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come from this very particular time and place. Every era has its own catchphrases and neologisms. Our world is not static, and as new ideas and objects enter the culture so do new words and phrases, even as old ways of thinking and outmoded vocabulary fade. We happily and knowledgeably chat about computer geeks and geneticists, but no longer about alchemists or natural philosophers. We would consider it rather stilted to speak of bluestockings, jesters, and foundlings, but we are quite comfortable speaking of women intellectuals, comedians, and children who have been put up for adoption. Such changes in language can convey far more than just dictionary meanings. For instance, “Negro,” “colored,” “black,” “African American,” and “person of color” could all technically be used to refer to the same person. But their historical freight gives each of these words different associations, so much so that we have strong preferences about which ones we would willingly choose. Words and the ways we use them are always rooted in time and in place.
    This is particularly important when we consider “heterosexual.” What Jonathan Ned Katz has called “the invention of heterosexuality” took place at a specific point in history, in a unique intertwining of historical and cultural streams. Put simply, these terms came to exist because a need was perceived to identify people as representatives of generic types distinguished on the basis of their tendencies to behave sexually in particular ways. The story of how this need arose is a story of industrialization and urbanization, the rise of the middle classes, the complications of empire, and the scientific and philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment, all of which contributed to creating a world in which the idea of a type of human being called “heterosexual” made a specific and useful kind of sense.
    SEX AND SIN IN THE NEW CITY
    In the nineteenth century, the cities of Europe and North America began to swell at a previously unimaginable pace. By 1835 London reached a population of one million, while its nearest Continental rival,Paris, hit the million mark in 1846. Urban growth took place at exponential rates: New York City boasted 60,515 residents in the 1800 census . . . and a whopping 3,437,202 in 1900.
    Behind the urban explosion lay newly mechanized and rapidly growing industry and its rapacious appetite for laborers—not to mention all the goods and services that a swelling population requires. The promise of steady work and steady pay lured the rural working classes out of the hinterlands by the hundreds of thousands in a twin process of urbanization and corresponding rural population drain that continues around the world even today. It is impossible to overstate, and nearly impossible to imagine for those of us who have always lived in a world with enormous industrialized cities, how dramatically the modern metropolis has altered human culture.
    These hugely increased, unprecedentedly dense populations transformed urban experience. All sorts of common but unorthodox sexual activities like prostitution, sexual violence, and same-sex eroticism seemed suddenly more frequent, more random, and more out of control than they had been when the cities and their populations were both much smaller. Certainly, by comparison to rural towns and villages, the cities seemed like hotbeds of sexual misconduct and excess. It also appeared to many that people not only engaged in more sexual misconduct in the cities, but that they were more likely to get away with it. This was often true, since city populations frequently lacked the social unity and interdependence of the smaller villages and towns, making community enforcement of proper behavior both less possible and less likely. Some rural modes of policing sexual behavior survived in the cities, at least for a while. The charivari, a gritty mob of people banging pots and