How interesting. Little known facts about heterosexuality and marriage:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hanne-blank/10-surprising-facts-about-heterosexuality_b_1269706.html
1) May 6, 1868
The words "heterosexual" and "homosexual" were coined on this day in a letter written by Austro-Hungarian journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny to the German legal eagle and proto-gay rights crusader Karl Ulrichs.
Technically speaking, before that fateful Wednesday, it was impossible for anyone in the world to be either a heterosexual or a homosexual, because the words didn't exist yet.
2) Married American women didn't gain full legal control over their own financial assets until after this landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 1981. In overturning "head and master" laws that gave husbands a legal upper hand over financial decision making within marriages, this decision finally made it illegal for a husband like Louisianan Joan Feenstra's, awaiting trial for sexually molesting his daughter, to decide to do something classy like mortgage the house for which his wife had paid in order to pay his legal bills. (And no, that date's not a typo: 1981.)
So who really benefited from the marriage contract, prior to 1981? More misogyny and male dominance.
3) The ideal that men and women should have mutually orgasmic sex developed during the same time period as the idea of "heterosexuality" did, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This novel notion helped establish the new notion of distinctively "heterosexual" desire and pleasure as scientific and medically proper.
By 1922 , Dr. Walter Robie would write that married coitus had to be "mutually pleasurable and simultaneously climactic... if it is to be scientifically correct."
More misogyny and male dominance.
4) Science Has Never Defined 'Heterosexual'
Never mind the question of whether there's such a thing as distinctively "gay genes" or "gay brains"; we don't even know if there's such a thing as straight ones. Physical and biomedical science have yet to define or even confirm the empirical existence of heterosexuality... no one's ever even tried.
This means that scientific research being conducted on the question of what makes people gay is being done without a properly characterized control to compare with. That's bad science.
Oops. So there goes all that talk about heterosexuality being "normal" and "proper" right out the window. That's going to leave scar on so many 'round here.
5) Folks Lie A Lot about Sex:
If you think you're better off trusting the statistics in sex surveys than what your friends say about their sex lives for an idea of what "normal heterosexuality" looks like, think again.
Research done on the accuracy of self-reporting in sexuality surveys, including a 2009 study in the Journal of Sex Research, demonstrates that in sex research as in life, what people claim about their sex lives often doesn't match up to reality. A better bet is to consider sex research stats as a representation of what's possible, not what's typical.
Please. Like we didn't already know. LOL.
6)Some late 19th-century authorities and physicians believed very sincerely that any woman who was interested in having a man perform oral sex on her was a sadist, and any man who complied was dangerously passive and submissive.
Performing oral sex on women, they believed, was a "gateway drug" that led inevitably to ever more depraved acts of submission, and could possibly drag men all the way down to what they saw as the bottom of the heap, making them into the kind of men who provided oral sex to other men.
How do you like that? Cunnilingus leads to Male to male Fellatio. Who knew? LOLOLOL. Don't stop now. LOL.
7) For most of Western history, it was considered shameful to feel or display too much romantic emotion toward a spouse. Treating one's wife "as one would a mistress" was excessive and unseemly; as the Lady's Magazine lectured its English readership in 1774,
"the intent of matrimony is not for man and his wife to be always taken up with each other, but jointly to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their families with prudence, and educate their children with discretion." Love, shmove, marriage was a job -- not an adventure.
Wow. Even if a couple didn't have children...the intent of marriage was to act, "as if". How "Stone Age". Some of those arcane ideas hold true today.
8) "Heterosexual"? Thank a Gay Rights Activist:
"Heterosexual" is not, and never was, a scientific term. Nor is "homosexual." Both were coined in the context of what we'd now call gay rights activism, during a campaign of pamphleteering and letter-writing in opposition to a mid-19th-century German sodomy law.
The idea behind the words "heterosexual" and "homosexual" was to demonstrate through language that these were merely two ways in which human beings could be sexual, distinct and equal,
with the implication that sodomy laws should apply equally to everyone... or else to no one at all.
Ooops. Gotta rethink all that rhetoric concerning heterosexual vs. gay. It's not even scientific terminology. Hello, somebody? LOL.
Too funny.
