In his article The Teratogenic Grid, Holt Parker makes an excellent point. Perhaps it's an excellent point only if you are a nerd of ancient sexual cultures.
He makes he point that the Roman world did not base its "division of sexual categories on the axis of same versus other" as we do upon the axis of gender when we say "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Instead, they contemplated an axis of active and passive.
Our bifurcated categorization is "a rather parochial affair and a comparatively recent development even in the culture of the West." I love the word "parochial" here.
In other cultures (past and present) sexual categories are instead based on "age, social status, ritual category, or power relations and often cut across of simply ignore the biological classes of male and female." More than two genders are recognized in "various" cultures. You can't make absolute choices about whether you like only boys or girls where some people are both, or decide to be "homosexual" or "heterosexual" if you are some measure of both. But you can make choices about whether you're active or passive.
America ignores its intersex population in an offensive way. (My spell check just red-lined "intersex"). Estimates of the children born intersex range from .018-1.7% of live births, but it seems obvious that most intersex births are not reported and kids are often "corrected" at the discretion of some inhumane nongeneticist (Wikipedia agrees). America has reached the point where it feels like it should tell ~576,000-5,440,000 of its citizens they aren't proper humans by not recognizing them as a natural part of our culture, and it's gross. And that's only the 576,000 to 5,440,000 Americans who outwardly exhibit both gender's organs, that's not even considering all the folks who have a little chromosomal swap going on. But, I digress.
Holt Parker went on to build a grid to show how language worked when you had gender identifications (as male, female, or intersex) but where homosexual can only be an adjective that describes discrete and brief acts of one's life. And where homosexual and heterosexual acts can happen simultaneously or interchangeably, across and between class levels. Different acts are taboo to Romans than to us. The lord, the lady, the soldier, the slave boy, or the other slave girls could fuck a slave girl and it was a-ok. No one thought anything of this because the slave girl's social status and gender computed to being passive - to being penetrated. The senator should never be penetrated, be passive. Dirtying your mouth with a sex organ was not proper for anyone and would have been scandalous for the upper classes. If some senator were found being passive at all, that would be an undue scandal.
The chart has two parts. First, the active role:
------------------Vagina-----------------Anus---------------Mouth
Activity: futuere pedicare irrumare
Person: fututor pedicator/pedico irrumator
Notice the grammar depends upon the orifice, not the gender. In a sense, this is because men are presumed to be active. Male Roman writers were disincentivized from talking about active women. But I have seen almost all of these words applied to women's activity in primary sources. When they are, the writer generally thinks something is awry. As Seneca said, women are pati natae - "born to be passive." Don't tell woman number 5 (I'm calling her "Sporty Spice" until she gives me a better nickname).
In the passive, gender categories return:
Early in my academic career I began to play in this space and it irrevocably destroyed my allegiance to the categories "homosexual" and "heterosexual." This destruction was facilitated by the fact that I had entered my first relationship with a woman, during which I still fantasized about and hooked up with men.
I no longer believe in "gay" and "straight." As a consequence people often comment that I think everyone is "gay." More accurately, I think that most everyone might enjoy some measure of homosexual acts or relationships. In a fraternity house, I think there's a lot of male-male love and sometimes some male-male blackout drunk sex to match.
If you made it all the way through that diatribe, email me at bacchus.paine@gmail.com so I can subscribe you to this blog.
He makes he point that the Roman world did not base its "division of sexual categories on the axis of same versus other" as we do upon the axis of gender when we say "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Instead, they contemplated an axis of active and passive.
Our bifurcated categorization is "a rather parochial affair and a comparatively recent development even in the culture of the West." I love the word "parochial" here.
In other cultures (past and present) sexual categories are instead based on "age, social status, ritual category, or power relations and often cut across of simply ignore the biological classes of male and female." More than two genders are recognized in "various" cultures. You can't make absolute choices about whether you like only boys or girls where some people are both, or decide to be "homosexual" or "heterosexual" if you are some measure of both. But you can make choices about whether you're active or passive.
America ignores its intersex population in an offensive way. (My spell check just red-lined "intersex"). Estimates of the children born intersex range from .018-1.7% of live births, but it seems obvious that most intersex births are not reported and kids are often "corrected" at the discretion of some inhumane nongeneticist (Wikipedia agrees). America has reached the point where it feels like it should tell ~576,000-5,440,000 of its citizens they aren't proper humans by not recognizing them as a natural part of our culture, and it's gross. And that's only the 576,000 to 5,440,000 Americans who outwardly exhibit both gender's organs, that's not even considering all the folks who have a little chromosomal swap going on. But, I digress.
Holt Parker went on to build a grid to show how language worked when you had gender identifications (as male, female, or intersex) but where homosexual can only be an adjective that describes discrete and brief acts of one's life. And where homosexual and heterosexual acts can happen simultaneously or interchangeably, across and between class levels. Different acts are taboo to Romans than to us. The lord, the lady, the soldier, the slave boy, or the other slave girls could fuck a slave girl and it was a-ok. No one thought anything of this because the slave girl's social status and gender computed to being passive - to being penetrated. The senator should never be penetrated, be passive. Dirtying your mouth with a sex organ was not proper for anyone and would have been scandalous for the upper classes. If some senator were found being passive at all, that would be an undue scandal.
The chart has two parts. First, the active role:
------------------Vagina-----------------Anus---------------Mouth
Activity: futuere pedicare irrumare
Person: fututor pedicator/pedico irrumator
Notice the grammar depends upon the orifice, not the gender. In a sense, this is because men are presumed to be active. Male Roman writers were disincentivized from talking about active women. But I have seen almost all of these words applied to women's activity in primary sources. When they are, the writer generally thinks something is awry. As Seneca said, women are pati natae - "born to be passive." Don't tell woman number 5 (I'm calling her "Sporty Spice" until she gives me a better nickname).
In the passive, gender categories return:
------------------Vagina-----------------Anus---------------Mouth
Activity: futui pedicari irrumari/fellari
Person:
male cunnilictor cinaedus/pathicus fellator
female femina/puella pathica fellatrix
They had one quick word for "one who [had/has/is having] cunnilingus performed on her by a mouth" to "one who [fucked/fucks/is fucking] a mouth" and another for "one who [sticks/stuck/is sticking] a cock into an ass." With those kind of words, an intersex person never has to search for how to describe herself/himself.
Early in my academic career I began to play in this space and it irrevocably destroyed my allegiance to the categories "homosexual" and "heterosexual." This destruction was facilitated by the fact that I had entered my first relationship with a woman, during which I still fantasized about and hooked up with men.
I no longer believe in "gay" and "straight." As a consequence people often comment that I think everyone is "gay." More accurately, I think that most everyone might enjoy some measure of homosexual acts or relationships. In a fraternity house, I think there's a lot of male-male love and sometimes some male-male blackout drunk sex to match.
If you made it all the way through that diatribe, email me at bacchus.paine@gmail.com so I can subscribe you to this blog.
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