ABSTRACT
Sexual idealism and sexual pessimism- these are the ancient Greek axes of the grid on which Western attitudes toward sex have been plotted for 2,500 years. Asceticism remained a powerful ideal in Christianity, strewing the deserts of Egypt with hermits and, as late as the Middle Ages, sending long lines of autoflagellants wandering the medieval landscape. In a Christian sexual idealism influenced by Platonism, is one origin of Romantic Love that locates this supposedly new idealization of eros in earlier Greek thinking. The Enlightenment's ideal of rational understanding and mastery over the forces of nature was, of course, a rebirth of Greek rationalism. The Enlightenment's ideal of rational understanding and mastery over the forces of nature was, of course, a rebirth of Greek rationalism. The sexualization of terror will dominate the Gothic, the old Greek linking of sex and death that once signified the destructiveness of eros now serving to heighten the sexual charge.
