Before starting this episode I just wanted to note that as the episode title suggests it's going to include discussion of sex and sexuality

with occasional more or less explicit detail

so you might not want to listen in the company of your children, or for that matter your parents or grandparents.

Actually, you know what, just listen to it alone. You're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with

the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy dot net today's episode the

good wife gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages.

Have you ever been tempted to describe retrograde views about gender and sexuality as being medieval?

If so, you were more right than you probably knew. A particularly good example

is the condemnation of homosexuality as immoral. Famously, the Greeks generally considered

male-sexual relationships to be acceptable, in some cases even

noble as with the sacred band of Thebes.

Petrastic relationships were seen as serving a potentially useful social function, with an older man

inducting a teenage boy into political life. As for the Romans, they did not divide erotic

proclivities into the heterosexual and the homosexual.

Instead, they distinguish between the dominant masculine role of penetrating a partner who might

be either female or male and the more shameful and passive role of being penetrated.

Even lesbianism was understood along these lines.

When the Romans were disturbed by it, this was not so much because both partners were women,

but because of the inevitable implication of this, namely

that one of the two women would have to play the active penetrating role.

But surely moral condemnation of homosexuality as such goes back at least as far as the origins of the Christian religion, right?

...