![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I should be writing other things.
I blame the Greeks for a lot of things.
This is may seem like something of a no-brainer; there are a lot of things to blame the Greeks for. Scholars have dedicated their entire careers to examine what things we are to blame the Greeks for and how. But on a personal level, I do think ancient Greek culture has provided me with life-shaping framework for two things:
1. Stories. This cornucopia of myths, epics, tragedies-- it's something I've grown up with since I was seven years old. It's still something that continues to influence the way I interpret and re-interpret the myths themselves, how they are used in modern media, everything.
2. Sex. Ridiculous, abnormal, innumeral sexual encounters.
I honestly believe that reading about Greek mythology and ancient art honestly has impacted the way I related to (male) sexuality and (male) bodies growing up; I never had a phase where I was curious about these things. Homosexuality was a thing that happened in myths; I'd seen more marble dicks than I could count by the age of twelve, when everyone else pointed and laughed at books about puberty in the library. Compared with, say, having sex with bulls and giving birth to minotaurs, everything else seemed rather tame (needless to say I found the uncensored versions of these myths pretty quickly once I'd finished every book in the children's section of the library). I think I encountered the concept of slash pretty soon after I started going online.
I was in, oh, fourth or fifth grade when the concept of female sexuality actually came up. In startling clarity, at least.
Let me explain: I was one of those extremely annoying children who teachers dub "gifted" because they simply have an insatiable desire to read. I read everything. By the age of ten I'd discovered that classics were a thing, and the things I wanted to read about were often written for adults. The Male Gaze in fiction was already something I was acquainted with (although of course I didn't quite realise what it was, or that it was called that) but the first book I remember female sexuality being a thing was... a book called Maia, by none other than Richard Adams.
(To this day I wonder how that ended up at my school library.)
Partly I think it was because this was the first time sex was described from the PoV of a female protagonist; partly I think it was because. Well. There was a lot of sex in that book.
Literally everything I remember about that book is sex.
I remember more than one bathing scene. I remember more than one description of female genitalia, and the main character's stepfather's inappropriate perving (which struck me as all kinds of wrong even then). I definitely remember the moment I realised that the main character was sleeping with her new-found female best friend.
And for reasons unknown I'd put this book quite far away from my mind - presumably because it was so boring to my younger self I didn't even get halfway through (which might be just as well because Wiki makes it sound really sexist) - when I got to thinking a bit about how comparatively little LGBT literature I read, and have read in the past.
But the flashback did prompt me to google that book long lost from memory. Most gratifyingly, Wikipedia bestowed this quote upon me:
"Much as Adams had invented words of the Lapine language for the rabbits of Watership Down, he employs some "Beklan" vocabulary for honorifics, natural objects, and sexual terms; the last "allows adults to leave the book within reach of children."
Well, Mr. Richard "Watership Down" Adams.
Either you thoroughly failed, or the Greeks rendered me more perceptive than I was aware of at the time.
This is may seem like something of a no-brainer; there are a lot of things to blame the Greeks for. Scholars have dedicated their entire careers to examine what things we are to blame the Greeks for and how. But on a personal level, I do think ancient Greek culture has provided me with life-shaping framework for two things:
1. Stories. This cornucopia of myths, epics, tragedies-- it's something I've grown up with since I was seven years old. It's still something that continues to influence the way I interpret and re-interpret the myths themselves, how they are used in modern media, everything.
2. Sex. Ridiculous, abnormal, innumeral sexual encounters.
I honestly believe that reading about Greek mythology and ancient art honestly has impacted the way I related to (male) sexuality and (male) bodies growing up; I never had a phase where I was curious about these things. Homosexuality was a thing that happened in myths; I'd seen more marble dicks than I could count by the age of twelve, when everyone else pointed and laughed at books about puberty in the library. Compared with, say, having sex with bulls and giving birth to minotaurs, everything else seemed rather tame (needless to say I found the uncensored versions of these myths pretty quickly once I'd finished every book in the children's section of the library). I think I encountered the concept of slash pretty soon after I started going online.
I was in, oh, fourth or fifth grade when the concept of female sexuality actually came up. In startling clarity, at least.
Let me explain: I was one of those extremely annoying children who teachers dub "gifted" because they simply have an insatiable desire to read. I read everything. By the age of ten I'd discovered that classics were a thing, and the things I wanted to read about were often written for adults. The Male Gaze in fiction was already something I was acquainted with (although of course I didn't quite realise what it was, or that it was called that) but the first book I remember female sexuality being a thing was... a book called Maia, by none other than Richard Adams.
(To this day I wonder how that ended up at my school library.)
Partly I think it was because this was the first time sex was described from the PoV of a female protagonist; partly I think it was because. Well. There was a lot of sex in that book.
Literally everything I remember about that book is sex.
I remember more than one bathing scene. I remember more than one description of female genitalia, and the main character's stepfather's inappropriate perving (which struck me as all kinds of wrong even then). I definitely remember the moment I realised that the main character was sleeping with her new-found female best friend.
And for reasons unknown I'd put this book quite far away from my mind - presumably because it was so boring to my younger self I didn't even get halfway through (which might be just as well because Wiki makes it sound really sexist) - when I got to thinking a bit about how comparatively little LGBT literature I read, and have read in the past.
But the flashback did prompt me to google that book long lost from memory. Most gratifyingly, Wikipedia bestowed this quote upon me:
"Much as Adams had invented words of the Lapine language for the rabbits of Watership Down, he employs some "Beklan" vocabulary for honorifics, natural objects, and sexual terms; the last "allows adults to leave the book within reach of children."
Well, Mr. Richard "Watership Down" Adams.
Either you thoroughly failed, or the Greeks rendered me more perceptive than I was aware of at the time.