Re: Were there heterosexuals in pre-capitalist Europe?

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Comrades,
    Phil Ferguson writes,

Phil,
Actually, it is precisely these 'Euro-centered/modern assumptions about
sexuality' that Yoshie and I (and Carroll) are avoiding by *historicising*
homosexuality and heterosexuality.

It is not us who are taking a modern-day sexual category of industrial
capitalist society and applying it willy-nilly to a whole set of different
societies and cultures and times, is it?

Doyle
Sounds like a tautology to me.  Yoshie and Carroll and you all claim that a
sexual identity that arose in this time in capitalism is only an expression
of these times and what happens between two people in previous epochs was
not that.  Instead all that happened before was just plain fucking since
conceptually they didn't see themselves as "Queers" or homosexuals in the
Modern sense and couldn't have invented a social relationship at all like we
have now.

How does one then explain the cultural variations from various regions of
the world in homosexual relationships?  Historically they started in
England?

Taking Yoshie's example of Japanese variable attitudes toward feudal
sexuality, is Japan really that closely following Anglo culture in terms of
how homosexual relationships form and root themselves in that culture?

Carroll's point concerning Teenagers is in some fundamental way
demonstrating that these concepts invented right now are spurious to our
times.  Is a Native American an invention of our times?  What about being
Jewish, or being a woman.  If the substance of things is an identity due to
a specific time period where does this stopped being relativistic?  How are
we not wholly relativistic?  In these discussions about identity there is
underlying these arguments a lack of understanding of how consciousness
works.  I can't understand how an identity arises in how human brains work.
We then argue about how a period of capitalism produces a homosexual
identity which did not exist before the English laws against homosexuality.
I can't see in that why various regions have different rates and forms, I
can't get my teeth in to the material reality of the concept.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor