The "What Are You Doing This Moment" Thread
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- Start date
Oh no Dave has a myspace....
Making Tea and than sleeping. I have not not had a good sleep since the Interpol show.
Valerie
¯\(ã)/¯
- Aug 29, 2005
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You must have tiny hands then, no offense. All Fender necks are comfortable for me.
@ Alter: have you seen the Jaguar basses? Far out.
Zephyrus
Tyrants and Slaves
Just finished my paper. I was shooting for 5 pages, but went on a hot streak and got it to 6 1/2 pages. For anyone who cares to read it, here it is...
Sexual Superiority in the Ancient Mediterranean
Mythology and the Epic Tradition
Jeremy Swist – Honors 111 – 10/14/07
Ancient texts, whether historical, religious, or poetic, have taught us most of how the peoples of thousands of years ago viewed humanity in a social and theological context. In the absence of scientific progress and philosophy, the social roles of men and women were often justified by the mythos of that culture. In the Near East, that mythos was compiled into the Hebrew Torah, the Bible’s Old Testament. Further west, the cultures of the Aegean Sea did reverence to the Greek pantheon of immortal gods and goddesses. Common thought assumes a deep contrast between the two ancient cultures—one a deeply moralistic monotheism; the other a relatively hedonistic polytheism. However, these differences, when examining the mytho-historical texts of both cultures, do not imply a correlation to either society’s gender roles. Homer and Moses undoubtedly worshipped different gods, but the patriarchies of their respective societies were strikingly similar.
To understand the roots of Greek and Hebrew gender superiority, it is best to review the origins of both mythological traditions. The textual bases of Hebrew creationism are embodied in the first chapters of Genesis, in which a male deity, the nameless God, fashions our present world and out of it, humanity itself. The foundations of a social patriarchy are already established by God’s assumed gender, but are tangibly reinforced by the creation of Adam, the first human, a man. “…but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner…and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman…” (Genesis 2:20-22) It appears, based on the text that man was God’s ultimate creation and that woman was only created as means of assistance and reproduction of man. So from its origins, the humankind of the ancient Hebrews had male superiority justified by divine favor.
Greek mythology, when traced to its theological origins, follows a slightly more complex path to patriarchy. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, the universe was asexually spawned from Chaos, a random, shapeless storm of disjointed matter. The word Chaos, in Greek and Latin, is a neuter noun, allying itself to neither gender. Among the various realms born of Chaos, was Gaia, or Mother Earth. A subsequent virgin birth saw Uranus, Father Sky, born from Gaia. The first pantheon was in place, a matriarchy. The earliest Achaeans may have reflected in their own societies the gender roles of the theological cosmos. What caused the reversal of the gender hierarchy has two possible explanations. First is that since the male Sky was placed over the female Earth, this superposition could imply a superiority. Since the Gods reside in the heavens, humankind would naturally construct their society in correlation to the immortals. This reasoning is strengthened by the second explanation for Greek gender reversal: a theological revolution. The first sexual union of Earth and Sky brought forth Cronus, Rhea, and the Titans. Cronus rebelled against his father Uranus and established the second pantheon. He took Rhea to be ruled over as his wife and sister, and went further to claim dominance over all the cosmos, Mother Earth included. Thus, the immortal patriarchy was in place and humanity followed suit. When Zeus and the Olympians took over, the third pantheon, Homer’s pantheon, maintained the gender statuses of the second order. Zeus ruled over all the gods, as a male king shall rule over his wife and subjects.
Therefore, though of starkly different theological origins, the divine plan for human sexuality arrived at the same end. Greek mythology was adopted by the Romans, who ruled the ancient world and thus maintained the patriarchal bias of their gods. When Judeo-Christendom rose to power, it took the dominance of Adam into modern times, where only in the most recent 150 years has this order been challenged and balanced.
Textual evidence for male superiority is shared by both the Hebrew and Hellenistic cultures. The earlier books of the Old Testament are filled with dialogue between men and the divine. Almost never, after the loss of Eden, is there an instance whereby God directly addresses a woman (this leads to an idea of contempt towards women, to be later elaborated). This demonstrates man’s divine favor over woman, as explained by Adam’s conception prior to Eve. The Hebrew Bible clearly shows that man is to govern his race both spiritually and politically as spokesmen of God on Earth. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a Christian elaboration on the Hebrew creation story, only Adam is directly spoken to by God or his angelic messengers, and Eve is only informed through Adam. So even into the seventeenth century this principle of superiority by divine favor still bore the same justifications.
Divine preference for men also applies to Homer’s subject culture. Immortal intervention permeates the Iliad and Odyssey, and just as in the Bible, men are in direct dialogue with the gods, while women are essentially shunned. In a Homeric society, the most prized human values were the capacities for glory in war and imperial wealth. In the context of war, women were seen as the gains of the end rather than assets to the process. In the Iliad, Helen contributed very little to the development of the story; she embodied the war’s cause and solution, rather than a factor to the process. The same can be said for Penelope in The Odyssey: she represents the goal of the hero’s epic journey, rather than a means to its accomplishment. And while the male heroes spilled blood and navigated through monstrous waters, Homer’s women were allocated to the gender’s ordinary societal roles. Helen and Penelope did little more than operate looms, while Chryseis and Briseis, simple priestesses, were treated as booty (in more ways than one). No hyperboles in the women’s department; glory and superhuman qualities were for men only. In the centuries before Athenian democracy, war was national policy, and heroes were the most valuable means to success in conquering wealthy subjects. Women were of little worth because masculine muscle was more effective than diplomacy, and Homer used the gods to drive men towards the spoils of conquest rather than the accords of peace.
Portraying women in their inferior societal roles is by no means unique to these texts; what is more important to understand is how the authors seem to justify female suppression on the grounds of women’s stereotypical natures. Gender suppression could be attributed to scandal. In the Bible, woman is faulted with the one great offense to God. Homer’s women, mortal and immortal, routinely emit an aura of deception and antagonism to the progress of male causes. By assigning such traits to the female characters, Homer may be relaying the common stereotypes of human nature: that women lack moral integrity and honor; they are more susceptible to carnal corruption. Helen, in Homer’s view, is the Iliad’s prime example of how a woman is corrupted by lust and thus causes unfathomable strife for tens of thousands of virtuous men. Helen runs off with Paris by the craft of Aphrodite, a female goddess. Not even the immortal women are immune to stereotypical vices. Hera and Athena lend their aid to the Achaeans purely out of jealousy, because Trojan Paris favored Aphrodite.
Hera’s jealousy would continue past Homer’s epic when the Roman Virgil penned the Aeneid, in which Juno (Hera) further pursues her vendetta against the Trojan survivors as they struggle to re-establish their lost glory. Aeneas, the Trojan hero, is further impeded by Dido, a typical Homeric seductress. Dido proves a mortal hindrance to Aeneas’ grand destiny; it takes the honorable compulsions of Jupiter (Zeus) and Mercury (Hermes), male gods, to sever the love affair, which was in fact a conspiracy by Juno and Venus (Aphrodite), female gods. So it seems that the Homeric tradition actively promotes the carnal generalizations regarding women, mortal and immortal.
The Odyssey makes no exception, either. Circe and Calypso play the standard role of the lustful delays to Odysseus’ journey. Even Penelope, who stays ever true to her absent husband, staves off the suitors by deception. She promises to marry once she completes a tapestry, yet every night she undoes her weaving. It is in this epic, in response to the tragic effects of Helen and Clytemnestra, that Agamemnon and Odysseus clearly promote these sexist sentiments:
“’Ah, what can be more horrible and brutish than a woman when she admits into her thoughts such deeds as these! And what a shameless deed she plotted, to bring about the murder of the husband of her youth! I [Agamemnon] used to think how glad my coming home would be, even to my children and my slaves; but she, intent on such extremity of crime, brought shame upon herself and all of womankind who shall be born hereafter, even on well-doers too.’
“So he spoke, and answering him said [Odysseus]: ‘Alas! The house of Atreus far-seeing Zeus has sorely plagued with women’s arts, from the beginning: for Helen’s sake how many of us died; and Clytaemnestra plotted for you while absent.’”
(Homer, Odyssey 141)
It is an almost gratuitous condemnation of womankind. Antiquity’s arguably most revered poet places contempt upon woman by generalizing her lack of virtue. Surely men are vulnerable to the same vices, but Homer renders them effectively immune; man’s only flaw is pride, hubris, a fault that often underlies ambitions for honor and glory.
Glorification of the self by Homeric heroics is far from the Biblical message. Womanly deeds, the original deed, rather, play a familiar tune to Homer’s display of human nature. Genesis does not stop at Eve’s late creation to justify her subjection to male dominance. It goes so far as to fault womankind with the loss of Paradise and humanity’s subsequent suffering for the millennia prior to Christ’s redemption. The story is familiar enough: Eve, of supposedly weaker virtuous integrity, is successfully tempted by the Serpent (Satan, according to Milton). Here we see the passive shortcomings of the female nature. Eve then actively exhibits her corruption by conducting it to Adam. Milton exacerbates this sexism by absolving Adam of his compliance: he chooses to honorably suffer at his wife’s side rather than inhabit Paradise, severed from her:
“Rather how hast thou yielded to transgress the strict forbiddance, how to violate the sacred fruit forbidden? Some curs’d fraud of enemy hath beguil’d thee, yet unknown, and me [Adam] with thee [Eve] hath ruin’d, for with thee certain my resolution is to die. How can I live without thee, how forego they sweet converse, and love so dearly join’d, to live again in these wild woods forlorn?”
(Milton 294)
And hereby God declares woman shall pay for her sin by eternal submission to man:
“’…yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’
And to the man he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you...”
(Genesis 3:16-17)
The Hebrews credited this as the infallible word of God, and modeled their society accordingly. From that point on in the Old Testament, women never deviate from their divinely assigned role. This may serve as punishment for Eve’s Original Sin, but also as a means to check the stereotypical weakness of female virtue.
Whether a fundamental holy text or a poetic testament to a heroic age, the parallels regarding sexual superiority not only transcend religion, but serve to perpetuate the Western standard of sexism into future eons. Homer’s epic tradition takes the theological sexual hierarchy and perverts by distinguishing men and women by terms of moral integrity. The Hebrew Bible legislates the same principles, but with a significantly more pious audience, needs only one instance to justify woman’s necessity for subservience to man. With a theological foundation, sexism permeated literary tradition throughout antiquity and well beyond. Human nature it is, perhaps historically its most tragic flaw, to generalize human nature itself, whether in regards to race, religion, nationality or, before all others, sex.
Sexual Superiority in the Ancient Mediterranean
Mythology and the Epic Tradition
Jeremy Swist – Honors 111 – 10/14/07
Ancient texts, whether historical, religious, or poetic, have taught us most of how the peoples of thousands of years ago viewed humanity in a social and theological context. In the absence of scientific progress and philosophy, the social roles of men and women were often justified by the mythos of that culture. In the Near East, that mythos was compiled into the Hebrew Torah, the Bible’s Old Testament. Further west, the cultures of the Aegean Sea did reverence to the Greek pantheon of immortal gods and goddesses. Common thought assumes a deep contrast between the two ancient cultures—one a deeply moralistic monotheism; the other a relatively hedonistic polytheism. However, these differences, when examining the mytho-historical texts of both cultures, do not imply a correlation to either society’s gender roles. Homer and Moses undoubtedly worshipped different gods, but the patriarchies of their respective societies were strikingly similar.
To understand the roots of Greek and Hebrew gender superiority, it is best to review the origins of both mythological traditions. The textual bases of Hebrew creationism are embodied in the first chapters of Genesis, in which a male deity, the nameless God, fashions our present world and out of it, humanity itself. The foundations of a social patriarchy are already established by God’s assumed gender, but are tangibly reinforced by the creation of Adam, the first human, a man. “…but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner…and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman…” (Genesis 2:20-22) It appears, based on the text that man was God’s ultimate creation and that woman was only created as means of assistance and reproduction of man. So from its origins, the humankind of the ancient Hebrews had male superiority justified by divine favor.
Greek mythology, when traced to its theological origins, follows a slightly more complex path to patriarchy. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, the universe was asexually spawned from Chaos, a random, shapeless storm of disjointed matter. The word Chaos, in Greek and Latin, is a neuter noun, allying itself to neither gender. Among the various realms born of Chaos, was Gaia, or Mother Earth. A subsequent virgin birth saw Uranus, Father Sky, born from Gaia. The first pantheon was in place, a matriarchy. The earliest Achaeans may have reflected in their own societies the gender roles of the theological cosmos. What caused the reversal of the gender hierarchy has two possible explanations. First is that since the male Sky was placed over the female Earth, this superposition could imply a superiority. Since the Gods reside in the heavens, humankind would naturally construct their society in correlation to the immortals. This reasoning is strengthened by the second explanation for Greek gender reversal: a theological revolution. The first sexual union of Earth and Sky brought forth Cronus, Rhea, and the Titans. Cronus rebelled against his father Uranus and established the second pantheon. He took Rhea to be ruled over as his wife and sister, and went further to claim dominance over all the cosmos, Mother Earth included. Thus, the immortal patriarchy was in place and humanity followed suit. When Zeus and the Olympians took over, the third pantheon, Homer’s pantheon, maintained the gender statuses of the second order. Zeus ruled over all the gods, as a male king shall rule over his wife and subjects.
Therefore, though of starkly different theological origins, the divine plan for human sexuality arrived at the same end. Greek mythology was adopted by the Romans, who ruled the ancient world and thus maintained the patriarchal bias of their gods. When Judeo-Christendom rose to power, it took the dominance of Adam into modern times, where only in the most recent 150 years has this order been challenged and balanced.
Textual evidence for male superiority is shared by both the Hebrew and Hellenistic cultures. The earlier books of the Old Testament are filled with dialogue between men and the divine. Almost never, after the loss of Eden, is there an instance whereby God directly addresses a woman (this leads to an idea of contempt towards women, to be later elaborated). This demonstrates man’s divine favor over woman, as explained by Adam’s conception prior to Eve. The Hebrew Bible clearly shows that man is to govern his race both spiritually and politically as spokesmen of God on Earth. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a Christian elaboration on the Hebrew creation story, only Adam is directly spoken to by God or his angelic messengers, and Eve is only informed through Adam. So even into the seventeenth century this principle of superiority by divine favor still bore the same justifications.
Divine preference for men also applies to Homer’s subject culture. Immortal intervention permeates the Iliad and Odyssey, and just as in the Bible, men are in direct dialogue with the gods, while women are essentially shunned. In a Homeric society, the most prized human values were the capacities for glory in war and imperial wealth. In the context of war, women were seen as the gains of the end rather than assets to the process. In the Iliad, Helen contributed very little to the development of the story; she embodied the war’s cause and solution, rather than a factor to the process. The same can be said for Penelope in The Odyssey: she represents the goal of the hero’s epic journey, rather than a means to its accomplishment. And while the male heroes spilled blood and navigated through monstrous waters, Homer’s women were allocated to the gender’s ordinary societal roles. Helen and Penelope did little more than operate looms, while Chryseis and Briseis, simple priestesses, were treated as booty (in more ways than one). No hyperboles in the women’s department; glory and superhuman qualities were for men only. In the centuries before Athenian democracy, war was national policy, and heroes were the most valuable means to success in conquering wealthy subjects. Women were of little worth because masculine muscle was more effective than diplomacy, and Homer used the gods to drive men towards the spoils of conquest rather than the accords of peace.
Portraying women in their inferior societal roles is by no means unique to these texts; what is more important to understand is how the authors seem to justify female suppression on the grounds of women’s stereotypical natures. Gender suppression could be attributed to scandal. In the Bible, woman is faulted with the one great offense to God. Homer’s women, mortal and immortal, routinely emit an aura of deception and antagonism to the progress of male causes. By assigning such traits to the female characters, Homer may be relaying the common stereotypes of human nature: that women lack moral integrity and honor; they are more susceptible to carnal corruption. Helen, in Homer’s view, is the Iliad’s prime example of how a woman is corrupted by lust and thus causes unfathomable strife for tens of thousands of virtuous men. Helen runs off with Paris by the craft of Aphrodite, a female goddess. Not even the immortal women are immune to stereotypical vices. Hera and Athena lend their aid to the Achaeans purely out of jealousy, because Trojan Paris favored Aphrodite.
Hera’s jealousy would continue past Homer’s epic when the Roman Virgil penned the Aeneid, in which Juno (Hera) further pursues her vendetta against the Trojan survivors as they struggle to re-establish their lost glory. Aeneas, the Trojan hero, is further impeded by Dido, a typical Homeric seductress. Dido proves a mortal hindrance to Aeneas’ grand destiny; it takes the honorable compulsions of Jupiter (Zeus) and Mercury (Hermes), male gods, to sever the love affair, which was in fact a conspiracy by Juno and Venus (Aphrodite), female gods. So it seems that the Homeric tradition actively promotes the carnal generalizations regarding women, mortal and immortal.
The Odyssey makes no exception, either. Circe and Calypso play the standard role of the lustful delays to Odysseus’ journey. Even Penelope, who stays ever true to her absent husband, staves off the suitors by deception. She promises to marry once she completes a tapestry, yet every night she undoes her weaving. It is in this epic, in response to the tragic effects of Helen and Clytemnestra, that Agamemnon and Odysseus clearly promote these sexist sentiments:
“’Ah, what can be more horrible and brutish than a woman when she admits into her thoughts such deeds as these! And what a shameless deed she plotted, to bring about the murder of the husband of her youth! I [Agamemnon] used to think how glad my coming home would be, even to my children and my slaves; but she, intent on such extremity of crime, brought shame upon herself and all of womankind who shall be born hereafter, even on well-doers too.’
“So he spoke, and answering him said [Odysseus]: ‘Alas! The house of Atreus far-seeing Zeus has sorely plagued with women’s arts, from the beginning: for Helen’s sake how many of us died; and Clytaemnestra plotted for you while absent.’”
(Homer, Odyssey 141)
It is an almost gratuitous condemnation of womankind. Antiquity’s arguably most revered poet places contempt upon woman by generalizing her lack of virtue. Surely men are vulnerable to the same vices, but Homer renders them effectively immune; man’s only flaw is pride, hubris, a fault that often underlies ambitions for honor and glory.
Glorification of the self by Homeric heroics is far from the Biblical message. Womanly deeds, the original deed, rather, play a familiar tune to Homer’s display of human nature. Genesis does not stop at Eve’s late creation to justify her subjection to male dominance. It goes so far as to fault womankind with the loss of Paradise and humanity’s subsequent suffering for the millennia prior to Christ’s redemption. The story is familiar enough: Eve, of supposedly weaker virtuous integrity, is successfully tempted by the Serpent (Satan, according to Milton). Here we see the passive shortcomings of the female nature. Eve then actively exhibits her corruption by conducting it to Adam. Milton exacerbates this sexism by absolving Adam of his compliance: he chooses to honorably suffer at his wife’s side rather than inhabit Paradise, severed from her:
“Rather how hast thou yielded to transgress the strict forbiddance, how to violate the sacred fruit forbidden? Some curs’d fraud of enemy hath beguil’d thee, yet unknown, and me [Adam] with thee [Eve] hath ruin’d, for with thee certain my resolution is to die. How can I live without thee, how forego they sweet converse, and love so dearly join’d, to live again in these wild woods forlorn?”
(Milton 294)
And hereby God declares woman shall pay for her sin by eternal submission to man:
“’…yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’
And to the man he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you...”
(Genesis 3:16-17)
The Hebrews credited this as the infallible word of God, and modeled their society accordingly. From that point on in the Old Testament, women never deviate from their divinely assigned role. This may serve as punishment for Eve’s Original Sin, but also as a means to check the stereotypical weakness of female virtue.
Whether a fundamental holy text or a poetic testament to a heroic age, the parallels regarding sexual superiority not only transcend religion, but serve to perpetuate the Western standard of sexism into future eons. Homer’s epic tradition takes the theological sexual hierarchy and perverts by distinguishing men and women by terms of moral integrity. The Hebrew Bible legislates the same principles, but with a significantly more pious audience, needs only one instance to justify woman’s necessity for subservience to man. With a theological foundation, sexism permeated literary tradition throughout antiquity and well beyond. Human nature it is, perhaps historically its most tragic flaw, to generalize human nature itself, whether in regards to race, religion, nationality or, before all others, sex.
Yea. Fender makes the best guitars, more met at least. I need a single coil.
I'm trying to get these damn files off of a camcorder; my grandfathers memorial service was today, and my patience for this damned technology is wearing thin.
I wouldn't be having this problem if I had access to my own computer....or if this didn't run Vista.
I wouldn't be having this problem if I had access to my own computer....or if this didn't run Vista.
genocide roach
DOOOOOOOOOOM
- Aug 18, 2002
- 9,421
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- 38
i have ginormous hands. its all a matter of taste though. i like them as thin as possible, so i can keep my hands flatter.
i do like the versatility of their jaguar though. if i found one in a pawn shop, id prolly buy it. and i really want to play the jag 6 string bass. http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Fender-Custom-Shop-Bass-VI-N.O.S-?sku=517904
as for needing a single coil, the single in my ibanez is sweet, for a stock p-up. the S/S/H is my favorite guitar config. its all about versatility.
~gR~
i do like the versatility of their jaguar though. if i found one in a pawn shop, id prolly buy it. and i really want to play the jag 6 string bass. http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Fender-Custom-Shop-Bass-VI-N.O.S-?sku=517904
as for needing a single coil, the single in my ibanez is sweet, for a stock p-up. the S/S/H is my favorite guitar config. its all about versatility.
~gR~
genocide roach
DOOOOOOOOOOM
- Aug 18, 2002
- 9,421
- 16
- 38
Valerie
¯\(ã)/¯
- Aug 29, 2005
- 6,765
- 4
- 38
I hate when players use guitars with just one pickup on the guitar *cough*Alexi Gayho*cough*
By the way, have you ever managed to play a fender with a v-neck? One of my dad's teles has one; kind of wierd.
Krigloch the Furious
Pants full of poo
Valerie
¯\(ã)/¯
- Aug 29, 2005
- 6,765
- 4
- 38
genocide roach
DOOOOOOOOOOM
- Aug 18, 2002
- 9,421
- 16
- 38
like the clapton boat neck? nope, not yet. it would probably freak me out though.
my kevin bond rhoads has one pickup. that guitar has one purpose, FUCKIN METAL! i dont know why more people havnt thought to stack 2 hot rails to make an uber-bucker before. but that pickup rules.
~gR~
Krigloch the Furious
Pants full of poo
Nikki
Member
Valerie
¯\(ã)/¯
- Aug 29, 2005
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zabu of nΩd
Free Insultation
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Procrastinating on work at an alarming rate. This will probably result in mass chaos and suffering within the next three days.
ThisIsACoolName
Member
genocide roach
DOOOOOOOOOOM
- Aug 18, 2002
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