Straight by Hanne Blank

evenmasturbation, are social activities, and all have at least some cultural significance. As David Halperin puts it, “Sexuality is not a somatic fact; it is a cultural effect.”[ 18 ] Doxa is both the medium that creates this thing we call “sexuality” and, simultaneously, the rulebook by which we figure out what “sexuality” means for ourselves and for everyone else.

CHAPTER THREE
Straight Science
    Scientifically speaking, we don’t know much about heterosexuality. No one knows whether heterosexuality is the result of nature or nurture, caused by inaccessible subconscious developments, or just what happens when impressionable young people come under the influence of older heterosexuals. We do not know whether heterosexuals have different anatomy or physiology compared to non-heterosexuals. Our knowledge of any potential differences in terms of how heterosexuals’ nervous systems respond to sexual stimulus, compared to non-heterosexuals, is nonexistent.
    This isn’t too surprising. We haven’t been looking. No dedicated neurologist has ever hunched over microscope slides of brain tissue teasing out telltale details that make a “heterosexual brain” heterosexual. Endocrinologists cannot give us the hormonal recipe for the biochemical cocktail that makes a person straight, nor have geneticists even tried to locate such a thing as a “straight gene,” except insofar as they often assume that genes are “straight” unless they are something else. Sociobiologists have yet to register any definitive statements on questions like whether being the firstborn, or perhaps having a lot of older sisters, or maybe being an only child, increase one’s odds of growing up to be heterosexual. Dozens, even hundreds of scientists have made careers, sometimes quite influential and lucrative ones, in attempting to answer exactly these and similar questions where homosexualityis concerned. But somehow heterosexuality seems always to be left out in the cold, with no one to show the slightest concern for its nature or workings.
    Interestingly enough, science has yet to prove that heterosexuality—or indeed any sexuality—exists in any way that is relevant to material science. For this to be the case, heterosexuality would have to be demonstrated to have a physical and objective existence. It would have to be quantifiable, in grams or nanometers or angstroms or amperes or joules or milliliters. And it would have to be measurable in some way not dependent on having a human being, with human biases, be the judge of whether or not it exists—that is, it would register a weight on a scale, produce a chemical reaction in a test tube, give off light or heat, and so on.
    This is the nature of the searching that lies behind much of the research that looks for things like “gay genes” or “gay hormones.” The theory is that if physical scientific evidence of homosexuality could be found, it would provide an objective foundation for sexual orientation, making it a legitimate object for the empirical sciences.
    The same should be true of heterosexuality. After all, in order for there to be the marked category “gay brain,” there must be an opposed unmarked non-gay brain. The confirmation of the existence of the marked category would simultaneously have to confirm the existence of the unmarked one. Neither one, however, has yet been confirmed to exist.
    This is not for lack of trying. Many scientists have claimed to find evidence of homosexuality in the body, in anatomy and genetics and hormones, but none has so far held up to scrutiny: when we look for proof that our “gay” bit of the body is genuinely different from a default “straight” model, the evidence tends to fall apart. In the face of more than a century of failing to find an empirical basis for sexual orientation, the depth of the faith scientists continue to maintain that