[lbo-talk] Nepal gays and Maoists/Marxist Approach

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Sat Jan 20 14:46:21 PST 2007


Joanna wrote:
>>
>...Aristophanes' bit in the Symposium is one of my all time faves,
>but it does not contradict what Miles wrote...Homosexuality was so
>common and so accepted in Greece, that Alcibiades' final story in
>the Symposium, about how Socrates refused to have sex with him, is
>meant to shock. But this is not the same as saying that Greeks
>identified themselves exclusively as homosexuals in the way that
>some men do today. That's all that Miles was arguing. I think.

My point is that [the dramatic character] Aristophanes makes a threefold division of human sexuality: heterosexuals; female-oriented women; and male-oriented men. And he justifies this division, in terms of the commonplace Greek nature/custom dichotomy, as entirely *natural*. No more (actually, even less) than any other dramatist can Plato be taken to cast his views in the words of his characters, not even those of Sokrates. What counts here is that these words were immediately comprehensible to the Greek audience because they reflected an ordinary reality of Greek life. Incidentally, the Symposium is far from a dialectical examination of human sexuality. If it had been, Alkibiades might have arrived earlier and presented a defense of the view that would sort humans according to their degree of bisexuality.

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos



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