The History Of Sexuality - Volume 2 by Michel Foucault

Author:Michel Foucault
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0394751221
Publisher: Vintage (April 14, 1990)
Published: 2010-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

The History Of Sexuality - Volume 2

PART FOUR Erotics

1 A Problematic Relation The use of pleasures in the relationship with boys was a theme of anxiety for Greek thought-which is paradoxical in a society that is believed to have “tolerated” what we call “homosexuality.” But perhaps it would be just as well if we avoided those two terms here. As matter of fact, the notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate as a means of referring to an experience, forms of valuation, and a system of categorization so different from ours. The Greeks did not see love for one's own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior. The dividing lines did not follow that kind of boundary. What distinguished a moderate, self-possessed man from one given to pleasures was, from the viewpoint of ethics, much more important than what differen tiated, among themselves, the categories of pleasures that in vited the greatest devotion. To have loose morals was to be incapable of resisting either women or boys, without it being any more serious than that. When he portrays the tyrannical man-that is, one “in whose soul dwells the tyrant Eros who directs everything”l-Plato shows him from two equivalent angles, so that what we see in both instances is contempt for the most fundamental obligations and SUbjection to the rule of pleasure: "Do you think he would sacrifice his long beloved and irreplaceable mother for a recently acquired mistress whom he can do without, or, for the sake of a young boy 187

188 The Use of Pleasure recently become dear to him, sacrifice his aged and irreplace able father, his oldest friend, beat him, and make his parents slaves of those others if he brought them under the same roof?“2 When Alcibiades was censured for his debauchery, it was not for the former kind in contradistinction to the latter, it was, as Bion the Borysthenite put it, ”that in his adolescence he drew away the husbands from their wives, and as a young man the wives from their husbands. “J Conversely, if one wanted to show that a man was self controlled, it was said of him-as Plato said concerning Iccus of Tarentum 4 -that he was able to abstain from relations with boys and women alike; and, according to Xenophon, the ad vantage that Cyrus saw in relying on eunuchs for court service was that they were incapable of offending the honor of either women or boys.5 So it seemed to people that of these two inclinations one was not more likely than the other, and the two could easily coexist in the same individual. Were the Greeks bisexual, then? Yes, if we mean by this that . a Greek could, simultaneously or in turn, be enamored of a boyar a girl; that a married man could have paidika; that it was common for a male to change to a preference for women after ”boy-loving“ inclinations in his youth.

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