From Anne: two touchstones for reading/interpreting/expanding Laqueur--

Brown Bag Series on What Counts?
Ted Wong: Scientists go to nature and extract numbers; measurement mediates--that is, inserts a process and so stands between--nature and science. These techniques of measurement are not completely transparent, but have a structure and life of their own, which affect how we think. The translation of the world into numbers changes what we are describing.

Paul Grobstein:... numbers become necessary when people are separate enough from one another that they need to resort to approximations of what they value. The alternative to using numbers is to share an unconscious.

And classic essay by Adrienne Rich on "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980; rpt. Blood, Bread and Poetry):
I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like mother-hood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution--even, or especially, by those individuals who feel they are, in their personal experience, the precursors of a new social relation between the sexes....

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. I doubt that enough feminist scholars and theorists have taken the pains to acknowledge the societal forces that wrench women's emotional and erotic energies away from themselves and other women and from woman-identified values. These forces, as I shall try to show, range from literal physical enslavement to the disguising and distorting of possible options.