The Rules of Attraction: Greek homosexuality and its influence on ancient Rome

laphamsquarterly.org

27 points·diodorus··5 comments

The article correctly points out that the Greeks didn't have a concept of "homosexuality" in the sense used today [1], and that the more accurate word for the Greek practice is "pederasty". [2]

Yet, they put "Greek homosexuality" in the subtitle.

[1]: "For the Greeks, the concept did not meaningfully exist at all; the social identities we today understand in the West as a gay man or a bisexual woman, for example, simply weren’t something that people recognized."

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece

Your username is apt.

This title is definitely clickbait-y. The Greeks had a very limited, socially acceptable context for homosexual acts, they had nothing (that we know of) resembling modern attitudes.

This is all with notable asterisks, however. "Sapphic" and "Lesbian" originate from a poet, Sappho, residing on the Greek island of Lesbos, whose work was very... Lesbian.

And the Romans divided sexual acts more into active/passive. Thus homosexuality was reasonably acceptable if you were topping, while heterosexual cunnilingus was frowned upon.

I don’t get your second example, performing a cunnilingus is pretty active and intensive, why would it be frowned upon?

Active/passive are just reasonably close English equivalents. Acts that were seen as subservient were deemed feminine.

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