5 ms·

As a bisexual guy, I enjoyed this article. I'd like to point something out, though: the title contains an anachronism. "Bisexual" is a thoroughly modern catego

As a bisexual guy, I enjoyed this article. I'd like to point something out, though: the title contains an anachronism. "Bisexual" is a thoroughly modern category, just as "gay" and "straight" are. Most cultures have not categorized sexuality as we do, with "we" being the post-Enlightenment West. Propensities toward attraction were recognized, but it never formed a core part of personal identity. Plato would have been very confused if you asked him if he was straight, bi, or gay. Another anachronism in the article: the West never practiced "racism" in the modern sense until the sixteenth century at the earliest. Race was an ideological lens to interpret and justify colonial and imperial expansion.

goto11 6y ago
> Plato would have been very confused if you asked him if he was straight, bi, or gay. Maybe for these particular terms, but the story told by Aristophanes in Plato's symposium do present attraction toward either males or females as something inherent to a person. It is the opposite of fluid.
- scarmig 6y ago
  I'm not saying that Greeks were genderfluid: I'm saying that their tendencies of sexual attraction ("orientation") weren't an abstraction they reached to to interpret their own realities and identities. They share the same biological territory as us, but a different map of it. In the case of the Greeks, the abstraction they did reach to to organize desire was not homosexual/heterosexual but penetrator/penetrated, with women and young boys expected to be the penetrated and post-adolescent men the penetrator. And for men, at least, there was an expected flow and directionality from one to another; it wasn't expected to be immutable.
  - goto11 6y ago
    I'm pointing out a literary source which contradict your claims. Not that the viewpoint of Plato was necessarily shared by everyone - Greece was not monolithic. But you specifically mentioned Plato.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Another anachronism in the article: the West never practiced "racism" in the modern sense until the sixteenth century at the earliest. The West in antiquity may not have practiced racism in terms of overt discrimination against people based on the color of their skin. However, many influential thinkers hold that othering a non-Western person based on his skin color or origin is a form of racism, and there are a number of attestations of sub-Saharan Africans in Roman and Greek literature where the author or his society is obviously othering them.
- scarmig 6y ago
  That's projecting contemporary social structures onto a very different time and place. It makes as much sense as saying the Han were white and the Xiongnu were black. "Whiteness" and "blackness" are social constructs that didn't even exist until a millenium after the fall of the Roman Empire. Sure, the Romans discriminated against and had stereotypes they held about different foreigners. But they didn't think of themselves as any of white or European or Western; the demarcation was Roman and non-Roman. They would have felt a much closer affinity with someone from Alexandria or Carthage than they would have with some random tribesman in Belgium, who would have just as many cultural and physical stereotypes about him as a Nubian from Kush.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    The sources are clear that the Romans and Greeks considered sub-Saharan Africans "exotic" because the latter had black skin, and prostitutes of sub-Saharan African origin were sometimes sought out by Romans and ascribed certain qualities due to their dark skin. It has been suggested that such othering is an act of oppression regardless of what historical era it occurred in. That is, the Romans did not need to have our contemporary understanding of race in order to engage in racism towards black Africans.
woodandsteel 6y ago
"Propensities toward attraction were recognized, but it never formed a core part of personal identity" Like many words, "gay" "straight" "bisexual" and so on have more than one meaning. One of those meanings is the idea that who one is attracted to is the core of one's identity. Another common meaning is that it is simply descriptive of attraction, and says little about the rest of one's personality.
- scarmig 6y ago
  Right. But they're loaded terms, and I think it's best to avoid using them when discussing historical sexual patterns, because of how easy they are to misinterpret and how it's easy to accidentally slip into the second definition while ostensibly using the first. It's similar to projecting the contemporary term "dictator" to Roman dictators: they're very different things, despite a superficial similarity. Even in the contemporary USA, sexual preferences and practices don't neatly map to those categories. See, for instance, the hyper-concrete use of "males who have sex with males (MSM)" in public health, to capture all the men who have sex with men who are (ahem) straight.
  - woodandsteel 6y ago
    I disagree. Think of how the gay movement took the word "queer" and turned it from an insult to something neutral or even positive. The way to change peoples minds is to change the meanings of words. In particular, take the most common words and change their connotations, rather than inventing awkward new expressions that very few people will adopt.

goto11 6y ago

> Plato would have been very confused if you asked him if he was straight, bi, or gay. Maybe for these particular terms, but the story told by Aristophanes in Plato's symposium do present attraction toward either males or females as something inherent to a person. It is the opposite of fluid.

scarmig 6y ago
I'm not saying that Greeks were genderfluid: I'm saying that their tendencies of sexual attraction ("orientation") weren't an abstraction they reached to to interpret their own realities and identities. They share the same biological territory as us, but a different map of it. In the case of the Greeks, the abstraction they did reach to to organize desire was not homosexual/heterosexual but penetrator/penetrated, with women and young boys expected to be the penetrated and post-adolescent men the penetrator. And for men, at least, there was an expected flow and directionality from one to another; it wasn't expected to be immutable.
- goto11 6y ago
  I'm pointing out a literary source which contradict your claims. Not that the viewpoint of Plato was necessarily shared by everyone - Greece was not monolithic. But you specifically mentioned Plato.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> Another anachronism in the article: the West never practiced "racism" in the modern sense until the sixteenth century at the earliest. The West in antiquity may not have practiced racism in terms of overt discrimination against people based on the color of their skin. However, many influential thinkers hold that othering a non-Western person based on his skin color or origin is a form of racism, and there are a number of attestations of sub-Saharan Africans in Roman and Greek literature where the author or his society is obviously othering them.

scarmig 6y ago
That's projecting contemporary social structures onto a very different time and place. It makes as much sense as saying the Han were white and the Xiongnu were black. "Whiteness" and "blackness" are social constructs that didn't even exist until a millenium after the fall of the Roman Empire. Sure, the Romans discriminated against and had stereotypes they held about different foreigners. But they didn't think of themselves as any of white or European or Western; the demarcation was Roman and non-Roman. They would have felt a much closer affinity with someone from Alexandria or Carthage than they would have with some random tribesman in Belgium, who would have just as many cultural and physical stereotypes about him as a Nubian from Kush.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  The sources are clear that the Romans and Greeks considered sub-Saharan Africans "exotic" because the latter had black skin, and prostitutes of sub-Saharan African origin were sometimes sought out by Romans and ascribed certain qualities due to their dark skin. It has been suggested that such othering is an act of oppression regardless of what historical era it occurred in. That is, the Romans did not need to have our contemporary understanding of race in order to engage in racism towards black Africans.

woodandsteel 6y ago

"Propensities toward attraction were recognized, but it never formed a core part of personal identity" Like many words, "gay" "straight" "bisexual" and so on have more than one meaning. One of those meanings is the idea that who one is attracted to is the core of one's identity. Another common meaning is that it is simply descriptive of attraction, and says little about the rest of one's personality.

scarmig 6y ago
Right. But they're loaded terms, and I think it's best to avoid using them when discussing historical sexual patterns, because of how easy they are to misinterpret and how it's easy to accidentally slip into the second definition while ostensibly using the first. It's similar to projecting the contemporary term "dictator" to Roman dictators: they're very different things, despite a superficial similarity. Even in the contemporary USA, sexual preferences and practices don't neatly map to those categories. See, for instance, the hyper-concrete use of "males who have sex with males (MSM)" in public health, to capture all the men who have sex with men who are (ahem) straight.
- woodandsteel 6y ago
  I disagree. Think of how the gay movement took the word "queer" and turned it from an insult to something neutral or even positive. The way to change peoples minds is to change the meanings of words. In particular, take the most common words and change their connotations, rather than inventing awkward new expressions that very few people will adopt.