The Greeks?

"If people could stop thinking of sex as some kind of illness" I think there's a difference between saying that something has a potential to harm and saying that it is entirely harmful. We all agree (I hope) that sexual desire can result in harm, just as any other good activity can result in harm. The only issue is how high that potentiality is. People like Thornton believe that sexual desire has a high potential for harm; you believe that it has a low potential. Neither of you, I think, would say that sexual desire is innately an illness. I think you missed the point, by the way, in who the "people" were I was directing your attention to. The "people" who held this darker view were Greek boylovers – the same Greek boylovers who wrote those beautiful love poems about boys. They were certainly not repressed in their sexuality – perhaps it is precisely because they were not repressed that they knew that sexual fire can burn. (This isn't a boylove issue, of course; they wrote the exact same warnings about woman-loving.) "BTW, who are these people you are referring to who have as you put it, 'sexual problems?' I'm assuming you are talking about BLs and/or gays." You assume wrong. I'm referring to people who hold what I refer to as a darker view of sexuality, such as Thornton, who doesn't specify his sexual orientation, but who I would guess to be a heterosexual nonpedophile. You said that anyone who held such a view had "personal problems" to work through, and you echo that in this post by saying that's a pathological point of view. I disagree; I think it's a difference in philosophy, based (I suspect) on different life experiences. Heather (who wishes that Jim would just once stop grouping her in with the nongays) Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]