Lesbians against lesbians
Wednesday April 30, 2008
Categories: Not the Onion
I love this story. A group of pissed-off Lesbians -- that is, people of Lesbos -- have filed suit in Greek civil court against a gay rights group, trying to force it to quit using the word "lesbian" in its...
Filed Under: lesbians
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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'deed I am, Cap', an' swinging not two but three weighted Louisiana Sluggers; for those a-fear'd and with good reason of touching my Tiny URL [illustrated]
tinyurl.com/6qqgqc
I annotate, for those Back in Plaid and along for the pride, in lieu of the first annual Mullet Surprise [btw, George Costanza was just whining in the background here in my seaside motel room, as only George could whine, about his penchant for driving his dates to lesbianism - not that there's anything *unfamiliar* to me about that...]:
No way are we gay, say Lesbos, or, I’m just mad about Sappho
Not since the historic Cornwall Riots of 1969, sparked when a lantern-helmeted miner in black leather from England’s Isles of Scilly took homophone indignation after overhearing a rumor his local butcher skinned and froze for sale “Cornish Gay Men” , have what that polymorphous polyglot George Steiner would call the Tongues of Eros been so bent:
People of Lesbos take gay group to court over term ‘Lesbian’
Yes, if the pissed-on lesbians are unavailable for comment.
Where's the foul language?
Anyway, hasn't this already been covered?
Janet: We aren't going anywhere! We have a history here! Persians are closing this bar over my dead lesbian body!
[City Hall, the Mayor's Office, day. Janet and the other lesbians are in the office.]
Janet: Mayor, this is an outrage! We are being discriminated against as lesbians!
Mayor McDaniels: You're a lesbian now?
Janet: That's right. A proud lesbian! And our home is being taken away!
Mayor McDaniels: The bar has been sold to Persian club owners. I don't know what you want me to do about it.
Janet: Forbid the transaction! This is happening all over the country, Mayor. Lesbian bars being bought out, shut down, it isn't right!
Lesbians: Yeah, that's right!
Mayor McDaniels: I'm sorry, but my hands are tied. The new owners plan to start redecorating the bar tomorrow. You have to be out by then.
Janet: [approaches the desk] Have you seen how Persians decorate? They will cover that bar in cheesy blue carpeting, white statues and gold curtain rods to the point that you will want to puke!
Mayor McDaniels: Mrs. Garrison, get out of here.
If Hugo deep in the catacombs of the Bibliothèque nationale to hunch your back, Hugh'll find that Les Misérables is *not* the Gallic rendering of Rod's "pissed-off Lesbians" [and I think I can get a Lesbia Majora-ty to agree].
Just don't drink the hot-and-sour soup in *les restaurants chinois* of Paris near the more raffish cathouses: the broth'll kill you.
Now you'll have to excuse me, as I'm due back on the 5:57 out of Crunchyville, on a whisker-stop tour now pulling out of Trac II: why Gillette me off in the first place?
What's funny is that in ancient Greek, the verb lesbiazein ("to lesbiate") is used to describe a woman performing oral sex on a man. In the ancient world the women of Lesbos were considered to be pretty forward and, er, accommodation, but not necessarily homosexual. The association with poor Sappho and her passionate poetry to the girls in her school is entirely responsible for that.
In other news, Greece sues American media for calling members of American fraternities, sororities, and honor societies "Greeks"....
Oh, Lordy, there are too many unseemly cracks to be had (no pun intended)here in this posted bag of tricks (no pun intended) just beggin' to bust out (no pun intended) but I will take the Leave It To Beaver (no pun intended) high road and try to be helpful. Perhaps try Spanish? 'Lesbianas'? It has a more feminine ring to it. (No offense) Or if they still object in Lesbos, think diametrically out of the box (no pun inended) with au current pop iconography a la 'Puff Mama'. (No pun intended). I give up! Those Lesbos are on their own!
Captain Fallopia Stubing welcomes you aboard The Les Boat.
...and Rod, the straight man's Andrew, Corbett to his Sullivan, now plays against type as Greece to Andrew's Rome; Edgar Allan?:
The Tory that was Andrew
And the *mangeur* that was Rod
See them both in archival footage on Bravo's new outside-looking-in reality series for Passover 2009, Choirboy for the Straight Goy...
I don't believe that Orthodox Christians should use terms like you use in the opening line of your story, and during bright week.
Well, they might get away with it in Greece but I can't see any US court taking it seriously.
"I love this story" shouldn't be used during Bright Week?
"Pissed off" is considered foul language? Orthodox Christians can't say "pissed off"? Or can only say it during certain times of the year?
That's news to me.
I think "pissed off" has long since passed into acceptable general discourse. I mean, if my 72-year-old mother can say that something "sucks" without giving it a second thought, then I think standards clearly have shifted. I still have trouble accepting the notion that "butt" (as in your rear end, not the end of a cigarette) is considered acceptable and is heard all the time on TV, since I was raised to consider it vulgar.
i assume that these women, who feel they have the sole right to the term or word "lesbian" live on the isle of Lesbos AND are decendents of Sapho. this is ridiculous, imo.
Can you imagine if the poor thing smoked only English cigarettes and was a contractor hired to do water-way work in the Netherlands? She would be a fag-smoking Lesbian who was hired to build a dike.
There was a young man from Groom, who took a lesbian up to his room.
They got into a fight, and argued all night, over who would do what to whom.
(Who says one never learns anything in college?)
Well I learned Graph Theory and Geophysics, what did you major in, lib ed?
Sappho had descendants? By whom?
Many many years ago my cousin showed us the slides of his trip to Greece, including Lesbos. He informed us that the natives there preferred to be called Mytileneans (after Mytilene, the largest city on the island.)
Who's next? The Vandals? The Moguls?
I understood that in the Classical world, "lesbian" meant a woman who actually enjoyed sex, whether with men or women, as in Catullus' poem. Perhaps some classicist could enlighten us.
Goths? Huns? Samaritans? Philistines? Laconic? Spartan? Lacedemonian? Sybaritic?
When I was in my early 20s I had a conversation with my grandmother, who was about 75 at the time, which proceded along these lines:
Gram: I don't understand about these lesbians.
Me: What do you mean?
Gram: Well, what are they?
Me: They're women who like each other instead of liking men.
Gram: Yeah, I know that but I still don't get it.
Me: Neither do I.
Gram: No, I mean I don't understand the whole thing.
Me: They are women who go with other women instead of men.
Gram: Do they sleep with each other?
Me: Yes.
Gram: But I don't get it.
Me: I don't know what else to tell you. They're women that have relationships with other women instead of men.
Gram: That part I get, but...
Me: But what?
Gram: You say they sleep together?
Me: Yes.
Gram: I don't understand.
Me: What do you mean?
Gram: Well, they sleep together...
Me: Yes
Gram (quieter, but more emphatic): What do they DO?
Seeing that she had lived 75 years without this vital, sexually life-affirming information, I decided, perhaps mistakenly, that the best thing would be for me to spare her this knowledge, knowing full well that she might very well pass into the great beyond without, as a result of my reticence, being a complete human being, let alone a complete womyn. Still, I thought it charitable of me to save her from even further confusion on the matter, should the nature of female homosexual practices prove disconcerting to her.
I pray daily that I made the right decision. And if I didn't, may she forgive me!
Rombald--I believe we defended the Goths once already on this blog,and quite recently at that.
Democritus - Sappho was married, and had at least one daughter, Kleis. Assuming any of her poetry is at all autobiographical, that is.
David - I've never bought the school argument. I think it says more about 19th century school masters than anything else.
Rombald - You're conflating two things. Women from Lesbos, as someone noted above, had a reputation in the ancient world of being, er, eager, and loving to perform fellatio. Catullus called his mistress Lesbia partly as a nod to Sappho (one of whose poems he translated and made his own) but also supposedly because the name was metrically equivalent to her real name, Clodia. Most poets used significant pseudonyms: Tibullus had Delia (a reference to Delos, associated with Apollo), and Ovid called his girl Corinna, which roughly translates as "girlie" or "little girl". (Not in a creepy, 'come here little girl' sense, though. Diminuative name aside, Corinna was the one running that show.)
The Hellenes are to be commended for their supreme virtue of logical consistency: they object to the perversion of both "Lesbian" by politicised tribades and "Macedonia" by renegade Bulgarians. They forget unfortunately that in the days of their glory they were licked by the Macedonians even as the then Lesbians rubbed them the wrong way: witness Philip's victory at Chaeronea and Cleon's expedition to Mytilene.
That the island's name today is "Lesvos" evinces the lamentable fact that the Greek tongue has degenerated from the classical bilabial occlusive to the vulgar labiodental fricative. But this is nothing more than Divine Justice. Zeus is not mocked.
I am parenthetically gratified that the French tongue at least retains all its traditional art. Nor do we French wax indignant over our own frotteuses de chatte. The French delight to embrace the chic, even the tongue in chic.
The Greeks should abandon these onanistic exercises in onomastics and get behind the movement to reclaim their marbles.
Roland, the Greeks and Slavs have been duking it out for eons, so while I get your intended meaning with your usage of "Bulgarians" around the naming of "Macedonia", the modern context does not support this: they are distinct cultures and languages.
And I say that with some of my own tongue in chic, being a devotee of the music and dance of the Balkans* as well as a devotedly admiring punster for your turn of phrase. ;-)
* The most notable difference between the slavic Makedonski tanec and Makedonikos horos is the clothing worn by the participants; for the music, it's the language in which the lyrics are sung. ;-)
I'd missed the Bulgars (buggers, bougres) in my list of peoples and places.
Roland, who is obviously not French, is very funny.
Roland, Roland, Roland
Keep those Doges a-roulant
Rawhide!
(The Petite Bourgeoisie were originally a sub-clan of the Bulgars found in the Pirin Mountains.)
Franklin, yes - my reference to Bulgarians was strictly in jest. But actually the difference between the Bulgarian and Macedonian languages is fairly minor. I'm not sure whether all dialects are mutually intelligible when spoken but the grammars are strikingly similar - especially in that they have both lost the elaborate Slavic case system. At any rate, maybe erroneously, I think of the language difference as similar to that of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian for what was once Serbo-Croatian. That said, Québécois is decidedly not French. ;-)
rombald, I wish I'd thought of your bugger/bougre/Bulgar phrase. Excellent! Mais moi? pas français? mon orgueil est gravement blessé. ;-)
Franklin: ROTFL!
Being the son of a Croat and a Serb -- and having read the excellent 1950 edition of the US State Dept's S-C/English language text -- I would agree that the differences between Macedonian and Bulgarian are of similar scope. All of the "national" languages in that region are heavily influenced by the non-Slavic neighboring languages. There are greater differences in regional Bulgarian between Thrace (Greek and Turkish) and the north (Romanian) than between standard Bulgarian and Macedonian. Their main interface is in the border region of the Pirin Mountains, and the source of some of my favorite music.
I remember being facetiously cautioned to be careful if I ever visited Quebec, because the French I learned in school left me with a distinctly Parisian accent. Better that I mispronounce words and sound like an American. ;-)
Everything I really need to know about French, I learned from playing . ;-D Roullez!
... I learned from playing Mille Bornes. Bad html tag, bad!
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