the authoritative voices repeating Freudian notions such as the idea that the way a woman loses her virginity will automatically and permanently color her attitudes toward sex. Freud had given this notion his scholarly and medical imprimatur in his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
in 1905. Stopes reinforced it in 1918 in her best-selling
Married Love,
explaining that husbands who were too eager and selfish to be tender on their wedding nights were creating