Hi, Rebecca! Yes, "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" are Western in origin, but they have been exported with not inconsiderable success -- cultural imperialism is a real thing. Most of the big influential cultures around the world have embraced some form of the hetero/homo construct at this time.

But historically, we can see how things worked differently: for instance, historian Bret Hinsch wrote a beautiful monograph on the "passions of the cut sleeve," on male-male love in Imperial China. There are other people who've worked on similar things in other parts of the world, including in Native American/First Nations cultures in North America.

There are also non-Western cultures that currently embrace some alternate or plural sexualities in ways that the hetero/homo divide doesn't make space for. Some of the more recognizable examples are Thai kathoey (sometimes called "ladyboys") and Indian hijra, who occupy a different space, in their cultures, from identities we would label as either "gay" or "straight."

Thanks so much for inviting me! And thanks to all of you who came by and asked such fun questions.

And your erotica has the best name--Zaftig!

It boils down to my fascination with bodies, selves, and culture. Sex, medicine, exercise, food (I recently published a long essay about the food writer M.F.K. Fisher in a book called ICON -- http://flavorwire.com/484260/h.... That's where I live. I'm fascinated by the life of the body and the life of the self and how the two things, in conjunction with culture, create one another.

Fat women and girls (REPRESENT!) are taught that exercise has a single purpose: to make you thin.

Moving your body because moving your body is great and does awesome things for you and lets you enjoy yourself and gives you entry to a whole bunch of activities that women (and especially fat women) can easily be excluded from? Rather than because it might make your body look a certain way? Yeah, that's still pretty radical.

Women owning their bodies and using their bodies for their own purposes, not for the purposes of trying to make their bodies serve the aesthetic needs of others, is incendiary. As well as deeply feminist. I'm a big big fan.

Again, I wrote it because there wasn't anything else out there like it. That empty spot on the shelves got me once again.

Me too!

Thanks for asking this! STRAIGHT followed VIRGIN pretty directly, and grew out of the fascinating problem that virginity has historically been defined almost exclusively by the one sex act that is also viewed as canonically "heterosexual."

(I use the scare quotes there because putting a penis into a vagina does not necessarily have anything to do with what the owners of either set of genitalia actually desire or how they experience their sexuality, as well we know.)

This became a problem for me when I was working on VIRGIN because so many writers on virginity cavalierly use the word "heterosexual" to refer to people and to behaviors that existed well before the notion of heterosexuality existed. This struck me as intellectually sloppy... and it is.

Thinking about how the problem could be fixed made me realize that the history of sexuality would look very different if historians understood heterosexuality to be a concept that is attached to a particular time -- and to some extent a particular place and culture.

And then I went off to the library to find some books that discussed heterosexuality as a historical problem and only found one of them, Jonathan Ned Katz's brilliant book "The Invention of Heterosexuality." Which was wonderful as far as it went, but I wanted more.

Oh, goodness.

Well, it got me going in a number of directions. Who knows whether they will ever become books, but in the best of all possible worlds, I would really love to write histories of sexual fidelity/infidelity and of sexual consent. Both of those ideas are really explosive, and really juicy, and I think have a lot to tell us about how we build our cultures around sexuality.

Currently I'm working on some very different stuff, so we'll see whether I'll return to those at some point.

I think the most important thing I learned was that I was right when I suspected there was no fixed definition for "heterosexual," and that the lack of a fixed definition is part of what makes it so powerful -- its boundaries can be expanded and contracted to suit a huge range of situations, which is hugely significant both socially and politically.

I do. Jenner, along with the amazing Ms. Cox and Ms. Mock, and others like Jenny Boylan, are raising the profile of trans* women in all kinds of ways, and I think this is wonderful. At the same time the backlash against trans* women, and the challenge they represent to our culture's essentialist ideas about maleness and power and sexuality, is still really horrific. Trans* women are still murdered at staggering rates, especially trans* women of color -- some (slightly dated but good) info here: http://www.thetaskforce.org/st...

Trans* women also face a lot of difficulty in employment, housing, and other crucial areas of life. This is particularly true for trans* women who aren't as beautiful as Ms. Cox or Ms. Mock, who are women of color, who are poor, or who simply do not "pass" well. So we have a long way to go yet before all my sisters get to live the lives they deserve.

Agreed--I was stuck by the seemingly sudden historical demarcation between "problematic" and "nonproblematic" sex--i.e., heterosexuality and everything else

That's a complicated question -- yes, it makes sense. To start to answer it, we have to recall that the coining of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" come at a time when Germany is trying to figure out how to arrange and write its civil law. In the age of revolutions across Europe, civil governments are endeavoring (often for the first time) to create secular versions of areas of law that had previously been based on, or were taken wholesale, from the canon law of the Catholic church. So there was an inheritance of that sinful/not sinful binary, and I think that is perhaps *the* big influence on C19th thinking on the matter of sexual behavior.

Judith, that's a great question. If I were writing the book now I would definitely write a lot more about marriage, and about the complicated issue of same-sex marriage. There are some amazing conversations happening about the politics of marriage and the question of whether the move to expand access to legal marriage is coming at the expense of a more egalitarian justice in regard to sexuality. So I would do more on that.

The trans* piece is also something I'd talk about. In fact, since I am no longer partnered to the person I was with when I wrote the book, I might very well frame the book with a discussion of transgender and transsexual issues and how they complicate discussions of sexual orientation.

That's not an unusual experience. Because heterosexuality is presumed to be a default and a norm, a lot of what we talk about and write about tends not to examine it. I wrote my book in part to try to change that tendency.

I did an interview with Salon that should give you a decent idea of what the book's about: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/2...

I'd try to give you a synopsis here but if I could give a synopsis that'd fit in a blog comment, I wouldn't have had to write a book!

Heidi, it's a funny, fascinating history of how our concepts of human sexuality developed to where they are today--it calls into question a lot of what we feel is "normal" and a given in relationships and sex