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Nihil sub sōle novum, or, Kinkshaming Aristotle

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Re: Nihil sub sōle novum, or, Kinkshaming Aristotle

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=phyllis+riding+aristotle

Thanks for that.

Also, is this where I drop the bit about Abelard (12th cen) beating Heloise with "blows sweeter than balm"? Not a euphemism: he was explaining how he would physically discipline her, to keep her father from suspecting their affair, and that was his job as her Latin tutor.

How'd that work out for him? (Well, before the part where they got caught anyway, I mean.)

Well, apart from the catastrophic consequences for them both, really fabulously:

To avert suspicion I sometimes beat her, but these blows were prompted by love and tender feeling rather than anger and vexation, and were sweeter than any balm.

In short, our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more eagerly for our previous inexperience, and were the less easily sated.

And then, there's the evidence (if they're authentic, which seems the consensus) of their actual letters for the rest of their lives, in which she is hot for him like nobody's business. I don't know she ever writes about the physicalities of it from her perspective, but her wild enthusiasm for their super D/s-y dynamic–

I love you more than ever, and, to revenge myself of him [her uncle that castrated Abelard], I will still love you with all the tenderness of my soul till the last moment of my life. If formerly my affection for you was not so pure, if in those days the mind and the body shared in the pleasure of loving you, I often told you even then, that I was more pleased with possessing your heart, than with any other happiness, and the man was the thing I least valued in you.

– never abates.

So: not sane, not safe, but, yes, apparently consensual and with abundant affirmative assent.

I mean, I think he's a total narcissistic ass, and would have told her to DTMFA, but she dug him like whoa. shrug Non gustibus disputandem est.

ETA: though I should also say, it may have worked out better for Heloise than Abelard. One can get the impression from subsequent events – and the way he kept trying to put her off, and the way she kept begging for more of his attention – that he found himself with WAY more submissive than he was up to topping.

Edited (HTML behaving oddly.) 2018-06-03 01:50 (UTC)

The article about Alexithymia, "The Only Emotions I Can..." Just vastly improved our lives. I feel like making a short pamphlet to hand out to people that deal with me on any long-term basis.

what a pathetic joke the incels are.

I'm not laughing anymore.

Nor am I.

The Evangelicals don't give a shit about the Sermon on the Mount, or about anything else Jesus of Nazareth purportedly said, because they are not Christians.

Evangelical Christianism bears about the same relation to the Christian religion as Islamist Jihadism bears to the actual Muslim religion: it's a twisted, murderous cult that tries to hide its hateful power agenda behind the trappings of bona-fide faith.

Those haters don't believe in Jesus, and it's a slap in the face to real Christians (those few who remain) to "give them the benefit of the doubt" by trying to pretend they do. If Christianity were true, they would be going straight to Hell. If they actually believed in Christ and his teachings, they would know this. Ergo, it is obvious that they do NOT believe. They only use the trappings of established religion to gull the simple, as the cynical and power-hungry have done throughout all of recorded history.

Jesus is dead (if he was ever a real person at all) and so is Mohammed; the words of dead guys are nothing but print on a page. The God of the Israelites is a myth, the same as the Gods of the Greeks, Norse, Inuit, Hawaiians and whoever. There is no Hell or Heaven; when our brains cease to function our consciousness goes where the light goes when the light-bulb burns out. What we're seeing is the result of basing an entire culture's morality on fundamentally erroneous notions. Once you know that Santa Claus isn't real, what reason do you have to be good when nobody's watching?

Edited 2018-06-04 18:02 (UTC)