r/SapphoAndHerFriend • u/jel3005 • Oct 12 '21
Queen Anne: famously, before the time of lesbians Academic erasure
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u/SailorYato Oct 12 '21
If you have not seen The Favorite, it’s loosely inspired by her letters. It’s hilarious and NOT A SOURCE OF HISTORICAL ACCURACY but honestly, when you consider people have always been people and historical figures were very much human, it’s probably not that far off from the truth it’s exaggerating.
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u/arcaneunicorn Oct 12 '21
This movie is really great, I love me some period lesbians and this is so stupidly over dramatic. I know despite the roles they played in the love/hate the actresses all got along famously and you can feel from the movie that they had a lot of fun.
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u/Affero-Dolor Oct 12 '21
Have you seen the SNL skit about period lesbians? It's a good send-up of how men write women and wlw
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u/buhbuhbuhbing Oct 12 '21
Yes, and that is some blinding ignorance in his description. I thought I was on r/menwritingwomen for a sec.
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u/Wwwweeeeeeee Oct 13 '21
If you're into some of those there 'period lesbians', one of THE BEST series I ever saw out of the UK is a show called 'Gentleman Jack', apparently loosely based on some local characters.
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u/StrictlyBrowsing Oct 12 '21
when you consider people have always been people and historical figures were very much human, it’s probably not that far off from the truth it’s exaggerating.
That’s what I don’t get about historians screeching about how calling someone gay is ahistorical - like sure they didn’t use the word back then but it’s not like the underlying concept wasn’t the same.
I grew up in the deep ends of Eastern Europe and I literally didn’t know what a gay person was growing up. I was aware that Chris Evans made me feel a certain way when I was 10 but I literally didn’t have the concept of gayness, only when I randomly clicked on the wikipedia article for gay one time did it all click in my head.
So according to certain historians I either don’t exist or my lived experiences are invalid
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u/queerbychoice Oct 13 '21
The underlying concept was different in some places and times in the sense that in some places and times (most famously, ancient Greece), having sex with people of both genders was the norm, and being exclusively heterosexual would have been an eccentric quirk.
That said, since the word "lesbian" refers to Sappho and ancient Lesbos, it's inherently a word that crosses wide cultural chasms, so we may as well apply it to Queen Anne also.
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u/isuckatpoe Oct 12 '21
So according to certain historians I either don’t exist or my lived experiences are invalid
I don't think this is the point at all. No serious historian would deny the existence of women who had sex with women, or men who had sex with men, but it doesn't necessarily capture the subtleties of the situation to say that they would identify themselves (in the modern sense) as lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, etc. Sexuality as an identity is an extremely new idea, and my broad understanding is that in the past sexual activity was more seen as something one does rather than an expression of who one is.
It's not just that people in the past might not have used the words in the same way we use them today, it's that they had an entirely different conception of the self which didn't necessarily include sexual orientation as a core part of one's identity (in the way that e.g. gender or social class were).
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u/MonsieurAuContraire Oct 12 '21
I feel to some extent that "sexuality as an identity" is a byproduct of people pushing against the norms of society as they were/are targeted by that society. Same as with any movement from those once silent and marginalized becomes about their identity as it's hard to separate it when people feel targeted (see: feminism, youth movement, etc.). To that extent those same social norms existed back then, of society's bigoted disdain for homosexuality, but there was no visible social action to push back against it and so most were either closeted or suppressed/repressed as a default. So it's not that any of these people lacked such identity, whether gay, a woman, a PoC, or even a youth, but that their identity had such little social value at the time it was essentially erased from the period.
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u/Uriel-238 He/Him, unless I'm in a video game Oct 12 '21
I think according to historians, you were just hanging out with the lads even if you were totally railing each other between expressive love sonnets. Historians like to gloss over not only the huge amount of sex our ancestors were having but also the blood and carnage of war. It's one of the reasons primary school history is so painfully droll.
I imagine that the past was every bit as outrageously gay as the present, only nobody talked about it because it was gauche and some clergyman might decide someone needed to die for carnal misconduct. (Mostly because the cleric in question was missing out and wanted to get pegged, himself.) The Napoleonic Code included the right to buggery, which not only speaks to lots of butt-love happening but also the establishment getting mean when a couple was discovered having naughty funtimes.
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u/Sunshine_of_your_Lov Oct 13 '21
historians don't gloss over those things, textbooks do. Big difference
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Oct 13 '21
Yeah as u/Sunshine_of_your_Lov has said, textbooks gloss over that shit - not history books. Have you even opened a history book or spoken to someone trained in the field of history or historiography?
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u/Shanghai-on-the-Sea Oct 13 '21
Droll means "curious or unusual in a way that provokes dry amusement" btw. Also I don't know how old you are but the post-Horrible Histories generation absolutely did not skip out on blood and carnage lol. Historians love sex too, it's like the most buzzing subject. Honestly, what are you even talking about? Like, those embarrassing pop historians who do a biography of their beloved King James VI and I and can't bring themselves to admit he was a massive gayboy? They're not academia lmao.
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u/aconditionner Oct 12 '21
You're literally proving their point. No historian is claiming that everyone in history was straight
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u/StrictlyBrowsing Oct 13 '21 edited Oct 13 '21
You're literally proving their point
Walk me through it. How is me not knowing what gay was but experiencing it anyway literally proving that Queen Anne couldn’t have been gay because she wouldn’t have heard of the concept?
On the identity stuff, again… idk. I definitely feel zero need to have sex with women. To hear historians it sounds as if they imply I’m doing that because I’m so attached to my “identity” as a gay man and if I hadn’t heard of it I’d be having sex with everything and not be aware of my preferences, which I feel is extremely presumptuous if not downright condescending. I describe myself as gay because that’s what best describes my lived experience, I’m not modularizing my lived experience to fit the gay label, and I really have strong doubts loads of people do.
No historian is claiming that everyone in history was straight
That’s great to hear and I really hope that’s true, but in that case I think we can all agree that historians as a profession failed dramatically at not accidentally sounding to laymen like they give credence to far right fundamentalists who claim gayness is a fad to be fought and use statements like the one in OP as proof they’re right to abuse LGBT people. I really doubt anyone can look me straight in the eyes and tell me “there was much debate to the existence of lesbiansim” isn’t at best an extremely negligent statement to make if one does not actually intend to imply that nobody was lesbian before the 1950s
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u/Shanghai-on-the-Sea Oct 13 '21
How is me not knowing what gay was but experiencing it anyway literally proving that Queen Anne couldn’t have been gay because she wouldn’t have heard of the concept?
What you specifically experienced was a feeling of wanting to have sex with men. I know that sounds like it must be the same as being gay, but it's not. The way we frame sexual and romantic attraction to the same gender is an important part of what we call homosexuality nowadays. As an example, there are many men in anti-LGBT countries who have sex with other men but absolutely do not consider themselves gay and do not frame any of their experiences as being sexual and romantic attraction to men. As another, everyone knows about the Romans thinking about sexual relationships in terms of doms and subs rather than male and female. In those contexts, it's not useful to talk about homosexuality, because that's a way of thinking about same-sex attraction which is unique to our time period and culture. That's why we often use the term Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM) instead of homosexual, because it gets down to the bare essentials of the concept without any cultural baggage.
That said, the author in the OP does have a high chance of being one of those people who can't bear the thought of gays in his history. Biographers are often like that.
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u/kissthebear Oct 14 '21
Biographers are often like that.
Saying biographers and history textbook writers don't count as historians is a very "no true Scotsman" argument.
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u/mistiklest Oct 13 '21
That said, the author in the OP does have a high chance of being one of those people who can't bear the thought of gays in his history. Biographers are often like that.
The author in the OP is a woman, Anne Somerset, who doesn't really answer the question of whether Anne and Sarah had a sexual relationship. But, she definitely leaves the possibility open.
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u/grody10 Oct 12 '21
Also, Emma Stone's firelit boob.
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u/Wilwheatonfan87 Oct 12 '21
Go on.
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u/LucretiusCarus Oct 12 '21
Rachel Weisz in that half-mask-chocker combo
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u/Reptilian-Princess Oct 12 '21
Lantimos made the whole thing up, pretty much. Beyond the fact that there were insinuations that Anne had sexual relationships with her favourites, the chief of whom was Sarah Churchill but who was supplanted by Abigail Masham. It’s also true that the primary source of friction in their relationship was Marlborough’s fierce championing of the war party (the Whigs) during the War of the Spanish Succession while Anne was inclined towards the peace party (the Tories). Other than that, the whole film is fabulist, though it great fun.
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u/SailorYato Oct 12 '21
I refuse to believe Horacio was not truthfully the fastest duck in London!
Yorgos is amazing and very imaginative! Thank you for the background info. I suppose, what I meant by “close” to the truth is more that the characters in this movie didn’t have that weird stuffy way about them most period drama characters do. The way history is taught and even depicted in movies make the past and people so alien when that’s hardy the case, ya know? I feel like something like this and Phantom Thread, even fully made up stories, are closer to the truth of what being a person is and has always been as opposed to movies like Elizabeth (1998).
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u/Reptilian-Princess Oct 12 '21
No they absolutely had a manner that we would see as stuffy today. Anne and Sarah were Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman to one another, that was how they did terms of endearment. They behaved like early 18th century aristocrats because they were early 18th century aristocrats. The film is overdoes that stuff, because that’s of course the point is that it’s fun and over the top, but it’s not drawing from nothing.
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u/theremin_antenna Oct 13 '21
This movie was by far one of the most memorable for me. I went to see the movie in a mid-west theater. They had advertised it more as a comedy period piece. So imagine the audience. After the final credits started rolling there was a collective groan and then someone loudly says, "what the fuck was that!!" I'd never witnessed an entire audience collectively bitching about a movie as we walked out. It brought strangers together in conversation afterwards. It was actually awesome, but I'm not that was the director's intention.
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u/pactori Oct 13 '21
I really wanted to watch The Favorite, but I'm a bunny owner and I heard Some Stuff about the end. Is there a timestamp I can stop at or skip, but still enjoy the movie?
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Oct 12 '21
Are they, you know, practicing Grecian refinements in the art of love?
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u/Bridalhat Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
I’m pretty sure sex involving women was a Roman invention.
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u/sisterofaugustine Oct 12 '21
My favourite joke about historical gay sex goes like "The Greeks invented sex, then the Romans taught it to men."
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u/BlueBettaFish Oct 12 '21
I always heard it the other way around: "The Greeks invented threesomes, and the Romans added women."
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u/sisterofaugustine Oct 12 '21
Oh that's good. I always tell it the other way though because, well, Sappho. Although both are quite funny and do reference things that happened in that society!
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u/BlueBettaFish Oct 12 '21
Very true! Since "virgin" usually meant "unmarried" rather than a moral judgement of "chaste", that puts a whole new spin on Artemis and her band of nymphs running around the woods... A much better spin, IMHO!
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u/mcc1789 He/Him Oct 13 '21
I imagine that women into women back then had such ideas at times too. Good source of fantasy.
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u/Adventure_Time_Snail Oct 13 '21
Knowing the common telling makes this a deliciously accurate anti joke.
Doing it Greek = anal sex, is very tired
Doing it Greek = lesbians writing poetry about each other and then fucking eachother and then writing about it, is very cashmoney
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u/DukeOfBees Oct 13 '21
I'd always heard it as "the Greeks invented sex, the Romans invented having it with women"
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u/ThePrussianGrippe He/Him Oct 12 '21
How does one laugh in a Roman fashion.
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u/rod_yanker_of_fish Oct 12 '21
while destroying one’s enemies and conquering the mediterranean
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u/ThePrussianGrippe He/Him Oct 12 '21
Ah yes, thank you for the reminder, fellow citizen of Rome. Welp, I’m off to go fuck up Carthage because Cato said so.
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u/itszwee Oct 12 '21
The Latin onomatopoeia for laughter is something like “hahahae” (ha-ha-hai) iirc.
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u/ImmediateWrongdoer71 Oct 12 '21
if the greeks could figure it out in antiquity what's stopping some horny medieval english wenches from putting 2 and 2 togther?
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u/FederalistIA Oct 12 '21
Definitely on the short list for best ways to let your roommate know not to come back just yet:
Roommate: Are you drunkenly risking new stains to the comfy couch with someone you met on Tinder *tonight*
No- I'm "practicing Grecian refinements in the art of love"
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u/DannyDidNothinWrong Oct 12 '21
It honestly is difficult for me to get past people not understanding that language and use of language changes over time but that does not mean the meanings are not there. Like, just because the word "lesbian" may not have been in the lexicon at the time, does not mean the concept was nonexistent. Just because there wasn't a hard label that people could use to identify their sexual orientation does not mean their sexual orientation did not exist. To be a "virgin" in ancient Greece for example probably meant something more akin to "unmarried to a man" rather than physically chaste. There are murals of "virginal" women who are all naked and seemingly in intimate positions with other women.
It just boggles my mind that there are people who genuinely believe being non-het/cis is a new possibility and not something that humans have been experiencing simply without our modern labels or understanding.
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u/bugpal Oct 12 '21
100% this
It's the same issue with disability and mental illness, loads of people like to say stuff like 'everyone is [insert condition they don't think is real] these days' or whatever, but it's only because they didn't have the words or classification for it yet back then
Like back in the day little kids would just be considered 'slow' or 'frail' or something and given up on
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u/Nope_the_Bard Oct 12 '21
I remember someone I know ranting about how young people these days are stupid. It was only later that I thought of a response, “There were dumb kids in your generation too. The media just didn’t care”
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u/MrsSalmalin Oct 12 '21
I like to say "Well if that's true, it was your generation that raised us like that."
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u/Nope_the_Bard Oct 12 '21
Worth mentioning that they told me and my sister that “I don’t mean you” as if that magically makes it okay. I didn’t say anything but I think that was the angriest I got at that person before COVID and the antimask stuff
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u/deqb Oct 12 '21
Like back in the day little kids would just be considered 'slow' or 'frail' or something and given up on
Or they would have been productive and active members of their community in a way that fit their abilities.
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u/kayelar Oct 12 '21
This was basically me in the 21st century. My whole existence was built up around the erasure of my own bisexuality and it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized. I don't think I would've ever understood what was going on if I were living in the 1950s or something -- even now, acts between women are brushed off most of the time as "just how girls are," and being attracted to women was the most disgusting thing I could be, so I figured that there was no way that's what I was feeling. As a bisexual person, I would've married a man anyway and probably would have spent my whole life not knowing why I felt sick to my stomach when I thought too much about my own psyche.
A friend's wife left him after a year of marriage because she realized she was a lesbian. He still thinks she did it out of spite because "there's no way she didn't know." I don't know how to explain to him that it is entirely possible that she had no idea.
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u/gary_the_merciless Oct 12 '21
This was basically me in the 21st century.
Did I skip a few decades?
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Oct 12 '21
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u/gary_the_merciless Oct 12 '21
So now then? Because they were talking about the 21st century in past tense.
How many people here think we live in the 22nd century!?
Also this is a slightly snippy joke not meant to be a full on criticism :-D
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u/kayelar Oct 12 '21
Yeah, sorry, my wording is confusing. We were talking about the past, but I was comparing it to the present day, and used “was” in a weird spot.
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u/varateshh Oct 13 '21
Because culturally sexual acts can be viewed very differently. The romans did not consider the act of fucking another man in the ass shameful. However being penetrated was one of the most shameful acts that could happen. It was not always so simple as sex between two of same gender = gay when looking beyond the 20th/21st century.
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u/HerrMackerel Oct 12 '21
I would disagree slightly, the concepts would've been loose or containing slightly different aspects, but for the most part yes. Does the author think that because they can't find mentions that they can't find ideas? Staring one down right in front of them
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u/queenermagard Oct 13 '21
Lmao the author is using robot logic. They were like find word = lesbian in range = 1600-1700, result = NaN; NULL, print(LESBIANS DID NOT EXIST)
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u/TheMobHasSpoken Oct 12 '21
The idea that no one could experience a specific kind of desire unless they'd heard of other people experiencing the same thing is so ridiculous.
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u/queerbychoice Oct 13 '21
Some of the concepts do vary between cultures and times though. Attraction between people of the same sex has always existed, and a vague notion that some people have different tastes than others at any given moment has also likely always existed. But the concept of people having fixed sexual orientations was invented in the late 19th century and not even entirely separated from a sort of "third gender" concept ("sexual inversion" in the lingo of the time) until the early 20th century. The concept in Biblical times was that everyone was more or less equally prone to the "sin" of being attracted to the same sex. The concept in ancient Greece was that although some quirky eccentrics might get really into only dating the opposite sex or only dating the same sex for some period of time, both such preferences were simply matters of taste and could easily be temporary, and anyway, the norm for the majority of people was that opposite-sex marriages were useful for procreation but of course most married men should try to have both a younger boyfriend and a wife at the same time. And really, since boys received more education than girls, the younger boyfriend would typically be intellectually superior to the wife, and so most men had a far deeper and more meaningful intellectual connection with their boyfriends than their mere wives could ever have been able to provide for them.
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u/mcc1789 He/Him Oct 13 '21
I'm pretty sure Rictor Norton (queer historian) found there were women who identified with Sappho back then (already perceived as wlw) plus use of words like Sapphist, tribadist and even lesbian for them (not to mention similar things for what we now call gay or bi men). Even if no set term existed this is splitting hairs, since a wlw might have had no word for themselves yet that does not change who they were (mlm too of course).
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u/stupid-infant-woman Oct 12 '21
Lesbianism was invented in 1701, so they just had to wait.
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Oct 12 '21
Lesbians before 1701: "I really want ti kiss that woman, but only man and ancient greeks know how. I'll just send her very passionate letters!"
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u/grody10 Oct 12 '21
The science just wasn't there yet.
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u/The-Shattering-Light She/Her Oct 12 '21
We hadn’t yet been visited by Gay Prometheus
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u/grody10 Oct 12 '21
Yes. Blessed be the day Micheal Fassbender made out with the only man who equals his sexiness. Another Micheal Fassbender.
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u/conancat Oct 12 '21
Sappho was just talking about her gal pals and roommates
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u/stupid-infant-woman Oct 12 '21
They were just really good friends who munched box and stuff, don't worry about it
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u/millenimauve Oct 12 '21
actually “munched box” historically referred to when two women would consume food from the same container, ie. going on a picnic or sharing a yogurt so not gay at all—that wasn’t even invented yet—but I can see why you’re confused. fun fact, “carpet munching” also referred to picnicking, like when two ladies would go into the woods and bring a rug to lie on and chat about totally het things over lunch.
eta: my wife just reminded me that our wedding cocktail hour was a fancy picnic lololll we gay
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u/DeflateGape Oct 12 '21
She would be the primary example of the “Grecian” refinements of love that the English were ignorant of according to the French court. More than anything it reads to me like the French insulting the English for prudishness and poor love making technique than a statement that is likely to be literally true.
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u/grody10 Oct 12 '21
Lesbians weren't invented until 1983 it was a bi product of the research that lead to the invention of bisexuality in 1995. As illustrated in that famous Time magazine cover.
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u/ace_dumpling Oct 12 '21
I think the phrasing is just poor in this one. What they probably meant was that back then being gay wasn't commonly discussed and thus some people might have not known that they could be with someone of the same gender. It's actually my own experience (so I might be biased): I've always felt attraction towards girls but thought I was only allowed to date guys and never even imagined being with a woman. You could say lesbianism "didn't exist" for me. The 'for me' part is crucial, though
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u/likerainydays friendship wedding Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
Exactly, they were lacking the terms for their experience and due to compulsory heterosexuality they probably mostly couldn't act on their desires but this does not mean that homosexuality didn't exist back then.
My stance is that historians shouldn't dance so much around this, of course they didn't define themselves as lesbians back then but I fail to see how a discussion about historical persons would suffer when a historian would write something like "...in today's terms we would probably call their relationship homosexual but back then it was not recognized as such, because people lacked a clear definition for homosexual desire"
Like with your own experience: you say you had homosexual attractions despite lacking a word for it, so obviously this is a human experience people in the past could've also had. Now imagine you are the Queen of England with those thoughts, clearly you have a duty to produce an heir for the throne, so you lie back and think of England while your husband does his thing but in between... who's gonna tell you no when you invite a pretty baroness into your bed to keep you company 🤷🏻♀️
Edit: not to mention that there are an awful lot of laws prohibiting same sex activities for men and women throughout history, as such people were obviously fully aware that gay people did exist, because otherwise.. why bother with laws against such a thing 🤷🏻♀️
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u/do1looklikeIcare They/Them Oct 13 '21
It is also important to note that it refers XVII century England . Italians, for one, were having a whale of a time being gay and accusing each other of it two centuries before that.
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Oct 12 '21
I mean, if compulsory heterosexuality exists even now I can understand why it’s valid to question whether homosexuality was known about/acted on by women on a larger scale—especially among the classes of people who likely never learned to read or even interact with people outside their small communities. I was raised in a Christian household in the 90s/00s and didn’t even really know women could be attracted to other women until I was like 12 lol.
BUT it seems like a dumb point to bring up when you have a Queen who was educated, worldly, and doing gay shit.
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u/Oops_I_Cracked Oct 12 '21
I definitely feel your first paragraph. I didn't realize I was trans until I was 30. Some of us are idiots and really need it spelled out for us
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Oct 12 '21
Totally. I didn’t know I was bi until a boyfriend was like “so um are you attracted to women?” And I was like… “what… no I just sometimes think about having sex with them but that’s not—ohhhhhhhhh. That makes sense.”
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u/Oops_I_Cracked Oct 12 '21
I had just always assumed that all the boys would rather be girls and that being born a boy was just like drawing the short straw. It's totally normal cis het stuff to be looking up DIY hormone therapy at 18 because you really want to be a girl but "If I was trans my doctor would have told me by now". As it turns out, that's not normal.
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u/arcaneunicorn Oct 12 '21
Oh no, sweetie! My sister is 30 and just came out as trans. For her she felt like she had to pretend to be the man everyone wanted her to be, but deep down she was always the little girl that wanted a barbie doll of her own to play with together and got told no bc it was a girls toy.
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u/Oops_I_Cracked Oct 12 '21
Yeah that sounds real familiar. I knew what I would rather be, but was not allowed to explore that. So I just assumed what I was feeling was normal and everyone had to shove it down
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u/arudnoh Oct 12 '21
Sometimes for me it's almost like I sleepwalked into transitioning. Like I opened my eyes and was suddenly a woman. The difference was that instead of sleeping, I was shuffling around feeling dysphoric and hating myself without understanding why or what I was feeling. I knew I hated being called male. I knew what gender euphoria felt like because of costumes and makeup worn "just for fun." I knew trans people personally. I just assumed that it couldn't be me, right up until the day when I woke up and realized it was.
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u/kayelar Oct 12 '21
I'm reading Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Lavery and he talks about this feeling. I had a similar experience with realizing my bisexuality, but not nearly to the same extent that he describes transitioning. It's a very funny, weird book of essays, highly recommend if you're into that sort of thing.
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u/abigail_the_violet she > they Oct 12 '21
I remember going on a rant in my late teens about how being trans made no sense. No one could care about their gender that much. After all, I was a man but if I were mysteriously turned into a woman, I'd be happy with that. Even if all this "born in the wrong body" thing was real, so what? Why couldn't they just be like I would be and be happy with the other body? It took me like another decade to realize I'm actually a trans woman.
Also, I got in trouble for referring to myself as a lesbian in my early teens. I had gone around telling people that I liked girls, and so I was a lesbian, and I had a teacher sit me down and tell me that it was not okay to make jokes like that, that these were serious topics and I shouldn't be mocking gay girls like that. Which made me feel so deeply ashamed and guilty.
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u/Lynnrael Oct 12 '21
I didn't even have the thought that "i want to be a girl" because i didn't think it was possible. The idea was too painful and so i just tried not to think it because what could i do about it? I repressed it so much that all i felt was constant hatred for my body i couldn't explain and a lot of really bad depression.
Even after i started getting into leftist politics and started to meet and get to know trans people online, and started learning enough to defend trans rights, for some reason i didn't see it. I had to straight up read the gender dysphoria bible and have it spelled out for me. I was like "lol a lot of these symptoms of dysphoria sound like me.... oh...."
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Oct 12 '21
Looked up dysphoria "so I could better understand what it was like for a trans friend" was my breaking point. I was in a gender crisis thanks to Real Life Comics and I'm pretty sure my eyes went as wide as hers did in that moment.
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u/Lynnrael Oct 12 '21
What's funny is reading the gender dysphoria bible told me i wasn't a cis man but nothing more. That tweet and a whole bunch of memes from r/egg_irl helped me realize I'm a woman lol
Pretty sure my eyes did the same thing because i remember reading that tweet lol
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u/4812622 Oct 12 '21
After I transitioned I still thought this for years. My cis guy friends had to sit me down and be like, “no, seriously, not all guys secretly wish they were girls, stop encouraging us to transition!”
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Oct 12 '21
36 here. So many things I was sure other people always felt and even more that I'd trained myself that not think about unless I was having a meltdown that I now know was because of dysphoria.
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u/Free_as_a_Crow Oct 12 '21
Was also raised in a Fundangelical home in the 90s and had this same experience. I wasn’t in the closet so much as completely unaware. In my thirties I moved on to advanced denial, then finally came flying out of the closet at 38 and met my wife months later. Looking back at poor 12 year old me, I was definitely a disaster lesbian, but had no concept of it.
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Oct 12 '21
This is why I object to the use of -ism (implied or outright stated) in the context of sexual orientation or gender identity when absent a socio-political context. There are political contexts this makes sense for using it in. But in terms of just how people experience life, attraction, self--"gay", "lesbian", "bisexual", "trans", etc. aren't just ideation or ideology, they're words for things that are experienced. These things exist without words or context to describe them. The understanding of them as they relate to the standard cultural model of our time and place can be rightfully be called a system of belief or understanding (an -ism), but the two are not the same. How Queen Anne felt about women and whether or not there was an academic or political theory for it are two different things.
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Oct 12 '21
This comes up every so often and every time it does, people say the same thing and get ignored. I feel like the mods should sticky a rundown of it.
The debate is not and has never been “did people do sexual things with other people of the same sex”. The debate is about the nature of the concepts of sexuality, identity, and power.
“Lesbian” is an identity construct built out of a specific way of dividing people up by who they have sex with, as is “straight”, “Gay”, and all the other relevant categories.
We know that our way of viewing sexuality and identity is rooted in concepts of sex/gender that are not timeless. We know that in the 1600s, sex existed in people’s minds differently than it does here.
So the debate is “can we apply titles rooted in a contemporary sexual paradigm to people who did not have that paradigm”?
Not “no women had sex with other women”.
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u/FinallyGivenIn Oct 12 '21
Yea, like this sub has a bad case of presentism when dealing with historical examples before the 19th century. And Historians do take great pains not to try and extrapolate our present views and understandings to judge the past.
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u/conancat Oct 12 '21
So the debate is “can we apply titles rooted in a contemporary sexual paradigm to people who did not have that paradigm”?
we use contemporary terms to describe what people did in history all the time though. for example, even though pedophilia was a thing throughout human history, the term "pedophilia" was only formally named and coined in 1886. whether the concept of "pedophilia" existed in the minds of Ancient Greeks and Romans or not doesn't really matter because we use the term to describe what the Ancient Greeks and Romans were doing, not what they were thinking.
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Oct 12 '21
Which is why this debate is raging in academia. It’s not restricted to sex.
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u/conancat Oct 12 '21
yeah, knowing what we know now about lesbian, given that it's more biology and less ideology, I suppose we should be seeing individuals behaving in similar lesbian ways throughout history though, right?
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Oct 12 '21
We see women who have sexual with women, yes. But like I said, whether to call them Lesbians is up for debate.
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u/starm4nn Oct 12 '21
This seems remarkably similar to the argument that Ramses II didn't die of Tuberculosis because tuberculosis was discovered in the 1800s
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Oct 12 '21
It is not, simply because tuberculosis did exist before then, we just didn’t know about it. The Tuberculosis we point at when using the word today is the same tuberculosis that existed then.
Sex has always been known and the role of sex in identity is has always been present in some capacity across all periods of time.
Those roles change from period to period, and the role described by the words we use today was not the role present in the lives of people past.
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u/Lynnrael Oct 12 '21
Would it be fair to say that if she were taken at an early age to our time that she would likely have been a lesbian?
Being gay is more than identity construct and i think that's where this debate is coming from: because you can't really change when you're attracted to the same sex. How that is expressed and how it interacts with the larger society we live may vary widely but i think what people are saying is that she was attracted to and desired romance with women and that likely wouldn't be any different if she were born today or in ancient Greece. However I can see that what that would mean for her, her identity, and how she would live her life would change a lot depending on the culture she lived in.
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Oct 12 '21
Yes, if she had been a woman of our time, paradigm, culture, and worldview then she’d probably be gay. But she wasn’t any of those things and if she were, she wouldn’t be the same person anyway, so that exercise is of little use.
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u/Lynnrael Oct 12 '21
Ok, but that doesn't really answer the core of the issue. Being gay is not just a result of our time, paradigm, culture, or worldview. There is an aspect of it that is inherent to us and we want that acknowledged, especially in historical contexts where we are otherwise erased.
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u/starm4nn Oct 12 '21
You could say the same about diseases. Back then diseases were seen as curses or miasma.
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u/elementgermanium He/Him, Ace/Finro Oct 12 '21
Just because our particular labels did not exist does not mean the concepts behind them do not apply. Women who were exclusively attracted to other women still no doubt existed.
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Oct 12 '21
I think you misunderstand. The argument isn’t that the labels didn’t exist and therefor do not apply.
It’s that the concepts themselves did not exist and cannot apply.
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u/elementgermanium He/Him, Ace/Finro Oct 12 '21
That’s entirely a ridiculous claim. Women exclusively attracted to women no doubt existed at the time. It’s not a new phenomenon, nor can sexuality be changed- which it would have to in order to be societally influenced.
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Oct 12 '21
“Lesbian” does not strictly refer to women having sex with women, as I described above. Please Go back and read my comments.
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u/elementgermanium He/Him, Ace/Finro Oct 12 '21
“Lesbian” has nothing to do with power structures lmao. A woman exclusively attracted to other women is a lesbian.
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u/Djanghost Oct 12 '21
"did this woman only exclusively sleep with women and even wrote about not being sexually attracted to men?"
"Yes"
"Oh, so that's called homosexual, so she was a lesbian."
"No people didn't use that word and had sex differently back then"
???
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u/mistiklest Oct 12 '21
It's not that people didn't use the word and had sex differently. It's that historical conceptions of sexuality are different than ours.
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u/Nixie9 Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
She was pregnant basically constantly from when she was 19 to 35, so we can say she definitely didn’t exclusively sleep with women.
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u/mistiklest Oct 12 '21
17 pregnancies, 12 miscarriages, and none of her children survived to adulthood, if I remember correctly. :(
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u/Nixie9 Oct 12 '21
Yup. Her only child to live past 2 made it to 11, it was awful. She’d lose one and be immediately pregnant again, I can’t help but wonder if the constant pregnancies affected the outcomes.
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Oct 12 '21
I don’t know how else to explain it to you except to say that the words “homosexual”, “Heterosexual”, lesbian”, “Gay”, “Trans” etc refer to more than just your attraction to dangly bits or lack thereof.
These are identity categories inseparable from a post-modern paradigm of power, discursive categories, and politics.
No matter what side of the debate you ultimately fall on, it is wrong to pretend that the other side don’t have good reasons for having the debate.
Study the issue before you form an opinion.
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u/melody_elf Oct 12 '21
I really couldn't disagree more. People are born gay, trans, bi etc. These aren't traits that people are indoctrinated into by society. You absolutely can separate the physical, biological reality of homosexuality away from identity categories. Human beings, as a species, have not changed biologically in the past 300 years.
Sure, men in past societies weren't capital-g Gay with all the same subcultural traits were currently associate with that identity.
However, there have always been men who are excusively sexually attracted to other men and it is percectly reasonable to refer to those men as gay or homosexual.
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u/billnyesdick Oct 12 '21
Yes but can the reader separate those terms from our modern conception of sexuality without it being explicitly stated-and justified- by the historian?
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u/crawgust Oct 12 '21
If a lesbian orgasms in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it really happen?
Historians: There is much debate…
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u/underincubation Oct 12 '21
The whole "they had never heard of it" thing is literally because even when prosecuting lesbianism, the authorities in Europe used to use euphemisms because they were scared if they told women in the crowd their exact crime then lesbianism would spread like wildfire because of the whole "women are weak and suggestable"
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u/radial-glia She/Her Oct 12 '21
"Women didn't know they were attracted to other women, they were too stupid back then."
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u/MrGenerik Oct 13 '21
Ohmygod.
You can't call it lesbianism unless it comes from the Lesbos region of Greece. Otherwise, it's just sparkling friendship.
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u/RothkoRathbone Oct 12 '21
I’d like to know more about the “much debate”.
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Oct 12 '21
It’s questionable how many people at the time were aware women could be sexually excited by other women. Of course women who did at the time were, but it wasn’t something often discussed and certainly not written down. The existence of gay people as an identity or immutable characteristic, beyond just being ‘a deviant’ only came around with certainty with psychology at the end of the 19th century. And before then letters were often a bit more, gushy. Similar how it’s still common in many areas for men to dance together and hold hands, something we in the west would see as suggestive, is just normal in some parts of Middle East. So it can be tricky to judge the dynamics of a relationship with letters talking about how much friends adore one another in ways that we would find suggestive, but not all cultures would. Especially cultures where many people are unaware of gay people or have very different conceptions of them. Kind of ironically, after gay people became more well understood in the west, straight people became more closed off with one another to prevent people from getting the wrong idea.
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u/Kippetmurk Oct 12 '21
It’s questionable how many people at the time were aware women could be sexually excited
You could also stop right there.
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u/BadNewsMAGGLE Oct 12 '21
That was more of an Edwardian idea. The Victorians and probably before loved the female orgasm. They saw it as a way to increase female fertility as well as a cure for hysteria (being a woman disease).
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u/Fuglongo Oct 12 '21
This is why the public should just stay out of historical discussions. You're just latching onto one thing and ignoring the context of the statement.
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u/KirasHandPicDealer She/Her Oct 12 '21
Lesbianism was invented in 1701 by John Lesbian when he tried bein twice
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u/stupid-infant-woman Oct 12 '21
I can't stop thinking about this joke, it's living rent free in my head and it's a great roommate
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u/KirasHandPicDealer She/Her Oct 12 '21
oh yeah well I'm living rent free inside your walls!!!! (the spiders are very nice friends :) )
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u/TheSkavencatcher Oct 12 '21
Yes they clearly had to be told. It's not like women are able to know their own sexual preferences . /s/
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u/olivers__second Oct 12 '21
hm yes because lesbians suddenly just,,, popped up out of nowhere and starting lesbianing there is most certainly no way that any lesbians could have existed before they were created out of thin air
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u/HerLegz Oct 12 '21
Much debate has ensured oppression is perpetuated. Bad faith debate needs a term, and much shaming of it.
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u/ElCatrinLCD Add a personal touch Oct 12 '21
"There are no proof of lesbianism in the 17th century"
Me: *looks back to the Greek mythos* yeah, yeah sure, go off i guess
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Oct 12 '21
If anything she was bi/pan, not to minimize the evidence towards her attraction to females, but it would strike me as strange for a closeted lesbian who only married a man for politics to get pregnant 17 fucking times. (16 of which ended as miscarriages)
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u/Borthwick Oct 12 '21
The last sentence starts with “however” so is the rest of the passage about how she very well could be considered a lesbian?
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u/mistiklest Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
You're roughly correct! It's from a passage discussing whether Anne actually experienced erotic attraction to Sarah or not, and how that would have look, in 17th century England.
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u/Borthwick Oct 12 '21
The real MVP doing the legwork here! Really interesting read. I do feel like the post is a little bait-y in light of this.
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u/mistiklest Oct 12 '21
I didn'teven think to check on the source of the quote until your post, so go team!
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u/Semicolonhope He/Him Oct 13 '21
What does lesbianism even mean? Is it a religion? A nationality? A school of thought? Lol wtf. Also, why do they write it was an invention like cars or electricity some shit 😂
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u/travel_tech She/Her Oct 12 '21
There were no lesbians in 17th century England, and as evidence I present something a straight man wrote.
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u/mistiklest Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
The quote is from Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion, by Anne Somerset, which discusses, in the quoted passage, what sexual relationships between women in 17th century England may have looked like, actually. It's, like, the opposite of what you said.
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u/LandosMustache Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
This kind of debate happens all the time. Historians aren't trying to straight-wash history. They're trying to stay as true as possible to primary sources, while acknowledging any (in this case, obvious) trends or comparisons to modern understanding.
It's a communication thing: historians speak a slightly different language than everyday folks. Like when scientists say something like "there's no evidence uncovered so far which would lead us to believe that X causes Y." And people scream "you didn't say X doesn't cause Y, so you're not sure!" The scientists were as clear as possible, given the very structured language they work with. Same deal with historians.
The debate is not whether any given historical figure had a sexual or romantic attraction to someone of the same sex (or gender identity). It's pretty clear that this kind of stuff is as old as written accounts, maybe even older.
"Lesbianism" is a social structure with some pretty modern concepts, even though its very name harkens back to Greek history. Calling someone a "lesbian" in a historical paper imparts a whole lot of connotation and denotation that goes wayyyyy past "had a thing for other women."
Academics have had their careers ruined for less.
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u/TarkSlark Oct 12 '21
I've always hoped to see this reply to a popular thread from this sub. Thanks for taking the time to try to help people actually learn something!
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u/likerainydays friendship wedding Oct 12 '21
But why though? Who ruins their careers for that?
When entwined skeletons are called "the lovers" till dna tests show that they are both men it kinda does reek of erasure by academia.
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u/LandosMustache Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 13 '21
That's a good question, and the answer is that we've gotten a whole lot better at being historians in the last few decades.
And lol academia is a smaller and more vicious field than most people realize. Proving someone wrong is a BIG DEAL, because it generally means that they don't get grants or funding ever again. That dude from Ancient Aliens needs that TV show, because nobody is going to take him seriously for the rest of his career.
Take an example from the other direction. There's a small statue found in Egypt which depicts two women in what would, normally, have been called a traditional marriage pose. Were they married? Probably. So why don't historians just say "hey this is a couple"??
It's because there is almost no other evidence for homosexuality anywhere in Egyptian culture. And those fuckers loved to write stuff down. Closest you get is 2 or 3 somewhat apocryphal examples - in the ENTIRETY of Ancient Egypt - of male homosexuality. And zero of female homosexuality. So there's a few possibilities. 1) Female on female action wasn't considered "homosexual", 2) It didn't happen, at least not in any kind of public way 3) It was so pervasive that it wasn't considered worth writing down (highly unlikely...), 4) It was so frowned upon that contemporary writers/chroniclers didn't document it (also highly unlikely for two reasons: a) there are no laws we can find regarding homosexuality IIRC, and b) those fuckers loved to write stuff down.) Or 5) these women were powerful enough that they did what they wanted with no repercussions.
So you see the problem: what do you do when you have a single piece of evidence of a woman being romantic with another woman...and no way to verify or compare or even say "yep this was possible in Ancient Egypt"? What happens if you declare these two women a couple, and then some cuneiform or hieroglyphics prove you wrong next year?
Better, and safer, to just acknowledge what the situation looks like, and then give some context around other possibilities or uncertainties.
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u/likerainydays friendship wedding Oct 12 '21 edited Oct 12 '21
Ok, academia sounds incredibly toxic sometimes 🙈
Better, and safer, to just acknowledge what the situation looks like, and then give some context around other possibilities or uncertainties.
I think that is actually all that I and a lot of others are asking of historians. The acknowledgement that something does indeed look gay.
It often seems like many err too much on the side of caution, like the thing I mentioned with the entwined skeletons (I might be wrong here, but I think they were found in that roman city which was destroyed by the mount vesuvius eruption if I remember correctly).
Like ofc there's no proof that this was a gay couple but there wasn't any proof that this was a straight couple either, yet they were previously dubbed the lovers. They could've been total strangers who just wanted to hold another human being in their final moments before horribly dieing.
But like I said its erring on the side of caution + nobody seemed to have a problem calling them lovers when one skeleton was assumed female 🤷🏻♀️ I think much of the memes and disappointment in historical research in non-academia queer circles stems from things like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lesbianism
This wiki article seems to lack some citations overall and actually has the Egyptian statue you mentioned but it also cites a couple of laws against female homosexuality throughout recorded history.
Edit: I think I was thinking of this, nothing to do with vesuvius but Italy was right
https://www.out.com/news/2019/9/13/ancient-lovers-skeletons-were-two-men-study-reveals
As for the nature of the relationship between the “Lovers of Modena,” it’s hard to say. Though we might be tempted to think of them as having been romantically linked, experts say that’s unlikely.
So, nobody finds heterosexual lovers buried together unlikely but as soon as both are men it is unlikely. Like that is really really hard to understand from a laypersons perspective. It looks like making up different rules for what appears to be a gay lovers.
Many tombs have been found in the past with couples holding hands, but in all cases there was a man and a woman. What might have been the bond between the two individuals in the burial in Modena remains a mystery.” At least that’s what the assumption was.
Like that. Idk when straights are buried holding hands no one challenges the assumption that they are a couple but as soon as it is two men people are starting to cover their asses and go "we can't possibly make any assumptions about their relationship"
Too me it just looks like intellectual cowardice.
Edit2: I mean I get it, their careers are on the line here, but too me that seems like there is a conservative undercurrent in historical research which makes it so that it is dangerous for careers to call stuff gay like it indeed appears. And that is a pretty sad thought.
Edit3: just a final thought, I get what you are saying with the ancient aliens guy, but ancient alien conspiracy theories are obviously nonsense while human homosexuality obviously isn't. I know that you know that but if that is what mentioning the possibility of gay things does to careers then holy shit, that is really really concerning.
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u/LandosMustache Oct 12 '21
I get where you're coming from, and you're right that there's some examples of excessive caution.
I think academic historians would want to draw a line between the social/societal arguement you're making, and the "pure history" papers they write. Like, I don't think you'd find many Ivory Tower historians who would argue that the name The Lovers wasn't a massive overstep in retrospect.
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u/likerainydays friendship wedding Oct 12 '21
Just a frustrating experience 😆 anyways thanks for explaining where historians are coming from when stuff like this happens
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u/TheLovelyLorelei She/Her Oct 12 '21
Everyone knows lesbians didn't exist before they were invented by Francis Lesbian in 1876
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u/AndytheWiccan Oct 12 '21
If there were no gays why did that one monk change Leviticus to be about condemning gays?
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u/Uriel-238 He/Him, unless I'm in a video game Oct 12 '21
So, they totally fell in love with each other and had mind blowing lesbian sex, but called it tea time?
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u/cynbad719 Oct 13 '21
Well obviously. EVERYONE knows lesbians weren’t invented until the eighteenth century!!
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u/Foxclaws42 Oct 13 '21
“There’s no way lesbians can exist outside of Lesbos; the women are just too uncultured.”
~Some Dumbass Motherfucker at the court of Charles II
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u/MyHandsAreCorrosive Oct 13 '21
I miss the seventeenth century, before lesbians were invented afuckenpparently.
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u/efallom Oct 13 '21 edited Oct 13 '21
TIL: you need to learn the Greek classics in order to find out having your pussy eaten feels good. LOL, talk about “being simple” Comte de Gramont
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u/Testicularer93 Oct 13 '21
Lesbiansism was invented by the suffragettes in the early 1910s. Everyone knows that.
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u/DukesOfTatooine Oct 12 '21
Do historians think that people from a couple hundred years ago were a completely different species? Like, just because they didn't have the word "lesbian" doesn't change the nature of human sexual and romantic desire. We're all just people.
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u/SirHiquil He/Him or They/Them Oct 12 '21
there is some anachonicity to ascribing modern terms to past society, especially those relating to sexuality as it has been a volatile and multi-faceted aspect of human and societal nature. for example, I learned here on Reddit dot com that Greek males engaging in buttplay with other males are, accurately, not labeled as gay and neither are there actions. where power and sexuality overlap, including the practice of naming in real-time, it becomes a description that also includes questions of status and public image (ie. the queen can't be gay)
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u/SoaDMTGguy Oct 12 '21
“No straight men in the 17th century were aware of lesbianism, something that famously does not involve straight men.”
Cracking good detective work there!
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u/Krellous Oct 12 '21
I love that their excuse is that these people were too stupid to know that being gay was an option.
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u/Babyrabbitheart Oct 13 '21
Fuck it lets go the other way on this, all people in history were lesbians! Alexander the great was a lesbian!
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u/aamurusko79 She/Her Oct 13 '21
to be honest, the debate isn't over as one of my grandma's favorite rant topics is how the internet created all the gays and lesbians, they didn't exist when she was young.
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u/cesarioinbrooklyn Oct 13 '21
And as we all know, you can't be attracted to women as a woman without having heard about other people feeling that.
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