Sexy Science
Consider this. When you think of an ancient civilisation such as the Greeks or the Romans you see their society as we interpret it from the clues they left behind. The pottery, stone and metal artefacts are most durable. The clothing and items made from precious materials may survive but only if the garments do not rot away (which they usually do) and are not looted and broken up as was often the case for the gravegoods of many civilisations.
We know some things about their sexuality, but what we do know is quite narrow in its scope. Take three civilisations. Ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. The first three things that probably pop into your mind about them are probably:
Egypt: the pharaohs married they close relatives, mothers, sisters etc.
Romans: Indulged in orgiastic sex.
Greeks: Had a thing for young men and invented anal sex.
To a greater or lesser extent these things may all be true, but they are a gross misrepresentation of each of those societies as a whole.
In Egypt only the ruling class probably indulged in incestuous unions. The Roman plebeians didn’t have the money for anything more than basic sustenance and an occasional jaunt to the Circus Maximus to watch Charlton Heston race chariots and the Greeks would have died out if anal sex was their only preoccupation.
It’s the same with today’s society and the stuff we leave behind as adult bloggers. In fact its true of any blogger, or diarist or contemporary historian. No matter how objective and honest you try to be, anyone reading what we write in a hundred years time will get a very distorted view of us. We don’t document every thing we do down to the last second of every day, you get the edited highlights. Which is of course what archaeologist see when they examine ancient texts.
Then of course there the problem of censorship and editing by the scholars of the future. To preserve reputations of to portray our antecedents in a light that serves our purposes there is always a temptation to place a certain amount of spin on the interpretation of “evidence”. Ascertaining the facts is one thing, but how those facts are used and communicated is another.
With every blogger’s work available on the Internet, and assuming it hasn’t all been deleted in a century or so, do you think that our ancestors will think we’re pioneers or perverts?
as a paleontologist i deal with large chunks of time; i work on rocks and fossils that are between one quarter of a billion and half a billion years old. as a person i have often thought about how it must have been like to have lived in the “primative” times 100 or 200 years ago. what must london been like during the industrial revolution when the skies were dark with pollution and sewage ran through the streets.
but but but… i finally realized that everyone who has ever lived has lived in as modern a world as we live in. my british grandmother who spoke of bobbins of thread reather than spools of thread, who taught me to cook curry and to eat it wearing my underware and a damp rag on my head, who lived in burma until it was no longer a good place to live, my grandmother lived in times as modern as i live now.
she traveled the world in ships rather than aeroplanes. she road the rails rather than driving an automobile. she drank gin and tonic for its mecdinal properties relative to malaria. she lived before personal computers. she probably thought of her grandmother as having lived in primitive times as i used to think of her having lived in primative times.
but it isn’t so. she lived ust as modern a life as i have, only the benchmarks have changed. i flew to asia while she road a boat. i call europe via satellites while she commuicated with America via airmail. for each of us it was the best of times, the worst of time.
here in the colonies it was the practice of the anthropologists to “discover” the secret sexual practices of the indiana. surely the savages had some hidden practices for deflowering their madens, and the Ph.D.s were bound and determined to find out what these bucks were doing.
go read “john fire lame dear, seeker of visions” by richard erdos if you want to find out what the indians told the anthropologists – and why they told them that.
gangs of fun!
weird