Although Boehringer doesn't touch on the question directly, I wonder how badly our image of f/f eroticism in Classical Greece is skewed by having two significant textual references filtered through one specific author (Plato)? There is a brief advisory in one discussion that Plato's opinions on the topic may not have been representative of the general public. But I also wonder to what extent Plato's opinions on anything were representative of his contemporaries. One of the things that struct me when I was reading Foucault's coverage of the same era and authors is how badly messed up the human psyche gets when asceticism and the devaluing of sensory pleasures is set on a pedestal. The pursuit of competitive asceticism is a game of chicken: the first person to blink loses the game but wins by living. If a culture buys into the idea that the greatest good is the derogation of physical pleasures in favor of abstract intellectual ideals, you end up with a bunch of sour old men making the "rules for living" that everyone else is evaluated against. While the discussion of Plato's Laws in this book doesn't go into the same detail about other topics than gender and sexuality, one does get the impression that life under the system as described might be economically and politically "successful" but perhaps not much worth living, regardless of one's individual desires. And given the material culture of Classical Greece that we see, it hardly seems likely that the average person on the street would consider it a desirable state of affairs.
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