rainbowodyssey: paratactician: nextian: andrewismusic: fantaxes: While that is a beautiful sentiment

rainbowodyssey:paratactician:nextian:andrewismusic:fantaxes:While that is a beautiful sentiment in itself, the context makes it kind of awful, because it condemns the female half and especially the female half that clings to another female half.I don’t really see anywhere where gender is implied in this quotation? Then again I haven’t read The Symposium so I have no idea what the context is.Fantaxes is literally right, but the context is satirical… You can read it here, and yes, the character Aristophanes is claiming that gay men are the best! of the best!! but in context in context, Aristophanes is actually the only straight guy at that party. The joke is not really that heterosexuality and lesbianism are less valuable than homosexuality because of women; the joke is that he’s loudly disclaiming the idea that homosexuals are shameless in the middle of a big boozy gay party in which Socrates is about to get hit on by a teenaged boy who he wouldn’t sleep with.The Symposium is honestly kind of atypical of Athenian high culture because Plato seems to have felt that women were a lot more worthy of personhood than many of his contemporaries. A lot of the speakers in the Symposium are blatantly misogynistic*, and then you have this, intended to puncture them: women as part of the original forms of humanity, women as equal partners in the world. Aristophanes the actual dude was sexist*, but I’m not convinced this speech was supposed to be.But I am not an expert! Super not an expert. Please let me know if I’m misreading it, or misremembering scholarly consensus.* I mean, calling him sexist makes him sound like he didn’t like women; neither sexism nor misogyny is the best word for Athenian mores towards women, which were utterly dehumanizing.I’m not even sure fantaxes is literally right? The Jowett translation linked is unhelpfully euphemistic; the passage about the different sexualities literally runs like this:So those men who are cut from the combined type (i.e. from the hybrids who were originally bi-gender), which at that time was called ‘androgynous’, are lovers of women, and the majority of adulterers originate from this type, and also all women who are lovers of men, and adulteresses originate from this type. But those women who are cut from the female type do not take very much notice of men, but are more inclined towards women, and hetairistriai originate from this type. And those who are cut from the male (type) pursue men, and while they are boys, since they are pieces of the male (type), they love men and enjoy going to bed with and embracing men; and they are the best among boys and young men, since they are the most manly by nature.The word hetairistriai is a puzzle. A hetairos is a companion or friend, but in the feminine form, hetaira, it usually means ‘companion’ in the Firefly sense - a relatively high-class prostitute. A hetairistria should be ‘a woman who likes hetairai’, which could therefore mean either ‘a woman who is attracted to (female) prostitutes’or just ’a woman who prefers to associate with other women’. Either way, and despite some robust denials in 20th-c. scholarship, the sense here must be ‘lesbians’, which the Greeks didn’t otherwise have a word for. (‘Lesbian women’ are just women from the island of Lesbos, who were reputed to be into the kinky stuff; the verb lesbiazein, ‘to play the Lesbian’, seems to mean ‘to give blowjobs’, ironically enough.)At no point, though, can I find in the text any condemnation of the female half of the pair. I wonder if fantaxes is misreading the line about homosexual boys being the best of all boys, as meaning that gay men are superior to everyone else? Aristophanes’ point - which is, as nextian correctly says, a joke - is that boys who enjoy sex with older men, far from being ‘shameless’ (anaiskhuntos), are actually better than other boys, because they’re ‘more masculine’ (i.e. they literally came from a fully male source). In case you missed the joke, he helpfully adds ‘and you can tell how much better they are than other boys, because they’re the only sort who grow up to be politicians’.This is a fascinating speech for a number of reasons, not only because it implies a notion of sexuality as biologically rather than culturally determined - contrary to the frequently-repeated modern view that Greek homoeroticism was a wholly cultural construct - but because it’s the only reference to female homosexuality in any Classical Greek source (as opposed to female homoeroticism - we sometimes find women having sex with women in art, but this is the only point where it’s suggested that some women are just into women by nature). And, strikingly, it’s not condemnatory. Aristophanes ends his speech by saying:I am talking now about everyone, both men and women, when I say that this is the way for the human race to become truly happy (eudaimon): if we let our love run its course, and each of us finds our own beloved and returns to our original nature.Like the real plays of Aristophanes, the speech of ‘Aristophanes’ is a series of jokes wrapped round a serious point. I actually disagree with nextian that A. himself endorsed the Athenian legal attitude towards women (which was, absolutely, dehumanising) - he takes several shots at that exact attitude, perhaps most explicitly in the parabasis to Thesmophoriazusae. He was sexist in the sense that all Greek men were sexist, in that he took for granted that women were physically weaker than men and less able to resist the temptations of food and sex, but I think he himself was relatively forward-looking where ‘women as people’ was concerned. Plato was a master of characterisation, and I suspect his Aristophanes is weirdly feminist precisely because he recognised in the plays of Aristophanes a weird feminist streak.A bunch of these points are really interesting but I can’t imagine any circumstance where a 5th Century Athenian man wouldn’t use the term hetairistra to demean sexuality between women.  It’s not as if Aristophanes has a particularly enlightened, positive attitude toward sex workers.As nice as it is to say that Aristophanes is a proto-feminist, we really have to keep in mind that Classical Greek thoughts about women were dehumanizing and that even though “all Greek men were sexist,” the standards for what counts as misogynistic isn’t relative and the fact that Aristophanes takes a few jabs at contemporary attitudes toward women doesn’t mean he’s deserving of some sort of special feminist award. -- source link

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