orichalcum

A couple of things I'd like reactions from all you intelligent folk out there. (Apologies if I lapse into Firefly-speak; we just blitzed the whole series.)

So, 239 pages later, with a complete draft, the thesis of my dissertation turns out to be that Roman elite males were anxious about the role of female prostitutes and condemned their excessive influence not because they despised female sexual activity or even female economic activity but because prostitutes were definitionally not loyal members of a family with a permanent bond to a specific man. Unlike the conventional ideal of the Roman matron, prostitutes were somewhat independent units who exerted power and influence on their lovers as means of enriching themselves or benefiting the current object of their affections, rather than because of permanent ties. They were disloyal and hence untrustworthy. Most of the dissertation goes to proving this point.

In the conclusion, I argue that this anxiety about female loyalty, manifested in a condemnation of prostitutes, has persisted throughout Western history and is still evident today in the controversy over women's balancing act between family and career. An automatic assumption is still made that a woman will still inherently be more loyal to her family than to her career, and, indeed, the common term for women who are the opposite is cold-hearted or selfish. Conversely, men are not viewed as making a choice between loyalties. Prostitutes are merely an extreme symptom here of women who have completely abandoned "family" for "career."

So the question is, do you think that statement is valid, do you have any nice academic studies backing it up, and so forth? I'd really appreciate people's opinions.

In another note, I'm somewhat surprised that the recent Supreme Court case on the Ten Commandments hasn't been bringing up more discussion of what seems to me to be a central issue. I think that there's room for reasonable disagreement over the presence of "religion" on federal property, and even a plausible if highly historically flawed argument that the Commandments are present as "part of the legal tradition."

However, what I find offensive about displays of the text of the Ten Commandments on government property is that they promote a specific _version_ of the Commandments by their very nature. It isn't just a deistic statement, or even a monotheistic Peoples of the Book statement: different Biblical religions and denominations count and sort out the Commandments in distinctly different ways, and religiously significantly ways! The version currently up for debate by the Justices has as the First Commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," the Protestant traditional list. But the Jewish and Catholic scriptures list the first commandment as "I am the Lord Thy God." (Hence West Wing). Not to mention debates in the 2nd Commandment about the whole graven images thing. It's not just that this is offensive to atheists  - it's offensive to 40% of the country or so, or should be.
What do folks think about this?