Sex And The Scientist

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?