Thanks for asking this! STRAIGHT followed VIRGIN pretty directly, and grew out of the fascinating problem that virginity has historically been defined almost exclusively by the one sex act that is also viewed as canonically "heterosexual."
(I use the scare quotes there because putting a penis into a vagina does not necessarily have anything to do with what the owners of either set of genitalia actually desire or how they experience their sexuality, as well we know.)
This became a problem for me when I was working on VIRGIN because so many writers on virginity cavalierly use the word "heterosexual" to refer to people and to behaviors that existed well before the notion of heterosexuality existed. This struck me as intellectually sloppy... and it is.
Thinking about how the problem could be fixed made me realize that the history of sexuality would look very different if historians understood heterosexuality to be a concept that is attached to a particular time -- and to some extent a particular place and culture.
And then I went off to the library to find some books that discussed heterosexuality as a historical problem and only found one of them, Jonathan Ned Katz's brilliant book "The Invention of Heterosexuality." Which was wonderful as far as it went, but I wanted more.
In reply to <p>I'm also interested in the by Judith Rosenbaum
Thanks for asking this! STRAIGHT followed VIRGIN pretty directly, and grew out of the fascinating problem that virginity has historically been defined almost exclusively by the one sex act that is also viewed as canonically "heterosexual."
(I use the scare quotes there because putting a penis into a vagina does not necessarily have anything to do with what the owners of either set of genitalia actually desire or how they experience their sexuality, as well we know.)
This became a problem for me when I was working on VIRGIN because so many writers on virginity cavalierly use the word "heterosexual" to refer to people and to behaviors that existed well before the notion of heterosexuality existed. This struck me as intellectually sloppy... and it is.
Thinking about how the problem could be fixed made me realize that the history of sexuality would look very different if historians understood heterosexuality to be a concept that is attached to a particular time -- and to some extent a particular place and culture.
And then I went off to the library to find some books that discussed heterosexuality as a historical problem and only found one of them, Jonathan Ned Katz's brilliant book "The Invention of Heterosexuality." Which was wonderful as far as it went, but I wanted more.