Homosexuality

[The Ghost of RubangB]

Rath said:

The Ghost of RubangB said:
The word lesbian come from the Island of Lesbos, because this one female teacher there (Sappho) had sex with a bunch of her students in the same teacher-student fashion, and it was the first time we had records of a woman doing that. But instead of naming it after her, we named it after her island? I guess Lesbian sounds prettier than Sapphic.

 

You sure on that part? I was fairly sure that Lesbianism was named after Lesbos because Sappho wrote homoerotic poems, I didn't think she was a teacher at all. Also sapphic does mean 'in relation to lesbianism' so it is still a word.

 

I just double-czeched, and found this at Wikipedia:

 

During the Victorian era, it became the fashion to describe Sappho as the headmistress of a girls' finishing school. As Page DuBois (among many other experts) points out, this attempt at making Sappho understandable and palatable to the genteel classes of Great Britain was based more on conservative sensibilities than evidence. There are no references to teaching, students, academies, or tutors in any of Sappho's scant collection of surviving works. Burnett follows others, like C.M. Bowra, in suggesting that Sappho's circle was somewhat akin to the Spartan agelai or the religious sacred band, the thiasos, but Burnett nuances her argument by noting that Sappho's circle was distinct from these contemporary examples because "membership in the circle seems to have been voluntary, irregular and to some degree international."^[22] The notion that Sappho was in charge of some sort of academy persists nonetheless.

 

So damn, I got duped hard by weird revisionist Victorian sensibilities.  Thanks for pointing that out.

 

 

Now I'm gonna go cut myself for making a mistake...