I've got a good rough draft of a section on ancient sexuality crafted. While I planned to have something written on modern thought on sex, I'm finding this is a huge topic. (And most of my research seems to turn up things saying "this is how we should be thinking about sex" rather than "this is how we are thinking about sex.") I suspect I need to better limit my topic to more psychological/sociological texts for this part, with some look at religious thought. That said, I have found some good points of view on the evolution of thoughts about sex. (Mostly delineating how Greco-Roman thought heavily influenced budding Christianity's thoughts on the subject.)
A number of sources seem to work on the idea that the modern binary concept of gender (you are male or female) versus the more continuum idea of older thought. I think I might need to dig into this a bit further. It seems to reach into other reading I've done in other areas, specifically it seems to echo some of the Tantric thought: that is that there is a dualism in the world of male/female, but those are ends of a spectrum and individuals fall into different places on that spectrum. Though the Tantric information I read treated the spectrum as equal or level, without one end being inherently better than the other. (They used positive/negative terminology, but I'm not sure they meant it in a better/worse sense, but rather a extruding/intruding sense?)
I find it interesting our language is so coded with insisting on marking one term in a duality as "higher" or "better" than the other term that even terms that in theory should be able to be value neutral aren't. Further on the subject of language, I'm curious whether this gender continuum exists as it has been stated in the Hebrew mind, since it and most of the other Semitic languages I've looked at are so strongly gendered languages. (I mean, they tend to gender their -verbs-, which even Greek doesn't do.) Further, the languages lack a neutral, save for the 3 person plural perfect forms and the 1st person, and even there I vaguely remember it being mentioned in class that there may have been a 3 person plural feminine at some point. (I don't remember if there were gendered 1st persons.)
But that is another interesting linguistic turn: If the society was so strongly gendered, why is there no gendered 1st person voice? Japanese has it, at least to some degree. That is, there are at least 2 versions of "I" (watashi and boku) and my first Japanese instructor insisted that males us boku while females and males can use watashi. In later studies, this might be dialectic, as not all my instructors used this dualism, and most just had us use watashi, with boku being used by males in informal settings. (There are at least 2 other words for "I": ore which was very informal and atashi which I suspect is a dialectic form of watashi.) This gendering of the 1st person pronoun is even more interesting because the language itself is virtually ungendered* and rarely uses pronouns.
Additionally, I'm not sure a thorough exploration of modern ideas about sex/sexuality is what is needed, mostly because it would take the better part of a lifetime (and then the ideas would have changed again and it would need to be started over...). Rather, I suspect I will work on contrasting ancient Israelite thought with modern, bringing out further some of the differences. One of the biggest that I suspect will come out is the soul/flesh dualism of Hellenistic thought, as it is already started even in Paul, but is so much more present in Augustine. (Though I suspect in Augustine's case it has to do with latent influences of his Manechean past and his regrets over his own sex life. Though I'm not quite ready to blame all of modern Christianity's problems with sex on Augustine's youthful libido.)
*It could be argued that it is more interested in social hierarchy for determining how one speaks, and since males were (are?) considered superior to females, this gendered how language was used. However this is a different kind of gendering of language than Semitic and Western languages tend to have.
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