What I mean by saying that R&J isn't just a heterosexual love story is that to the audience of the time, the question of whether they should disobey their families would have been a real question, not just the fly in the ointment that we tend to see it as nowadays. (The source text in fact comes down on the side of family and tradition.) So it's not a "timeless love story" at all, it's a story about the struggle between a feudal discourse of marriage as a property relation and an emerging modern discourse of marriage based on love and companionship--with the two opposing sides magically synthesised in the end by the reconciliation between the two families.

Oh, and I stand by my statement that sex historically was considered something Person A did to Person B. That doesn't mean that Person B didn't enjoy it or desire it or have any control over it--it's possible after all to enjoy something being done to you. What it means is that up until relatively recently in Western culture, sexual acts, gay and straight, have been divided quite strictly into "active" and "passive" roles. But what I'm referring to is the way sex was talked about and thought about--there's all kinds of room for variation in practice. (Also, obviously there's enormous variation across periods and cultures so I'm only talking in the very crudest historical terms about dominant cultural norms in the West.)

Cos, y'know

What I mean by saying that R&J isn't just a heterosexual love story is that to the audience of the time, the question of whether they should disobey their families would have been a real question, not just the fly in the ointment that we tend to see it as nowadays. (The source text in fact comes down on the side of family and tradition.) So it's not a "timeless love story" at all, it's a story about the struggle between a feudal discourse of marriage as a property relation and an emerging modern discourse of marriage based on love and companionship--with the two opposing sides magically synthesised in the end by the reconciliation between the two families.

Which doesn't seem to contradict my point that it is about love as madness - defying the families in the context of the time is madness. It is not totally madness only because the feud is also madness.

Thanks for the example, Angus!

In neither case, incidentally, would this behaviour preclude the participants also having sex with women.

Because there wasn't a social drive towards monogamy? Or because sex with a man wasn't 'real' sex? Or was there some sort of balance, where marriage as an institution encouraged monogamy but the 'patronage' system allowed this specific kind of sex not to break the marriage vows?

(I may be wrong, here, but I was under the impression that the Greeks (in their status as founders of the modern world and inventers of all that is right and proper) were as keen on marriage as the next country. They must have had it as an institution, at least.

I've read one story which played Frodo/Sam as eros rather than agape and managed it beautifully, and I do see it can be done. What I don't buy is the idea that Sam's love is founded on the wish to get into Frodo's pants.

If I understand you correctly, I have to agree. Extending "I want to make Mr. Frodo happy" to include "Mr. Frodo wants a blow job-- here goes" is one thing; changing the basis from "I want to make Mr. Frodo happy" to "I want to fuck Mr. Frodo through one of these nice soft elven mattresses" is another.

Definitely? Because my understanding is that Tudor ladies had pretty lively sex lives - Kathryn Howard, afiak, had a good number of liaisons prior to marrying Henry VIII (including noisy sex with one of the servants, iirc - possibly a music teacher, I forget) and it's not that much later than Chaucer was writing about the Wife of Bath and the Miller's tale and so forth.

That's a good point, Fay. It had sort of occured to me, but I couldn't think of the relevent examples.

I suspect that in Elisabethean times it would seem the most natural thing in the world for an unbalanced, unrestrained hatred between families to express itself in an equally unbalanced unrestrained loved between two dimwitted members of those same families.

That would make sense to me: if you approach it from that angle, "from forth the fatal loins of these two foes/ A pair of starcrossed lovers take their lives" actually looks logical.

(I love this thread.)

Pederasty was (and this is incredibly complicated) part of the interzone between childhood and adulthood - you're no longer a kid, and you have all these dangerous but valuable urges, so you get a mentor to help you reach a plateau of adulthood. He also gets, as a sort of fringe benefit, to bugger you senseless. It's the derivation of the fag/fagmaster relatioship in English public shools.

In neither case, incidentally, would this behaviour preclude the participants also having sex with women.

Because there wasn't a social drive towards monogamy? Or because sex with a man wasn't 'real' sex? Or was there some sort of balance, where marriage as an institution encouraged monogamy but the 'patronage' system allowed this specific kind of sex not to break the marriage vows?

I may be wrong, here, but I was under the impression that the Greeks (in their status as founders of the modern world and inventers of all that is right and proper) were as keen on marriage as the next country. They must have had it as an institution, at least.

From what I've read, the Greeks had a rather low view of women--they saw them as unintelligent, shrewish, petty, greedy, and generally a royal pain. Intimate relationships with men (sexual and otherwise) were considered superior to those with women, because men were equals and could discuss philosophy and art and politics and "important" stuff.

However, the Greeks were not stupid, and recognized the necessary role of women in producing future generations. Plus, hey, sometimes a man just wants a nice vagina. So the attitude of the philosophers was, "Well, I suppose marriage (and other heterosexual sex) is okay, if you have to." But within the marriage, men and women led pretty separate lives--women ran the household and had babies and looked pretty, men invented the Republic and hung out with other naked men at the gymnasium.

Keep in mind that this was the situation among the upper classes, who had the leisure to be very silly about sex. The lower classes, being illiterate, left no records of their feelings on the matter, but I imagine that their approach to sexual relationships was much more practical.

Can I say how funny it is that the eros/agape conversation is persisting in its use of Frodo/Sam? Considering that Angus, th original hobbit-hater, is a major paticipant!

Poor Angus, reading with both eyes closed! (Nonetheless it's a very interesting conversation.)

Heh. There's nothing like Googling for information about the history of homosexuality to make everyone else in the family wonder what exactly you're doing.

Anyway, I did find some things. This page covers quite a lot of 'traditional' ideas about sex in Ancient Greece, the kinds of things we've already touched on; while this page puts forward some quite different ideas.

Seems that what's presented by one person as simple straightforward evidence (say vases, or literature), can also be simple straightforward evidence for something quite different, if you chose to argue it that way.

Which doesn't seem to contradict my point that it is about love as madness

No, quite, Gar, I don't disagree with your reading at all...my objection is to people who would treat it ahistorically as the greatest love story of all time, whereas it's actually a pretty twisted love story when you think about it.

Am-Chau, yes, the evidence for all this historical sexual stuff is never straightforward, which is why there are still lots of arguments about it. What does seem clear is that in the context of the history of sexuality, we--late 19th to early 21st century Westerners--are incredibly odd, with our strange ideas about everybody having a "sexual orientation" as some deep-seated part of their psychology, our belief that a person's sexual nature is determined not by what they like to do but by who they like to do it with, our idea of sex as a completely mutual activity between two (or more) equal subjects, and so on. Some of these I wouldn't want to part with of course (especially the last one), but still, we're the exception.

Nice of you to consider my anti-hobbit sensibilities Nutty! But actually I find the Frodo/Sam friendship/relationship/call it what you will quite interesting, and the Frodo/Sam/Gollum scenes were the only ones I really liked in the second film.

Am-Chau, I'm not familiar with the book mentioned in your second link, but it sounds to me like it's essentially arguing against a straw man--nobody believes any more that ancient Greece was a "paradise for homosexuals" in any uncomplicated sense, still less that it was a sexually "liberal" society. If you're really interested in this stuff, I'd recommend that you (or anyone else) have a look at the title essay in David Halperin's book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. Halperin is a classicist and a historian who has formulated most of the ideas I've been talking about above (with help from others of course, esp. Foucault)...he's also a very readable author and he was one of my PhD examiners!