Heterosexuality

Sexual attraction to members of the opposite sex.

The sex drive, or sexual desire, is an unlearned, powerful drive that humans share with other animal species. Heterosexuals experience sexual desire in relation to members of the opposite sex. This contrasts with homosexuals, where the object of sexual desire is a member of one's own sex. Most researchers believe that children begin to notice physical differences between males and females by about age two. As children grow, they learn about sex roles and sex differences by observing their parents and other adults, including teachers, child care providers, and from play experiences and the attitudes and behavior of peers. Gender identity becomes firmly established, that is, the young boy understands that he is a boy, and thinks of himself as a boy.

Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), who founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1942, believed that sexual orientation in humans is complex, ranging from exclusively homosexual to exclusively heterosexual, with most people's sexual desires falling somewhere between the two. In fact, some individuals practice bisexuality , that is, they engage in sexual relations with both members of their own sex and members of the opposite sex. Kinsey's controversial study, popularly known as the "Kinsey Report," was published in 1948 under the title Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. His theory caused heated public discussion, since sexual behavior was considered a taboo subject for public discussion and study. In fact, until the late 1960s, any sexual behavior outside of exclusively heterosexual was considered either a mental illness or perversion. Although homosexuality continues to be prohibited by law in many locales, it is no longer listed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association .

Although much research into underlying causes of sexual orientation has been done, little conclusion evidence has emerged about why one individual is heterosexual and another homosexual. Researchers have studied biological and genetic determinants, hormone levels, and environmental factors. It seems from evidence available in the mid-1990s that environmental and biological factors combine in the complex process of human development to establish sexual orientation.

See also Sexuality

Further Reading

Fisher, Seymour. Sexual Images of the Self: the Psychology of Erotic Sensations and Illusions. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1989.

Levand, Rhonda. Sexual Evolution. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1991.

HETEROSEXUALITY

The terms to designate sexual orientation arose only in the later nineteenth century. "Homosexuality" owes to work by the Austro-Hungarian journalist and literary figure Károly Mária Kertbeny, who wished to reform prevailing sodomy laws in Prussia; in 1868 he coined the term to avoid the pejorative "pederast." First used in a letter, it gained some currency and in 1880 its binary opposite—"heterosexuality"—appeared in a book by Kertbeny's friend and colleague, zoologist Karl Jager. Richard von Kafft-Ebing picked up both terms, though not systematically, for use in his Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886. Not long afterward, in 1894, the French intellectual Marc-André Raffalovitch used the term "heterosexual" in an article published in the Archives of Criminal Anthropology.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud's developmental stage theory gave special force to the implicitly privileged status of heterosexuality in a normative context. He outlined a biological and psychological program for each individual, to be elaborated by instinctual objects and aims in a trajectory that moves from a polymorphously perverse disposition in infancy to heterosexual object choice in adolescence.

Heterosexuality in recent years has attracted attention as an aspect of gender and sexuality, a new discipline of study in Anglo-American scholarship, combining traditions of feminist scholarship, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies.

Bertrand Vichyn

See also: Bisexuality; Ego; Homosexuality; Object, change of/choice of; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality .

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.

Katz, Ned. (1995). The invention of heterosexuality. New York: Dutton.

Further Reading

Chodorow, Nancy J. (1992). Heterosexuality as compromise formation: A theory of sexual development. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. 15, 267-304.

het·er·o·sex·u·al / ˌhetərōˈsekshoōəl/ • adj. (of a person) sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex. ∎  involving or characterized by sexual attraction between people of the opposite sex: heterosexual relationships. • n. a heterosexual person. DERIVATIVES: het·er·o·sex·u·al·i·ty / -ˌsekshoōˈalitē/ n. het·er·o·sex·u·al·ly adv.

heterosexuality (het-er-oh-seks-yoo-al-iti) n. the pattern of sexuality in which sexual behaviour and thinking are directed towards people of the opposite sex.
—heterosexual adj., n.

heterosexuality Attraction of a male or female to members of the opposite sex. The word is used to distinguish such attraction from homosexuality.

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