|
Khazar-khum posted:No one knows just what the various 'Venus' figures were for. I would guess a variety of things, from porn to childbirth aids to kids' toys. I know some were found in the grain stores in one of the oldest neolithic settlements ever found (Çatalhöyük), which suggests perhaps some sort of religious "don't let the grain go bad" talisman sorta thing, at least in that instance. That settlement is also interesting because of the architecture- all the houses are clustered together, and are accessed by climbing through a hole in the roof of the building.
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 13:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 11:27 |
|
|
Red Bones posted:I know some were found in the grain stores in one of the oldest neolithic settlements ever found (Çatalhöyük), which suggests perhaps some sort of religious "don't let the grain go bad" talisman sorta thing, at least in that instance. That settlement is also interesting because of the architecture- all the houses are clustered together, and are accessed by climbing through a hole in the roof of the building. Figured out fat people before they figured out doors
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 13:30
|
|
|
VanSandman posted:Figured out fat people before they figured out doors The holes in the roof was just like a neolithic Dukes of Hazard thing. Down at the old cave there was this new painting everyone loved about some dude that just dropped in through the roof everywhere. Then everybody wanted to do it. It was this whole dumb fad.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 13:52
|
|
|
alpha_destroy posted:The holes in the roof was just like a neolithic Dukes of Hazard thing. Down at the old cave there was this new painting everyone loved about some dude that just dropped in through the roof everywhere. Then everybody wanted to do it. It was this whole dumb fad. Maybe it was to keep things out? Monkeys, bears, etc?
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 13:55
|
|
|
DurosKlav posted:
Speaking of the White Star Line being dicks, they charged the family of Wallace Hartley (the band leader who famously kept playing as the ship sank) for the uniform that was lost when the ship sank. You know, the uniform he was wearing and died in.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 14:06
|
|
|
VanSandman posted:Maybe it was to keep things out? Monkeys, bears, etc? Well see that's where you are dead wrong. Bears were the cats of the neolithic period. Okay I'll stop now.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 14:17
|
|
|
Red Bones posted:I know some were found in the grain stores in one of the oldest neolithic settlements ever found (Çatalhöyük), which suggests perhaps some sort of religious "don't let the grain go bad" talisman sorta thing, at least in that instance. That settlement is also interesting because of the architecture- all the houses are clustered together, and are accessed by climbing through a hole in the roof of the building.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 15:20
|
|
|
Boardroom Jimmy posted:Speaking of the White Star Line being dicks, they charged the family of Wallace Hartley (the band leader who famously kept playing as the ship sank) for the uniform that was lost when the ship sank. You know, the uniform he was wearing and died in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicians_of_the_RMS_Titanic Wikipedia posted:Hume and the other members of Wallace Hartley's orchestra all belonged to the Amalgamated British Musicians Union and were employed by a Liverpool music agency, C.W. and F.N. Black, which supplied musicians for Cunard and the White Star Line. On 30 April 1912, Jock Hume's father, Andrew, received the following note from the agency:
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 15:43
|
|
|
The specific icon that was found in the grain bin at Çatalhöyük was less pornographic, more matriarchal, ftr still got tiddy tho
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 15:45
|
|
|
Would a big hole in the roof not be for letting out the smoke from a fire?
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 16:07
|
|
|
learnincurve posted:Would a big hole in the roof not be for letting out the smoke from a fire? It's true, but the hole in the roof was also the only point of entry. The website goes into detail about it, but they were living in dense clusters of buildings with communal roof spaces from which you could enter individual rooms. Maybe it was a defensive measure against other people, or to protect the houses from being entered by wild animals.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 16:29
|
|
|
You may have heard of "Handkercheif Code," the largely- apocryphal system by which gay men use a colored kercheif in their back pocket to indicate they are a top, bottom, whatever. This actually has a real event behind it. In the 1840s-50s, during the gold rush, mining towns were overwhelmingly male. One of the things they did to have fun when they weren't mining was square dancing, which involves two pairs of men and women per, uhh, square. Since there weren't enough women in town to populate a whole dance, some miners would wear a kercheif in their back pocket to indicate they were the "woman" for this particular dance, just to keep the steps straight. They weren't gay, but for the purposes of "sashay left, now promenade 'round" they were feminized. It's likely this was re-appropriated by gay subculture, though it's largely fallen by the wayside now.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 16:54
|
|
|
The incredible part is that men were that desperate for formal dancing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 17:14
|
|
|
They didn't have the internet yet and eventually their dicks got chafed so they had to find SOMETHING to do besides jerk off
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 17:22
|
|
|
Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:You may have heard of "Handkercheif Code," the largely- apocryphal system by which gay men use a colored kercheif in their back pocket to indicate they are a top, bottom, whatever. This actually has a real event behind it. I sincerely doubt that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 17:39
|
|
|
InediblePenguin posted:The specific icon that was found in the grain bin at Çatalhöyük was less pornographic, more matriarchal, ftr Reminds me of those morbidly obese people from the EMS thread who fuse with their couches due to immobility and poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 18:07
|
|
|
Felix_Cat posted:García's story is amazing. He manages to so completely fool the nazis that he gets their top medal, they never realise what happened even after the war happened, and they paid him a bunch of cash for his (non-existent) network of informers. They did a great job of keeping the lie that Garcia was a dedicated nazi going despite him giving them false info. In the D-day landings for example, first he tells them that the attack is not going to happen at Normandy, it'll be somewhere else. Then the attack happens at Normandy...so his cover is blown right? No he tells them this is just a diversionary attack, the real attack is still going to happen elsewhere so keep those units in reserve! Then when the supposed real attack never occurs the story becomes "Oh Normandy totally was a diversionary attack and the real attack was going to happen somewhere else, for sure. But the diversionary attack at Normandy was so unexpectedly successful that the allies changed their plans and decided to commit their resources there instead". Every lie has some sort of explanation, and they buy it. Other techniques included sending the Germans real intelligence of military value, but timing it to arrive just too late to use. Honestly, if someone told me that Operation Bodyguard at one point included fart cushions and fake mustaches I wouldn't be that surprised. Basically:  -Let's make Patton lead a fake military unit, that'll make him good and mad
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2016 18:49
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:The incredible part is that men were that desperate for formal dancing. Probably less about formal dancing and more about socializing and dancing in general. Humans are really, really social and loneliness is devastating. Everybody wouldn't be dancing the whole time and I imagine there was a lot of laughing and goofing off. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the guys being "women" were hamming it up for laughs then somebody else would take a turn. Sounds more like just making do with what you had handy. People like to dance and that's probably one of the main dance things everybody there knew. It was probably a big party with a band made out of whichever locals could play instruments. There was probably also a lot of booze.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 01:45
|
|
|
Male intimacy was not seen as being "gay" in the 19th and early 20th centuries:    
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 04:14
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:Male intimacy was not seen as being "gay" in the 19th and early 20th centuries: At the same time, I get the feeling that a lot of legitimate homosexual feelings were repressed as "typical male bonding" and nobody really wants to talk about it. Even today, you get a lot of historians who awkwardly shuffle away when you suggest that a historical display of affection may have been something a little more than friendship.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 04:48
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:At the same time, I get the feeling that a lot of legitimate homosexual feelings were repressed as "typical male bonding" and nobody really wants to talk about it. Even today, you get a lot of historians who awkwardly shuffle away when you suggest that a historical display of affection may have been something a little more than friendship. I remember reading a book called "Leviathan" which all but called Herman Melville gay. Though the guy writing it wasn't a proper historian. Anyone got any sources on that?
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 08:50
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:I remember reading a book called "Leviathan" which all but called Herman Melville gay. Though the guy writing it wasn't a proper historian. Anyone got any sources on that? Well, if Ishmael is supposed to be the author-stand-in, then the first encounter with Queequeg is pretty revealing
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 12:16
|
|
|
Two historical facts I'd like to hear more about :TapTheForwardAssist posted:I recall clearly in the 2003 Iraq invasion, counter-battery fire was one of the biggest worries the artillery guys had since the Iraqis had these fine Austrian howitzers that slightly outranged ours. Not that it ended up mattering much since we either pulverized those from the air or called their Iraqi commander's cell-phone and talked him into sending everyone home on leave that week and just lay low until this all blows over. In retrospect, "battery defense", protecting the battery from ground attacks, given all the irregular units that started running around, should've been a much bigger worry. Quidam Viator posted:However, put simply, the idea of "bicamerality", that shared agency between the "identity" of the left-brain, speech-producing, "rational" mind, and the "intuition" of the right-brain, abstract, "imaginative" brain is not an eliminative concept. People like to reduce evolutions into hard transitions from one thing to another. If you read that McAuliffe article on Aeon, you'll see that there's an immense amount of evolutionary crossover between what we adapted to do just as animals, what we adapted to 50,000 years ago as pre-conscious humans, and what we adapted to during the rise of agriculture 10 kya, the rise of language 5kya, and a bunch of stages since then.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 13:14
|
|
|
They might have meant the rise of written language from about 3000 BCE on, because language itself is way older
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 13:23
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:I remember reading a book called "Leviathan" which all but called Herman Melville gay. Though the guy writing it wasn't a proper historian. Anyone got any sources on that? Melville was married for over forty years and had four kids. If he was a homosexual, he did such a good job of hiding it that we have no evidence whatsoever for the claim, apart from the fact that some of his works contain homoerotic elements.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 13:38
|
|
|
He could have been bisexual.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 13:44
|
|
|
WickedHate posted:He could have been bisexual. It's entirely possible, or possible that he was into jacking off to cartoons of anthropomorphic animals for that matter, but it's the same kind of "evidence" that allows charlatans to deduce that Shakespeare was craving teenage boys' asses. As far as we know, both these men restricted themselves to heterosexual relationships for their entire lives.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 14:06
|
|
|
skasion posted:Melville was married for over forty years and had four kids. If he was a homosexual, he did such a good job of hiding it that we have no evidence whatsoever for the claim, apart from the fact that some of his works contain homoerotic elements. I'm not saying that Melville was gay, but considering how hard it would've been to openly gay then it wouldn't be that weird if he tried to bury those feelings as best as he could.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 14:24
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:I'm not saying that Melville was gay, but considering how hard it would've been to openly gay then it wouldn't be that weird if he tried to bury those feelings as best as he could. It's tricky because it was in vogue to basically suspect every historical figure as being secretly gay because it was controversial so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Especially artistic types.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 14:27
|
|
|
RagnarokAngel posted:It's tricky because it was in vogue to basically suspect every historical figure as being secretly gay because it was controversial so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Especially artistic types. The party of Lincoln.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 14:29
|
|
|
But Oscar Wilde was surely straight, right?
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 14:50
|
|
|
'X was gay' is the historiography version of 'You can't prove God isn't real!'.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 15:03
|
|
|
yeah of course you can't prove that a person in history was gay unless they explicitly said "i'm gay" you also can't prove that a person in history was straight unless they explicitly said "i'm straight" for the exact same reason, though, which is a concept which somehow gets ignored a lot more than the first one
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 15:38
|
|
|
I'm given to understand that, for a lot of western history, the stigma wasn't necessarily (it was a stigma, but not the main one associated with homosexuality) on whether or not you were gay (or, perhaps more accurately, whether you were a man who had sex with other men) so much as it was on whether you were the dominant or submissive partner. You get stuff like discussions over whether the Roman Emperor Elagabalus might have been transgender, and it's certainly a possibility, but I'm informed that you have to account for the fact that many of the sources we have about the man came from historians who were out to discredit him, not just because of political animosity, but because he was known to be a bottom in his sexual relationships with other men, and being a bottom was where the stigma lay for them. Wheat Loaf has a new favorite as of 15:40 on Dec 15, 2016 |
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 15:38
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:Male intimacy was not seen as being "gay" in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Aw, heck, that just exemplifies the lack of chairs in the 19th century.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 15:47
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:I'm given to understand that, for a lot of western history, the stigma wasn't necessarily (it was a stigma, but not the main one associated with homosexuality) on whether or not you were gay (or, perhaps more accurately, whether you were a man who had sex with other men) so much as it was on whether you were the dominant or submissive partner. It varied from culture to culture. One of the challenges is impressing our modern ideas of queer-ness on the past and how it's difficult to ignore the lens we've grown up in when evaluating the past. Trying to make a generalized statement about "homosexuality was ok if x" is a bit of a fools errand working cross-cultural and cross-time.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 16:04
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:I'm given to understand that, for a lot of western history, the stigma wasn't necessarily (it was a stigma, but not the main one associated with homosexuality) on whether or not you were gay (or, perhaps more accurately, whether you were a man who had sex with other men) so much as it was on whether you were the dominant or submissive partner.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 16:05
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:Ok, in Rome, but was that a thing in Christian Europe? I don't know; I wouldn't imagine so, no. Homosexuality was illegal for a very long time and you'd be prosecuted and either fined or jailed if you were discovered, but at least in Britain, by the time you got to the late Victorian era, a lot of the time (at least in high society) it was something people knew about and didn't discuss because it wasn't fit for polite conversation. Anyway, another fact I learned today is that during the Second World War, Enoch Powell was mistaken for a German spy (because he was once heard singing the Horst Wessel Lied in perfect German) and for a Japanese spy (because, no joke, he was recovering from jaundice at the time).
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 16:40
|
|
|
We'll never know for a lot of people because they didn't talk about it, and even if it was referenced it would often be referenced obliquely enough that it's not clear. Since it's also often been an insult, the people who might bring it up are also the people most likely to be lying about it. So it's a big ol' "who knows" for a lot of them. Hell, historians still waffle about Buchanan and they're right, it comes right up to the line of "I love cock!!!!" being part of the State of the Union, but as it happens there isn't proof-proof. he was super gay though
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 17:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 11:27 |
|
|
I seem to remember that a male couple were prosecuted in I think Renaissance Venice for having entered a kind of "same-sex union". They'd sworn each other love and fidelity, and I think the main problem was supposed to have been the swearing, not the homosexuality. But of course I can't find a citation now, so add huge grains of salt to taste.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2016 17:58
|
|
