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Happy Downfall of Sauron Day, '11
Mar. 25th, 2011 11:11 amWanting both to support activity on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
asexual_fandom and celebrate Downfall of Sauron Day (March 25), I'm going to write a bit about culture and asexuality in Middle-earth.
The language of sexual orientation codifies (a)sexual feelings and practices shaped by a combination of biological drives and cultural construction. For example, men have always slept with men, but the prevalence and expression of this drive is strongly culturally conditioned, and it is somewhat misleading to refer to the relationship between two male lovers in Sparta as "gay."
Middle-earth is fictional space, constructed (in its original literary form) by rather a devout and quite heterosexual Catholic, who was raised among the trappings of late-Victorian morality. So we might argue that the reason Middle-earth presents as a strongly heterosexual culture in which everyone is a virgin until married (even if it takes millennia) is that it's shaped to the moral fantasies of its staid author and, thus, is simply unrealistic.
Fair enough, but we don't need to stop there, because Tolkien created a civilization whose inner coherence transcends its author's specific perspectives.
( Read more... )
asexual_fandom and celebrate Downfall of Sauron Day (March 25), I'm going to write a bit about culture and asexuality in Middle-earth.The language of sexual orientation codifies (a)sexual feelings and practices shaped by a combination of biological drives and cultural construction. For example, men have always slept with men, but the prevalence and expression of this drive is strongly culturally conditioned, and it is somewhat misleading to refer to the relationship between two male lovers in Sparta as "gay."
Middle-earth is fictional space, constructed (in its original literary form) by rather a devout and quite heterosexual Catholic, who was raised among the trappings of late-Victorian morality. So we might argue that the reason Middle-earth presents as a strongly heterosexual culture in which everyone is a virgin until married (even if it takes millennia) is that it's shaped to the moral fantasies of its staid author and, thus, is simply unrealistic.
Fair enough, but we don't need to stop there, because Tolkien created a civilization whose inner coherence transcends its author's specific perspectives.
( Read more... )
