Straight Quotes

“We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality--whatever the current version of that concept happens to be--is unremarkable because it is the standard by which everything else is measured. That is heterosexual privilege.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“(In actuality there are no such things as "male" or "female" hormones. Hormones have no sex of their own, and all types of sex hormones are present in all human beings in varying amounts.)”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“[Masters and Johnson found] the so-called vaginal orgasm was actually not vaginal. When it happened at all, it was the result of friction between clitoral hood and clitoris that some women experienced when the thrusts of the penis tugged at connected flesh.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“My favorite Viagra ad, a Spanish-language print ad I saw some years ago, simply shows an image of the distinctive blue pill with the text “Un divorcio menos. Gracias, Pfizer.” (“One less divorce. Thanks, Pfizer.”)”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“The opposite of “slut” is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“For Hitschmann and Bergler, 'frigidity' had a single criterion: 'absence of the vaginal orgasm.' The standard was unqualified and absolute. A woman who did not enjoy intercourse: frigid. Women who derived sexual pleasure from acts other than intecourse were frigid too. Nothing else mattered, only whether a woman had an orgasm because a man's penis was inside her vagina. Sexually agressive women were labeled 'frigid' because of the association between masculinity and aggressiveness. Womanhood that was not passive was not properly womanly. "Frigidity," as Jane Gerhardt points out, "thus became a label and a diagnosis that defined how much sexual desire a woman must have and in what kinds of sexual behavior she must engage to be 'healthy'.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Kertbeny coined 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' as a pair on purpose: having two marked categories instead of only one generates a certain amount of equality, which was precisely his point. The paired words suggest that both 'homo' and 'hetero' are marked categories whose specialization sets them off from the unmarked human universal, the undifferentiated 'sexual'.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“While the “women just want to have consequence-free sex” anti-contraceptive argument is often trotted out by latter-day social conservatives, such a view is a cruel and misogynist oversimplification. A more realistic assessment of the struggle for effective contraception would be to see it as the struggle to achieve some level of control over the single most dangerous, resource-intensive, and biologically crucial activity in which human beings regularly engage.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

“Not for nothing did phrases like 'he who marries for love has good nights and bad days' and insults like 'cunt-struck,' the eighteenth-century equivalent of saying that someone was thinking with his dick, survive into the Victorian age.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality