![]() ![]() If I fail to convey the book’s central point, that is because the book has no center. And dragging herself into it, she uses a light touch to make us question the pronoun she. Shuttling back and forth through time to chat about related issues-including matrimony and sodomy, the economics of nonsexual bed-sharing and the history of romantic love-she exhibits the handsome confidence of a popular historian. ![]() Tracing the way those coinages and the ideas animating them radiated into general discourse-by way of Kraft-Ebbing and Kinsey and Freud-she is deft and nimble. Tracing the history of the word heterosexual and homosexual-coined, in 1868, by a pamphleteer opposed to the laws against “unnatural fornication” being written into the Prussian penal code-she is calm and clear. ![]() She is, on the evidence, a rigorous thinker. Hanne Blank is “an independent scholar,” earlier the author of Virgin: The Untouched History, and her “work has been featured everywhere from Out to Penthouse“-a gamut that would seem to exclude both Oui and Playgirl. There are no illustrations, lamentably, so let’s start with the author bio. It runs 264 pages, including index and footnotes. ![]() Straight covers an impressive bit of social-historical ground despite being, true to its subtitle, a compact production. ![]()
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