Straight by Hanne Blank Read Free Book Online

experience. Krafft-Ebing no more “discovered” the various sexual peccadilloes of the human race than he could’ve “discovered” his own grandfather. But he did apply a formal taxonomy to the sexual actions and actors he described. Although hewas not the one who coined the word, his taxonomic vocabulary also included the word “heterosexual,” its first adoption in the medical literature.
    WHAT’S IN A NAME
    Naming and cataloging can be real and powerful science. They can also be real and powerful cultural magic. This is precisely why we have to be wary of who is in charge of naming and cataloging things, what their motivations are in doing so, and how they go about doing it. If the right person with the right qualifications names a thing or a phenomenon in the right way, chances are excellent that other people will accept unquestioningly that that thing or phenomenon is a real scientific (which is to say objective and material) entity. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the word “heterosexual” was first coined—in a letter written May 6, 1868, by a writer named Karl Maria Kertbeny—scientific naming was a ritual that had the weight of more than a hundred years of authority behind it. But the process of scientific naming was not always as objective, or as material, as we often suppose.
    Science is at root a social effort. As a discipline, material science—whether physical or biological—is a collective effort carried out by a large, loosely affiliated group of people for the greater good, and it is subject to a certain amount of human bias no matter what we do. We are simply not capable of omniscience, and so we must choose what we will pay attention to at any given instant, what qualities of an object we will decide are important enough to observe, characterize, and record. This alone is enough to show our hand.
    The history of taxonomy bears this out to a degree that is frankly astonishing, and which hints at some of the human prejudice to come later in the cataloging and naming of human sexuality. Carolus Linnaeus, the brilliant Swedish father of scientific naming and self-anointed “prince of botanists,” was an ardently Christian academic who wrote lengthy compendiums in scholarly Latin. He was also a bit of a sexual obsessive. Once Linnaeus had finished with them, all plants known to him had been classed according to the number and function of their sex organs, and many of them had been named for genitals as well. With a decided knack for the unsavory image, he named a stinkhorn fungus
Phallus daemonicum,
and a perfectly innocuousNorth American shrub commonly called the Jamaica caper became
Capparis cynophallophora
—the caper that bears a dog’s penis. Even during his lifetime, Linnaeus’s relentless sexualizing of his subject matter often raised critical eyebrows and occasionally inspired tirades in print. Linnaeus, in turn, immortalized his critics by naming ugly or noxious plants after them. The most famous example of this is the unattractive little relative of the aster called
Siegesbeckia,
named for Johann Siegesbeck, an academic who took strong exception to the “loathsome harlotry” of Linnaeus’s work.
    We can perhaps understand why others might’ve been frustrated. Linnaeus’s system was more than a little offbeat and decidedly arbitrary in what it chose to describe: the
nuptiae plantarum,
or marriages of plants. He did not mean this as a euphemism. A world of human social and sexual expectations was encoded in his categories.
Monandria
were one-husbanded plants, tidily monogamous, with a single pistil (female sex organ) and a single stamen (male sex organ) in a given flower.
Dodecandria,
on the other hand, had a disturbingly numerous twelve “husbands” per bloom. Linnaeus’s assumption was that all plants “married.” He did not presume that plants like mosses, whose “weddings”