When was the term heterosexual coined

Heterosexual and homosexual, as contrasting terms, Katz concludes, may become obsolete. After having read these books, I wanted to tell that mother in Central Park that because her daughter was born female does not necessarily bind her to any special way of behaving; it does not require her living with a man and having his baby.

That if her daughter chooses, in the future, to change her sex, there are many ways she can do this. That sex, behavior and sexual practice exist along a continuum. These possibilities, explored so thoroughly in these two books, mark the possible emergence of a far more ethical and tolerant future, one heralded by both Rothblatt and Katz.

All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Something remarkably similar happened with heterosexuals, who, at the end of the 19th Century, went from merely being there to being known. Neither were there homosexuals. But the emphasis was always on the act, not the agent. In the late s, Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined four terms to describe sexual experiences: heterosexual, homosexual, and two now forgotten terms to describe masturbation and bestiality; namely, monosexual and heterogenit.

The next time the word was published was in , when Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing included the word in Psychopathia Sexualis, a catalogue of sexual disorders. Hierarchical ordering leading to slavery was at one time accepted as normal, as was a geocentric cosmology. For Krafft-Ebing, normal sexual desire was situated within a larger context of procreative utility, an idea that was in keeping with the dominant sexual theories of the West.

The Bible, for instance, condemns homosexual intercourse for the same reason it condemns masturbation: because life-bearing seed is spilled in the act. Musonius Rufus, for example, argued in On Sexual Indulgence that individuals must protect themselves against self-indulgence, including sexual excess. Early Christian theologians took up this conjugal-reproductive ethic, and by the time of Augustine, reproductive sex was the only normal sex. While Krafft-Ebing takes this procreative sexual ethic for granted, he does open it up in a major way.

When most people today think of heterosexuality, they might think of something like this: Billy understands from a very young age he is erotically attracted to girls. One day he focuses that erotic energy on Suzy, and he woos her. The pair fall in love, and give physical sexual expression to their erotic desire. And they live happily ever after. It was only at the turn of the 20th Century that thinkers began to divorce sexual desire depicted here in Rodin's The Kiss from reproduction Credit: Alamy.

Defining normal sexual instinct according to erotic desire was a fundamental revolution in thinking about sex. Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised.

As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class. In the late 19th Century, populations in European and North American cities began to explode. By , for example, New York City had 3. As people moved to urban centres, they brought their sexual perversions — prostitution, same-sex eroticism — with them.

Or so it seemed. Small-town gossip can be a profound motivator. It was important for an emerging middle class to differentiate itself from such excess. However, heterosexism , with its historic macro-level focus on cultural ideologies rather than individual attitudes, is not a satisfactory replacement for homophobia.

Sexual Prejudice. Scientific analysis of the psychology of antigay attitudes will be facilitated by a new term. Sexual prejudice serves this purpose nicely. Broadly conceived, sexual prejudice refers to all negative attitudes based on sexual orientation, whether the target is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Given the current social organization of sexuality, however, such prejudice is almost always directed at people who engage in homosexual behavior or label themselves gay, lesbian, or bisexual Herek, Like other types of prejudice, sexual prejudice has three principal features: It is an attitude i.

It is directed at a social group and its members. It is negative, involving hostility or dislike. First, sexual prejudice is a descriptive term.

Unlike homophobia, it conveys no a priori assumptions about the origins, dynamics, and underlying motivations of antigay attitudes. Second, the term explicitly links the study of antigay hostility with the rich tradition of social psychological research on prejudice. Third, using the construct of sexual prejudice does not require value judgments that antigay attitudes are inherently irrational or evil. Herek, G. The context of anti-gay violence: Notes on cultural and psychological heterosexism.