Three Wise Men in a Bed: Bedsharing and Sexuality in Medieval Europe (2014)
notchesblog.com
notchesblog.com
The range of acceptable "straight" behavior has greatly narrowed in the modern west. I've read that in India, it's still absolutely unremarkable for two men to walk down the streets holding hands, even though homosexuality is vastly less accepted than in the US.
I feel like we're in a weird place in the US where there's no room in our culture for male physical closeness that isn't sexual. (And it's pretty common to hear people say that the bits that persist, like e.g. wrestling or butt-pats in football, are secretly gay/repressed.)
Optimistically, I'd say it's a side-effect of becoming more aware and accepting of homosexuality. It's still new and a bit of a battleground. As the newness fades away and it becomes simply normal and less polarized, more room will bloom again in the middle for an understanding of non-sexual forms of closeness.
PS: WW_ aka 'Professional' wrestling is often called gay because it's a male version of soap opera mixed with theater. Actual wrestling has long held 'sexual' overtones likely due to what it looks like to observers. where boxing/judo/karate sparing can also have a lot of physical contact, but rarely comes off as gay.
That's a tautology. dilap's point was that our views in society have changed, and acceptable physical contact between males has narrowed in modern history.
The accepted English demonym for inhabitants of the United States of America is American. It has been this way for 200 years. We call ourselves American, and every English speaking country calls us American.
The only measure of correctness for language is use, and when speaking in English, American is only commonly used in one way--in English, American is almost universally unambiguous. No other country name contains the word America, and no one else commonly refers to themselves as American in English.
But thinking about it, I guess "American" isn't really the most precise term, since there are a bunch of other countries in the Americas. I might be more aware of this, subconsciously, than your typical citizen of the USA because my wife is Mexican.
Googling around shows I'm certainly not the only person using the term "USian".
It's interesting how it's impossible to choose language without also choosing political sides. :)
>Googling around shows I'm certainly not the only person using the term "USian".
You're not, but nearly everyone using it is doing so out of some desire to avoid a non existent controversy. It's also used so rarely that you'll often run into people who've never heard the term.
In addition, it's very difficult to pronounce and will therefore likely never be widely adopted. Do you say "you-es-ians" when speaking?
It's a very similar situation to Australia. There is more than one country that is part of the Australian continent, yet people from the Commonwealth of Australia unambiguously refer to themselves as Australian.
It just seemed a natural term to me. I promise I wasn't using it to avoid a controversy (which I'm not even aware of!). In my experience with spanish speakers, they'll usually just say "gringos" (not as a derogatory term), but they'll also happily use "americanos" -- and don't seem to have any problem w/ it. (Tho Spanish it is literally an ambiguous word; you have to deduce from context whether it means from the USA or from the continent.)
I'd posit the only measure of correctness for language is the ability of being understood, even before the use. So when I read and understand USian, I don't really care that much that it's less used than American to deem it "incorrect".
If you don't like it, say so, but limited usage is a small reason to consider something "wrong".
The ability to be understood is directly tied to use. If you use nonstandard constructions, fewer people will understand you. Less people understand USian than American precisely because it's not in common use.
>but limited usage is a small reason to consider something "wrong".
No, most linguists consider lack of use pretty much the only reason to consider something "wrong". When something is used enough to be in common use is a bit arbitrary, but USian has definitely not met that standard. You might as well start using USican or USperson.
Beyond being very uncommon, it's also distracting even to people who do understand it. The capitalization is non-standard, and it's difficult to pronounce.
The purpose of writing is to effectively communicate, and unless your goal is to purposely pull people out of the flow of your writing, it's not a good idea to use it.
>Beyond being very uncommon, it's also distracting even to people who do understand it. The capitalization is non-standard, and it's difficult to pronounce.
The data points from this thread paint the opposite picture. You seem to be the only person distracted by it or having difficult pronouncing it.
It always irks me that some linguists dislike the "changing" nature of living languages. Words and phrases go in and out of style, new phrases and words are invented, and some of those new words and phrases will make it into the common lexicon. Others will die out.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with them using USian other than it not being an "official" word. The intended meaning seems to be well understood by those reading it and there is no reason to assume motives, that behavior is annoying in and of itself. There is enough context clues in the message that even if the meaning isn't picked up on immediately, one can infer it.
If the crux of your argument rests on people being confused by the word - the same could be said about a plethora of words.
A word may be in common use in the future, or it may have been in common use in the past, but if it isn't currently in common use, using it decreases your understandability.
>The data points from this thread paint the opposite picture. You seem to be the only person distracted by it or having difficult pronouncing it.
2 out of 5 people in the thread who have expressed an opinion said it was distracting and hard to pronounce. 40% of our small sample size finds it distracting. I also have a fair amount of upvotes for my original comment.
>If the crux of your argument rests on people being confused by the word - the same could be said about a plethora of words.
If the percentage of your intended audience that is distracted by or doesn't understand "plethora" is larger than the percentage that prefers it to "a lot", I'd argue that you shouldn't use "plethora" either.
>The intended meaning seems to be well understood by those reading it and there is no reason to assume motives, that behavior is annoying in and of itself.
It's not common and was created for political purposes. There is a decrease in understandability over using the accepted term, what other purpose is there for using it?
The term was specifically created and promoted by people who dislike the term American.
How do you propose a word become common to use without early adopters? If people did as you suggested and never used a word until it was in common use, nobody would use the word and it would never enter common use.
"Common use" first and foremost denotes that people use the word. It's a requirement. A word has to be used and be picked up upon by others to either replace a synonym or take on a new meaning. There has to be early adopters of the word that are using it before it is in common usage.
You're right, but using a word that may be popular in the future decreases the effectiveness of your writing today. Are you writing to effectively communicate, or are you writing to spread the adoption of new words for future generations?
I'm also not arguing that no one should ever use uncommon words. I'm arguing that there is a cost to using uncommon words, so the benefit should be worth the cost.
Usually a word becomes common because there is a need for it, because it fills a niche better than available words--either because it is easier to say or write, or because it is more descriptive than available terms. If that is the case, the word will spread incredibly fast. There are many examples, the most recent I can think of is "selfie". It became common over the course of a few months.
I wouldn't advise that an individual writer should have started using the word selfie 2 years ago simply because it was going to become common, anymore than I would've advised Charles Dickens to describe writing love letters as sexting.
USian has no benefit over American other than political, and people have been pushing for it's adoption for decades. It hasn't happened, it's not likely to happen, and the only result of using it, is that your writing is less effective.
I checked the list of sovereign countries. It's actually true.
Interestingly, the anti-gay law in India (Article 377) is an 1860 law that was brought over by the British. Hindu culture is resplendent with gay and transsexual gods. We dont have a deeply religious or cultural basis for an anti-gay law.
How unsurprising. And sad.
[1] http://www.bu.edu/bucflp/files/2012/01/Reserve-Bank-of-India...
And whereas in the present disorganization of the monetary systems of the world it is not possible to determine what will be suitable as a permanent basis for the Indian monetary system;
But whereas it is expedient to make temporary provision on the basis of the existing monetary system, and to leave the question of the monetary standard best suited to India to be considered when the international monetary position has become sufficiently clear and stable to make it possible to frame permanent measures
[2] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/finance/the...
I didn't know the British still had a hand in Indian economy but I guess they still need their old 'supervisor' behind the curtain.
Not sure about India, but I've heard that in the Arab world, and seen in Ethiopia, that men holding hands doesn't imply homosexuality. Different cultures have different rules.
A man kissing a man on the cheek in France doesn't mean they are gay.
Even that is too frequently associated with romance by a small but vocal population in the US.
My boys get hugs and kisses regardless. Love shouldn't have to be defended from others, but alas PDA for children is a huge social issue in modern America - and England too, I have noticed. In some ways, our societies are terribly pornographic.
I don't know if I could be as un-self-conscious with a daughter, at that age, in public. And that troubles me.
Good for you for not letting the SJWs get to you.
However. I have read in the news about parents being arrested for allowing their children -- 9- and 10-year-olds, not young children -- to play unsupervised, or (in one case) to hang out at a mall while their parent was at a job interview there, for what some busybody thought was too long. 50 years ago, one could never have imagined the police being called -- or if they had been called, actually arresting the parent -- in such a situation. Whatever label one puts on it, there has been a change in American culture that I think is not entirely salutary. Protecting children is important, but people are jumping to conclusions that are not actually warranted by the facts and nuances of the situation.
Ideally the "rule" is a guideline, and is only ever used as part of a package of information to protect children (who are by definition vulnerable).
So "left young children alone" gets at most a friendly chat with some advice about home safety, while "left children at home alone" combined with "arrested for drunk and disorderly" and "arrested for solicitation and drug possession" gets a friendly chats combined with targetted drug and alcohol rehab.
It's weird that CPS bother taken action in these cases. They're so busy with other cases where the need is unambiguously there.
Yes, it's absolutely terrible. But when you're a single mom and you have to go out and make a living it helps if you raise your kids in a way that teaches them to take responsibility from an early age.
My sister and I never thought this was 'dangerous', we walked hand-in-hand to school, crossed at the lights like were were taught to and never were late or went missing.
For sure the world was safer back then, today it may not be possible to live like this but I'm pretty happy that we had the experience of being trusted with some responsibility from an early age onward.
The survivor bias is non-existent, there were tons of kids like us back then and I don't recall any of them that didn't make it because of being unable to walk home from school or being home for an hour or two un-attended.
The world was more dangerous back then.
There was more crime. Products were less safe (eg cars were more likely to kill pedestrians in accidents) etc.
> The survivor bias is non-existent,
The person most likely to harm your child is your other child. While the numbers are tricky we think sibling sexual abuse is about 5 times more common than paternal sexual abuse in the US. (This is from reported figures. There's a lot of attention on paternal abuse, there's not much attention of sibling sexual abuse, so we think that sibling abuse is less reported than paternal abuse even though they're both under-reported).
In the UK one in twenty children have been sexually abused. http://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neg... it's unfeasable that none of the tons of kids like you were unaffected by this, or were not neglected to the level of abuse.
I'm not a big fan of the nanny state, I think life is full of risks and if you arrange society in such a way that all the risks are gone you will squeeze the life out of it as well. It's a hard balance to get right but I feel that going overboard on the protective side is not the answer.
But from the reserved side of the exchange, I definitely tend hug my dad when I greet him or leave.
Extreme logic alert...you say "as a father, I can't think of anything worse than some social entity claiming that my affection for my children has a nefarious intent." You can think of _nothing_ worse? Really? Where do you live I want to move there.
* emphasis mine
edit: For the record, I didn't downvote you.
What do feminists have to do with this? A typical feminist position is that our society expects dads to be cold and distant and leave parenting to the women, and that this is a bad and sexist assumption. Feminists explicitly call for men to be more involved in parenting and childcare.
It would make just as much sense if he'd blamed this problem on communists.
That perception does exist, I personally experienced it at a park less than a week ago. It is an open question who is "responsible" for it.
I'm confused how someone would not want to ask those questions.
I think the issue is that it's hard to nail down what is "typical". I think you are certainly right, but there is "typical" (i.e. majority of feminists/people think this way) and there is "socially visible" (e.g. SRS/Tumblr, etc). When a person uses the SJW acronym they are definitely talking about the latter, but it's unfortunate if they conflate that with mainstream feminism: that men should be more affectionate and involved in parenting and not emotionally repressed in Western society, as opposed to the tripe that you find on the dumber parts of the web.
It's not like "TERF" or "anti-sex-worker" or other disparaging terms that nonetheless have specific meaning. There's simply no pattern to who gets called a SJW, other than that they pissed off gamergaters or MRAs.
The term may be more broadly applied in GamerGate/MRA circles or whatever, but who gives a shit? Those people are assholes, and they don't represent even a significant minority of anything, to say nothing of majority. Why should anyone care what they think, or what loaded and mangled terminology they use to describe their perceived enemies? None of those idiots would last long on HN, or any of the more reasonable communities on Reddit, much less anywhere in real life, unless they kept their outrageous and wrong opinions to themselves. Which is as it should be.
(I'm aware that there are people who claim to be fighting for social justice but are in reality weaponizing other people's struggles as ammo in their own private feuds. This is unfortunately a thing, but the right way to handle that is to recognize that they are not really SJWs, not to accept SJW as a bad thing.)
Still, I think the point of it is like calling someone a "morality crusader". Morality is good (if you don't mean "hating gays" by morality, mind you), but if someone called me a morality crusader, I'd get that they thought I was pompous, self-important and meddling in other people's business.
It's classical puritan pearl clutching with the sacred cows of the left instead of the right, totally annoying, and totally completely normal and well within the tradition of American moral panics.
much more true in southern France or in Italy than it would be in Paris.
We call it أنجاجيه from the French word Engagee meaning engaged but this is only reserved exclusively for teens/high-schoolers who are BFFs or very close and not for every acquaintance but as you grow up you abandon those bromance/frat stuff and get tired of it.
However, holding hands incessantly and crossing fingers and stuff is frowned upon and could raise some eyebrows or suspicion in people around you.
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/our_real_first_gay_president...
Of course, given his weakly pro-slavery and otherwise terrible presidency, no one feels the need to devote a lot of publicity to this fact.
As for Buchanan, that article feels rather polemical. Is there a more authoritative summary anywhere?
Totally. When I'm visiting India and taking a walk with cousins, it's almost awkward to not throw your arms around while we are walking. This is very visible during school lunch hours in India: you will see endless sights of straight men and women holding hands or with their arms around their best friend of same sex.
"Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."
http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/775/chapter-94-a-sque...
Moby Dick has a ton of homoerotic scenes like the man donning the whale's penis skin as a robe, or the various bed-sharing scenes with Ishmael and Queequeg including gems like "Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy we were," and "Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner."
The passage linked-to above doesn't appear sexual to me, but rather a reflection of the affection a person can feel for his fellows, and the (non-sexual) sensual joys that exist in this world.
While Moby Dick was slightly more subtle, Billy Budd and Melville's letters to Hawthorne and are even more heavily loaded with homoeroticism than Moby Dick. Homosexuality isn't a new thing.
Could be right, could be wrong, but the gp seemed to be dismissing even the possibility out of hand.
But let's not forget that until recently heating was extremely primitive, houses had almost no insulation, and European winters seem to have been colder and longer-lasting.
Staying warm and dry was a real problem, and it wasn't unusual for families and sometimes friends to share a bed because of it.
There's probably a PhD waiting for someone who can write up a thorough survey of the effects of improved heating and lighting on relationships and sexuality.
I'm really curious how pre antique cultures, tribes for instance, dealt with this.
But you do the same to a person of opposite sex in public, it would raise some eyebrows. Unless, you are in a big metropolitan city.
Study abroad should be more than transporting your ass to a different geographic location, it should mean exchanging cultural mores and ideas, but I digress.
Such a behavior would raise an eyebrow in the US, but it was completely normal in that corner of the world at the time.
That doesn't read to me like a statement that they shared a bed, necessarily (though I acknowledge that, even if they did share a bed, it wouldn't be sexually suggestive). I read it as "they sat up all night and didn't go to bed".
Other gay icons from a slightly creative historical reading: King David and Jonathan from the bible.
In the English speaking west we are evolving into a world of behavioral taboos because so many behaviors are seen as heuristics that identify us as something.
As Nigel Havers said to Christian Bale's character in Empire of the Sun: Perhaps we should "try not to think so much".
https://melaniekillingervowell.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/b...
http://upload.democraticunderground.com/top10/09/362_kiss1.j...
Because of that, it seems that it's quite difficult to describe sleeping with someone without having sex (and without any intent to) if I believe: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/148323/is-there-a...
It would be interesting to study the interaction between the language and the behaviour in this case.
There is such a term: to be bedfellows. But the practise is so uncommon these days that many living English speakers only think of it as metaphorical expression.
"And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh." - Matthew Chapter 2
http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Matthew-Chapter-2/
Scholars think that there were actually hundreds of wise men who brought the gifts.
I'm guessing that Philip and Richard were sharing female sexual partners.
This just keeps being repeated, as if it's fact, but it's just not true. In fact, it's less true than the opposite conclusion.
It's been shown, repeatedly that toy preference, conflict resolution style, gender identity, and now even the genetic programming of the immune system are very different between the sexes, and exist at birth.
I'm not aware of any reason to believe sexual preference doesn't fall into the same bucket. In fact, wasn't this the entire basis of the gay rights movement?
The literature is extensive, and I don't have time to list all the references at the moment, but here's a couple to start off with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamen...
For further reading, you can browse through "The Optimistic Child" by Doctor Martin Seligman.
No, the basis for the gay rights movement was that being gay is not a justification for denying someone regular human rights. There are some people who only conditionally agree with this, if being gay is a way you are born and have no choice in it. There are other people who think it is repugnant to suggest that it is only ok for someone to be gay if they can't help it.