The question of lost potential offspring doesn’t even come up (although one very horny man tries to lure his wife home by saying their young child needs her care), but by the end of the play all the men are sporting such huge erections that they find it difficult to walk or even wear clothing below the waist. There can be no doubt that these men are desperate for some luvvin’ from their women…and equally little doubt that the women also find their self-imposed seperation from their husbands and male lovers extremely difficult to bear.
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I believe part of the marriage included a mock kidnapping of the bride from the home of her family. Yeah, I’d have to go along with you that traditions are sometimes adhered to even though they have little to do with the actual attitudes of people.
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Every culture has their own mores about sexual relationships. I think most of us would find the Spartans, and indeed the Athenians, to be quite strange.
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The interesting thing there is that men could find another outlet for sex other then their wives. I think that play illustrates that need for affectionate love one gets from a wife that one wouldn’t find with a prostitute or a slave. Of course I’m not Greek scholar.
Marc
Of course, it could always be argued that Aristophanes was an Athenian who was writing for an Athenian audience. And Lysistrata was first performed in 411 BCE, which was during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (Sparta wouldn’t win that war until 404 BCE, 7 years later). Maybe he didn’t care about getting Spartan culture correct.
Why are you so sure he didn’t get Spartan culture correct, at least on this point? I have yet to see any reason to believe that the men of Sparta all genuinely preferred sex with each other to sex with any woman. Sex-segregated upbringing and peculiar wedding traditions certainly aren’t proof.
I also don’t believe that Aristophanes would pass up the opportunity to make jokes about any peculiar sexual practices of the Spartans in a play that was full of both sex jokes and jokes about Spartan stereotypes. There are plenty of cracks about the funny way Spartans talk, their love of exercise, their aggressiveness, etc., but no suggestion that the men in Sparta don’t much like sex with their women anyway.
Well said, Lamia.
If sexual preference could be an “acquired taste,” there would be damn few gay people in the world. We are all brought up to be heterosexual - our families, our friends, our schools, our religious institutions, our government, our culture - our entire collective environment provides us with consistent rewards for being straight and consistent punishment for being gay. If we were all impressionable and malleable, heterosexuality would be the “acquired taste” for everyone.
But in spite of this, many of us are nevertheless gay. I can’t imagine anything that could outweigh all of society’s pressures, except an incredibly strong internal sense that this is something that can’t - and shouldn’t - be changed. And I can’t conceive of anything that could ever have made me “acquire” a preference for women.
But I strongly suspect that most people are somewhat bisexual - that the Kinsey scale, without society’s influences, would be a symmetrical bell curve. But society’s pressures are very successful at skewing the middle 80% or so toward heterosexuality.
The way I look at it is Humans are sexual beings…Meaning…we enjoy getting off. We are also a part of nature and nature dictates survival of the species.
Now when you mix the 2 and some prefer being with those of the same sex and others find it an aboration ,thats where the debate begins.
The one thing I have taken note of is even homosexuals and lesbians have the inborn need to want to be parents and nurture offspring. I don’t find anything wrong with that but others do. Things could be worse for the kid. Living in an abusive home or what not. Not to say the same thing wouldn’t happen in a gay home. A good parent is a good parent , gay or straight.
I guess I think this way because I’m a single hetero father with 2 girls and my best friend is gay with a life long partner. They have a kid and the humiliating shit they have had to go through in the courts to keep her is mind boggling. BTW she’s 12 and churches that don’t eve know them start alot of the shit.
Anyway…getting to the point of this topic…I think your born straight or gay…I don’t you have a choice in the matter.
Well I’m off to change my user name to “Off On a Tangent Guy”
Sorry, first post I hit the wrong button.
I have read the spartin warriors were very competitive and brutal and that domination was the key to winning the match. I would guess the loser of the days practice match would be the one that is face down and cring into the pillow. These men are warriors and the spoils went to the victor.
You may be right. I see things in terms of points on a continuum. Re orientation, not three separate, distinct groups (straight, bi, gay) but rather a continuum with many, many points; a continuum that ranges from very straight through fairly straight through slightly leaning to the straight side through bi through slightly leaning to the gay side though fairly gay to very gay. In our society, it’s cultural conditioning that causes most people to grow up to behave as, and see themselves as, straight. The only ones who can’t do this are the minority at the very gay end of the continuum.
The two “very” groups in my continuum could be your two ten percents. And, I suppose, the complete bis could be a middle 10%. Or the three groups may be more or less than 10%. Or the very straigt group may be larger than the very gay group. We’ll never know until and unless we first achieve a society where everyone is really, absolutely, free to be whatever they are, and then maintain that situation long eough that no one alive has ever experienced any other situation.
Wierd indeed, Rashak. Hard to fathom. Cultural lag, perhaps? We’ve had quite reliable means of protecting ourselves from STDs and unwanted pregnancies for over a century, yet we’ve still got people who believe it’s necessary and important for people to remain virgin until marriage. How long are these lags* supposed to last?
*The lag between the occurance of a development that should result in a cultural change and the actual occurance of the change.
There is no “point” – it’s all conditioning/brainwashing. The process of growing up is a process of being brainwashed into the culture in which you’re living.
But… there are damn few gay people. In the US, for many years, it’s been widely believed that gays represent about 10% of the population, which I’d say was damn few. And many of those who dispute this statistic are convinced that the actual percentage is less than that. I disagree (see my earlier posts), but that’s the common perception.
No, I think you’ve only party got it. The Spartans were brought up to be tough fighters, but the boy who lost the practice match was not the “spoils” of the victor; same-sex acts were not punishment. The cultural ideal was the tough fighter who cared deeply about / was bonded with his fellow warriors, with whom he had enjoyable sex.
Nor was this confined to the Spartans. The Athenian ideal seems to have for a young man to have a mentor (and later on in life, to be a mentor). A mentor a man a few years older from whom one learned about life, love, sex, etc.
FWIW, there’s a book entitled (IIRC) Vice Versa, by Marjorie Garber, which deals with this issue at some length. It seems that plenty of bisexuals cultivate bisexuality as a matter of conscience, a la joining a religion.
I would WAG that part of the reason why bisexuals aren’t considered legitimate in American culture is because they don’t fit in the political paradigm. American homosexual activists have put a lot of energy into arguing that sexual orientation is not a choice, no way, no how. Thus if someone comes along and says, “I changed my sexual orientation, but I recognize that not everyone can do so to the same degree, or even at all,” that’s seen (incorrectly) as an argument against the “I didn’t choose to be gay” claims. If fundie nitwits are going on and on about how hummasekshuls are just trying to be kinky, then there’s an incentive to be as 100% true-blue unchangeably gay as possible, and to expect all other non-straights to be likewise. Otherwise, the fundies can point to bisexuals and say, “See? They can choose to marry the gender we decide for them. Why can’t you? Some of them even admit that they chose to be gay! Why can’t you just admit that you’re just in it for kicks?”
So who isn’t just in it for kicks? 
I want to comment first on the title of this thread – while ‘sexual preference’ and ‘sexual orientation’ are normally used interchangeably, ‘preference’ has connotations of choice and mutability, which goes against what most mainstream researchers (that is, those affiliated with academic institutions and not religious groups) have found about sexual orientation. It’s not a big issue, but I don’t personally believe that one ‘prefers’ one gender over the other in the same way that one ‘prefers’ a certain type of food or music or a sports team.
In cultures where homosexuality is practised alongside heterosexuality, there is usually some sort of structure or situation in which each is acceptable. The most common structure for homosexual relationships in these kinds of cultures seems to be post-pubescent males who have not yet reached the age of full manhood acting as passive partners to older men. Sometimes these older men also have wives; sometimes they go through a transition period before they enter a permanent, heterosexual relationship and have children.
I suppose that in these cultures most men learned to enjoy at least some of their activities with partners of both genders. In the absence of a culturally implanted repugnance towards certain activities, they would be appreciated for the physical pleasure alone.
This is not the case in our culture, where the only universally accepted sexual practice is heterosexuality with a single partner (one’s spouse). Nevertheless, a large number of people (don’t think of it as 10% or 4% or 8%; think of it as maybe 5 to 30 million Americans) have sexual practices which are not universally accepted.
What, then, leads them to do this? I don’t believe it’s a simple genetic issue; at least according to our current understanding of molecular biology, no one ‘gay gene’ could be responsible. Nor do I think it’s physiological, like a difference in brain structures. I most definitely do not believe it’s a choice, or caused by lack of attachment to one’s father.
The actual cause may be impossible to determine, and I am quite sure it’s impossible to influence. It’s probably a very complex issue of several genes and the expression of those genes. This would shape the characteristics which an individual finds sexually attractive, including gender (sexual attraction is tied very closely to natural selection; individuals are sexually attractive because they would be most likely to produce fit offspring). Note that the archetypes for sexually attractive individuals are quite different between sexual orientations, so the formation of homosexual orientation cannot simply be an ‘inversion’ of heterosexual desires. Heterosexual women generally find different men attractive than do gay men; straight men are typically attracted to different women than lesbians. This is important, because in my opinion it means that homosexuals are not simply individuals with the ‘ordinary’ desires of the opposite gender.
Sexual orientation is not something that can be explained in simple terms. I don’t think that science in its current state is capable of explaining it. We therefore need to depend on established cultural values such tolerance and the belief in the equal rights of minority groups in order to interpret what evidence we do have. We must, at least, accept that sexual orientation is not chosen and is not changeable.
panache45 and Hazel: 10% is not ‘damn few’. It’s still millions of people – many more people, actually, than some other minorities that have gained widespread acceptance. That being said, I don’t think it’s 10%; one in ten is just a catchy and politically useful number. The actual figure is irrelevant; it could be 2% and that wouldn’t mean that homosexuals were an insignificant minority and therefore deserving of persecution. (To compare, about 2% of Americans are Jewish.) I think the real figure is probably somewhere between 4 and 10 percent.
Ben: I don’t believe that it’s possible to truly and legitimately change one’s sexual orientation. Individuals who ‘change’ their sexual orientation typically either are formerly self-identified bisexuals who become exclusively heterosexual, or homosexuals who attempt heterosexual relationships for some reason, usually religion. Such relationships may be emotionally successful, but I doubt strongly that people who have ‘changed’ their sexual orientation are as sexually attracted to their heterosexual partners as they were (and, in many cases, still are, though they are ‘fighting their sinful urges’) attracted to people of the same sex.
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In other words, your “tolerance” means ignoring people’s descriptions of their own experience of their own sexuality.
“You say you didn’t choose to be gay? You’re just fooling yourself. I know your sexuality better than you do.”
“You say you chose to be bi? You’re just fooling yourself. I know your sexuality better than you do.”
I must say that your reply leaves a little bit to be desired. You have not at all addressed what I actually wrote (i.e. mono to bisexual change, motivated by affirmation, rather than bi or homo to hetero, motivated by a sense of sin.) Unlike me, you’ve also failed to provide any kind of cite to back your assertions.
Ben: No, tolerance is the basic value which I believe should be upheld, simply because tolerance is desirable and necessary for an enlightened society. I can’t make a very strong argument for that, but if one doesn’t believe that some degree of tolerance is a good thing, the rest of what I’m saying won’t matter anyway.
As far as sexual orientation not being chosen, I mean that it must be accepted that is not generally chosen. If it is the experience of some individuals that they choose to be bisexual, for example, the experience of those individuals does not mean that sexual orientation is a choice for others.
I think ‘choosing’ bisexuality is probably the most likely scenario; someone chooses to act on desires for both genders rather than taking the more convenient route of ignoring or suppressing their attraction for members of the same sex.
In contrast, certain conservative groups suggest that a far less likely and entirely illogical decision is responsible for homosexuality. They claim that people choose to be gay – that they make a decision to become part of an alienated, persecuted group that enjoys limited acceptance (relative to heterosexuality). I see this as part of a narrow, naive worldview in which millions of people willingly decide to rebel in various ways against a deity whose existence and truth are, to them, patently obvious. Some people choose to become witches or satanists; some choose to become homosexuals.
It’s true I didn’t address what you wrote, the decision to cultivate bisexuality rather than the more socially convenient option of monosexuality – nor did I address the situation of ordinarily heterosexual men choosing to have single or occasional homosexual experiences. These clearly are choices, but I am certain that the vast majority of people of all sexual orientations never make an active decision to ‘join’ a particular group. Furthermore, the decision not to suppress one’s instinctively perceived orientation is not equivalent to ‘choosing to be gay’.
Finally, on references: I don’t read books on this subject, so my opinion is formed mostly from websites and similar material; some of it is simply my opinion. Also, I believe that books on this subject are inherently biased by the author’s opinion. I’m reluctant to cite books as evidence; to me, it just means that someone shares my opinion. Incidentally, if you know of any unbiased (i.e. not sponsored by a religious or activist group) scientific literature in this area, I’d like to hear about it.
Sexual orientation cannot be chosen, but sexual BEHAVIOR can be chosen – not that it SHOULD be… as far as homosexual behavior goes. But people choose to behave a certain way every day. Gay men and women marry the opposite sex, have children, and live the life of a hetero all the time. They do it because it’s too hard to face whatever society is going to throw their way. Fear, financial repercussions…whatever. All these things can be an influence on how a person’s sexuality is shown to the rest of the world. It can’t change who you are, but it can change who you want the rest of society to THINK you are.