However, I will say that reading the classics in their original Greek and Latin has added a lot of sanity to my life, and I would recommend it to anyone. Your own conception of Greek and Roman sexuality is highly romanticized, and would fall away with a course of general reading.
This is not to say that I would hold the ancients forward as examples of "sane" societies. Generally the opposite, in fact. General societal sanity is a post-Enlightenment condition.
What do you think I'm romanticising? Can you mention a specific point? Also I didn't mention the actual aspects of Greek sexuality - just how Romans viewed Greeks. If you want to discuss Greek sexuality I'm happy to. You wanna discuss Phaedrus or The Republic, or the Sacred Band, or something else? Would be lovely to revisit postgrad.
Waters is indeed a very sane post-Enlightenment thinker, steeped in and derived from the sanity of the civilisation he is a product of.
Sure. How much Plato have you read in Greek? What do you think, for example, he means by ὑπηρετεῖν when applied to χαρισάμενα παιδικά?
> Waters is indeed...steeped in and derived from...
This makes me suspect what the answer to "How much Plato have you read in Greek?" was, and exactly how much that postgrad degree was worth.
He didn't become respectable. His mental illness became mainstream.
I wish I knew how this happened. Maybe the mechanism was a combination of internet porn and the destruction of real life social spaces. Maybe it's something else. But people should perhaps spend some small fraction of the time that they spend freaking out about the weather, and use it to freak out just a little about how we are going to survive the next 50 years as a civilization with a functioning social and political system.