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PARTISAN REVIEW
male slaves and foreigners allowed a variety of sexual expression with
them which became problematic for the Greeks between males of equal
status, the group among whom most homosexual activity took place.
Thus, the anal penetration of women commonly pictured in Greek vase
painting has very few counterparts in pictures of homosexual intercourse,
and scenes of fellatio are confined to heterosexual activity or the antics of
satyrs. Women are almost invariably placed in a physically subordinate
position, while the intercrural copulation of two males, which appears as
the norm, shows the youth standing bolt upright, looking past his partner,
who bows his head and shoulders as he inserts his penis between the boy's
thighs. Obvious enjoyment of sexual activity in the pictured scenes is
largely confined to women or satyrs, and women arc often shown satisfY–
ing their sexual cravings artificially by means of dildos.
Greek comedy and other literary sources support the view that the
youth who broke the conventions - sought or expected sensual pleasure
from his homosexual lover, permitted a subordinate physical position or
the penetration of a bodily orifice - detached himself from the ranks of
male citizens and classified himself with women, sbves, and foreigners.
Any male believed
to
have done whatever his senior homosexual partner
wanted him to do was considered to have prostituted himself.
Yet the Greek vase paintings studied by K.
j.
Dover did, in their de–
piction of the male genitals, indirectly seem to indicate the difference in
status of the partners. Beautiful youths arc invariably portrayed with very
small, thin penises, unrealistic in contrast to the depiction of a normal
scrotum and incongruous with their broad shoulders and powerful thighs,
the latter apparently a strong sexual stimulus. Dover's view is that the
small penis not only represents an intended contrast between the imma–
ture and the adult male but that it is "an index of modesty and subordina–
tion, an abjuration of sexual initiative or sexual rivalry." He explains the
painters' adoption of the ideal youthful penis as the standard for men,
heroes and gods as a tendency to make them all appear young, but since
the senior homosexual partner was usually a young adult not yet married,
the convention may also be another reflection of the Greek disavowal of
the purely sexual as an approved stimulus. This seems the more likely in
that satyrs are routinely pictured in the vase paintings with enormous
penises, and a very large, pendulous artificial penis was normal wear for
the comic actors of Aristophanes's time.
Greek literature is virtually silent on the subject of female homosex–
uality, classical Attic literary sources referring
to
it only once and that in
an imaginary context, when Plato, in one of his
Sympo sia,
has
Aristophanes explaining the origin of sexual preference . The phantasy of–
fered is that humans were originally double beings of three types -
all
