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Sex and Sexuality
- hackandtrip 8y agoTalking about Plato and his idea of sexuality and love, the Symposium[0] is worth a read. Aristophanes speech in particular is, in my personal opinion, one of the best thing ever written in this context.
- jgrahamc 8y agoCan you link to Aristophanes' speech?
- seanchapman 8y agohttp://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/myths/androgyne.htm http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/myths/androgyne.htm
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- olavk 8y agoAristophanes speech is interesting because it presents preference towards either men or women as something innate an immutable in a person. This is quite different from how it was usually seen in antiquity - for example one Roman historian noted that the emperor Claudius was kind of weird because he only was attracted to women.
- hackandtrip 8y agoYes, usually people writes about the "homosexuality" in the Greece for example, but that's a completely different view: old philosophers used to have their own young boy that gave their body in exchange of intellectual knowledge. Platone express a completely different view (we won't never know how much the Aristophanes speech was Platone's, and viceversa), without judging.
- arketyp 8y agoFoucault is spot on in saying in this day of age we are obsessed with sex and its labels. Sadly I don't see much liberation in the HBQT movement. All those labels are just shackles on a heavy chain of controlling discourse.
- funfunfunction 8y ago> All those labels are just shackles on a heavy chain of controlling discourse. Can you elaborate on what you mean by controlling discourse?
- jacquesm 8y agoThat almost nothing changes except for the words people use because that's all that they can influence. Now, real change is precursed by a change in attitude and a change in attitude can be in turn precursed by a change in terminology. But a change in terminology does not always lead to a change in attitude and a change in attitude does not always lead to real change. It's confusing cause and effect.
- hanselot 8y agoDon't force views on deaf ears. The gradual shifting of awareness is happening regardless and irrespective of the attempts by liberals to further the cause (which is essentially politically driven at this stage). Allowing yourself to be vulnerable with who you are (to those close to you) is how you spread awareness and actually change people into activists for your cause (without resorting to dogma and rhetoric).
- jacquesm 8y ago100% agreed, in fact I think that the 'change the language' approach is a net negative because it contains an element of force and force tends to breed resentment. Some people just weren't born to be part of progress and for every mind changed I suspect there are a large multitude that dig in even further. The time is ripe, enough people are reasonable to get an actual change happening on this front in the lifetimes of almost everybody that it really matters to. Force will get you nowhere at all. Taking Rosa Parks as a nice example: she wasn't complaining about the language used to determine her place in the bus, she took what was rightfully hers and stood by it.
- Vaskivo 8y ago[Off Topic] I absolutely LOVE Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I've been learning and reading about philosophy and this website as been a good resource. They have it organized by people and thematic. It is very accessible in writing and structure. It doesn't resemble an encyclopedia. It's more like a structured collection of essays and summations on the themes and people. I'd only wish we could download the pages as epub, instead of only in PDF.
- barking 8y ago>I'd only wish we could download the pages as epub, instead of only in PDF. I find calibre great for converting formats
- dsr_ 8y agoAn awful lot of this is most easily done with pandoc. Use wget to pull pages down, pandoc to convert to markdown, apply edits (for example, a table of contents), and then pandoc again to make it an epub.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoI love it too, though I wish they had a way to look up philosophers by chronology. Their chronological ordering is based on the post date, not on the timeline of the philosopher's life.
- ArtWomb 8y agoWe may be headed to a possible future in which technology makes it possible to decouple "romantic" impulses from the reproductive drive. Surrogacy at scale, artificial wombs, even gamete design and editing are all possible within this generation's lifetime. Concomitant relaxations in regulations regarding sexual work and the commodification of sexual satisfaction would be one possible outcome. The philosophic quandary then shifts from sex to the nature of love. Is it simply another innate need with primal place atop the human hierarchy? Or an evolution-tuned biochemical survival mechanism that can itself be synthesized akin to the "pregnancy substitutes" in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World? Again, back to Plato (as all inquiries lead), but this time consider The Republic and its ideal family-state. Plato envisioned a community of parents, and a dissolution of the edicts of traditional marriage. In which the entire village parented each child as if they were their own. And privileges associated with hereditary and parentage begin to disappear in deference to the needs of the state. Another modern evolution in traditional practice is the use of Tantric and Orgasmic Meditation. Hindu philosophy usually places desire beyond prosperity, knowledge, duty and spiritual perfection. But it is fairly easy to see how cults wholly consecrated to Venus may arise.
- watwut 8y agoKnowing what we know about human psychology, emotions and behavior, this proposal alone make me think that Plato did not understood much about those. You can't raise 30 children "like few of your own" not even if another 30 adults mess with that too.
- wetpaws 8y agoThere are certain tribes in human history that did exactly this for centuries.
- fortythirteen 8y ago> We may be headed to a possible future in which technology makes it possible to decouple "romantic" impulses from the reproductive drive. This type of techno-hubris, which thinks it can undo millions of years of evolutionary biology, leads to the type of utopic visions that devolve into murderous chaos. What you're proposing isn't terribly different than eugenics.
- dschuetz 8y agoI'm still waiting for the point in history of this planet that people abandon the concepts of sexual orientation or identity or gender completely. The only interesting thing to know is whether a person is able to give birth, biological sex that is, and that's only interesting for medical reasons.
- ryanx435 8y agoI'm still waiting for the point in history where science denying gender warriors like you wake up and come back to reality.
- erkkie 8y agoWhy?
- dschuetz 8y agoGender identity and sexual preference don't really matter. They are natural attributes of a person, just as natural as eyes and ears. The only thing I can do is to ignore people's attempts to appear more unique than others by treating them as regular human beings. I haven't seen any person identifying themselves by their eyes, or their umbilicus (which is in fact unique on every single person). Because it's normal thing. If gender identity is a normal thing, then let's ignore it altogether?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoSerious question: how long into the future do you think it would be before society meets the criteria you are expecting? Even if it seems bang obvious to you, it would be an irreconcilable and inconceivable shock to deep-seated cultural beliefs for billions of people, and we are a very political / status-driven type of animal that has deeply ingrained reflex to use any kind of physical characteristics as differentiators for tribes, wars, social classes, etc. Even if we granted your presumption, it still seems like something that could not possibly be pragmatic or tractable even in hundreds of years, unless there was essentially a global propaganda campaign lasting for generations, orchestrated in unison by wildly different governments and cultural institutions. Again, I’m not making any normative claim about your viewpoint. I’m only questioning the “still waiting” part .. because surely any even optimistic estimate about when the human species would have a radically different concept of gender or identity would be hundreds and hundreds of years from now, if ever.
- poster123 8y agoI think the discussion in the article of how to define perversion is interesting. Nowadays it is difficult to say that certain consensual sexual practices are morally wrong without being condemned as a bigot.
- selllikesybok 8y agoPerhaps, rather, it is morally wrong to say that certain consensual sexual practices are morally wrong?
- virmundi 8y agoNope. There is no such thing as morality apart from God. The universe doesn't care (it can't). All morality then is man made. To say something is morally wrong is to create an absolute. No one has the power to do so. The best you can say is that you think it's wrong, which means you don't feel something as positive.
- poster123 8y agoI strongly disagree. I am atheist but have no doubt that wantonly killing people (or for that matter, animals) is morally wrong. Empirically, I don't think atheists are much more likely than theists to commit crimes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lainon 8y agoWhy has this been flagged?