Straight by Hanne Blank

wives who would always dislike sex and resent their husbands’ imposition.
    The depth of Freud’s influence shows all the more clearly when it emerges in the work of writers like the influential Theodor van de Velde, who ordinarily steered clear of psychology in favor of physiological verities. Van de Velde’s 1926
Ideal Marriage
was the
Joy of Sex
of its day, going through forty-six printings in its original edition before being reissued in 1965. (
The Joy of Sex
dates from 1972.) In its pages, van de Velde calmly endorsed Freudian claims that “the longing for maternity” was a primary motivator of sexual interest “in the majority of women,” as well as passing along other Freudian shibboleths, such as warning of the dangers of sexual neurosis and “psychic impotence” among men who were “brain workers.”
    Through such repetition Freud’s theories became truisms, and the truisms, echoed over and over, read by thousands and discussed by thousands more, gradually became incorporated into our thinking on a grand scale. Before long, they emerged as doxa. The process was doubtless hastened both by the internal logic of Freud’s theoretical framework and by the fact that Freud’s theories were invented as clinical observations made of people’s recollections of their experiences. Particularly in the large outlines in which popular sources typically handed them down, they were easily adapted for self-analytical use.[ 7 ] Because psychoanalysis and self-analysis were automatically transactional and participatory, Freud’s theories on sexuality were uniquelyavailable to the public conversation. By the time of World War II, a basically Freudian understanding of sexuality had become a cultural commonplace, a sex doxa that has contributed not only to the now-laughable notion that comic books turn young people into juvenile delinquents and sexual deviants, but which continues to influence the ideology of American government-mandated “abstinence-only” sex education.[ 8 ]
    At this point, Freud’s presence in our sexuality doxa often seems weirdly indirect, diffuse, almost homeopathic. This is precisely the point: when ideas thoroughly permeate a culture they emerge as doxa. The widespread and dramatic simplification of Freudian ideas is what gave them their power to shape thought and action. Freud never set out to influence millions of people who never read a word he wrote. He never could have. Repetition and diffusion, on the other hand, did a dandy job of making his ideas into integral parts of what “everyone knows” about sex.
    THE OPPOSITE OF SLUT
    Another way doxa gets shaped, transmitted, and put into practice is through language. Consider, for example, the word “slut.” Calling a woman a slut singles her out. It labels her as not just doing something wrong, but doing quite a bit of it. She breaks the rules, runs right over the boundaries of sexual propriety, goes overboard in a direction a respectable woman isn’t supposed to admit to. “Slut” is clearly part of the doxa of sex, in that it informs us of a boundary in regard to how sexual a person, specifically a woman, is supposed to be.
    But if a “slut” is the exception, what is the rule? What is the opposite of “slut”? “Slut” is an example of what social scientists call a “marked category,” meaning a term that signifies something that transgresses or contradicts the expected or the doxic.[ 9 ] The differences between “nurse” and “male nurse” or “bishop” and “female bishop” are the modifiers that mark the differences between the typical and the atypical, the expected and the startling. We see the same effect at work in words like “disabled” and “disfigured,” and indeed in “retarded,” all of which imply the existence of some comparatively better or more perfect