I mean, yes and no? that was my immediate reaction too, because the whole idea of "lover" vs "beloved" is on some level about the lover giving up his power to his otherwise unempowered beloved, and I think the RAH RAH CHASTITY thing that you come across in some texts is about the power that's found in the ability to consent. (lol watch me poorly rephrase concepts adopted from skimming BDSM instructional manuals hurrrrrrr.) Halperin has this semi-annoying tendency to completely shut down my objections in a footnote as soon as I think of them, haha, so I will just retype his note. he's way more eloquent than I am anyway XD
"This account of the principles that structured sexual and social roles in classical Athens does not capture, of course, what the sensation of being in love was like: I am interested here not in erotic phenomenology but in the social articulation of sexual categories and in the public meanings attached to sex. Hence, my discussion of the male citizen's social and sexual precedence is not intended either to convey what an erotic relation felt like to him or to obscure the extent to which he may have experienced being on love as a loss of mastery - as "enslavement" to his beloved or to his own desire. Such feelings on a lover's part were evidently conventional (see Dover [1974], 208; Golden [1984], 313-16; Foucault [1985], 65-70) and possibly even cherished (see Xenophon, Symposium 4.14 and Oeconomicus 7.42). Indeed, the citizen-lover could afford to luxuriate in his sense of helplessness or erotic dependency precisely because his self-abandonment was at some level a chosen strategy and, in any case, his actual position of social preëminence was not in jeopardy." (Halperin 32)
so I guess I worry that while I can totally relate to that sort of relationship and I can see how other people can too, we might still be overriding the social reality (that what we think of as the romance is just window-dressing and play-acting on top of a potentially ugly and only semi-consensual relationship) in our determination to find something we can relate to, especially in poetry and literary texts like the Symposium. I mean, very obviously some men loved their wives - there are Latin funeral inscriptions that make me want to sob my eyes out - and some men loved their boyfriends, but it makes me uncomfortable to think that I'm romanticizing the system. because let's not kid ourselves, the system is fucking creepy and based on a desire to perpetuate the patriarchy and institutionalized misogyny.
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"This account of the principles that structured sexual and social roles in classical Athens does not capture, of course, what the sensation of being in love was like: I am interested here not in erotic phenomenology but in the social articulation of sexual categories and in the public meanings attached to sex. Hence, my discussion of the male citizen's social and sexual precedence is not intended either to convey what an erotic relation felt like to him or to obscure the extent to which he may have experienced being on love as a loss of mastery - as "enslavement" to his beloved or to his own desire. Such feelings on a lover's part were evidently conventional (see Dover [1974], 208; Golden [1984], 313-16; Foucault [1985], 65-70) and possibly even cherished (see Xenophon, Symposium 4.14 and Oeconomicus 7.42). Indeed, the citizen-lover could afford to luxuriate in his sense of helplessness or erotic dependency precisely because his self-abandonment was at some level a chosen strategy and, in any case, his actual position of social preëminence was not in jeopardy." (Halperin 32)
so I guess I worry that while I can totally relate to that sort of relationship and I can see how other people can too, we might still be overriding the social reality (that what we think of as the romance is just window-dressing and play-acting on top of a potentially ugly and only semi-consensual relationship) in our determination to find something we can relate to, especially in poetry and literary texts like the Symposium. I mean, very obviously some men loved their wives - there are Latin funeral inscriptions that make me want to sob my eyes out - and some men loved their boyfriends, but it makes me uncomfortable to think that I'm romanticizing the system. because let's not kid ourselves, the system is fucking creepy and based on a desire to perpetuate the patriarchy and institutionalized misogyny.
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