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Dharmachari Jñanavira, writing in the Western Buddhist Review, suggests homophobia is at the root of a modern decline in the Western world.[21] In a cultural context where homosexual desire is considered sinful, the experience of homoerotic desire can be traumatic, limiting the potential for same-sex friendship. Japanese psychologist Doi Takeo has expressed similar views. He claims that male friendships in American society are fraught with homosexual anxiety, and thus homophobia is a limiting factor stopping men from establishing deep friendships with other men. The Danish sociologist Henning Bech, for instance, writes of the anxiety which often accompanies developing intimacy between male friends: The more one has to assure oneself that one's relationship with another man is not homosexual, the more conscious one becomes that it might be, and the more necessary it becomes to protect oneself against it. The result is that friendship gradually becomes impossible.[this quote needs a citation] The suggestion that friendship always contains an element of erotic desire is not new. It dates to the time of the ancient Greeks, where it comes up in the writings of Plato. More recently, the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger claimed that: There is no friendship between men that has not an element of sexuality in it, however little accentuated it may be in the nature of the friendship, and however painful the idea of the sexual element would be. But it is enough to remember that there can be no friendship unless there has been some attraction to draw the men together. Much of the affection, protection, and nepotism between men is due to the presence of unsuspected sexual compatibility. (Sex and Character, 1903)[full citation needed] Recent Western scholarship in gender theory and feminism concurs, as reflected in the writings of Eve Sedgwick in her The Epistemology of the Closet, and Jonathan Dollimore in his Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. |
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