apparently Socrates was bisexual?
Why are people applying labels to people who didn’t even have the same concepts of identity and individuality to us?
As far as I know the earliest evidence in western history for even the categories of heterosexual and homosexual were in the 1600s when philosophy and religion began to understand humans as plural and not universal.
Socrates was not straight, bisexual, asexual, or homosexual. Unless you can come up with some writing where Socrates claims that he is x category in his sexuality and this x category corresponds to a category today and had a continuous tradition from antiquity to modernity, in the way that the identity of “molly” in the 1600s corresponds to gay today, what you are doing is ideological. It’s a high form of liberalism, the belief that throughout all of human history humans have always been the same and that we have just been simply “progressing” in a linear fashion, political forms such as fascism, communism, monarchism, are all “hiccups” that, according to this pensée unique, will eventually fade away leaving liberalism as the “end of history”
Socrates lived in a society that saw only free men, and only freemen from the poleis as full humans. Women were, with rare exceptions, viewed as incomplete and thus not worthy of love and sexual pleasure, scholars are even debating on if the history of romantic love as the ideal for marriage extends back before early modern times (1500s) in Europe. Marriage in antiquity was meant either for forging alliances between families and/or for producing sons as heirs. Therefore the “bisexuality” of Greeks at this time was literally the fact that only free and civicly-engaged men “loved” one another. Women were viewed merely as domestic servants and bearers of children.
My area of specialty is far removed from antiquity so I don’t know much more about this, but I would guess that they didn’t have a term for sexual identity at all, that merely to be a free Greek man in a polis meant that you would love and have sex for pleasure with men and that women just cleaned, cooked, and did other domestic duties for you when they weren’t in labor with you 5th son.
However, it is important to note that Socrates loved men even if we shouldn’t apply an identity to describe this love that didn’t exist at all in his lifetime. We should do this to shatter the myth that heterosexuality is how some are treating homosexuality and bisexuality, universal and having an unbroken history as an identity, including subcultures that carried on traditions, from the dawn of humanity to the present.
I haven’t read it, but basically this idea is in much more detailed form in Foucault’s History of Sexuality
History is debatable, we should not be trying to set up our own mirrored monolithic historiography to compete with the dominant liberal historiography.
tl;dr Lao Tzu had anarchistic ideas but an anarchist that does not make Lao Tzu
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