Tuesday, August 19, 2014

And now, God damn to bloody fucking Hell your fucking unsubstantiated and unexamined Notions of what is normal for all People (and all Species) at all Times, while you consider this curious little Anecdote from Pliny [the Elder's] Natural History (XXXIV.61-62):










"Lysippus as we have said was a most prolific artist and made more statues than any other sculptor, among them the Man using a Body-scraper which Marcus Agrippa gave to be set up in front of his Warm Baths and of which the emperor Tiberius [as exclusively gay a man as ever there was] was remarkably fond.  Tiberius, although at the beginning of his principate he kept some control of himself, in this case could not resist the [overwhelming homosexual] temptation, and had the statue removed to his bedchamber [where he could masturbate over it when he fell asleep at night, and when he got up in the morning], putting another one in its place at the baths; but the public [who were all men] were so obstinately opposed to this that they raised an outcry at the theatre, shouting 'Give us back the Apoxyomenos!'--and the Emperor, although he had fallen quite in love with the statue [which was, in accordance with the practice of the time, painted and covered with flesh-colored wax, in order to make it look as life-like as possible, and which had not yet had its verisimilar and proportionate penis lopped off], had to restore it [to its rightful place in front of the warm baths of Agrippa]."

Now, Sir or Madam, Con or Asshole, as the case may be, would you care to try to refute the proposition that [male] homosexuality is, and always has been, the normal, default mode of sexuality for the vast majority of normal men--as it is (and, we may assume, ever was) for males of certain other Species, cetaceans (dolphins of all kinds, particularly) and giraffes to name but two for sure, but possibly including cheetahs, elephants and lions. You might start with a snarky, captious Open Question about those theatre-going, sexy male statue-admiring Frequenters of the Warm Baths of Agrippa...Some of whom might just, you think perhaps, have been Women?  N'est-ce pas? Hell, yes--if Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren can play Prospero, and Sarah Bernhardt can play Hamlet...and if indeed the Sex must be granted, by courtesy, the right, as equals with men, to act in the plays of Shakespeare (who never saw an actress in his life)...Surely then, just as trannies now claim to've been the original high-kickers in the riots at the Stonewall Inn  in 1969 (when there were as yet no transsexuals), surely we may suppose that short, gruff, hoarse-voiced "gay trans men" (women pretending to be men in order to dupe, or argue, gay men into having sex with them) were among the sculptor Lysippus' earliest, most ardent admirers.  In fact, if I look closely at the Apoxyomenos, at what I had thought, or just assumed to be a rude, late barbarian penectomy, I think I perceive, instead, a crude early phalloplasty.  Bring it on, ladies.






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