"Let us be merry and drink wine and sing of Bakkhos [#Dionysos], the inventor of the choral dance, the lover of all songs, leading the same life as the Erotes, the darling of Kythere [#Aphrodite]."
The Anacreontea, Fragment 38
🏛️ Roman terracotta relief dated 20 BCE - 50 CE. Today in the British Museum.
@AimeeMaroux@antiquidons@histodons@mythology It's important to remember that people in history were just as horny as us, and that there are no new sex acts save for those not yet possible due to lack of certain technologies.
@orionkidder@AimeeMaroux@antiquidons@histodons@mythology I'm always confused that there is this illusion that folks in past generations were all prudes. It's not that there weren't prudes back in the day, it's what you're saying. Horny is universal. The main difference is the accessibility of online porn.
@SDZ@AimeeMaroux@antiquidons@histodons@mythology Exactly. There wasn't phone sex before phones, but other than that! Like, I listened a podcast a few weeks ago about that history of lube. People have been making it forever.
@orionkidder@AimeeMaroux@antiquidons@histodons@mythology Thinking more about this, I might do a newsletter post on this. I'm super interested in this idea of imaginary prudishness. And I think some older folks support it. They don't want people of their kids generation to know what freaks they were when they were young. Wouldn't it be better for young folks to understand the hormones rushing through them are normal?
@SDZ@orionkidder@antiquidons@histodons@mythology Not my era but I heard about an obsession with nipple piercings in Victorian England, so even those old prudes had a kinky streak, it seems 😁
Prudishness and freedom seem to come in waves. The generation after me (Gen Z) seems way more concerned with purity than mine was (millenial).
@AimeeMaroux@SDZ@antiquidons@histodons@mythology There's a political factor to that, too (conservative religious groups pushing anti-sex nonsense) and of course STI's. I'm an 80s kid. We were told sex would kill us dead.
@orionkidder@AimeeMaroux@antiquidons@histodons@mythology That's absolutely true - the social side of things is important. I don't remember where I read it, but there are supposed to be statistics about young folks today not having as much in-person sex - I'm sure that's not due to a lack of horniness.
@AimeeMaroux@orionkidder@antiquidons@histodons@mythology Oh, I love that! ain't nothing new under the sun. I had heard about nearly-transparent dresses and some dresses that basically revealed the nipples, but I hadn't heard about piercings.
@SDZ@AimeeMaroux@antiquidons@histodons@mythology Sure, watch some early cinema for all some very revealing costumes, pre-Hayes code. Censorship creates the illusion that people in other eras just didn't have sex, but any art historian, including literature scholars, will tell you they did it all back then.
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