The Historical Record and Its Impact on WritingThread

Wow, that’s rough! I hope she asked for a second opinion.

“Enlightenment” is a sliding scale. Anecdotes like this are a healthy reminder that as little as a few decades ago, the ends of said sliding scale were universes apart, even in what some would call the “civilized” world.

Late to the discussion, but this site has long been a favorite of mine, for those looking to do more research. That he presents the stories in fully illustrated vignettes is a bonus! :smile:

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Well count me in too. I have been put in the shoes of way too many straight protags and never quite enjoyed it whenever romance was involved as sexually women are about as interesting to me as watching paint dry.
I always used to skip the romance bits in my old games and occasionally fast-forward the video to skim over those bits. It’s not really surprising I either tried to go for games in which romance really was optional, as a result many of my old protagonists were more married to their jobs or work then they were straight or went for games in which there was no romance and being technically presumed “straight” didn’t matter. Those latter ones were mostly business sims and political games.

Sadly the gay panic defense still exists in some parts of Europe and not just in the usual culprits you’d suspect of it like Poland. :unamused:

Far before Wahhabism became as utterly dominant as it is today and the West had a near pathological obsession for empowering the shittiest, religious nut-jobs they could find in the Middle-East, because the modern, secular(ising) parts of their societies tended to like socialism and the Soviet-Union better. Now we get to enjoy the fruits of that bit of policy.

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I know @Cataphrak has already answered this for you, but I feel the need to clarify some particulars of Roman views on homosexuality.

Firstly, we need to be careful about applying our modern ideas of homosexuality (and other sexualities) upon other cultures. The farther away from the twentieth century we go, the more unfamiliar the terminology and the more alien the conceptions become. This applies not only to Classical Rome, but very nearly all pre-Modern societies.

With that out of the way…

While it’s true that homosexuality in Rome was tolerated up until Christianization, Rome’s view of sex was also largely colored by its militaristic mindset. To be conquered, to be forced to submit, to be servile, was shameful. This applied in war as much as in sex.
The receiving partner was derided because they allowed themselves to be used, not because it was between to men, but because they were dominated, conquered.
It was not shameful, and it was completely accepted, that a freeborn Roman male would seek pleasure from outside his marriage, so long as the people he had sex with were prostitutes, male or female. More often than not, these prostitutes were slaves and were afforded no rights; in a sense, to have sex with these prostitutes as the penetrating partner, was to conquer them again. So you can see why relations between two male Roman citizens would be doubly shameful.

With all this in mind, it should be noted that Romans didn’t really conceptualize the idea of romantic relationships between two men. This is because marriage was inherently a male-female arrangement for the purposes of continuing lineage, love did not play an active part in Roman marriage. It was appreciated, but not expected. Thus, the idea of seeking pleasure outside of marriage with prostitutes was widely accepted.
Really, as long as your love for another person didn’t lead you to having an affair with a married Roman citizen, then Rome really didn’t care; so long as you maintained dignity (i.e., were not the receiving partner) in all sexual affairs, Rome had no thoughts about your relationships.

Now, for women, there’s even less information, but as far as I can tell, a woman could only have an affair if there was a penis involved, because only PiV sex was seen as sex. Female homosexual relationships may as well not have existed to the Roman state as they posed no threat to familial lineage.
So long as women still performed their duty and gave birth to legitimate children who could carry on the family line, they could do whatever they wanted with other females. It wasn’t hurting Rome, so Rome didn’t care.

Similar ideas are found in many other pre-Modern societies. The idea of ‘love = marriage’ is a relatively new concept, so most societies with political marriages were accepting of homosexual relationships because they posed no threat to familial lines. China, Japan, Persia, Assyria, etc. None of them particularly looked down upon homosexuality, and homoromantic relationship were widespread and accepted so long as you performed your duty.

Abrahamic religions and their influence are what caused the decline of this acceptance. Opposition to homosexuality in China began with the Tang Dynasty, the Meiji Period is when Japan began to discourage homosexuality—interestingly, even Islamic societies accepted homoromantic feelings, though they had similar concepts regarding active and passive roles as the Romans (and of course, the Greeks) did when it came to homosexual sex.
It really isn’t until the Colonial period that we see widespread homophobia in most cultures.

Drawing this long-winded essay to a close, what I’m basically trying to say is that homosexual relations and homoromantic relations were widespread across all human cultures up until about Colonialism. However, the way that these past cultures and our modern ideas regarding homosexuality are very different, and there was still shame associated to the receiving partner, so it wasn’t all sunshine and roses back then. Further, in many of these cases, the receiving partner would be far, far under the age of consent, and in many cases, wouldn’t have had much of a choice due to the class and age differences in many of these relationships.

Now, I do want to take a moment to say that I am not equating homosexuality with pedophilia. Again, our modern views of sex and sexual identity would be alien to these ancient societies, in much the same way that their preference for an age different makes most of us sick to think about. It’s simply a fact that most ancient homosexual relationship held an element of what we call today of hebephilia and ephebophilia.
Information of sexual relations between partners of a similar age and rank are few and far inbetween because even then the idea of being a receiving partner is so deeply shameful that few would ever speak of it.
While I have expressed the importance of realizing how different some aspects of homosexuality have changed (in my view, for the better–hooray for age of consent!) over the millennia, I would also like to note that some aspects have stayed relatively untouched the entire time.

When it comes to writing, you must consider what is more important to you, the author. If realism isn’t what you’re after, then do as you will, but if it is, then take everything I said and consider it carefully, but more importantly do your own research, as much as you can.

Sorry for the long-winded reply!
And hopefully I haven’t been beaten to this by like a billion other posts because I took about three hours to write this.

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Actually, in my opinion, the roots of the problem came around the 1100s and 1200s, when Islamic theologians started to distrust secular philosophy and critical thinking just as they were taking off in Western Europe. The sack of Baghdad by the Mongols didn’t help all of this.

As a result, the Middle East kind of backslid and Europe took the lead, in time becoming the global civilization.

This is true, if you’re looking for a full reformation and Islam as a progressive religion. However 50-60 years ago many societies and governments in the Middle-east were secularizing quite nicely and that would have largely reduced Islam and religion in general to possibly the same cultural space it occupies in a lot of western nations today and kept it, by and large, out of the state and less intrusive into public life.

There’s a level of irony in this considering that Habsburg attempts at “composition” (read: a more broadly tolerant religious policy) was partially scuppered indirectly by Ottoman policy in Eastern Europe. The Schmalkaldic and Thirty Years’ Wars were partially fuelled by the fact that the Sublime Porte, like Washington or Whitehall of more recent days, were willing to allow religious conflict in a far-off infidel land to serve their own national interests.

That is a) History above and beyond the extent of my education on the subject and
b) I’m not feeling the deleterious effects of those Ottoman policy decisions the way I’m feeling the ones of the past decades of British, American and French meddling in the Middle-East. All because most of the more secular minded movements there generally happened to like the Soviet-Union quite a bit better, for perfectly understandable reasons.
In Syria the knock-on effects of the “Arab Spring” demolished one of the few countries in the region that still had the remaining vestiges of a (barely) functioning civil society.

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Considering one of those “deleterious side effects” was the current cultural makeup of the United States, I’d say we still are.

What, you mean a society that firmly decided very early on that we were not going to play the “kill each other over which end we break our eggs at” game?

The revival of toxic religion in the United States (and as exported to Canada in fortunately small doses) is primarily a result of our failure to properly tear out the roots of black slavery (which began in strict economics and turned into an ideology), not the Thirty Years’ War, and the particular alliance between religion and hate is actually a '70s thing.

(Incidentally, the Southern Baptist Conference is turning full speed away from the Republican Party. The recent exposure of the sheer extent of the rot within was too much for 70% of their voters.)

Depending on where you looked at sure. The evolution of religious freedom in Massachusetts was very different from that of Maryland, and certainly that of Pennsylvania.

That being said, events that affected the policies of colonising powers in Europe necessarily affected their colonies. It’s not necessarily as direct as “There is a direct line of descent between the nutjobs of Cromwell’s day and Jeff Sessions” (although I would say a line of descent is still there thanks to the character of American mainline Protestantism and its shining city on a hill/manifest destiny rhetoric), but the Thirty Years’ War did have ripple affects all the way to the present day, in both Europe and the Americas, they just take some digging to find.

Any way to do that without simply throwing in the towel and letting the CSA have their “Independence”?
I mean it’s not like they were set-up to be able to be a functional nation-state. So it is very possible they might have come crawling back in couple decades anyway. Winning by losing, or more accurately forfeiting I guess.

On the other hand almost seven decades of the pursuing the absolute worst possible policies regarding the Middle-East are literally staring me in the face and don’t exactly require training as a historian to see since they’re rather easy to spot.
Whatever sort of dive, say a possible Rashidi Arabia would have been it would at least have been far superior to the Saudi Arabia of today.

A Rashidi Arabia and whatever Mossadegh’s Iran would have turned into would probably belong to a timeline too good for us to deserve.

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Well it is highly probable to have a surviving Soviet Union, which can be good, neutral or bad, I suppose.
Also Nationalist China had even more extensive territorial claims the PRC of today, make the (beginning of) the cold war just slightly different and they could still emerge on top.

Such a Nationalist China and a surviving Soviet Union poking at each-others borders in the 21st century could be really scary too, not to mention the fact that such a China might well be more aggressive in trying to “flood” Siberia and all its other claims with Chinese colonists immigrants and then trying the Putin playbook of annexation whenever there is a real or manufactured incident and the country in question is also otherwise already distracted. Of course that in turn assumes such a Nationalist China would have better grip on its territory and citizens then today’s PRC and moved beyond the warlords outside of the major cities and triads everywhere inside them stage of development.

Anyway, I digress, but since we’d still be human no conceivable timeline is going to be universally good, but I do like to think better than ours by almost any metric is certainly possible.

Bad, probably.

The West’s imperial fuckups (and the people who fixate on them) sort of obscure the fact that the USSR was just as much a colonial empire as the US or Britain - only a more desperate desire for security made them unapologetically take internal and external measures which most Western governments would have seriously balked at.

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Hey it was positively enlightened compared to the thought that illness was caused by evil spirits like Cataphrak was saying :wink: In a round about way (and not knowing what Bacteria and viruses were for example) they were trying to explain why certain people were naturally more prone to certain types of disease than others, and that internal (mindset) and external (what you ate, weather, amount of exercise, occupation etc) factors could affect your overall health and bring things in or out of balance. It was kind of heading in the right direction in some ways. (Although in others it was still obviously quite wrong.) Step forward a thousand years and they’ll probably see our level of medicine as comparatively primative too. (You get to find your humoural temperament if I ever get Oedipus finished and it there for anyone despiratey interested in knowing :smile:)

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If that alternate “Cold war” goes more its way and remains a perpetual stalemate that settles into more respected spheres of influence though it is certainly possible for it to have been hit by the same kind of imperial fatigue the US is beginning to suffer from now that it’s been a few decades into “the end of history”.
The increased prosperity of having more of the world in its (nominal) camp might have made it feel more secure and it is possible increased prosperity could have prompted more and more successful reforms, Soviet society was not PRC society after all. Then again it might have remained Stalinist too, which is seriously scary.
It probably wouldn’t have in a timeline that “too good for us to deserve” tho. But an equally bad one, just in a very different way is certainly possible. At least that one is better for the Middle-East I suppose.

That happened in the 70s and 80s, and the Brezhnev Doctrine tried to make the USSR as much “the socialist world’s policeman” as that might imply, with the VDV serving as Moscow’s imperial shock troops. Part of the reason fatigue set in earlier was simply because the USSR had less resources to throw at maintaining its sphere of influence, and the fact that the US was benefitting from an existing anglo-american capitalist cultural infrastructure to project soft power from.

Doubtful. The USSR didn’t tolerate the prospect of a multipolar socialist world order. Witness its antipathy towards Yugoslavia, its interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia when their socialist governments tried to leave the Soviet orbit, its attempt to maintain “party discipline” among international branches, including its infamous purging of dissenting leftist groups within the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and its acrimonious split with Beijing after Mao tried to restore China to great power status.

The Soviet Union lacked the level of complacency it needed to allow credible rivals and potential allied powers to form, a complacency which the US had after a century of being the undisputed hegemon of the Western Hemisphere.

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Option #1: Give them said “independence” in 1787, forcing Virginia and North Carolina to decide between union or ineffectual independence (at that point, SC and Georgia obviously would have gone “screw you” to the Union, but V-NC, not so clear). If Virginia and North Carolina agree to an abolition timetable, slavery as an ideology can be allowed to discredit itself and we’re 50 years ahead in civil rights without a civil war.

Option #2: After the Civil War, eradication of the planter class, division of their assets among their former slaves (with a share for carpetbaggers from the North, of course) and aggressive, violent repression of the Klan and the Lost Cause - make it clear that the South is going to be occupied aggressively for a generation. All it would require is for the North to have been committed to aggressive equality…

…hahahahano, not happening.