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Saturday, January 1, 2022 - 09:31
Just a reminder that submissions for the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast's 2022 fiction series will be accepted for the entire month of January. I'm looking forward to having just as hard a time picking just four as I did last year!
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Sunday, December 26, 2021 - 07:32
This brings to a close my summary of Boehringer's Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. The book was everything I hoped it would be. (Well, ok, I fantasized that it might include data that I'd never encountered before, but I'm not surprised it didn't.) This book makes a good pairing with Williams' Roman Homosexuality, which primarily focuses on the male side of the equation. Read Williams to get a grounding in the dominant structures of the Roman sexual system, and then forget everything he says about f/f sex and read Boehringer. (Not that Williams is wildly wrong, but only that he doesn't have space for the same scope of investigation.)
I'm feeling semi-inspired to write the "classical world" chapter of my secret project (a practical guide to writing f/f historical fiction in various eras) while all this is still fresh in my memory.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 5: Conclusions
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
This brings to a close my summary of Boehringer's Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. The book was everything I hoped it would be. (Well, ok, I fantasized that it might include data that I'd never encountered before, but I'm not surprised it didn't.) This book makes a good pairing with Williams' Roman Homosexuality, which primarily focuses on the male side of the equation. Read Williams to get a grounding in the dominant structures of the Roman sexual system, and then forget everything he says about f/f sex and read Boehringer. (Not that Williams is wildly wrong, but only that he doesn't have space for the same scope of investigation.)
# # #
I rather like the conclusions chapter—neither a rote summary of the analysis nor an unrelated philosophical excursion. Boehringer starts by noting that there’s an inherent anachronism in defining the scope of the book in terms of modern categories. Whether you consider that scope to be “female homosexuality” or even the narrower “love and sex between women”, the definition assumes the existence of a category that the research has yet to demonstrated existed in classical Greece and Rome. Her second point is that, in studying a data set that is largely cultural representations of the topic, rather than direct records of it in everyday life, we are still looking at “reality.” Texts such as the Satyricon are just as much a part of Roman reality as the real-life dinner parties that we can appreciate only through a filtered lens, in the same way that the characters and stories appearing in contemporary advertising or television shows are “part of our reality”. They are not the whole story, but are an integral part of it and provide useful data.
The largest part of Boehringer’s conclusions involve recognizing the asymmetry and non-binary nature of classical Greek and Roman systems of gender and sex. With regard to gender, the societies under study did not revolve around a gender binary of male/female, but rather a central reference point of “dominant, virile, male citizen” with all other social categories operating in contrast. There were no “natural categories” defined solely by biological sex that people identified with, and that affected their experience of the world. Given that “male human being” was not a cultural category, it follows that “male homosexual” cannot be a cultural category, particularly in light of the expectations and judgments that shaped how sexual pairings were evaluated.
But the asymmetry of all categories being defined and understood in relation to a central model that is (among other things) biologically male means that love/sex between women will always fall outside the frameworks and structures that are defined in relation to that model. A m/m pairing will always be evaluated with respect to whether it follows the hierarchical rules regarding “male virtue/honor”. Those rules by definition will be irrelevant to a f/f pairing. F/f pairings are not legible within the existing system. One obvious effect of that illegibility is the dearth of surviving documentation regarding them, as they simply weren’t culturally important. Another effect is that when they are discussed (by elite male authors), there will generally be a sense of incoherence—an absence of inherent meaning as an independent concept.
But, that said, it is still possible to extract themes and motifs relevant to love/sex between women. They are not universal or consistent, but are recurring across time.
- There is an “amorous and erotic tension without a consummated physical relation.” Obviously this is not universal! But it is one repeating motif, seen in the works of Sappho but also in text such as Iphis where the supposed inability to “consummate” the relationship (via sex as defined for m/f pairings) is a feature.
- There is “social illegibility tied to the lack of differentiation between partners.” M/f and m/m pairings always involve the assignment of differentiated and contrasting roles, and the adherence to or divergence from those roles creates social meaning. A consistent them in imagining f/f pairings is a lack of differentiation, an equality and similarity between the partners and how they are understood.
- There is “a gender shift that is not systematized or articulated in terms of the active/passive binary.” That is, when f/f pairings are described in terms of “acting like a man” it is inconsistently applied and does not align systematically with expectations of sexual behavior.
- There is “physical excess that is not socially inscribed as erotic.” Women who engage in f/f sex may be depicted as acting “immoderately” in other ways, but those extreme behaviors are not seen as being part of their erotic life. (Perhaps, rather, their erotic life is simply one more example of their immoderation.)
- There is “an essentially discursive imaginary, not figured in images or embodied by real people.” What Boehringer seems to mean by this is that the information we have about f/f sex comes from the fictional stories people tell about it, but where it is not (or rarely) a subject of visual art or represented by relating the experiences and relationships of actual historical people (even when we may assume that actual historical people participated in f/f sex).
Individually and in isolation, these themes have given rise to conclusions about classical female homosexuality that Boehringer considers to be inaccurate, such as the archetype of the hypersexual, macro-clitoral, masculine tribade (which certainly appears as a motif in much later ages), or the image of a sentimental non-erotic love between equals (similar to the ideals of 19th century romantic friendship). But even when such conceptual connections can validly be traced, the elaborations and social forms found in other ages should not be projected back onto classical societies in their later forms. Social categories have meaning only within the cultural systems that developed them. But (Boehringer emphasizes) one of the modern cultural systems that cannot be projected onto classical societies is the assumption of symmetry between “male pre-homosexual” concepts and “female pre-homosexual” concepts. The evidence and arguments that scholars such as David Halperin bring to bear on the question of “male homosexuality” in pre-modern times are not necessarily relevant to the question of “female homosexuality”. And, to a certain extent, Boehringer does think that a concept roughly identifiable as “female homosexuality” existed in classical Greek and Roman society (assuming I have not drastically misunderstood her), even though it cannot be equated with modern sexual orientation concepts.
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Saturday, December 25, 2021 - 16:15
I have some thoughts about the structure of the book, in how the examination of the Dialogues of the Courtesans is placed apart from the main presentation, as if it were a different type of evidence. As the most complex and extensive presentation of sex between women in the classical era, I can see how it makes sense to sort out the simpler texts first and then use that analysis to interpret the dialogues. And given that it's an adaptation of an independent article, Boehringer may have had structural reasons for separating it from the overall outline. But in a way it feels like the reader is being guided to treat it as a different type of evidence than all the other material, which feels...odd...to me. I may need to think about this a bit more. (And maybe some of my questions will be answered in the book's conclusion section, which I haven't read yet--a hazard of blogging as I go!) In any event, there's one more post on this book and then maybe a brief break before starting whatever I tackle next.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 4: Epilogue - Lucian’s Dialogues
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
I have some thoughts about the structure of the book, in how the examination of the Dialogues of the Courtesans is placed apart from the main presentation, as if it were a different type of evidence. As the most complex and extensive presentation of sex between women in the classical era, I can see how it makes sense to sort out the simpler texts first and then use that analysis to interpret the dialogues. And given that it's an adaptation of an independent article, Boehringer may have had structural reasons for separating it from the overall outline. But in a way it feels like the reader is being guided to treat it as a different type of evidence than all the other material, which feels...odd...to me. I may need to think about this a bit more. (And maybe some of my questions will be answered in the book's conclusion section, which I haven't read yet--a hazard of blogging as I go!)
# # #
Those familiar with the corpus of classical references to sex between women may have noticed a gap in the material covered up to this point. In a chapter labeled “Epilogue: Lucian and the saturation of signs” Boehringer tackles Lucian’s Dialogue 5 from Dialogues of the Courtesans, in which the narrator describes her sexual interactions with a female** couple who present themselves as “married”.
[**Note: Some discussions and analyses of this dialogue consider Megilla/Megillos through a transgender lens, which makes a great deal of sense when studying the fictional character in isolation. Boehringer discusses the masculine elements in the character’s depiction, but on the whole evaluates Megilla as representing a woman. This makes sense in context, as the question is “what does dialogue 5 tell us about Roman attitudes toward sex between women?” not “what are the possible ways of interpreting the identity and presentation of this fictional character?” Given this, within this post I will follow Boehringer’s approach of using the name Megilla and female pronouns.]
The discussion begins, as usual, with a review of how the text has been interpreted in the past, and the larger context of the Dialogues. Lucian wrote his Dialogues in Greek in the mid 2nd century CE, following a tradition of dialogues created as rhetorical exercises, but using content more related to drama of the New Comedy tradition. As the overt framework of the work is the world of courtesans, it is unsurprisingly populated with the stock figures and plots of that world: prostitutes of all ages and backgrounds, clients ranging from the pleasant to the jealous to the abusive. While many of the individual dialogues can be traced to existing comedic works and themes, the fifth dialogue has no known parallel. Lucian’s fictional setting was Golden Age Athens, but they cannot be understood as representing actual everyday experiences of courtesans either in their setting or in the time they were written.
Furthermore, the fifth dialogue in particular is distanced from “reality” by several layers: Lucian creates a fictional text in which a (fictional) courtesan is relating an off-stage encounter with a third party to a colleague. In addition to Lucian’s own purposes in how he presents the material, there is the question of how reliable the character of Leaina is in descrbing her experience to her friend Klonarion, even aside from the parts that Leaina explicitly states she declines to report. On top of that, there’s the motif of how Megilla reports and frames her own part of the event in talking to Leaina. So even if the text were representing actual people and events at their heart, we would need to sort through the layers of interpretation. Once again, we must understand that this is a fictional depiction and can only convey the author’s view of the world and the elements he chose to present to his audience.
The chapter presents a translation of the dialogue in its entirety, with key vocabulary given in the original Greek. [Note: For a different translation of the text to use as a reference, see my podcast on classical material. I recommend reviewing it to have context.] Boehringer then proceeds to identify the “facts” that can be extracted from the scenario-as-presented and how they support or contradict existing scholarly interpretations.
The dialogue involves four women: the courtesans Leaina and Klonarion, and the clients Megilla and Demonassa. The courtesans are friends, with a certain expectation of honest communication between them. Klonarion has been hearing gossip circulating about Leaina’s ongoing relationship with one of the named clients and wants to know more. They both have Attic names and therefore represent the native courtesan community of Athens.
The clients are identified as “foreigners”, both by the given names they bear and by explicit identification of their origins. Megilla is from Lesbos and Demonassa is from Corinth. In this genre of text, cultural origin is typically used to indicate stock character types, although the characteristics may change over time. At an earlier period, identifying a woman as from Lesbos might have alluded to the island’s reputation for general lustfulness and debauchery. But in this text a specific connection is made to sex between women. “…she is a hetairistria. For they say there are such women in Lesbos, masculine-looking, not willing to have it done to them by men, but preferring to associate with women as men do.” This appears to be the earliest known context in which the island of Lesbos was used to indicate sexual desire between women.
It is less clear what Demonassa’s Corinthian origin is meant to signify. Corinth is sometimes associated with prostitution, but there is no indication in this text that either Megilla or Demonassa is a sex worker. Both women are described as wealthy. They are a couple (Megilla says they’ve been married for some time). They are the ones hosting the drinking party at which Leaina was hired to entertain.
After the party, when Leaina is alone with Megilla and Demonassa, and in the middle of the three of them engaging in sex (about which more in a moment), Megilla takes off her wig, revealing a shaved head “like a manly-seeming athlete,” she suggests that Leaina consider her a “handsome youth” and gives her name in the masculine form Megillos. In response to Leaina’s questioning, Megilla indicates that she doesn’t have male physiology or ambiguous physiology, but has the “mind and desire” of a man. Boehringer notes that Leaina’s narration doesn’t indicate that Megilla had an obviously masculine presentation before this episode. I.e., that during the party and any earlier negotiations, Megilla presumably presented as female in an unremarkable way, such that the later conversation was unexpected. This undermines the interpretation that Megilla represents a “masculine tribade” archetype.
The post-party encounter between the three women is unambiguously sexual. The women kiss with open mouths including some biting, both Megilla and Demonassa embrace Leaina and caress her breasts. And after the gender talk, Leaina “gives herself” to Megilla who “enjoyed herself incredibly”. Leaina is then given the sort of gifts that a client typically gives to a courtesan. Boehringer notes that, contrary to framing Megilla and Demonassa as an active/passive pair, both women are described as taking an “active” role in sexual activity with Leaina, whatever they may do when alone together. Boehringer notes that this is the only one of the dialogues in which pleasure is the outcome of sexual encounters. The framing conversation with Klonarion indicates that Leaina’s professional association with Megilla has continued since then and that Megilla loves her (using a form of eros, not philia) “as if she were a man.” So here’s another item that is presented as imaginable: that a courtesan could be in an ongoing professional relationship with a wealthy female client, and that the relationship would be public knowledge and believed to be sexual.
Leaina the courtesan is curious about her client’s sexual behavior, is amenable to providing the sexual services her client(s) request, and expects to be paid for that by means of valuable gifts. But Megilla is harder to classify. In some aspects she performs a feminine social role (her initial presentation, organizing an all-women party), in other aspects she takes on a male social role (her hidden hair style, claiming a masculine form of her name, calling Demonassa her wife). And Megilla + Demonassa as a couple present an otherwise unparalleled social form: a long-term female couple, whose relationship is overtly sexual, and who as far as we can tell are not married to men or in any sort of sexual relationship to men. They represent the “unimaginable” thing that other authors have danced around or made invisible.
Boehringer concludes by talking about how the dialogue is about the act of story-telling, where Leaina in some way stands in for the author—shaping what parts of the narrative will be revealed or concealed—and Klonarion stands in for the audience. The motifs that Leaina narrates about Megilla represent standard tropes about women who loved women that were in circulation at the time, but only addressed obliquely in other texts. These motifs include: framing f/f sex as shameful, describing f/f sex as new or paradoxical, a context of drunkenness and debauchery, describing f/f sex with the language of m/f sex, the absence of distinctly separate sexual roles, and the assignment of same-sex desire to “foreign” women. But within these motifs, none of them is universal to all the characters in the dialogue. There is no consistent, coherent archetype of the woman who loves women, and therefore the concept once again fails to be legible within the Roman sexual system.
[Note: Despite the discussion of these motifs, I feel that there isn’t quite enough consideration of how the Dialogue does support (or at least introduce) certain stereotypes that Boehringer otherwise concludes were not part of classical Roman understandings of f/f sex. There is a motif of at least one partner being masculinized. And that does at least imply a possible differentiation of roles between partners. I feel that her overall arguments against a concept of f/f sex that involves gendered, differentiated roles are sound. One can see the Dialogue as an outlier from a generally undifferentiated model, as opposed to representing the primary understanding that should be assumed when reading other texts. But this is somewhat glossed over.]
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Friday, December 24, 2021 - 11:00
Several years ago, I did a podcast on f/f sexuality in classical Rome, based on everything I had read up to that point. Obviously, I might discuss certain details differently with the addition of Boehringer's analysis. That's only to be expected and entirely unsurprising. If I weren't learning new things all the time, I might as well close down the Project. And conversely, if I waited to post any summaries or analysis until I had perfect and complete knowledge about a topic, I'd never post anything at all.
One of the reasons I love Boehringer's approach to this material is exactly because she make me think in new ways, and points out places where I've accepted the interpretations of authors whose understanding was shaped by conflating disparate time periods, or back-projecting later assumptions and interpretations. And neither do I take Boehringer entirely uncritically. I think there are a few places where she prioritizes her overall conclusions (that classical understandings of f/f sexuality included no aspect of role differentiation or gender-crossing) over multiple possible readings of the available texts.
And that's the way things ought to be. We learn, we analyze, we challenge, and we accept that at no point do we have a perfect understanding of the past.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 3i: The Roman Period - Scientific Texts
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
Several years ago, I did a podcast on f/f sexuality in classical Rome, based on everything I had read up to that point. Obviously, I might discuss certain details differently with the addition of Boehringer's analysis. That's only to be expected and entirely unsurprising. If I weren't learning new things all the time, I might as well close down the Project. And conversely, if I waited to post any summaries or analysis until I had perfect and complete knowledge about a topic, I'd never post anything at all.
One of the reasons I love Boehringer's approach to this material is exactly because she make me think in new ways, and points out places where I've accepted the interpretations of authors whose understanding was shaped by conflating disparate time periods, or back-projecting later assumptions and interpretations. And neither do I take Boehringer entirely uncritically. I think there are a few places where she prioritizes her overall conclusions (that classical understandings of f/f sexuality included no aspect of role differentiation or gender-crossing) over multiple possible readings of the available texts.
And that's the way things ought to be. We learn, we analyze, we challenge, and we accept that at no point do we have a perfect understanding of the past.
# # #
[Note: calling these texts “scientific” is stretching things a bit, but I’ll allow that the people writing them considered them to be scientific, in a sense.] This section of the chapter covers a handful of texts that fall generally in the category of non-fiction, as understood by their authors. A secondary theme to this section is “motifs that classical Roman texts do not support,” specifically with respect to physiology and gender role topics.
Macro-clitoral Motifs
Boehringer takes a fairly strong position that no texts of the period under consideration support the idea that Greek or Roman cultures associated f/f sex with a specific physiology, in particular with clitoral hypertrophy. The interpretation of various of the Roman sources as supporting the “tribade with an enlarged clitoris” is, she asserts (and I’d go so far as to say, demonstrates) a back-projection based on later material in which that theme is clearly present. Boehringer reviews a number of authors who have interpreted the classical Roman use of tribas as indicating sexual acts involving a macro-clitoris (or at least, as indicating that this was a standard cultural motif at the time). She points out that texts that speak of women “penetrating” someone during sex are referring to f/m sex, not f/f sex. Medical manuals do cover the topic of women with a macro-clitoris, but do not associate it with sexual desire for women or with sex between women. (This also holds for Greek texts.) She specifically notes that the texts that come the closest to suggesting this motif do not hold up (or at least offer no concrete support), including the fable by Phaedrus of Prometheus attaching the “wrong” sexual organs (resulting in same-sex desire) and the epigrams by Martial that refer to a woman as a “fucker” of women. Boehringer reminds the reader that she has similarly previously addressed the topic of the olisbos (dildo) as a marker of f/f sex, and similarly discounted this as an ahistorical projection from later eras. That is, there are references to the use of an olisbos by women for sexual gratification, but not to the use of it by pairs of women for sexual activity. [Note: I’d be interested to see a specific analysis of the line in Lucian about women making love to each other “harnessed to this object built in the shape of licentious parts,” because that strikes me as highly suggestive.]
Dream Symbolism
Manuals of dream interpretation (oneiromancy) include the meanings assigned to a variety of dreams about sexual activity. Although the dreamer is mostly assumed to be male, there are a few interpretations where the dreamer is female and dreaming about sex with another women. Two key points are crucial in trying to use dream interpretations as social commentary on sexual activity. Pairings that are clearly socially disapproved (such as incestuous pairings, or pairings where the male dreamer takes a passive role) are not associated with negative meanings. The interpretation of the dream (positive or negative) comes from other elements of the scenario and don’t systematically correspond to how the scenarios would be evaluated in real life. And with respect to male dreams about sex, there is no “natural category” of interpretations relating to the sex of the partner. Sexual motifs in dreams are categorized as those that “conform to morals,” those “against morals,” and those “against nature.” Incest and oral sex are “against morals,” while the category “against nature” includes sex with oneself, with a deity, with a corpse, with an animal, or a female dreamer having sex with a woman (the only scenario among the sexual dreams in which a female dreamer is mentioned at all). From this it can be seen that “against nature” isn’t by definition “bad” but perhaps more along the lines of “unimaginable, impossible.” All of the sexual scenarios in dreams are divided into those in which the dreamer penetrates the other participant and those in which the dreamer is penetrated by the other participant, with differing interpretations (but, as noted, not ones in which one group is entirely positive and the other negative). Dreams involving two women follow this pattern, specifying different meanings for the dreamer penetrating or being penetrated, however given the unreal nature of the context, it isn’t clear who what extent this indicates distinct sex acts. It’s entirely possible that the rhetorical listing of penetrating/penetrated simply follows the structure set up for the default case (the male dreamer) without consideration for the logistics of the act. [Note: compare, for example, to medieval punishments for sodomy in which women, in parallel with men, are sometimes sentenced to have the “offending member” amputated, without regard for actual anatomy.] Boehringer’s overall conclusion is that the key feature one can draw from the symbolic structure of dream interpretation regarding f/f sex is that such scenarios were entirely outside the sphere of what could be categorized coherently. Unlike m/m sex dreams that could be further sorted into types of acts and participants, f/f sex imagery involved only one relevant feature by which it was classified: the sexes of the participants. And that feature placed it into the category of impossible/unimaginable scenarios that.
Physiognomy
Physiognomy was the system of attributing tendencies toward certain behaviors or desires based on anatomical features such as body configuration, facial features, color of eyes and hair, etc. While later manuals of physiognomy discussed features that were associated with f/f desire, Boehringer identifies no texts from prior to the 4th century CE that do so. Neither a propensity for f/f sex nor a “masculine” personality in a woman are included in earlier texts, although features that indicate an effeminate man are present. The earliest inclusion of f/f topics is in an anonymous 4th century CE text and is an addition to the base text it is drawn from which refers only to m/m desire. The male-related text discusses how certain anti-virile features are associated with a man who desires women, in contrast to the more exaggeratedly virile features of a man who “seeks men.” Following this, the 4th century author adds, “It is the same for women: the feminine type (species muliebris) bed down with women, but the virile type (virile speciem) are more likely to seek men.” Note that these correspondences are the opposite of the image of an effeminate man desiring men and a masculine woman desiring women. Rather, in both sexes, the gendered physiognomy “seeks its like” in a partner.
Medicine
Medical texts from Antiquity do not make any connection with atypical anatomy and same-sex desire in women. Indeed, up to the 5th century CD, this genre doesn’t cover sex between women at all. The earliest known medical text that mentions sex between women (Caelius Aurelianus) covers both male and female same-sex desire as a moral sickness rather than a medical condition (reflecting the dominance of Christian attitudes by that time). The passage is difficult due to corruption of the various manuscript versions that survive, but refers to tribades as practicing “the two forms of love” who “come together with women rather than with men” and who “pursue the women in question with a jealousy almost worthy of men”. Boehringer interprets “the two forms” as indicating alternating or symmetrical roles in sex (as contrasted with an active/passive distinction in roles). She notes that the passage deserves more analysis that she gives it, but that it falls outside the scope of her study.
Motifs
The final part of this section catalogs various motifs that recur across multiple genres discussing sex between women. A common theme is treating sex between women as something “new” or “never before seen/discussed”. Another is treating it as a paradox—as something inherently contradictory (as in “adultery without a man present”). A third theme is seeing f/f sex as something “prodigious” in the sense of surprising, mysterious, or “monstrous” (with the caveat that “monstrous” can also apply to miracles in this context). It is a spectacle causing surprise and fascination in the audience. A fourth theme is association with the supernatural or the practice of magic (though Boehringer offers only the example of Martial’s female couple engaging in sex alone at night under the moon, a context associated with magic). A fifth theme is association with gender ambiguity—of confusion or playing with images of gender-crossing or existing between gender categories. A sixth theme is that of love/desire that falls outside “natural” categories, associating f/f desire with inter-species love (as in Ovid). In general these discursive themes work to remove f/f sex from the realm of the “real” and into the realm of the fictional, the contradictory, and the purely hypothetical.
The chapter ends with a summary of topics that Classical Roman attitudes toward f/f sex do not include: a masculine appearance, an atypical genital physiology, the use of a dildo, a distinction into active and passive sex roles or maculine/feminine gender roles. Overall, what defines “women who have sex with women” as a single identifiable category is, in part, that such relations fall entirely outside the system of socially defined categories relevant to sexual relations and the illegibility of f/f relations within those categories.
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Event / person:
Thursday, December 23, 2021 - 08:46
In the texts discussed in this section, it is particularly important to keep in mind that these are fictional depictions, created for specific rhetorical purposes. While the women and their sexual activities in these texts need to make sense to the audience (to say nothing of needing to be imaginable by the author), these are not neutral, documentary descriptions of random real-life women. We have a complete absence of neutral documentation of real-life Roman women who engaged in sex with women. That doesn't mean that we can't envision such lives based on biased and polemical texts of this sort, but it does mean that we will be adding our own (modern and biased) layers, whether we're filtering out the misogyny baked into Roman literature or trying to imagine the interior lives of the women these authors are holding up for ridicule. In such exercises, I think it can be useful to consider other historic contexts where the "official" literature is uniformly hostile and misogynystic, but where we do have glimpses into the interior lives of women who loved women. We can't know the specifics of Roman women's lives, but we have sound basis for expecting them to be unaligned with what men said about them.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 3h: The Roman Period - Fictional Women
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
In the texts discussed in this section, it is particularly important to keep in mind that these are fictional depictions, created for specific rhetorical purposes. While the women and their sexual activities in these texts need to make sense to the audience (to say nothing of needing to be imaginable by the author), these are not neutral, documentary descriptions of random real-life women. We have a complete absence of neutral documentation of real-life Roman women who engaged in sex with women. That doesn't mean that we can't envision such lives based on biased and polemical texts of this sort, but it does mean that we will be adding our own (modern and biased) layers, whether we're filtering out the misogyny baked into Roman literature or trying to imagine the interior lives of the women these authors are holding up for ridicule. In such exercises, I think it can be useful to consider other historic contexts where the "official" literature is uniformly hostile and misogynystic, but where we do have glimpses into the interior lives of women who loved women. We can't know the specifics of Roman women's lives, but we have sound basis for expecting them to be unaligned with what men said about them.
# # #
Petronius’ Satyricon
The Satyricon of Petronius includes a fleeting episode in which two women kiss and embrace each other during the “feast of Trimalchio”. Once again, a full understanding of the context of this literary passage is necessary to determine how this scene reflects Roman realities. Trimalchio’s feast is only one episode in the larger work that is the Satyricon and both it and the work as a whole require a lot of background which cannot be summarized here. But in brief, the fictional Trimalchio is a very rich freedman who is showing off his wealth and status by giving an over-the-top banquet. Boehringer notes two important themes. Everything in the Satyricon is a sort of reversal or inversion of ideals. And in particular, the banquet can be viewed as a distorted reflection of Plato’s Symposium, conveying the message that the characters are reaching cluelessly for the values and experiences of that earlier era, but failing to achieve them at every point. Within this context, the episode of the embrace between the women can be seen as motivated by / referring back to the myth of love between two-bodied creatures, but as having no other significant motivation for its specific inclusion.
The two women, Fortunata and Scintilla, are the wives of the two wealthy men present at the banquet, the host Trimalchio and his rival Habinnas. The two women initially serve as proxies for their husbands’ one-up-manship, where they show off the expensive jewelry their husbands have given them, and the husbands make a point of commenting on the cost and value of the objects. The women serve as placeholders for the necessary parts of a high-status life, but without a qualitative function. They are not described as beautiful, they have not provided sons, and their conversation makes clear that their husbands do not feel romantic love for them or treat them with the respect due to a wife.
After the display of jewelry, the two women fall to talking together, laughing and exchanging drunken kisses. They have expressed pleasure and eagerness at seeing each other and are in the middle of embracing each other when Habinnas, the husband of Scintilla, assaults Fortunata by seizing her feet and tipping her backwards over the couch so her garment hikes up above her knees. Fortunata protests, settles herself with her tunic in place again, and “takes refuge in Scintilla’s arms” hiding her embarrassment under a cloth.
Boehringer interprets this incident as a proxy for the two men’s rivalry, with Habinnas treating the women’s actions as if it were a form of adultery, for which a husband has the right to take action. But here he is at fault for a husband only has the right to take action within his own home, not by assaulting the “offender” in their home. The specific form of the assault is a type of symbolic rape (Boehringer goes into the details of the actions and language that support this). But in assaulting Fortunata, he is actually challenging Trimalchio.
The acts of affection between the two women have no social significance or meaning on their own—the characters themselves exist only as display of their husbands’ wealth. And the interruption of their affection gives social meaning to the act only by reframing it as a power struggle between the men.
[Note: Boehringer’s point is primarily that this episode cannot be taken as evidence regarding actual social attitudes toward women—including married women—engaging in sex-adjacent activities, whether at a public banquet or in any other context. However it should still be noted that the author has created a scenario in which two women, wives of indifferent husbands, indulge in erotic activity together, to all appearances as a way of satisfying their unfulfilled desires. Whatever symbolic meaning Petronius intended to give the women’s encounter, this was a scenario that he could envision and that he expected to make sense to his readers.]
Martial’s Bassa
As previously discussed, Martial’s epigrams should be understood as witty and satirical commentary on “character types” that illustrate some facet of Roman in/out-group psychology, and not as documentation of specific actual people. The epigram on Bassa follows the typical “set-up, punchline” format.
In the initial part, Bassa is described as a paragon of virtue—a second Lucretia! (Lucretia was a historic figure considered the epitome of female virtue and modesty.) Bassa hasn’t had a succession of husbands, there are no rumors of her having any (male) lover. In alignment with the expectations for a modest woman, she socializes only with women.
The second part reinterprets the same set of facts, beginning with an accusation of scandal. Bassa’s all-female company is no longer innocent as she is their fucker (fututor). But in despite of the use of this word that normally is defined as vaginal penetration, Bassa’s activities are elaborated on as “uniting twin cunts” with man-like lust. The epigram ends with a “Theban riddle” (making reference to the riddles of the Sphinx): adultery with no man involved.
As with many of Martial’s epigrams, the imagery is deliberately crude and shocking. But, also as usual, the point isn’t to present a neutral description of Roman experiences and attitudes, but to present an absurdity or conundrum for humorous purposes. Clearly he doesn’t mean to suggest that all women who engage in superficially modest and virtuous behavior should be suspected of secret vices. Another take-away is that the term fututor, when applied to women, can’t be assumed to indicate penetrative sex. (It implies sex, but perhaps may simply be the most “neutral” term available, unless a less normative act is specifically implied.) Another point is that—as we saw in the hypothetical legal case previously discussed—the application of the term “adultery” to sex between women was not a legal fact. Applying it here via language (adulterium), and in the Satyricon by means of the framework of action-and-reaction, shows that the authors saw a parallel but not that it had the same official status.
[Note: So in terms of envisioning Roman realities, what can this text suggest? Firstly, that Romans could imagine that women could have same-sex encounters within the context of an otherwise respectable life. Secondly, that male authors would consider such encounters to be improper and outside the norm. Thirdly, that sex between women could be imagined to intrude on male proprietary rights (adultery) at a symbolic level, even if not at a legal level. Fourthly, we have a specific sexual technique implied that adds to the repertoire that can be extracted from other texts.]
Juvenal’s Satires
Juvenal’s satires are very far from an objective record of the society he lived in. Basically (and this is my phrasing, certainly not Boehringer’s) he was yelling at clouds and shit-posting and get-off-my-lawning and kids-these-days-ing to the utmost of his talents. Juvenal’s satires rage at all the vices and degeneracy he feels are destroying Traditional Roman Values™, including debauchery, greed, corruption, and the growing presence of foreigners. [Note: I’m quite certain that if Juvenal had been alive today in the US, he would have been a Fox News commentator.] Unlike Martial, Juvenal often does have specific people in mind as the targets of his pen, though he dodges lawsuits by using partial names. Nor do Juvenal’s satires present a consistent and coherent picture. The claims he makes in one may be completely contradicted by his assertions in another. All of this must be kept in mind when evaluating the truth value of specific claims and statements.
The second satire (after one which lays out his basic arguments) is aimed at pathici (men who take a passive role in sex with other men or have other “unmanly” habits and practices), including a passage written in the voice of a female character, Laronia. Boehringer discusses two laws relating to female and male sexual behavior that are referenced in the passage, particularly concerning stuprum, a concept relating to shameful or degrading sexual behaviors. The passage in the Laronia text referring to sex between women is framed in the negative in order to criticize men more strongly, Roman women, she claims do not lick each other (using fairly tame language to indicate oral sex), while men allow themselves to be penetrated by other men. [Note: the verb in this passage is lambere “lick” rather than the more crude lingere, which comes down to us in the compound cunnilingus. While both have similar denotations, it is the context of usage that tells us that one is more polite than the other.] Women do not claim male social prerogatives by arguing law or wrestling in the gymnasium, but men take up feminine activities such as spinning wool. [Note: it’s unclear here whether the accusation is that men are literally engaging in fiber production or whether “spinning wool” stands in metonymically for female-coded activities in general.]
Setting aside, for the moment, the judgement implied about sex between women, Boehringer points out several understandings that can be extracted from this passage. Criticism of pathici is predicated on an assumption of differentiated roles within m/m sex, and that certain roles are more shameful than others. Indeed, the man who alternates between active and passive roles appears to be more condemned than the man who prefers a passive role. But the description of f/f activity makes no distinction of roles or status. “Media does not lick Cluvia, nor Flora, Catulla.” But there is not the linguistic apparatus for distinguishing licker and lickee as separate roles to be evaluated individually, as we regularly see for sexual activity involving men. The women are not distinguished by age or status, but treated as a single undifferentiated category. From the context of the discussion, the hypothetical women can be presumed to be “respectable” married women rather than prostitutes or courtesans, as the legal context of this discussion involves forms of adultery, which would not apply to prostitutes.
Boehringer’s interpretation is that this passage is not intended specifically to provide an opinion on sex between women in the abstract, but rather to use an accepted view that f/f oral sex is strongly negatively evaluated in order to imply that the behavior of men in the same discussion is even worse than that.
The fictional Laronia’s defense of Roman women is shown to be a rhetorical tactic rather than a claim about actual practice by the appearance in Juvenal’s 6th satire of a long litany of accusations of women’s sexual debauchery. The framing story of this satire is that of a man trying to convince his friend never to marry, by listing all the ways in which women are unworthy of his love. This catalog specifically targets the hypocrisy of wives of citizens, not the behavior of more marginal women, and covers a very wide range of behaviors, not only sexual ones.
But among this catalog is one dramatized scenario in which two women, returning together from a drunken party, literally piss on the altar of Chastity. Following this, they take turns to straddle/ride (equitant) each other, “writhing together beneath the gaze of the Moon.” In context, this is clearly intended to indicate sexual behavior. Even more so than the licking passage, the language indicates the absence of role differentiation and a mutual activity. The two women are of equal status, likely of equal age being described as “milk sisters” (i.e., nursed by the same wet-nurse), and to the extent that the sexual activity is asymmetric, each takes turns at each activity. There is no implication of masculine role-playing or of penetrative activity. (While Juvenal also condemns women who engage in male-coded activities such as athletics, this is done in separate scenarios not related to f/f sex.) Much of Boehringer’s further commentary speaks to the multiple ways in which this scenario violates the expected behavior of modest citizen wives.
Summary
Overall, these fictional depictions by Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal present a relatively consistent picture. These are free women of various social ranks, the wives of citizens and freedmen. They are not described as tribades or fricatrixes (although sexual activities implied by those labels are described). There is no parallelism between the way f/f sex and m/m sex is treated. The judgement of m/m sex hinges on an assumption of asymmetry and differentiated roles, while f/f sex does not involve different judgements based on distinctive roles within the sex act. Rather, the negative judgment of f/f sex hinges on the fact that no man is involved. The category of tribas is not a parallel for the category of cinaedus, in the sense of envisioning an overarching category of “people who engage in same-sex sexual activity.” The contrasting categories applied to men who have sex with men are irrelevant to women who have sex with women because they are entirely outside the system of masculine virtue that allows some roles and disallows others. This pattern continues in the next section which looks at “scientific” discourse around sexuality.
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Wednesday, December 22, 2021 - 06:50
It remains frustrating that essentially all of the surviving source material on female homosexuality in classical Greek and Roman contexts comes not simply through male voices, but through elite male voices who tended to view women as a whole as standing outside the concept of "virtuous, acceptable, praiseworthy behavior." It becomes impossible to filter out the authors' attitudes towards women, and towards relations between the sexes, from any possible evidence about how the women (hypothetically) involved in such relationships might have felt. How did Roman women in general feel about the male-centered rules and structures by which their lives were evaluated? How did any marginalized group in Roman society feel about their own lives? A friend of mine has been summarizing read-throughs of academic texts on the experiences of enslaved people in Roman society and many of the same questions arise, often with fractionally more direct evidence (but only fractionally). Since the end product of the LHMP is to provide information that can help us create fictional scenarios that are compatible with (even if not supported by) the existing data, if seems reasonable to bring in such tangential considerations. Some day I will try to write a "guide to writing f/f fiction in classical contexts" like I've been working on for some other eras. It may be very scanty. But I'm starting to feel a bit more up to the task.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 3g: The Roman Period - Tribades - Philaenis
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
It remains frustrating that essentially all of the surviving source material on female homosexuality in classical Greek and Roman contexts comes not simply through male voices, but through elite male voices who tended to view women as a whole as standing outside the concept of "virtuous, acceptable, praiseworthy behavior." It becomes impossible to filter out the authors' attitudes towards women, and towards relations between the sexes, from any possible evidence about how the women (hypothetically) involved in such relationships might have felt. How did Roman women in general feel about the male-centered rules and structures by which their lives were evaluated? How did any marginalized group in Roman society feel about their own lives? A friend of mine has been summarizing read-throughs of academic texts on the experiences of enslaved people in Roman society and many of the same questions arise, often with fractionally more direct evidence (but only fractionally). Since the end product of the LHMP is to provide information that can help us create fictional scenarios that are compatible with (even if not supported by) the existing data, if seems reasonable to bring in such tangential considerations. Some day I will try to write a "guide to writing f/f fiction in classical contexts" like I've been working on for some other eras. It may be very scanty. But I'm starting to feel a bit more up to the task.
# # #
One particular woman’s name crops up in relation to several references to tribades, creating a confusing implication that a specific tribade named Philaenis was part of Roman history. In this section, Boehringer dissects out the origins, traditions, and contexts that connect the name Philaenis to sex between women (as well as other sexual contexts). This is a long, complicated discussion and I will skim over some parts.
Classical literature makes reference to a number of treatises on love and sex, although very few survive. (Ovid’s The Art of Love operates within this genre, and a number of literary works have characters comment on, or quote excerpts from, sex manuals.) Even the nature of the referenced works is not entirely clear. They may have been serious compilations of sexual advice, or parodies of technical manuals on other topics, or satirical works. Some later catalogs of books (often our only source for material that is now lost) discuss books that describe various sexual positions. A number of authors for this type of literature are named or referenced in multiple unrelated sources, indicating the likelihood of a genuine original. Of these, the name Philaenis is the most common, and came eventually to stand in for the entire genre of sex manual.
It was not uncommon for sex manuals to be attributed to female authorship, although in some cases this may be a pseudonym used by a male author, with a nod to the belief that women were more interested in sex (or at least, less restrained). Boehringer sets aside the question of whether there was a real author named Philaenis (and whether that author was in fact female) and focuses on the “authorial persona” that went by that name.
Many references to Philaenis’ work suggest that it was a catalog of sexual positions, but the discovery of three papyrus fragments that reference Philaenis as author show a somewhat broader coverage—more of an “art of love” discussing many aspects of behavior on topics such as seduction and kissing.
In addition to this limited direct material, the appearance of the name Philaenis in connection with sexual manuals suggest that the authorial persona was known from the late 4th or early 3rd century BCE. Two epigrams of the 3rd century BCE state, in the voice of Philaenis, that she was not a debauched woman or prostitute, though she had been slandered as such. These are literary exercises, written about her legacy and reputation, not about the woman herself (and certainly not by her). By the 1st century CE, a humorous reference in an inscription written for a statue of Priapus (a clearly sexual context) references a woman demanding “all the positions described by Philaenis” from her (male) lover. In the 2nd century CE, Lucian uses “the tablets of Philaenis” as an example of filthy language. Eventually the author’s name became metonymic for the work itself and “a Philaenis” simply meant a sex manual.
Although various sources argue over or refute that Philaenis was a courtesan or prostitute—perhaps a natural conclusion given the subject of the text—there is no evidence that supports either conclusion. Boehringer argues against some scholarly opinion that the name came to stand in for a generic courtesan or prostitute. (Part of the difficulty comes from the limited contexts in Latin literature in which ordinary women are mentioned by name at all, and the very limited number of “respectable” women so named.) Thus the interpretation of references to the literary Philaenis has been confounded by scholarly assumptions that any woman with that name could automatically be interpreted as a prostitute. But conversely, it is reasonable to interpret any mention of the name as raising sexual associations in the minds of the classical readers/hearers, even when there is no overt indication of sex work.
This association with sex, but not specifically with prostitution, is evident in the three contexts of most relevance to the present work, in which a character named Philaenis appears as a tribade: two epigrams by Martial and a passage in Lucian’s Erotes. Here again we run into confusion created by more recent scholars who projected a post-Classical connection between prostitution and female homosexuality onto the Classical material. But a study of the specific contexts in which tribas appears, make it clear that the Romans did not conflate the two. In looking at those contexts, it’s key to understand that to the Romans “Philaenis” did not mean “a prostitute or courtesan” but rather “a woman who has a deep theoretical knowledge about sexual matters and writes on this topic.”
A total of nine epigrams by Martial involve a character with the name Philaenis. Two specifically associate the subject with sex between women (though not necessarily exclusively) while the other seven do not. It should not be assumed that all the epigrams are intended to be understood as referring to the same specific woman (or even to an actual woman at all). Martial’s epigrams, in general, address concrete everyday subjects in a vivid and exaggerated way, and only rarely can be associated with actual historic people. The humor is often crude and there is an over-arching theme of mocking or demonizing behaviors that the poet disapproved of. In general, Martial is targeting character types, not specific individuals.
Boehringer provides an extended analysis of the themes and topics that Romans considered obscene or repulsive (and which therefore were the sorts of themes Martial addressed). This is too complex a topic to get into in this summary, but key features are disapproval of immoderate and excessive behavior, and an attitude that oral sex pollutes the mouth and is therefore degrading to the one who performs it.
Thus we set up the interpretation of a fairly lengthy epigram describing the behavior of “the tribade Philaenis” who engages in a series of activities to an immoderate degree that she believes to show her “manliness”. But as the punchline twist, “when she’s horny, she doesn’t give blowjobs—that would be unmanly—but greedily eats out girls cunts.” The force of the satire is to show how Philaenis is so misled as to how to “perform masculinity” that she does the least manly thing of all: perform oral sex on women. The full explanation of the symbolism and reasoning behind this text is very detailed and necessary to understand the epigram, as the point of the text is not to accuse a specific actual woman of being a tribade and to associate the performance of masculinity with that status, but rather to mock the idea of excess (both sexual and non-sexual) as being a virtue, using a “clueless woman” as the butt of the joke. This is important, as a superficial reading would suggest that all the activities Philaenis engages in (including fucking boys, fondling girls, exercising in the gymnasium, and excessive dining and drinking) are part of a Roman stereotype of female homosexuality. Boehringer argues (similarly to other recent studies) that Philaenis’s sexual activities are not part of a coherent “type” and do not represent a sort of “proto-butch” stereotype. But rather that they are only one element in a catalog of activities related only by standing outside the ideal of behavior.
The second of Martial’s epigrams is much shorter: “Philaenis, tribade of tribades, you are right to name the one you fuck (futuis) your mistress (amicam).” The punchline here—if briefer—is similar in presenting an apparent absurdity: a woman “fucking” someone (using a word that is defined as performing insertive sex in a vagina), and the wordplay of amica meaning both literally “female friend” and specifically “mistress, female lover”, when Roman society made little allowance for the category “female lover of a woman” to exist.
There is also a discussion of the other contexts in which Martial uses the name Philaenis, which he generally applies to an “anti-erotic” woman, one whom no man would care to fuck. Within this context, the tribade Philaenis is simply one more type of unfuckable woman.
The reference to Philaenis in Lucian’s Erotes comes within a rhetorical exercise in which four characters debate whether a (male) preference for boys or for women as sexual partners is preferable. In addition to the gender issue, the debate also concerns the appropriate place of phyical pleasure with respect to love. This is not a debate about heterosexuality versus homosexuality (as it is sometimes presented) but about the appropriate purpose and experience of love. In particular, the characters universally reject love between two adult men, and the spectre of love between two women is raised as the ultimate sexual bogeyman that can negate any position to which it can be compared. As with Martial, the detailed explanation of the context for interpreting this is essential and too long to summarize here.
A potential f/f scenario is not part of the central debate—there is no point at which the characters evaluate it in the same way they are evaluating other relationships. Rather, it is presented as a reductio ad absurdum: if relations between (adult? this isn't entirely clear) men are simply a matter of individual taste, then one might as well accept desire between women. The text spins an ever more elaborate vision of this scenario, envisioning women “harnessed to this object built in the shape of licentious parts” performing acts identified by “this word, that we hardly ever hear, and that I even feel shame pronouncing, I mean tribadistic lust”, where women’s bedrooms are “each a Philaenis outraging decency with her androgynous loves.” The speaker is arguing on behalf of the primacy of m/f love and this vision of f/f love being a natural conclusion of supporting m/m love is intended to nail down his position as unassailable. But at the same time, the text as a whole—as a philosophical exercise—is not meant to argue against the validity of men loving boys. Only the specific character does so.
Boehringer then discusses this genre of philosophical argument and how it is normally structured, to provide more context for understanding this episode. Skipping ahead to her conclusions, Philaenis—as a figure of female sexual knowledge—becomes a spectre of all types of sexual activity outside the acceptable, of which the tribade is simply an extreme case. Lucian’s Philaenis is not specifically and exclusively a tribade, but she opens the door to “tribadistic” possibilities.
But though the Classical Roman references to Philaenis cannot be construed to interpret the author-persona as a tribade (just as they can’t be taken to construe her as a prostitute), two later commentaries from the 10th century did make this leap, specifically identifying the author-persona Philaenis as “a hetairistria and tribade” who “described the different types of sexual relations between women.” And these later interpretations are part of what has led modern scholars to make the same connection, even though the 10th century commentaries are shaped significantly by later Byzantine opinions about same-sex relations.
In sum: Philaenis the putative author of a manual on love and sex (whoever the real-life author may have been) was gradually turned into a stock character representing a sexually knowledgeable woman, and then in turn into a tribade in some examples. But the texts referencing this stock character must be interpreted in the context of the evolution and not as indicating a fixed, enduring meaning. She became, in some ways, an “anti-Sappho.” Sappho was connected to love, Philaenis to sex. Not until the 3rd century CE does any surviving text apply the term tribade to Sappho, even when discussing Sappho’s relations with women. In addition, Philaenis represents the “public tribade”, the woman whose activities are done openly and about which everyone knows. But in contrast to the later use of f/f imagery for male titillation, Philaenis and her fellow tribades are never represented as attractive for the male gaze. They stand outside the realm of the erotic (from a male point of view).
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Monday, December 20, 2021 - 05:46
Just a quick intro this time, as it's the morning after Worldcon and I'm in that "mentallyexhausted in a good way" state. The convention had a LOT of challenges, both leading up to this week and in the execution, and while it was far from perfect it was also quite good. I did a lateral-flow Covid test last night and came up negative, so I'll continue keeping my fingers crossed that the strict safety requirements the convention had in place have been successful. I have an actual "vacation vacation" for the next week and a half, part of which will be used to finish the read-through of Boehringer. Which I hope you are enjoying as much as I do!
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 3f: The Roman Period - Tribades - Astrology
Following Seneca’s quote of the use of “tribade,” in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, uses of the term in Latin are closely connected with astrological literature, and appear in very similar formulas (some clearly deriving from each other or from a common original), such that we can derive additional context from similar formulas that use other language, as well as context from Greek astrological literature that uses the Greek form of the word. Boehringer provides a chronology of the exact sources, with their dates and the word forms used in them. In addition to Greek and Latin forms of “tribas,” parallel astrological references introduce the term “fric(a)trix,” which derives from a similar meaning (to rub).
The astrological texts have the general purpose of explaining a wide variety of types of behavior in terms of the person’s astrological influences. In all cases, the behaviors in question deviate from the norm. The general formula for tribades/fricatrices is that some star or planet is located under a “masculine sign” and therefore causes women to be sexually attracted to women, sometimes using the word tribade. The more specific explanation of why and how this influence acts is various, and additional understanding can be found in how the same or parallel configurations affect men. For example, in certain examples the configuration causes women to be tribades and men to be excessively attracted to women (i.e., it influences both sexes to have increased attraction to women). In other conjunctions women become tribades but men are impotent or eunuchs (i.e., it causes each sex to become more like the other sex). In yet another version, a “masculine” conjunction causes women to be tribades while the parallel “feminine” conjunction causes men to be effeminate or sterile. Women who are influenced to be tribades may also behave in a “virile” fashion in other aspects of their lives.
The same type of explanation may appear without using a specific term for the women, describing them as desiring sex with women. And rather than the word tribade, the text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus describes a conjunction giving rise to the fricatrix who “is loved by women who are fricatrices” in which both partners are given the label, with the implication that there is no distinction of active and passive.
Within this period, the other instance of Frictrix, in Tertullian, is ambiguous in meaning. Tertullian is listing types of people associated with extreme “oral pollution” (which didn’t necessarily derive from sexual activity). While some have interpreted Tertullian’s use as generally meaning “prostitute”, the context suggests that this reading would be redundant, since the women in question have already been described as prostitutes, to which is added, “and who are, themselves, fricatrices too.” This leaves open the possibility that, as in the other example of fricatrix from astrological sources, Tertullian’s text is refering to women who have sex with women. [Note: Possibly with the implication that oral sex is involved.]
Boehringer discusses the social context of astrological literature in general and emphasizes that it concerns itself with characteristics outside the norm (since the norm doesn’t need to be explained) The texts discussed here uniformly describe women’s same-sex unions as outside the norm and immoral. But they do not construct a category of “homosexual orientation” that encompasses both sexes, nor do they consistently construct an understanding of tribades as male-acting. Although a “masculine” astrological influence is common among them, the effects on women are sometimes to make them more “virile” and sometimes to create desire between two “feminine” women.
The references in astrological literature as not describing actual, specific individuals, but rather personality “types”. Boehringer concludes from this that during the 1st and 2nd centuries the “tribade” was a literary construction that can be disregarded. [Note: I may be misunderstanding the text. It seems to me that a literary trope of this type would make no sense unless there were actual real-life behavior that people wanted an explanation for. But it remains that this evidence operates on a theoretical plane, not a concrete one.]
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Saturday, December 18, 2021 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 218 – Abstract by Kat Sinor - transcript
(Originally aired 2021/12/18 - listen here)
Since I started the fiction series in this podcast four years ago, one of the most exciting parts of the process is when I read through the submissions and have a story reach out and grab me. It’s especially exciting when the setting is completely unexpected. I know I’m always saying that I want to see stories set outside of the overly popular 19th century, but I wouldn’t have predicted that I’d receive one set 15 thousand years before the Common Era—or that it would blow me away with the lyrical, sensual language I found in Kat Sinor’s story “Abstract”. Kat evokes what archaeologists call the Magdalenian culture of Europe, the people who created the stunning art in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux. And it is that art that forms the focus of today’s story—the art and the artists who created it.
We can only speculate about the sexual attitudes of human beings that far in the past. This story doesn’t dwell on how same-sex desire may have been understood in that era, but simply assumes it as a possibility and tells a story of individuals and of the power and mystery of artistic creation.
Kat Sinor has been writing stories that center hope and queer voices for nearly a decade, exploring those very themes that allowed her to survive. She has published short stories for a variety of projects and is an alumna of Tin House’s 2021 Writing Workshop for her debut novel. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she spends her time working in museums and dreaming up stories to share.
The first time I read “Abstract” in the submissions pile, I was utterly lost in the beauty of Kat’s prose. And when the contract was signed, I knew exactly who I wanted to have narrate it. Jasmine Arch did the narration for a pair of stories we presented back in 2019. She has a lush, haunting voice that I think works perfectly for the otherworldly quality of this story. In addition to her narration work, she is a writer, poet, and artist. Jasmine lives in Belgium and her creative work can be found at jasminearch.com.
This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.
Abstract
By Kat Sinor
We do not let her enter the cave hungry, although it is the hungry season. She is chosen, she is divine, and the whole of us sing a song of praise as she nears the mouth of it. She strips down, her furs falling to her feet, and she is left bare for us, although it is the cold season too. Her hair is a tangled twirl down her back, and I take a step forward, as if I can see the intricate tendrils better from a breath closer. In one hand, she holds a brush—holds it in the same way that we hold the points of our spears after they’ve been carved. Precious things. Precious, wonderful things that were not meant to last. In the other hand, she holds a flat piece of bark. Color is smeared on the brown. There are reds and blues and more blacks than I knew existed.
Choose one, is the only thing asked of her. Choose one to accompany you.
She is scarred, mud-speckled, raw and tortuous. In the instant before she speaks, I become a thing that wants—that wants to hear her say my name, that wants to feel the weight of those black eyes on me, that wants to carry her furs behind her. In the instant before she speaks, I am in agony. It will not be me, but I hope. It will not be me, but I look at the images painted on the outside of the cave, ready to greet her. There is a herd of horses, one imprinted over the other. There is a man-shaped thing, a soul, near a bison. There is scene after scene of hunts. I look at them, and I ask them this one thing, the only thing.
I ask them to make my want solid.
She chooses me in a breath of fate, and I believe again in the things my mothers and fathers taught me. Hidden, unspeakable things. I pick up her clothing, grasp a torch, and cast my eyes on the heels of her feet as she enters.
She has been here thrice before, our divine painter, and so she does not enter as I do, with awkward steps and squinting eyes. Instead, she dances into the darkness, dances until she arrives at where she wants to be. The torch shadows lick up the sides of the walls, hungry for her. (I do not like this image of her, twisted and otherworldly. I do not like understanding the hunger of the shadows.) She presses her hand into the color mixture and touches it to the wall in greeting. When she removes her hand, an imprint is left.
She smiles.
I do not.
I have always been afraid of the dark.
We stand just past the entranceway, just where the light from the sky fades.
“I have seen you paint the outside before,” she says, almost laughing, teasing in a way that shocks me. With the simple ease she carries, we may instead be kneeling by a bush, side by side, two women attempting to find the first berries of the season. There is excitement to her, as if she does not understand the situation, even as she understands it better than I do. We act as two women who are becoming more. “You do not create beast or man or any known thing. Why?”
“I do not like to,” I answer. My finger twists into the loose knot of my hair, tugging at the split, slick end. We would not let her be hungry, but I am not important here. My stomach aches, and I tug my hair tighter, hoping to focus.
“You place dots in patterns I do not see elsewhere,” the artist states. There is something in her eyes, something black and something belonging to me. “Are they stars? Are they children?”
“I haven’t done that in seasons.”
“Yes, and I have not seen you since then.” She clicks her tongue. It echoes. Her joy has run itself through, and she is sharp again. I think: sharp like her shoulder blades, pressing together as she lifts a child to her chest. I think: sharp like the corner of her hip as it curls against me, not in sleep, never quite in sleep when she is that close. The artist tilts her head to the side, holding out her mud-caked hand. Once, I ran because of that sharpness. “Why did you come back this season? Is the cold too lonely?”
I try to listen for the singing that guided us inside, but it does not exist in the cave. Silence. An echoed silence, a holy silence. The cave rids us of the outside completely; truly, there is nothing else in all the world. The torch makes her handprint move. There are truths here that rip my voice from my throat.
“Yes,” I whisper. “I could not survive alone.”
I take her hand.
She is satisfied with my answer, but I realize that we are just beginning our descent into the cave. She pulls me deeper, and the entrance vanishes. Caves are truthful things, the others warned me. Caves are devourers of art, eating the scenes of our world with a greed inspired by it. They told me that these caves had been visited by generations, and in my bag, tucked beneath the supplies and the herbs that our artist needs, there is an offering to the cave. If it is not good enough, they laughed, then I would be the offering instead. I did not believe them until now.
The walls of the cave are not even, and the ceiling reaches for us in waves. It scratches at my palms as I brush it, desperate for some guidance in the dark. The artist laughs at my clumsy feet, and it is not a cruel laugh, not something that causes me embarrassment—it is an echoing sound, a sound that both grips me and calms me. A sound that kills loneliness and robs fear. She is feral when she laughs, and it turns me feral too. When I grab at the wall next, when the cave sees fit to pick away at my skin, I do not grimace. I smear my blood with pride.
“Come nearer,” she finally says. She steps forward herself and reaches her hand into my bag, exchanging her pallet for a tube of hollowed, hallowed bone. She gestures to the rock face before us—the tallest part of the cave so far, it stretches up and up, of a different sort than what we have seen. On the surface, there are endless handprints, some on top of each other, some red and some black. They glow, they whisper. The cave is no longer silent, it is alive. The artist continues, “These are the first. A reminder, I am sure you heard. You leave part of yourself here when you place your hand on the smooth face of our past.”
“Who are they?”
"Mothers, fathers, children, artists, those chosen and those not. The guardians of the cave.”
“I am not fit to be a guardian.” My teeth have rotted, my leg has not healed as it was. I am aged and stripped of splendor. No children, no mates. I returned because of the cold. Because I could not stay away. Because of her. “I am not even a mother.”
She presses a kiss, gentle and true, to my cheek. I love her for it. I love her in the way of our wild youths. She cups my neck. “If you are not, you will die, and your spirit will be the guardian then.”
I move my hand onto empty stone, next to one handprint that has two crooked fingers and another that is small, too small, so small it makes my eyes fill with tears and my breath come shaky. The artist holds the hollowed, hallowed bone to her lips and blows, spraying a shock of red across the back of my hand. When I pull my flesh away, an imprint is left behind, and I join them, I become them. I am left on the wall of my ancestors. I stand with their spirits.
“What will you paint?” I ask my artist.
She takes me deeper into the cave.
(My secret, the one lodged so neatly between rib and heart, beats faster.)
The artist takes me past the flickering memories that were left behind on the walls, the light of our fire turning all the art into dancing, driving, deadly memories. The black and red birds are not trapped in flight, but instead, they soar along the top of the walls, they disappear to shadow, they reappear in terror. I can hear them, I think. The sound of our breaths might be the coos of the birds as they feed their young. The figures dance, hunt, love one another on the walls as we walk; they watch us with no curiosity. The shapes of animals stalk us, and I realize we are meeting one another—they step off their walls, and we step into them.
I know we have reached her canvas when she stops suddenly, her breath catching in her lungs.
“It is so empty,” she says. I ignore that her cheeks are wet and her hands now shake. I have not thought that she might be frightened too; I have not thought of what it means to come into this cave and face these terrors year after year, to bring them to life to torment our descendants and to save ourselves. She gives breath to her own nightmares, and, still, she comes back. She cries at the emptiness, and I step forward to stand beside her, both understanding and not.
“What will you paint?” I ask again.
She takes the bag from me and brings out her supplies, mixing new browns and blues and reds. She balances a brush in her hand and dips it into the colors, the only colors that exist in the cave. The world here is muted, and she becomes the only point to hold onto.
“I want to paint the things that you do. The things that are not beast or man or any known thing. The things that exist only to you.” This one a plea. Her back stays to me, and she stares at the wall in front of her. This one a demand, “Tell me about them.”
“I don’t know,” I answer.
She is not satisfied, I know she is not satisfied. In the flickering light of the flames, she has become as fluid as the paintings. Her hair falls in thick layers around her, black and heavy and twined with fabric and flowers—the only other living things brought with us. Her scars are in motion, her past injuries intent to live on in the present, and her eyes, her black and lively eyes, see more than I am willing to give. She turns, and they focus on me, on what I am not saying. On my secret heart.
She dips her fingertip into the blue paint and reaches forward, drawing a strange swirl on my arm. Where she drags her touch, bumps appear, marring the swirls she leaves behind.
“The sky,” she says. “What would you have me do for the sky?”
“Any color than what it is,” I answer, closing my eyes. She continues her patterns, swirls blending into swirls. She is the one meant to be nude, but I feel on display for her. “The shape of it being what you feel. When you have visions of the sky, what do you see? I see a womb. And in the place where the sky sets and changes to nightmare, I see a birth.”
The finger halts. I keep my eyes closed, suddenly afraid.
My artist returns her touch to me, fingertip setting on my lips. I can taste the animal fat, the charcoal. I can taste the dirt. She drags the color across my lips, and I part them for her. In secret. In something else. She spreads the color to my cheeks, tracing a design as if it was in familiar practice.
“You don’t create what you see,” she says suddenly. “You create something else, don’t you?”
My hand moves to match her, catching her against my cheek and keeping her there. I turn my face toward her palm, my painted lips against her painted skin.
“Yes,” I answer. “Yes.”
I take her hand, lead her to the wall again. My hand over hers, I guide it to the blank space. Press her hand to the surface, feel the coldness radiate through us both. I drag her hand across it, feeling it, feeling us. And so we paint together, the two of us, creating shapes that have never existed before, creating new ideas between the images of hunting beasts and dying prey, dying people. Us, the goddesses of them all; us, the creators, the artists.
When she catches the flow of the movement, I remove my hand and begin painting her skin instead. Swirling spirits between her shoulder blades, strange shadows on the sharp bone of her hip. I paint her bare, for me. No one else will ever see us like this, no one else will know the truth of who we are in this cave. Both of us painted, and when I press my lips to the top of her spine, to the place where speckles dot her skin, I know that we are painting more than thoughts, more than ideas.
The two of us together paint all things unspoken in this cave.
Show Notes
This quarter’s fiction episode presents “Abstract” by Kat Sinor, narrated by Jasmine Arch.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Links to Kat Sinor Online
- Twitter: @katsinor
Links to Jasmine Arch Online
- Website: jasminearch.com
- Twitter: @Jaye_Arch
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LHMPSunday, December 12, 2021 - 10:29
Ordinarily this blog would go up on Monday (yeah, like I've been sticking to that - hah!), but since tomorrow will be filled with travel (cars! planes! buses! trains!) I'd rather get it up now. Also, since I'm all packed and the house is cleaned up and ready for the sitter, and I have time to kill...why not? I have seven more subsections of the book to cover, some of them only a few pages, so my goal is to finish up by the end of the year while I'm on vacation. I continue to emphasize that if you want a great example of how to approach the interpretations of historic sources, Boehringer is gold standard, in my opinion.
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LHMPFull citation:
Boehringer, Sandra (trans. Anna Preger). 2021. Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0-367-74476-2
Chapter 3e: The Roman Period - Tribades - Seneca
The mention of tribades in Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae, something of a textbook for arguing legal cases, appears to be straightforward. A man comes upon his wife and another woman engaged in sex and kills them both. The women are identified as “tribades,” and there is a passing mention of the man examining the second person, whom he had perceived as being a man, “to see whether he was born that way or whether it had been stitched on.” Superficially, this would appear to be evidence that sex between women was classified as adultery and that there was a perception that a woman might use and “attached” implement to engage in it.
But as with many of the other fleeting references that Boehringer examines, there’s a lot more nuance to this example and the understanding of f/f sexuality is represents is more nuanced.
The Controversiae are not simple presentations of actual cases in law, but hypothetical cases that are intended to stretch the boundaries of argumentation, supported by secondary examples that examine specific questions and considerations of the case. Each case in the work is structured similarly: a statement of the (fictional) case to be considered, presentations of existing legal texts that the accusation and defense will draw on to make their arguments, then examples of speeches relevant to the case by other orators (interrupted by Seneca’s commentary). The material is grouped under several categories: the sententiae (the opinions on the topic), the divisio (an organized presentation of the arguments), and the colores (various legal motifs not directly related to the law in question but that are presented to explain or excuse the act).
The reference to tribades occurs in one of these colores and so is not the central legal case being argued, but rather brought in to examine one of the central issues from a different angle. In this case, the question is how to make arguments on a sex-related crime without resorting to crude and obscene language. The tribade example is given of an argument that does not avoid obscenity – that is, the point of talking about tribades is to emphasize that talking about tribades is to engage in obscenity. The episode itself is not Seneca’s but is quoted from the early 1st c CE consul Scaurus, who is referencing a speech he heard by two Greek orators, Hybreas and Grandaus. The episode is quoted in Greek, embedded within Seneca’s Latin text and the manuscript is somewhat mutilated and has been transmitted via several different variants in later copies, so there’s a great deal of distance between any interpretation of the episode in question and everyday reality, even aside from the fictional nature of the text’s genre.
But given all that, one central question is, “What is the purpose that this example is serving within the legal argument? What can that tell us about how to interpret it in sociological and legal terms?” Boehringer notes the difficulty and uncertainty in answering these questions and gives her best understanding.
Firstly, the example indicates that Roman land was not ambiguous on the topic of women’s same-sex relations, because it the law itself were ambiguous, then that would have been included as a topic of debate within the text. The orators make no reference to a specific law covering sex between women (which is a highly meaningful omission) and there are no other legal or literary texts referring to this scenario.
Secondly, the other details presented as exculpatory for the man who killed the two women indicate that the concern was whether he had a legitimate basis for his acts. The scenario mentions that it was dark, that he thought his wife’s lover was a man (whether natural or “stitched on”). If sex between women, in and of itself, constituted adultery and was a legitimate reason for a husband to take revenge, then none of these circumstances would be relevant. Therefore one clear conclusion that can be drawn from the case is that sex between women was not illegal and was not considered adultery, for which a husband was entitled to take revenge.
A third consideration raised by Grandaus is whether the context of the event removed the wife’s lover from the category of “woman” and thus could justify the category of adultery. Boehringer points out that the fact that this is a topic of debate does not support the interpretation that f/f sex was understood as an asymmetrical relationship with one partner performing a masculine role. Both women are identified with the label tribade and the suggestion of one partner being read as masculine is raised as a possibly mitigating factor, not as an assumed fact. Given the layers of hypothetical argumentation, we need not even assume that in the original altercation that the husband actually did perceive his wife’s partner as male—the point is that if he did, this would be a circumstance that could justify his actions. (Assuming that there was an actual original altercation and the whole thing isn’t invention in the first place.)
A fourth conclusion—one specifically stated by Seneca—is that the topic of sex between women was considered “obscene” in a way that topics such as prostitution and heterosexual adultery were not.
[Note: The Roman definition of “obscenity” is a complex topic in itself—in the last couple days I’ve been following along with a friend tweeting a summary of a study of this specific topic, and Roman “obscenity” was very tied up with the presumption of an elite male point of view. So one should interpret Seneca’s statement as having an implicit context of “elite Roman men considered the topic of sex between women to be obscene”. We have no indication of what Roman women of any class thought about the topic.]
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Tuesday, December 7, 2021 - 08:24
Hey, so I'm going to be at Worldcon in Washington DC next week and I'll be on some programming. (See the event link.) If you happen to be there, look me up to say hi. The convention is being quite careful about Covid precautions. (Everyone must document vaccination, no exceptions. Required masking in all convention spaces.) I know we were all hoping that greater vaccine distribution and fergoodnessakes common sense precautions would have made the pandemic much less of an issue by now. But you make your best predictions and then you evaluate your risks. I'm comfortable (but careful) about traveling. And I intend to enjoy myself, and not think too much about those more carefree times when "con crud" was considered an unavoidable inconvenience as opposed to a model for disease transmission that perhaps we should have been addressing all along.
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ConventionsPages
