The Puzzle of Silent Sexuality

Claire Dunbar

Brown University

If love truly does make the world go round, then it has done so for many years. A cross-section of texts from any time period reveals people thinking about love in every aspect: affection, lust, sexuality, tenderness. The emphasis on one aspect or another has varied through time. Male views dominate what we know of love in classical antiquity, because few women wrote then. And so we have a record of male perceptions of male feeling and male perceptions of female feelings, instead of a record of discrete male and female perceptions. Questions related to specifically female feelings, such as women’s attitudes towards their bodies, men, and one another, pose a significantly serious problem for men. This paper examines various ways male writers of classical antiquity compensated for ignorance of women’s feelings about love.

In the Symposium, the dialogue about love, Plato largely ignores women. Five original speakers assume that love occurs exclusively between men, and so they necessarily leave out women, or introduce them to illustrate the weaknesses of love. Pausanias, for instance, divides love into “Common” and “Heavenly,” in which the latter joins soulmates and the former “is the love which the baser sort of men feel. . . . It is directed towards women quite as much as young men” (181a). The figure of Diotima complicates Plato’s vision. She has the final speech, yet because she is sexless and because Socrates, a man, delivers her speech, she does not represent a woman’s perspective. Plato does not concern himself with the female capacity to love. Even his Aristophanes, who posits a world originally inhabited by hermaphrodites, believes that the male remnants who love other male remnants are “the best of their generation” (192a), for he cannot conceive of female fidelity in love.

Similarly, Cicero’s text De Amicitia surveys friendship exhaustively, but completely on the basis of male relationships. When Cicero begins, “This, however, I do feel first of all—that envision women having the virtue, love, truth, and reverence that friendship requires, so he cannot picture friendships between women. In fact, he prohibits them because “helpless women would use friendship “for the sake of the defense and aid . . . and not out of goodwill and affection” (XIII.46). Except for this one reference, Cicero does not mention women in the essay at all. The silence indicates his unconcern wit an important aspect of love, namely, female friendship.

Some male writers of antiquity, when they do try to address female sexuality, express it in terms of their own. Lysias illustrates the subordination of female sexuality to male concerns in a speech he composed for a husband, Euphiletus, who killed his wife’s lover, Eratosthenes. Euphiletus’ speech demonstrates that, in the eyes of the law, the distinction between women’s unwillingness and cooperation in adultery matters more to the man than to the woman. Paraphrasing Solon’s laws on rape and seduction, Euphiletus states:

[Solon] considered violators deserving of a lesser penalty than seducers. . . . His idea was that those who use force are loathed by the persons violated, whereas those who have got their way by persuasion corrupt women’s minds, in such a way as to make other men’s wives more attached to themselves than to their husbands, so that the whole house is in their power. (quoted in Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant, Women in Ancient Greece and Rome, p. 45)

Solon would have the rapists and adulterers prosecuted for crimes against the husbands, instead of for crimes against the wives, because women’s feelings matter only in relation to their husbands’ feelings. The issue of extra-marital sex for women, then, becomes one for men because men react to female sexuality only as it touches them.

Similarly, although Aristotle and Hippocrates write specifically about women, the authors explain female physiology in terms of male bodies. Thus, when “in men the organ of generation becomes rebellious and masterful . . . the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women” (Lefkowitz and Fant, p. 81), and “further, a boy actually resembles a women in physique, and a woman as it were in infertile male” (p. 83). This correspondence of female to male allows the men to describe the mystery of female sexuality. No one could determine the actual events of procreation and pregnancy, so men reduced them as much as possible to male parallels.

The attempt to depict women’s feelings from a female perspective also generated incomplete, but more complex, views of women’s feelings about love. Ovid and Terence provide two examples. The latter achieves the cruder balance of silence about and inclusion of women. Although he cannot fit women into a male scheme, Terence tries both excluding them and describing them in male terms to compensate for his ignorance. Central female characters appear in the Andria, the Eunuchus, the Phormio, and the Hecyra. These characters, generally the object of the hero’s love, incorporate a suggestive silence in Terence’s work. Terence had no way to represent their feelings, so he simply deleted them. When he did try to introduce women to the action, he used either stock characters of women emblematic of male fantasies. The helpful maidservant, the midwife, and the nagging shrew all play standard roles in the plays, and their characterization presents little trouble; but figures such as Thais in the Eunuchus and Bacchis in the Hecyra act out male projections of the self-supporting, self-reliant female who does not demand anything from men, and who accepts their actions without complaint. Thus Thais, who worries to herself that her lover “judges her character by other women” (Eunuchus, line 198), readily agrees to Thraso and Parmeno’s sharing of her, and Bacchis promotes Pamphilus’ marriage at her own expense. These women behave as their men would like them to, for Terence has gone from the extreme of no women to that of male-defined women.

Ovid’s work manifest much the same conflict because he directs his work to women and yet describes them in terms of male fantasies. Even his proclaimed pleasure in women, suggested by his general focus on them and his specific declaration in Amores II.4, results in an incomplete understanding of them, as both the Amores and the Ars Amatoria document. In the Ars, for example, Ovid presents women as welcoming rape. The Sabine women

. . . contrived
to make panic look fetching . . .
(A.A. I.126-127, in Ovid, The Erotic Poems, trans. Peter Green)

Later Ovid writes

She may struggle, cry ‘Naughty!’,

yet she want to be overcome.

(A.A. I.665-66)

Even when Ovid addresses love from the female perspective in the Ars, Book II, he exhibits insensitivity. He encourages women to deceive, to perpetuate stereotyped, male impressions of women. The images Ovid develops in the Amores exemplify his perhaps personally unresolved opinion of women. The women in the poems range from Dipsas, the “old hag” of Amores I.8, to Corinna, the shy seductress of I.5, to the accusing wife of II.7. Women elude Ovid, although he persistently attempts to define them.

This survey of male attitudes to women’s feelings about love is misleading inasmuch as it speaks to a modern concern. Collectively, these authors show only that female sexuality did not preoccupy classical antiquity as it does the modern world, so ignorance of women did not matter. Because they did not share this concern, classical male authors circumvented “the woman question” in ways insufficient for a modern audience, and created a distorted view of women’s feelings about love: a puzzle to ponder if not to solve.