On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, BklynMagus wrote:
> Dear List:
>
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> > Your claim above is contradicted by reams of historical and
> > anthropological research. This is simple ethnocentrism and
> > presentism: why insist on projecting modern concepts (heterosexuality
> > and homosexuality) onto the past?
>
> Well, whatever term you wish to use, women have been having sex with
> women for centuries and men with men, and there is documentation/record
> of it. All this fun did not start when somebody coined the term
> "homosexuality" in the late 19th century LOL.
>
Again, the conflation of two very different things: the sexual act and the stable sexual identity. For instance, from Ancient Greece, we have good documentation of "homosexual" sex. However, almost all the men involved in this activity were married men or young men who would soon marry and have families. This male sexual activity simply doesn't map onto anything like our modern sexual categories. We don't need to agonize about whether they were "really" homosexuals or bisexuals; rather, we need to appreciate that people in different societies make sense of sexual activity and sexual identities in quite different ways.
--And this diversity of sexual definitions is, in my view, a wonderful thing: look at the possibilities! We don't have to live according to currently popular sexual categories!
This may be misunderstood, but my position on this is like my position on race: my political goal is to eliminate the social categorization that enables one group of people to exploit and harm another. If we didn't identify/divide people up into these rigid sexual/racial categories, social discrimination on the basis of these categories would be rendered impossible.
The more I think about it, the more I like the religion analogy: these rigid social categories like sexual orientation and race that people embrace and use are ideology, like religion. They are the modern opiates of the masses.
Miles