Straight by Hanne Blank Read Free Book Online Page A

he could not observe, were simply not the “marrying type”; it would take later observers to realize that many mosses actually reproduce asexually. Linnaeus could not bear the thought of it and so consigned them to the class of
cryptogamia,
those who married in secret.
    Linnaeus and his sex-obsessed work would almost be laughable if they hadn’t been so influential. Linnaeus’s taxonomic principles—if not necessarily his sexual focus in applying them—became the basis for a breathtakingly prolific discipline. The 1735 first edition of Linnaeus’s
Systema Naturae
was a mere eleven pages, but by the thirteenth and last edition in 1767, the book had grown to over three thousand pages. (Currently, the Species 2000 initiative database project based at University of Reading is working toward a valid checklist of all known species of organism, and their rolls included, as of 2009, more than one million species.)
    The cataloging of known things, and the establishment of names for those things, remains a central project of science. The fact that it is a profoundly human endeavor, saturated with human values and prejudices,is one of science’s open secrets, betrayed in the very language that is used to name things. Dead languages cannot remove human fingerprints. “Phallus daemonicum” is as overt a cultural reference as “Electrolux.”[ 3 ] Or, as we shall soon see, as “heterosexual.”
    Cataloging and naming human characteristics is but an extension of the principle of cataloging and naming natural objects and phenomena. When nineteenth-century culture began to perceive a need to manage sexual behavior on a civic level, it also had to devise language and concepts with which to talk about them. The language that already existed for doing this lay mostly within the realm of religion—the syntax of sin and sinners, virtue and saints. Neither that language nor the Church authority on which it rested were terribly desirable to the new secular state. The practice of scientific naming provided a logical place to turn. The physical and biological sciences (including medicine) could claim a politically valuable neutrality: the objects that science investigated were not the works of man but the works of nature. Scientists could claim that they merely looked at what
was.
It was the right tool at the right time. But as we have seen, much might depend on what was chosen for observation and by whom.
    It can scarcely come as a surprise that much of what was chosen for observation, when human sexuality became the object of study, was chosen because it was perceived as troublesome. Nor can it come as a surprise that those who decided to take upon themselves the task of cataloging and naming these troublesome sexual behaviors had very strong opinions about the objects of their investigation, opinions that influenced their work. Sexuality had, after all, become a pressing public issue, and it wanted effective handling by people who understood just how serious an issue it was. Nothing less than the fate of the family—and even the nation—was at stake.
    FOCUS ON THE FAMILY
    If the morally grey, sexually suspect world of the working-class city was the realm of public concern and state regulation, the private and eminently respectable realm of the middle-class family was one of the primary things all that regulation was intended to protect. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a new “focus on the family” emerged as a primary concern for the newly fledged middle classes whose reach,ranks, and social power were on the rise.
    Unlike inherited aristocratic wealth, middle-class money came from work in the professions, from trade, or, increasingly, from ownership and management of industry. Just as with the aristocracy, tight control over marriages, families, and children was key to protecting and increasing this wealth and security. But the middle classes did this in their own