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Peter Davis's avatar

On the Liberian sex strike you should read Helen Morales’s article in Greece and Rome (2013).

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

Oh I do love her, let me see if I can find it online ✍️

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Genghis Galahad's avatar

Wait, there's an article? A lot to unpack....I got lost in the draw and then woken up cold water splash on face, whoa nelly at the lingam drawings. But the initial seemingly invitational photography of the ladies at the table ("will there be a steamy story sequence?") had me anticipating... (oh nice photographed thematic postcard!) Where was I? 🧠

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

whoa nelly is honestly the appropriate response.

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Genghis Galahad's avatar

Thank you! I'm properly reading now! Funny how "Lacedaemonians" has now set me off on a tangent to Sparta! 🙏

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Russ Wiecking's avatar

As I recall, the wife of bath was referred to as a “queynte” woman. Ooo!

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

it all makes sense !! I've actually never read it, would you recommend?

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Russ Wiecking's avatar

It was a play on quaint and c*nt. Quaint probably meaning strange.

I loved it but it’s just a foreign enough language to be difficult without some work. Chaucer is rough and bawdy. Great fun.

I very much wish I had learned latin…

What I would recommend, if you haven’t read it, is Joseph Campbell The Mask of the Gods. Take for example:

“And why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination — preferring even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some violent god, to accepting gracefully the bounty the world affords?

Or

“whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sigh of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.”

And and and

Best to you. I going to rekindle my love of Greek/Roman myth.

Russ

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Glenn Ebo Perry's avatar

I gave my brother a book of Beardsley prints at Christmas 1975 and our mother never recovered.

In vain did I mention the lingam and yoni found in most Indian temples, or the decline of Athens in the Pelopennesian War signaled by the mutilation of the Herms throughout the city as it prepared for the Sicilian expedition.

Perhaps we’d all be more relaxed if our strolls through American cities were punctuated by the sight of modern Herms sporting an excited membrum virile.

Was it really Alcibiades impiety?

In the city of Athena, called Pallas

There were hundreds of statues that featured a phallus.

From Plutarch we have learned

That these numerous Herms

Were defaced in an act bold and callous.

The embargo found in Lysistrata

Might result in some penile stigmata.

If the beavers in question

Were to block all erections

With that nightmare, vagina dentata.

Best,

Glenn

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cosi’s odyssey's avatar

Glenn you're giving Aristophanes a run for his money!!!! Love your work, as always (and herms are a great example to bring up alongside these drawings) 💛

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