-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Charles Brown
CB: Are Roman orgies a myth ? Surely they had secularized sex, contraception , too.
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** Can anyone help me out here? I don't know enough about Roman orgies to say whether or not they correspond to Boy-Toys in Gang Bang Land 2004. I'd say no... but perhaps there was a stenographer in the room writing about what transpired... Do we have these texts? I'm curious.
^^^^^^^ CB: If you think everybody in the olden days only had sex in fertility rituals, or that the writers of the Bible were 100% virtuous, I think you forgot about the original sins. Were those guys coveting their neighbors' wives to have fertility rituals with them ?
** That neighbours' coveted one ass or another is not pornographic... it has to do with property relations and property rights. My point was that in general "sex" was related to fertility, not to enjoyment. The Biblical text is rather clear that it should be the expectation of women that "sex" will often be coerced; the viewpoint is entirely male.
** BTW --> I'm not arguing that people didn't have sex, I'm not arguing that people didn't experience lust, I'm not arguing that people got drunk and took off their clothes... I'm just saying: pornography as a genre is theorised (by some) is probably modern. And the question I had was this: is the advent of pornography linked to modern notions of political economy (public and private sphere), secular surveillance (panopticon), and masculine power (fraternity). I have no doubt that people all over the world have been masturbating for some 5 million years.
ken