Let me add a note to the discussion. When people used to slaughter their daughters, sisters and wives after their being described as witches (all that Hell for the pleasure of the Church and for serving Nonsense), they thought they were doing the proper-most thing in the world, the civilised most thing.
Does the soldier fighting in Iraq know anything about what he is fighting for? Why he may have to lose his life there or why others have lost their lives there? And whose benefit he has become so petty an animal?
Is there any similarity between the gays, lesbians and the American soldier in particular and all soldiers in general?
That was their culture, psyche, etc., etc.
One more grave problem facing humanity is drug-addiction. Is their any similarity between drug addicts' and same-sex partners psyche?
Ramesh
----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 8:34 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Nepal gays and Maoists/Marxist Approach
>
>
>>
>>^^^^^^
>>CB: Was this an ideology of all classes of the time and place, or only the
>>ruling class elite ?
>
> I'm not sure that the words of [the dramatic character] Aristophanes
> should be regarded as expressing an "ideology." As I pointed out, the
> treatment of sexual orientation as determined by "nature" goes along
> with [the historical] Aristophanes ridiculing Cleon's effeminacy--and
> that neither the speech in the Symposium nor the jokes in his own
> plays should be taken as proof of his opinions, ideological or not. The
> whole point was that *the existence of the stable sexual orientations
> we today call "straight," "lesbian," and "gay"* was familiar, even
> commonplace, to the amcient Greeks.
>
> Shane M
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: How about "custom" ? Is that an apt word. I'm assuming that Greek
> customs regarding sexual practices is somehow reflected in the passage. Are
> the customs described confined to the ruling class elite or did the working
> classes have the same customs ?
>
> Also, it seems that not only were there stable sexual orientations, but that
> the man-boy sexual relations were considered of superior virtue in the
> "mainstream", and among the ruling class.
>
>
> The below addresses the question of whether the practices were in all
> classes.
>
> Charles
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Greece
>
> Scholarship and controversy
> After a long hiatus marked by censorship of homosexual themes,[15] modern
> historians picked up the thread, starting with Erich Bethe in 1907 and
> continuing with K. J. Dover and many others. These scholars have shown that
> same-sex relations were openly practiced, largely with official sanction, in
> many areas of life from the 7th century BC until the Roman era.
> Although this perspective is the scholarly consensus in North America and
> Northern Europe, some scholars believe that homosexual relationships,
> especially pederasty, were common only among the aristocracy, and that such
> relationships were not widely practiced by the common people (demos). One
> such scholar is Bruce Thornton, who argues that insults directed at passive
> homosexuals in the comedies of Aristophanes show the common people's dislike
> for male homosexuality.[16] Other scholars, such as Victoria Wohl, emphasize
> that in Athens, same-sex desire was part of the "sexual ideology of the
> democracy," shared by the elite and the demos, as exemplified by the
> tyrant-slayers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton.[17] Even those who argue that
> pederasty was limited to the upper classes generally concede that it was
> "part of the social structure of the polis."[18] Outside academia, both
> opponents of LGBT rights and Greek nationalists have latched on to the
> argument that homosexuality was limited to the elite for political purposes.
> The subject has caused controversy in modern Greece. In 2002, a conference
> on Alexander the Great was stormed as a paper about his homosexuality was
> about to be presented. When the film Alexander, which depicted Alexander as
> romantically involved with both men and women, was released in 2004, 25
> Greek lawyers threatened to sue the film's makers,[19] but relented after
> attending an advanced screening of the film.[20] The movie was a financial
> disaster in Greece, where it played for only four days
>
>
>
> Context
> The ancient Greeks did not conceive of sexual orientation as a social
> identifier, as Western societies have done for the past century. In the
> ancient Greek context, the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are
> properly used only to describe activities, not identities. Greek society did
> not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants,
> but by the extent to which such desire or behavior conformed to social
> norms. These norms were based on gender, age and social status.[5] There is
> little extant source material on how females viewed sexual activity.
>
> There are two main views of male sexual activity in ancient Greek society.
> Some scholars, such as Kenneth Dover and David Halperin, claim that it was
> highly polarized into "active" and "passive" partners, penetrator and
> penetrated, an active/passive polarization held to be associated with
> dominant and submissive social roles: the active role was associated with
> masculinity, higher social status and adulthood, while the passive role was
> associated with femininity, lower social status and youth.[5] In this view,
> any sexual activities in which a male penetrated a social inferior was
> regarded as normal; "social inferiors" could include women, male youths,
> foreigners, prostitutes and/or slaves; and being penetrated, especially by a
> social inferior, was considered potentially shameful.[5]
>
> Other scholars, however, argue that the relations, while usually
> age-structured, were mutual and democratizing.[6][7] They also describe them
> as "warm," "loving," and "affectionate," [8] and argue that the Greek
> tradition of same-sex relations was central to "Greek history and warfare,
> politics, art, literature and learning, in short to the Greek miracle."[9]
>
>
>
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