April 30, 2012 • 37 mins
In this episode, Hanne Blank discusses her new book, "Straight: A Surprisingly Brief History of Heterosexuality." The term "heterosexual" was coined in 1868. Tune in to learn more about heterosexuality and the development of the American middle class.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you?
From housetop Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we are talking
(00:22):
to Hannah Blank, who is an activist, historian and author
UM who I first ran across um with her book
Virgin The Untouched History. But we're not talking about Virgin today,
although she does bring it up a little bit at
the beginning of our discussion. The reason why we got
(00:43):
in touch with Hannah Blank is because she recently published
a new book called Straight, The Surprisingly Brief History of Heterosexuality,
And when we talked to her a little while ago,
she we got through all the questions and she said, man,
you know what, I I am so glad that you
(01:04):
did not ask me the question that so many other
interviewers have been asking me about the book, which is, well,
how how do you talk about a history of heterosexuality
since hasn't this just always been? And the answer is no,
that is not in fact the case, because the term
heterosexuality as Hannah Hannah, not Hannah Hannah. We'll talk about
(01:27):
in more detail, has only been around since eighteen exactly,
and it she talks a little bit about the evolution
of the term, how it started out. It was really invented.
I mean it was really invented. Homosexuality and heterosexuality, those
terms were coined in order to talk about these things
(01:50):
from a legal standpoint. Yeah, it wasn't even it didn't
even start out as a scientific or a medical term,
but actually a legal one. Um, So us to kick
things off, we don't we don't want to talk too
much about what Hannah had to say about straight because
she was such a fantastic interview and she has so
(02:10):
much great information to share with us, I think that
we should go ahead and just jump right into things. Indeed, indeed,
so to kick things off, and we just wanted to
ask her what inspired her to study and write this
history of heterosexuality. And it turns out that there were
academic reasons behind it, which makes sense because she is
(02:31):
a historian, but she also has a compelling personal story
behind this as well that she weaves into the book. So,
so let's hear from Hannah Blank. Well, there were two
things really that got me going on this project. One
was that when I was working on my book on
the history of virginity, I kept coming up against the
(02:54):
fact that the only kind of virginity that ever seemed
to matter was women's virginity, and specifically as it applied
to whether or not they had been penetrated by men.
And I was looking at this issue and it kept
coming up over and over and over again across this
very long history, because the history of virginity and it
(03:14):
was basically as old as we have history for and
I kept thinking, God, that's such a such a heterosexual
way to think about it. And then I thought. Then
I paused, and I thought to myself, but as a historian,
can I really say that, is that actually accurate? So like,
for instance, are you know, we're the authors of Deuteronomy Um.
(03:39):
Deuteronomy twenty three has quite a bit about virginity and lost,
how virginity gets lost and how you tell whether it's
real or not and all these things. So you know,
I had to ask myself as a historian this question
was okay, but you know, we're the people writing Deuteronomy
thinking of this as heterosexual? Is that was that even
an operating idea in their in their world? And so
(04:03):
that got me looking at this question of Okay, so
what is heterosexual where does that come from? How long
have we have been using this concept to etcetera, etcetera.
And the other thing that got me um interested in
working on heterosexuality is my own relationship of the past
fifteen years has been with somebody who is genetically intersexed,
(04:27):
whose sex chromosomes are not x X, which is this
typical female um sequence, or x Y, which is the
typical male sequence. Instead my my partner's chromosomes are x
x Y, So there's there's this third chromosome in there.
And when you have xx Y, how do you know?
You know, is this an x Y person with an
(04:48):
extra X or is this an x X person with
an extra y? You know? You don't know, and and
medical science doesn't know either. And so when you have
this person who is you know, in a very real
physical genetic a not male and female, what does that
due to sexual orientation? And that became a question that
(05:09):
I wanted to try to to puzzle out. Next, Hannah
Blank talks a little bit more about the origin of
heterosexuality and the term itself, and talks about how it's
something that we might take for granted, just because we
kind of think that this word, this concept, this aspect
(05:29):
of our lives has always existed in the same way
that we think about it today. It didn't start out
in medicine. It started out as a as a legal term,
as a term that was sort of invented as a
way to describe a phenomenon that no one knew how
to describe. Um Carl Maria Cartbaney, who is an Austro
Hungarian journalist, was part of a group of people who
(05:51):
were protesting a Prussian sodomy law German sodomy law, and
in the course of his writing about that law, he
coined the terms heterosexual and homosexuals on the very same
day in the very same letter. And his reasons for
doing that was that he wanted a way to describe
human beings as being sexual. Human beings are sexual beings,
(06:13):
and these are these two different ways that human beings
can be sexual. Sort of you know the thing that
I've been saying um as I've been talking about this book,
cause it's a little bit like saying, you know, there
are couch pillows and there are bed pillows, but they're
both pillows. There's not an implied hierarchy. One kind of
pillow is not better than the other kind of pillow.
(06:35):
They're just different kinds of pillows. And that was the
kind of kind of implication that Kartpenny was trying for,
that there's not one kind of sexuality that is better,
they're just different. And so that was where that started,
and it started in this this totally non medical, non
scientific realm. So it's kind of talks about in the book.
(06:57):
One of the most sgnificant transitions of of this term
heterosexual and the term homosexual happens when it escapes from
law to medicine, specifically into psychiatry, and with that, the
meaning and the baggage attached to heterosexuality changes from being
(07:19):
just this sort of explanatory term to being something that's
more problematized. It establishes the heterosexual as the normative standard,
and then by default homosexual as problematic and abnormal. And
as we take that term UM to self label ourselves
(07:40):
as checking one box or another box, if we're speaking
just UM strictly in terms of the gender binary, then uh,
then the homosexual becomes non normative and therefore deviant. When
it got adopted in the way it came to us.
Um was through medicine, specifically through psychiatry, and psychiatry at
(08:01):
the time had a big investment, as it still does
today in helping to deal with various types of socially
problematic behaviors, among them sexual behaviors and recard. Foncraft aiding
Um was the psychiatrist who was the author of Psychopathia
Sexualis was the first to sort of pick up this
(08:22):
word heterosexual and use it in a in a professional
context in his field. And again it was it was
also a legal context. He was writing psychopatheo Sexualities as
a sort of Yellow Pages of disorders of sexuality that
could be used by people who had to make legal decisions.
(08:43):
So he and he thought, he never defines heterosexual. He
never says, you know, and this is what a heterosexual is,
this is what they look like, this is what their
bodies are shaped like, none of that. He uses heterosexual
as the thing against which everything else gets defined. It's
the backed up it's and then there's these heterosexuals which
are not problematic and they're not pathological, and they're not
(09:07):
out there causing problems. So it gets defined by omission.
It's very circular way of doing it as being normal.
You know, this is the normative thing against which we
are judging all of these other problematic cases. And it
spends a while, you know, the terms spent a while,
(09:29):
you know, well into the twentieth century, the early twentieth
century sort of being batted around in the medical context
in various different ways. And you find early on some
American writers using it to mean bisexual, and what we
would now say it was bisexual because they took that
Greek root, that hetero, which means different, and assumed, okay,
(09:53):
well hetero, if there's somebody's attracted to different sexes, that
must mean they're attracted to both males and females. So
therefore we can use this word. We're going to use
it literally to mean somebody who's attracted to different sexes. Um.
And that that was one of the definitions that batted
around for a while, and eventually the sort of the
(10:14):
normal sexual definition took hold. It was partly about Havelock
Ellis and partly about Freud, and it gradually filtered into
our common language. And as it filters into the common language,
I think is where the the most significant change happens.
When people start using it to refer to themselves and
(10:37):
their own lives, in their own relationships, Then they are
no longer just referring to sex or sexual desire, but
they're referring to the whole constellation of associated ideas about
under what circumstances should men and women be having sex
with one another? Under what sorts of emotional um circumstances
(11:01):
is it okay for women and men to feel desire
for one another? What kinds of desire is it okay
for them to feel? How should women and men organize
their relationships, What should their economic relationships to one another be?
All of that stuff that gets folded into how we
build families, how we build households, how people pair, bond
(11:24):
and take responsibility towards one another in different ways. As
people start to use the word to talk about themselves,
all of that starts to get folded into what we
mean when we say heterosexual. And that's why it's so
hard to define. So speaking about this this deviant behavior,
things that deviate from the norm, there's definitely a drive
(11:48):
to well, Hannah talks about this drive to define yourself
as one way or the other, and when you define
yourself as heterosexual, you were defining yourself as normal and
have certain boundaries to what that behavior entails. And so
she goes into how this makes the closet, this whole
(12:08):
drive to be one thing or another makes the closet
a very real place. We're talking about the impulse to
self define as normal and unexceptional, and to therefore self
defined as being worthy of being taken seriously and worthy
of being protected and worthy of not being harassed and
(12:31):
all of that stuff. And you know, there's a reason
that the closet exists. There's a reason people closet themselves.
This is real stuff. The stakes are high. Um, they're
not as high as they used to being, at least
not everywhere, but the steaks can be real, real high
for being seen as a deviant and also for seeing
(12:53):
yourself as a deviant, because when you're aware of what
happens to sexual deviance in your cult her, that's not
something you want to see in yourself. That's something that
you want to protect yourself from in you know, as
much as you possibly can. And that's one of the
places where heterosexual starts getting used. And as you say,
I write that, I write about that in the book,
(13:15):
that this is a term that when people start using
it to talk about themselves, they're using it to establish
their normalcy. They're using it to say I am not
all of these other things that cause problems and that
deserve punishment. And so a lot of this this evolution
of heterosexuality and homosexualities as these two conflicting terms, it's
(13:37):
all about this social idea of of normalcy and what
is normative and what is not. And with that in mind,
one of the most compelling themes in the book is
how the history of heterosexuality parallels the history of middle
class development, which when you think about the middle class
(13:58):
ideal of know, the husband, the wife, the two point
five kids, a dog in a white picket fence, it's
all about attaining and maintaining these normative standards of success
and what that looks like. And uh and I thought
that was so fascinating, and we wanted to ask or
why that intersection of middle class and heterosexuality exists. I mean,
(14:25):
it's about the fact that the people who have the
most economic and social power in a society get to
define what normal is for that society, and the idea
of heterosexual grew up at the very same time as
the middle classes rose to a position of social and
economic dominance. Um, you know, the eighteen sixties when the
word heterosexual was coined, our right smack in the middle
(14:51):
of a period where all over Europe and in North
America as well, you find that cultures of societies everywhere
going through these growing pains to define themselves as civil societies,
with civil civil laws and civil rulerships and civil governance
(15:14):
on a bunch of different levels. A lot of the
sort of the apparatus of a civil society comes from
that period of time. Government bureaucracies that are designed to
help regulate the way we lead our lives. Metropolitan police forces.
That's a big one that right arises up in that
last last quarter to a third of the nineteenth century.
(15:37):
The idea that a city has an obligation to protect
the safety of its citizens. And that is coming up
not because somebody is just suddenly very enlightened and saying, oh,
people deserve to be protected. It's because suddenly you have
this growing middle class with a lot of money and
a lot of cloud who are saying, hey, we aren't aristocrats,
(16:01):
we cannot lobby, we can't form an army, We can't have,
you know, our own private guard, our own private militia,
and yet we need to be kept safe. How does
that work? How do we make that happen? Well, how
you make that happen is you make a civil police force.
That's that's an emblem of the middle class right there.
(16:25):
And so as the middle classes are growing and they
are becoming that powerful and they're able to mobilize that
kind of force in government. Socially, economically, most of most
of the economy is moving out of the hands of
the old um the old aristocratic regime, and into a
(16:47):
mercantile and industrial regime that's run by largely by middle
class people. Um, so the people who have the money,
the people who have the cloud. That people who have
the power are also the people who get to call
the shots in terms of what is considered appropriate and
what is considered normative in terms of how you lead
(17:08):
the rest of your life. So as far as people
in power go, these are the people who are in
a position to define what is normal and what is
accepted in society. And they're with the rise of marriage
being a civil institution not a religious one anymore in
the modern era. Um, all of a sudden. You know,
(17:30):
our our civil governments are tracking who's getting married, who's
owning property, and there were a lot of rights tied
in to marriage. But the laws have become more gender blind,
but there's still the issue of are they sexual orientation blind?
And she talks about that, Well, that's a really good question,
(17:52):
and that is in fact, part of what the whole
same sex marriage controversy is about. UM is you know,
is you know, basically that whole fourteenth Amendment issue. Do
we are we genuinely going to have equal representation for
all citizens under the law. Are we going to go
back to the principles of de condor say, and the
Declaration of Rights of Men and citizen, which is a
(18:15):
large part of what, you know, the the goals of
the American revolutionary founders are based on. Are we going
to go back to that and talk about this, you know,
complete egalitarian enfranchisement of all citizens or do we in
fact have for whatever reason, a de facto sort of
hierarchy of citizenship that we use and that's real and
(18:40):
valid and that we're going to uphold. Marriage is a
is a civil instrument. It's a civil legal instrument, and
UM governments have not always been invested in regulating marriage.
It used to be that that was a religious thing entirely,
and it was governed by religious law. And it was
(19:02):
not really until the eighteenth century that that civil governments
began to invest themselves in the regulation of marriage. Um.
And again this links into the rise of the middle classes.
It starts to happen in the mid eighteenth century. It
really hits it's it's stride in the nineteenth century, as
(19:24):
you know, again, as the middle classes are on the rise,
and you've got all of these people with all of
this money and all of this power in the middle classes,
and the state has a really serious interest in knowing
who's marrying whom and having some sort of, um, some
sort of ability to control that and and decide who's
allowed to get married and who's not allowed to get married,
(19:45):
and how does property get handled into marriage and all
of those things. And what we're seeing really is, in
my opinion, um, you're seeing a lot of people who
have had this sort of state involvement in their personal
lives and in their relationships for you know, several hundred
(20:07):
years now, um, thinking you know what, we don't actually
need the state to be involved and at the same time,
there are a lot of people who have not had
the option of being recognized in that official way. And
it is very very official, very formal to have the
state recognize your relationship. Certainly, um, a lot of people
(20:28):
who haven't had that option are saying, hey, look we
we demand to be recognized too. We're standing over here,
we're citizens. Why don't you want to regulate our lives?
Why don't you want to acknowledge our lives? Why our relationships?
Why is our property? Why are our children not important
enough to you? And so they're really there are two
(20:52):
very different experiences of interacting with the state and being
interacted with as citizens, and and it does kind of
boiled down to a citizenship issue. Who has full access
to the state, Who has full access to the government
that they have to live under. Now, I talked a
(21:13):
lot about the social and legal ramifications of the concepts
and the constructs of heterosexuality and homosexuality, but there's also
this scientific side of it that she talks about in
the book. There is this this quest to find some
biological difference between Kinsey's sheep and goats. Well, you know,
(21:37):
is there some kind of genetic turnkey something. And I
wanted to find out from Hannah why why we are
so hell bent to to keep putting sexual orientation under
the microscope. Why we need to as a society somehow
need scientific proof, maybe as some kind of security, get
(22:00):
to explain non normative behavior rather than just accepting it
as part of the social fabric. Are the cultural fabric?
The fact that, um, human sexuality might be more fluid
than just two boxes that you could check. I think
one of the big issues here is that we have
(22:20):
this notion that if something is provably biological, then it
is something over which human beings have no control. Um.
Now let's leave aside the fact that there are a
whole lot of biological things that can happen to bodies
over which we do, in fact have plenty of control.
Contraception comes to mind. Um. But there is this idea
(22:44):
that if something if it is a matter of nature,
if it is a fact of your biology, and you
did nothing to cause it, then you are not at
fault and cannot be punished for it. And that is
the draw having forced behind a lot of the biological
research into sexual orientation, is this idea that if we
(23:06):
can prove that sexual orientation has biological origin, that it
is biologically innate to human beings, cannot be changed, cannot
be induced one way or the other. Then there's an
argument to be made that, well, these this is just
the way people are. They can't do anything about it,
(23:26):
they did nothing to cause it, and therefore they should
be not be treated any worse for it, because clearly
it's not their fault. So that is the underlying sort
of thinking that goes on behind a lot of that
um and that is arguably it's another legacy of the
(23:51):
whole period, out of which the terms heterosection homosexual arise.
One of the other people protesting the same German sodomy
law was Carl Ulrich, who was a German UM. He's
a jurist, he worked in the law, and he formulated
what turned out to be a really influential idea, which
was this idea of inversion theory, which was basically that
(24:13):
gay men were gay because they weren't really men. They
were men on the outside, their bodies were male, but
their minds were female, and because they have this female mind,
that was why they desired other men. And a great
deal of what's been done in terms of biomedical research
on on sexual orientation has basically been to look for
(24:35):
ways in which homosexuals are not really either either male
or female that they are, you know, one thing on
the outside and another thing on the inside, and that's
where that comes from. And again Ulric's argument was basically, well,
if this is innate, if they're born this way, then
there's nothing to punish. There's nothing that can be punished,
(24:56):
and there's no point in punishing. So there's this deep faith.
I think that, um, deep and inexplicable faith in a
lot of ways, that this must be and in a
issue that this must be biological because we don't experience it,
(25:18):
we don't tend to experience it as a matter of
volition mhm and UM. I find that really unimaginative, since
there are lots of things that we do that we
don't have to intend to do that are clearly also
(25:38):
not biological. I mean, most of us who drive cars regularly,
we don't think about everything we do when we drive
a car. We've learned to do it really without without
much volition. You can avoid an accident without really meaning
to avoid an accident. You can do it by reflex um.
So there there's a lot of gray area there, and
(26:01):
it gets very complex. And of course people are very
uncomfortable with the idea that sexuality might be that complex.
But it might be, there might be so many layers involved.
They want a simple, clear answer to why we do
things this way? Why are some people this way? And
why are other people a different way? And you know,
(26:25):
I I side in the book as a scientists this
isn't basically, um, you know, we believe that we can
we can divide people into these two groups, into heterosexuals
and homosexuals based on the fact that we have this
belief that human beings come in these two varieties and
(26:46):
in a very real way. That's what it boils down to,
is that we have we've adopted this belief, we have
a social use for this belief, and by golly, we
are we are bound into termined to find something that
can prove that. So, as we pointed out, the terms
heterosexual and homosexual have only been around since the eighteen sixties.
(27:10):
So we wanted to ask Hanna if she thought that
we could live in a post sexual orientation society. Well,
we certainly lived in a pre sexual orientation society. I
see no reason why we can't, you know, have a
post sexual orientation society. It's very it's very difficult to
imagine what that would look like because we're just we're
(27:31):
also steeped in it. But um, but as a historian, yeah,
I think, why why shouldn't that be possible? There's nothing
to keep us from doing it. What's really remarkable about
the idea of heterosexuality is that it took such a
short time comparatively speaking, I mean, from eighteen sixty eight
when the word is coined in nine three, when it
(27:53):
appears in the first you know, English language dictionary. Um,
that's not a medical dictionary. That's a really short period
of time for a concept like that to take hold,
which is one of the reasons why I find that
history so fascinating. UM. And, as I argue in the book,
the reason it took hold was because it came to
be at a time when it was really useful and
(28:15):
it could do a lot of work for a society
that was in a process, you know, this process of
enormous social change, and there's nothing, there's absolutely nothing but
that would limit that from happening. Again, since you've probably
gathered from this interview, UM, and we didn't even touch
(28:35):
on nearly, like even close to everything that she that
she covers in the book. Um, but it's it's so
clear just from this brief conversation with Hannah that the
definition of heterosexuality is so vast and so broad, and
when we talk about sexual orientation, we're talking about so
(28:56):
many other larger things that really the end of the day,
it seems like orientation is you know, it's it's almost
an insignificant label when you consider the history and the
culture and the scientific quest that surrounded it. So um,
we wanted to find out that whether or not the
process of learning about this history of heterosexuality and writing
(29:20):
the book has changed Hannah's definition of heterosexuality, what what
is straight in her mind? Now? One of the things
that happened to me when I was studying because as
a history was I discovered just how much can be
absorbed by that word, and just how many kinds of behaviors,
(29:42):
and how many kinds of relationships, and how many kinds
of marriages, and how many kinds of economic arrangements, and
how many different kinds of sex people are having and
have been having for you know, a hundred years now,
and saying that this is heterosexual and um, it's it's
a pretty damn broad gamut. I mean, in the last
(30:06):
chapter of the book, I I compare heterosexuality to the
board from Star Trek. You know, this sort of huge,
you know, traveling juggernaut that just sort of assimilates things
as it goes, and I don't you know, And that's
actually not so far off. There are there are some
limits to what heterosexuality has been able to assimilate, but
(30:26):
it's been able to assimilate an awful lot. What I
what I've found is that my my way of relating
to heterosexuality has changed. My way of relating to the
idea has changed in that I no longer consider it
a definition of anything in particular. I think of it
more as a sort of a guide to probability. I
(30:49):
think when somebody tells me, oh, I'm heterosexual, I think, okay, Well,
that gives me sort of better than fifty fifty odds
that I know a handful of things about what you
might do, be and desire, But it certainly doesn't give
me anything for free. So after all of this, everything
(31:11):
that Miss Blank has touched on, we wanted to ask
her for any final takeaways. Basically, you know, is there
anything that she wanted to drive home? And she she
talks about the flexibility of people's perception of what is
normal and how we are always sort of incorporating new
things into our definition of normal, into our definition of
(31:34):
just you know, heterosexual, homosexual, That there seems to be
more blurring and that's fine, and basically what we what
makes people feel good can be the new normal. You know.
I think that the big takeaway for me um having
written the book is that there's a lot more out
(31:57):
there than you think, and that if you basically, if
you feel like you're you're really sure that you know
what this is, I can guarantee you that you're wrong
and that that's actually a good thing. That's actually a
really really good thing, because what it means is that,
you know, human there's a lot more human beings are
(32:19):
capable of a lot more, we do a lot more,
we're a lot more expensive. Then we often want to
give ourselves credit for being and some people find that
really threatening, um, but I I tend to find it
really liberating. I really like the fact that we push
those boundaries, that we we go places that we're not
(32:41):
supposed to go and then we find ways to incorporate
them back into our normal. Um. That's a really human
characteristic and it's a really interesting one, and it really
it bears watching. It bears a lot of watching. So
huge thanks to Hanna Blank for talking to us about
horror new book Straight, A Brief History of Heterosexuality. Um.
(33:06):
She was such an insightful interview. She had so much
knowledge to share with us, not at all of which
can even fit on this podcast. So I encourage everyone
out there to to go out check out Straight. It is, Um.
I mean it's a history of yes, sexual orientation and
also the middle class, also marriage. It all ties together,
(33:28):
um in a in such a well done book. So
UM thumbs up to that. Now, the first email that
I have is from Steven and this is in response
to our episode on whether airbrushing damages body image. And
Steven points out that he is a professional photographer, very experience,
and he has been using Photoshop since its first release
(33:51):
in Wow and uh it's also a teacher of photoshop
and photo editing. And he says that one subject that
is not taught in our three graphic design degree programs
is ethics. I'm on the Curriculum Advisory Board, which works
with all of our neighboring colleges and tech schools to
(34:12):
make sure credits from our programs will transfer to and
from these other programs. Because of this, I'm fairly familiar
with their curriculum curriculums as well. None cover ethics. While
a few professional design societies do have statement of ethics
for their members, none is widely accepted and much less
are followed. Due to the ease with which photos can
be manipulated using free or nearly free software, I can't
(34:35):
see this issue being settled anytime soon. Unless you see
or hear something directly, you must assume that it has
been edited. Air Brushing is everywhere, Caroline, everywhere everywhere. I
I might even be airbrushed now, I have no idea.
You do look quite blemish free. Thank you. Um. This
(34:58):
is from Amy about our boxing episode. She says, I'm
a female who will be forty four next month. I've
been training with a personal trainer for almost a year
and got seriously bored. I've never liked working out anyway,
so when he suggested boxing, I laughed, but was up
for anything to break up the monotony. Two months later,
I have fallen in love with it so much that
(35:18):
I had my husband hang a heavy bag in an
extra room so I can get my cardio in on
days I don't go to the gym. I've never felt
weird as far as gender goes. All this sparring with
my trainer for exercises as far as I can see
myself going. Especially at my age, I was always told
to find something I'd like doing, but never thought it
would be boxing. Just goes to show that it is
good to try something before discounting it, which is true. Amy.
(35:40):
Thank you for your letter. I have also tried sparring
with a trainer at the gym one and it was awesome,
and I can tell how it would really get you
in shape immediately because I almost picked out I've been
doing so many fast repetitions of things for such a
long stretch of time. I was like, really, I'm I'm
in the color of a made right now. Maybe I
(36:01):
should sit down, but yes, it is an excellent workout.
So thank you for your letter, and thanks to everyone
who has written in and if you have any thoughts
to share with us about the interview. Hannah Blank Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, uh.
Let us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can send them, and you can
also let us know what you're thinking on Facebook and
(36:24):
on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcasts, and of course, you
can always check out our articles during the week. You
can find them at how stuff works dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house
(36:47):
Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you?
From housetop Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we are talking
(00:22):
to Hannah Blank, who is an activist, historian and author
UM who I first ran across um with her book
Virgin The Untouched History. But we're not talking about Virgin today,
although she does bring it up a little bit at
the beginning of our discussion. The reason why we got
(00:43):
in touch with Hannah Blank is because she recently published
a new book called Straight, The Surprisingly Brief History of Heterosexuality,
And when we talked to her a little while ago,
she we got through all the questions and she said, man,
you know what, I I am so glad that you
(01:04):
did not ask me the question that so many other
interviewers have been asking me about the book, which is, well,
how how do you talk about a history of heterosexuality
since hasn't this just always been? And the answer is no,
that is not in fact the case, because the term
heterosexuality as Hannah Hannah, not Hannah Hannah. We'll talk about
(01:27):
in more detail, has only been around since eighteen exactly,
and it she talks a little bit about the evolution
of the term, how it started out. It was really invented.
I mean it was really invented. Homosexuality and heterosexuality, those
terms were coined in order to talk about these things
(01:50):
from a legal standpoint. Yeah, it wasn't even it didn't
even start out as a scientific or a medical term,
but actually a legal one. Um, So us to kick
things off, we don't we don't want to talk too
much about what Hannah had to say about straight because
she was such a fantastic interview and she has so
(02:10):
much great information to share with us, I think that
we should go ahead and just jump right into things. Indeed, indeed,
so to kick things off, and we just wanted to
ask her what inspired her to study and write this
history of heterosexuality. And it turns out that there were
academic reasons behind it, which makes sense because she is
(02:31):
a historian, but she also has a compelling personal story
behind this as well that she weaves into the book. So,
so let's hear from Hannah Blank. Well, there were two
things really that got me going on this project. One
was that when I was working on my book on
the history of virginity, I kept coming up against the
(02:54):
fact that the only kind of virginity that ever seemed
to matter was women's virginity, and specifically as it applied
to whether or not they had been penetrated by men.
And I was looking at this issue and it kept
coming up over and over and over again across this
very long history, because the history of virginity and it
(03:14):
was basically as old as we have history for and
I kept thinking, God, that's such a such a heterosexual
way to think about it. And then I thought. Then
I paused, and I thought to myself, but as a historian,
can I really say that, is that actually accurate? So like,
for instance, are you know, we're the authors of Deuteronomy Um.
(03:39):
Deuteronomy twenty three has quite a bit about virginity and lost,
how virginity gets lost and how you tell whether it's
real or not and all these things. So you know,
I had to ask myself as a historian this question
was okay, but you know, we're the people writing Deuteronomy
thinking of this as heterosexual? Is that was that even
an operating idea in their in their world? And so
(04:03):
that got me looking at this question of Okay, so
what is heterosexual where does that come from? How long
have we have been using this concept to etcetera, etcetera.
And the other thing that got me um interested in
working on heterosexuality is my own relationship of the past
fifteen years has been with somebody who is genetically intersexed,
(04:27):
whose sex chromosomes are not x X, which is this
typical female um sequence, or x Y, which is the
typical male sequence. Instead my my partner's chromosomes are x
x Y, So there's there's this third chromosome in there.
And when you have xx Y, how do you know?
You know, is this an x Y person with an
(04:48):
extra X or is this an x X person with
an extra y? You know? You don't know, and and
medical science doesn't know either. And so when you have
this person who is you know, in a very real
physical genetic a not male and female, what does that
due to sexual orientation? And that became a question that
(05:09):
I wanted to try to to puzzle out. Next, Hannah
Blank talks a little bit more about the origin of
heterosexuality and the term itself, and talks about how it's
something that we might take for granted, just because we
kind of think that this word, this concept, this aspect
(05:29):
of our lives has always existed in the same way
that we think about it today. It didn't start out
in medicine. It started out as a as a legal term,
as a term that was sort of invented as a
way to describe a phenomenon that no one knew how
to describe. Um Carl Maria Cartbaney, who is an Austro
Hungarian journalist, was part of a group of people who
(05:51):
were protesting a Prussian sodomy law German sodomy law, and
in the course of his writing about that law, he
coined the terms heterosexual and homosexuals on the very same
day in the very same letter. And his reasons for
doing that was that he wanted a way to describe
human beings as being sexual. Human beings are sexual beings,
(06:13):
and these are these two different ways that human beings
can be sexual. Sort of you know the thing that
I've been saying um as I've been talking about this book,
cause it's a little bit like saying, you know, there
are couch pillows and there are bed pillows, but they're
both pillows. There's not an implied hierarchy. One kind of
pillow is not better than the other kind of pillow.
(06:35):
They're just different kinds of pillows. And that was the
kind of kind of implication that Kartpenny was trying for,
that there's not one kind of sexuality that is better,
they're just different. And so that was where that started,
and it started in this this totally non medical, non
scientific realm. So it's kind of talks about in the book.
(06:57):
One of the most sgnificant transitions of of this term
heterosexual and the term homosexual happens when it escapes from
law to medicine, specifically into psychiatry, and with that, the
meaning and the baggage attached to heterosexuality changes from being
(07:19):
just this sort of explanatory term to being something that's
more problematized. It establishes the heterosexual as the normative standard,
and then by default homosexual as problematic and abnormal. And
as we take that term UM to self label ourselves
(07:40):
as checking one box or another box, if we're speaking
just UM strictly in terms of the gender binary, then uh,
then the homosexual becomes non normative and therefore deviant. When
it got adopted in the way it came to us.
Um was through medicine, specifically through psychiatry, and psychiatry at
(08:01):
the time had a big investment, as it still does
today in helping to deal with various types of socially
problematic behaviors, among them sexual behaviors and recard. Foncraft aiding
Um was the psychiatrist who was the author of Psychopathia
Sexualis was the first to sort of pick up this
(08:22):
word heterosexual and use it in a in a professional
context in his field. And again it was it was
also a legal context. He was writing psychopatheo Sexualities as
a sort of Yellow Pages of disorders of sexuality that
could be used by people who had to make legal decisions.
(08:43):
So he and he thought, he never defines heterosexual. He
never says, you know, and this is what a heterosexual is,
this is what they look like, this is what their
bodies are shaped like, none of that. He uses heterosexual
as the thing against which everything else gets defined. It's
the backed up it's and then there's these heterosexuals which
are not problematic and they're not pathological, and they're not
(09:07):
out there causing problems. So it gets defined by omission.
It's very circular way of doing it as being normal.
You know, this is the normative thing against which we
are judging all of these other problematic cases. And it
spends a while, you know, the terms spent a while,
(09:29):
you know, well into the twentieth century, the early twentieth
century sort of being batted around in the medical context
in various different ways. And you find early on some
American writers using it to mean bisexual, and what we
would now say it was bisexual because they took that
Greek root, that hetero, which means different, and assumed, okay,
(09:53):
well hetero, if there's somebody's attracted to different sexes, that
must mean they're attracted to both males and females. So
therefore we can use this word. We're going to use
it literally to mean somebody who's attracted to different sexes. Um.
And that that was one of the definitions that batted
around for a while, and eventually the sort of the
(10:14):
normal sexual definition took hold. It was partly about Havelock
Ellis and partly about Freud, and it gradually filtered into
our common language. And as it filters into the common language,
I think is where the the most significant change happens.
When people start using it to refer to themselves and
(10:37):
their own lives, in their own relationships, Then they are
no longer just referring to sex or sexual desire, but
they're referring to the whole constellation of associated ideas about
under what circumstances should men and women be having sex
with one another? Under what sorts of emotional um circumstances
(11:01):
is it okay for women and men to feel desire
for one another? What kinds of desire is it okay
for them to feel? How should women and men organize
their relationships, What should their economic relationships to one another be?
All of that stuff that gets folded into how we
build families, how we build households, how people pair, bond
(11:24):
and take responsibility towards one another in different ways. As
people start to use the word to talk about themselves,
all of that starts to get folded into what we
mean when we say heterosexual. And that's why it's so
hard to define. So speaking about this this deviant behavior,
things that deviate from the norm, there's definitely a drive
(11:48):
to well, Hannah talks about this drive to define yourself
as one way or the other, and when you define
yourself as heterosexual, you were defining yourself as normal and
have certain boundaries to what that behavior entails. And so
she goes into how this makes the closet, this whole
(12:08):
drive to be one thing or another makes the closet
a very real place. We're talking about the impulse to
self define as normal and unexceptional, and to therefore self
defined as being worthy of being taken seriously and worthy
of being protected and worthy of not being harassed and
(12:31):
all of that stuff. And you know, there's a reason
that the closet exists. There's a reason people closet themselves.
This is real stuff. The stakes are high. Um, they're
not as high as they used to being, at least
not everywhere, but the steaks can be real, real high
for being seen as a deviant and also for seeing
(12:53):
yourself as a deviant, because when you're aware of what
happens to sexual deviance in your cult her, that's not
something you want to see in yourself. That's something that
you want to protect yourself from in you know, as
much as you possibly can. And that's one of the
places where heterosexual starts getting used. And as you say,
I write that, I write about that in the book,
(13:15):
that this is a term that when people start using
it to talk about themselves, they're using it to establish
their normalcy. They're using it to say I am not
all of these other things that cause problems and that
deserve punishment. And so a lot of this this evolution
of heterosexuality and homosexualities as these two conflicting terms, it's
(13:37):
all about this social idea of of normalcy and what
is normative and what is not. And with that in mind,
one of the most compelling themes in the book is
how the history of heterosexuality parallels the history of middle
class development, which when you think about the middle class
(13:58):
ideal of know, the husband, the wife, the two point
five kids, a dog in a white picket fence, it's
all about attaining and maintaining these normative standards of success
and what that looks like. And uh and I thought
that was so fascinating, and we wanted to ask or
why that intersection of middle class and heterosexuality exists. I mean,
(14:25):
it's about the fact that the people who have the
most economic and social power in a society get to
define what normal is for that society, and the idea
of heterosexual grew up at the very same time as
the middle classes rose to a position of social and
economic dominance. Um, you know, the eighteen sixties when the
word heterosexual was coined, our right smack in the middle
(14:51):
of a period where all over Europe and in North
America as well, you find that cultures of societies everywhere
going through these growing pains to define themselves as civil societies,
with civil civil laws and civil rulerships and civil governance
(15:14):
on a bunch of different levels. A lot of the
sort of the apparatus of a civil society comes from
that period of time. Government bureaucracies that are designed to
help regulate the way we lead our lives. Metropolitan police forces.
That's a big one that right arises up in that
last last quarter to a third of the nineteenth century.
(15:37):
The idea that a city has an obligation to protect
the safety of its citizens. And that is coming up
not because somebody is just suddenly very enlightened and saying, oh,
people deserve to be protected. It's because suddenly you have
this growing middle class with a lot of money and
a lot of cloud who are saying, hey, we aren't aristocrats,
(16:01):
we cannot lobby, we can't form an army, We can't have,
you know, our own private guard, our own private militia,
and yet we need to be kept safe. How does
that work? How do we make that happen? Well, how
you make that happen is you make a civil police force.
That's that's an emblem of the middle class right there.
(16:25):
And so as the middle classes are growing and they
are becoming that powerful and they're able to mobilize that
kind of force in government. Socially, economically, most of most
of the economy is moving out of the hands of
the old um the old aristocratic regime, and into a
(16:47):
mercantile and industrial regime that's run by largely by middle
class people. Um, so the people who have the money,
the people who have the cloud. That people who have
the power are also the people who get to call
the shots in terms of what is considered appropriate and
what is considered normative in terms of how you lead
(17:08):
the rest of your life. So as far as people
in power go, these are the people who are in
a position to define what is normal and what is
accepted in society. And they're with the rise of marriage
being a civil institution not a religious one anymore in
the modern era. Um, all of a sudden. You know,
(17:30):
our our civil governments are tracking who's getting married, who's
owning property, and there were a lot of rights tied
in to marriage. But the laws have become more gender blind,
but there's still the issue of are they sexual orientation blind?
And she talks about that, Well, that's a really good question,
(17:52):
and that is in fact, part of what the whole
same sex marriage controversy is about. UM is you know,
is you know, basically that whole fourteenth Amendment issue. Do
we are we genuinely going to have equal representation for
all citizens under the law. Are we going to go
back to the principles of de condor say, and the
Declaration of Rights of Men and citizen, which is a
(18:15):
large part of what, you know, the the goals of
the American revolutionary founders are based on. Are we going
to go back to that and talk about this, you know,
complete egalitarian enfranchisement of all citizens or do we in
fact have for whatever reason, a de facto sort of
hierarchy of citizenship that we use and that's real and
(18:40):
valid and that we're going to uphold. Marriage is a
is a civil instrument. It's a civil legal instrument, and
UM governments have not always been invested in regulating marriage.
It used to be that that was a religious thing entirely,
and it was governed by religious law. And it was
(19:02):
not really until the eighteenth century that that civil governments
began to invest themselves in the regulation of marriage. Um.
And again this links into the rise of the middle classes.
It starts to happen in the mid eighteenth century. It
really hits it's it's stride in the nineteenth century, as
(19:24):
you know, again, as the middle classes are on the rise,
and you've got all of these people with all of
this money and all of this power in the middle classes,
and the state has a really serious interest in knowing
who's marrying whom and having some sort of, um, some
sort of ability to control that and and decide who's
allowed to get married and who's not allowed to get married,
(19:45):
and how does property get handled into marriage and all
of those things. And what we're seeing really is, in
my opinion, um, you're seeing a lot of people who
have had this sort of state involvement in their personal
lives and in their relationships for you know, several hundred
(20:07):
years now, um, thinking you know what, we don't actually
need the state to be involved and at the same time,
there are a lot of people who have not had
the option of being recognized in that official way. And
it is very very official, very formal to have the
state recognize your relationship. Certainly, um, a lot of people
(20:28):
who haven't had that option are saying, hey, look we
we demand to be recognized too. We're standing over here,
we're citizens. Why don't you want to regulate our lives?
Why don't you want to acknowledge our lives? Why our relationships?
Why is our property? Why are our children not important
enough to you? And so they're really there are two
(20:52):
very different experiences of interacting with the state and being
interacted with as citizens, and and it does kind of
boiled down to a citizenship issue. Who has full access
to the state, Who has full access to the government
that they have to live under. Now, I talked a
(21:13):
lot about the social and legal ramifications of the concepts
and the constructs of heterosexuality and homosexuality, but there's also
this scientific side of it that she talks about in
the book. There is this this quest to find some
biological difference between Kinsey's sheep and goats. Well, you know,
(21:37):
is there some kind of genetic turnkey something. And I
wanted to find out from Hannah why why we are
so hell bent to to keep putting sexual orientation under
the microscope. Why we need to as a society somehow
need scientific proof, maybe as some kind of security, get
(22:00):
to explain non normative behavior rather than just accepting it
as part of the social fabric. Are the cultural fabric?
The fact that, um, human sexuality might be more fluid
than just two boxes that you could check. I think
one of the big issues here is that we have
(22:20):
this notion that if something is provably biological, then it
is something over which human beings have no control. Um.
Now let's leave aside the fact that there are a
whole lot of biological things that can happen to bodies
over which we do, in fact have plenty of control.
Contraception comes to mind. Um. But there is this idea
(22:44):
that if something if it is a matter of nature,
if it is a fact of your biology, and you
did nothing to cause it, then you are not at
fault and cannot be punished for it. And that is
the draw having forced behind a lot of the biological
research into sexual orientation, is this idea that if we
(23:06):
can prove that sexual orientation has biological origin, that it
is biologically innate to human beings, cannot be changed, cannot
be induced one way or the other. Then there's an
argument to be made that, well, these this is just
the way people are. They can't do anything about it,
(23:26):
they did nothing to cause it, and therefore they should
be not be treated any worse for it, because clearly
it's not their fault. So that is the underlying sort
of thinking that goes on behind a lot of that
um and that is arguably it's another legacy of the
(23:51):
whole period, out of which the terms heterosection homosexual arise.
One of the other people protesting the same German sodomy
law was Carl Ulrich, who was a German UM. He's
a jurist, he worked in the law, and he formulated
what turned out to be a really influential idea, which
was this idea of inversion theory, which was basically that
(24:13):
gay men were gay because they weren't really men. They
were men on the outside, their bodies were male, but
their minds were female, and because they have this female mind,
that was why they desired other men. And a great
deal of what's been done in terms of biomedical research
on on sexual orientation has basically been to look for
(24:35):
ways in which homosexuals are not really either either male
or female that they are, you know, one thing on
the outside and another thing on the inside, and that's
where that comes from. And again Ulric's argument was basically, well,
if this is innate, if they're born this way, then
there's nothing to punish. There's nothing that can be punished,
(24:56):
and there's no point in punishing. So there's this deep faith.
I think that, um, deep and inexplicable faith in a
lot of ways, that this must be and in a
issue that this must be biological because we don't experience it,
(25:18):
we don't tend to experience it as a matter of
volition mhm and UM. I find that really unimaginative, since
there are lots of things that we do that we
don't have to intend to do that are clearly also
(25:38):
not biological. I mean, most of us who drive cars regularly,
we don't think about everything we do when we drive
a car. We've learned to do it really without without
much volition. You can avoid an accident without really meaning
to avoid an accident. You can do it by reflex um.
So there there's a lot of gray area there, and
(26:01):
it gets very complex. And of course people are very
uncomfortable with the idea that sexuality might be that complex.
But it might be, there might be so many layers involved.
They want a simple, clear answer to why we do
things this way? Why are some people this way? And
why are other people a different way? And you know,
(26:25):
I I side in the book as a scientists this
isn't basically, um, you know, we believe that we can
we can divide people into these two groups, into heterosexuals
and homosexuals based on the fact that we have this
belief that human beings come in these two varieties and
(26:46):
in a very real way. That's what it boils down to,
is that we have we've adopted this belief, we have
a social use for this belief, and by golly, we
are we are bound into termined to find something that
can prove that. So, as we pointed out, the terms
heterosexual and homosexual have only been around since the eighteen sixties.
(27:10):
So we wanted to ask Hanna if she thought that
we could live in a post sexual orientation society. Well,
we certainly lived in a pre sexual orientation society. I
see no reason why we can't, you know, have a
post sexual orientation society. It's very it's very difficult to
imagine what that would look like because we're just we're
(27:31):
also steeped in it. But um, but as a historian, yeah,
I think, why why shouldn't that be possible? There's nothing
to keep us from doing it. What's really remarkable about
the idea of heterosexuality is that it took such a
short time comparatively speaking, I mean, from eighteen sixty eight
when the word is coined in nine three, when it
(27:53):
appears in the first you know, English language dictionary. Um,
that's not a medical dictionary. That's a really short period
of time for a concept like that to take hold,
which is one of the reasons why I find that
history so fascinating. UM. And, as I argue in the book,
the reason it took hold was because it came to
be at a time when it was really useful and
(28:15):
it could do a lot of work for a society
that was in a process, you know, this process of
enormous social change, and there's nothing, there's absolutely nothing but
that would limit that from happening. Again, since you've probably
gathered from this interview, UM, and we didn't even touch
(28:35):
on nearly, like even close to everything that she that
she covers in the book. Um, but it's it's so
clear just from this brief conversation with Hannah that the
definition of heterosexuality is so vast and so broad, and
when we talk about sexual orientation, we're talking about so
(28:56):
many other larger things that really the end of the day,
it seems like orientation is you know, it's it's almost
an insignificant label when you consider the history and the
culture and the scientific quest that surrounded it. So um,
we wanted to find out that whether or not the
process of learning about this history of heterosexuality and writing
(29:20):
the book has changed Hannah's definition of heterosexuality, what what
is straight in her mind? Now? One of the things
that happened to me when I was studying because as
a history was I discovered just how much can be
absorbed by that word, and just how many kinds of behaviors,
(29:42):
and how many kinds of relationships, and how many kinds
of marriages, and how many kinds of economic arrangements, and
how many different kinds of sex people are having and
have been having for you know, a hundred years now,
and saying that this is heterosexual and um, it's it's
a pretty damn broad gamut. I mean, in the last
(30:06):
chapter of the book, I I compare heterosexuality to the
board from Star Trek. You know, this sort of huge,
you know, traveling juggernaut that just sort of assimilates things
as it goes, and I don't you know, And that's
actually not so far off. There are there are some
limits to what heterosexuality has been able to assimilate, but
(30:26):
it's been able to assimilate an awful lot. What I
what I've found is that my my way of relating
to heterosexuality has changed. My way of relating to the
idea has changed in that I no longer consider it
a definition of anything in particular. I think of it
more as a sort of a guide to probability. I
(30:49):
think when somebody tells me, oh, I'm heterosexual, I think, okay, Well,
that gives me sort of better than fifty fifty odds
that I know a handful of things about what you
might do, be and desire, But it certainly doesn't give
me anything for free. So after all of this, everything
(31:11):
that Miss Blank has touched on, we wanted to ask
her for any final takeaways. Basically, you know, is there
anything that she wanted to drive home? And she she
talks about the flexibility of people's perception of what is
normal and how we are always sort of incorporating new
things into our definition of normal, into our definition of
(31:34):
just you know, heterosexual, homosexual, That there seems to be
more blurring and that's fine, and basically what we what
makes people feel good can be the new normal. You know.
I think that the big takeaway for me um having
written the book is that there's a lot more out
(31:57):
there than you think, and that if you basically, if
you feel like you're you're really sure that you know
what this is, I can guarantee you that you're wrong
and that that's actually a good thing. That's actually a
really really good thing, because what it means is that,
you know, human there's a lot more human beings are
(32:19):
capable of a lot more, we do a lot more,
we're a lot more expensive. Then we often want to
give ourselves credit for being and some people find that
really threatening, um, but I I tend to find it
really liberating. I really like the fact that we push
those boundaries, that we we go places that we're not
(32:41):
supposed to go and then we find ways to incorporate
them back into our normal. Um. That's a really human
characteristic and it's a really interesting one, and it really
it bears watching. It bears a lot of watching. So
huge thanks to Hanna Blank for talking to us about
horror new book Straight, A Brief History of Heterosexuality. Um.
(33:06):
She was such an insightful interview. She had so much
knowledge to share with us, not at all of which
can even fit on this podcast. So I encourage everyone
out there to to go out check out Straight. It is, Um.
I mean it's a history of yes, sexual orientation and
also the middle class, also marriage. It all ties together,
(33:28):
um in a in such a well done book. So
UM thumbs up to that. Now, the first email that
I have is from Steven and this is in response
to our episode on whether airbrushing damages body image. And
Steven points out that he is a professional photographer, very experience,
and he has been using Photoshop since its first release
(33:51):
in Wow and uh it's also a teacher of photoshop
and photo editing. And he says that one subject that
is not taught in our three graphic design degree programs
is ethics. I'm on the Curriculum Advisory Board, which works
with all of our neighboring colleges and tech schools to
(34:12):
make sure credits from our programs will transfer to and
from these other programs. Because of this, I'm fairly familiar
with their curriculum curriculums as well. None cover ethics. While
a few professional design societies do have statement of ethics
for their members, none is widely accepted and much less
are followed. Due to the ease with which photos can
be manipulated using free or nearly free software, I can't
(34:35):
see this issue being settled anytime soon. Unless you see
or hear something directly, you must assume that it has
been edited. Air Brushing is everywhere, Caroline, everywhere everywhere. I
I might even be airbrushed now, I have no idea.
You do look quite blemish free. Thank you. Um. This
(34:58):
is from Amy about our boxing episode. She says, I'm
a female who will be forty four next month. I've
been training with a personal trainer for almost a year
and got seriously bored. I've never liked working out anyway,
so when he suggested boxing, I laughed, but was up
for anything to break up the monotony. Two months later,
I have fallen in love with it so much that
(35:18):
I had my husband hang a heavy bag in an
extra room so I can get my cardio in on
days I don't go to the gym. I've never felt
weird as far as gender goes. All this sparring with
my trainer for exercises as far as I can see
myself going. Especially at my age, I was always told
to find something I'd like doing, but never thought it
would be boxing. Just goes to show that it is
good to try something before discounting it, which is true. Amy.
(35:40):
Thank you for your letter. I have also tried sparring
with a trainer at the gym one and it was awesome,
and I can tell how it would really get you
in shape immediately because I almost picked out I've been
doing so many fast repetitions of things for such a
long stretch of time. I was like, really, I'm I'm
in the color of a made right now. Maybe I
(36:01):
should sit down, but yes, it is an excellent workout.
So thank you for your letter, and thanks to everyone
who has written in and if you have any thoughts
to share with us about the interview. Hannah Blank Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, uh.
Let us know your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can send them, and you can
also let us know what you're thinking on Facebook and
(36:24):
on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcasts, and of course, you
can always check out our articles during the week. You
can find them at how stuff works dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house
(36:47):
Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today
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