Sexual Inversion

by John Addington Symonds

Homosexuality and pederasty in Greece and the modern age, an ethical reconsideration. Part one, a problem in Greek ethics, contains, among other chapters, Homer had no knowledge of pederasty - Achilles - treatment of Homer by the later Greeks; Romance of Achilles and Partroclus; Heroic ideal of masculine love; Vulgar pederasty - how introduced into Hellas - Crete - Laius - myth of Ganymede. Part two, a problem in modern ethics, contains, among other chapters, Christian opinion from the Age of Justinian; Vulgar errors; Literature: idealistic - Walt Whitman; Suggestions upon legislation.

Genres: Sexuality

191 pages, Hardcover

First published December 26, 1984

About the author

John Addington Symonds, English poet and literary critic.

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐

Here, too, I find bits of untranslated French...Though not as much as in Ethel Smyth's Streaks of Life. (Thank God!) And, for this and a few other reasons, today I bought a French-English, English-French dictionary (used and cheap) for whenever I need to translate short bits of French but don't want to open my computer or type into my phone.

This book was interesting, especially as I have read Symonds' memoir and thus have some insight into this book that general readers new to Symonds wouldn't. It was an altogether reasonably enjoyable reading experience, although there were some bits that I disagreed with…which is perfectly natural considering the time this was written. Generally my disagreements were when he mentioned Greek women and minimized how oppressed and disadvantaged they were. On the bits about homosexuality, he has very progressive and modern views, and when they seemed conservative, I had the sense he was fibbing a bit so as to be more palpable to the reader of the time. Too bad he devoted only about three or four pages to female homosexuality, considering the title is “sexual inversion” not “male sexual inversion”! And those three or four pages were very fascinating. (I do need to read a history book about female homosexuality in Ancient Greece.) But, after all, he is a male homosexual, so male homosexuality is what he’s gonna be interested in.

An interesting book, again, though it didn't teach me much that was new. He mentioned a lot of works of philosophers and quoted some of their writings, in the part on Greek Ethics, and in the part on Modern Ethics, he quoted a lot of sexologists and doctors, including Ulrichs, who is his personal favorite, as he favors Ulrichs’ word Uranian.

Actually, what's cool is that today, I went to a thrift store/used book store and found Ellis and Symond's Sexual Inversion, totally spontaneously! It was a very nice copy, too. I bought it, naturally. So, that’ll be coming next. One by one, I’m conquering Symonds’ works.

I found it funny sometimes while reading this when I knew in the text that Symonds was referring to himself, when talking about an anonymous “B” or “A”, but was keeping that a secret, since he actually published this while he was alive (unlike his memoirs, where he admits explicitly his homosexuality). It came off as a little silly, though I know it was very serious and he was doing so to escape social ostracization and prosecution.

One final comment: I really don’t like the way he refers to male homosexuality as “paiderastia” much of the time. It…It sounds like paedophilia (and I’m sure it’s where that term came from), and it blurs the line between homosexuality and what we know of as paedophilia. I know that it wasn’t a term back then, but it’s a little discomforting. And I do remember having a similar feeling reading Symonds memoir, where the lines are blurred in an even more extreme way.

That’s about it! Quotations are below, per usual.

Quotations:

“Partly owing to the social habits of their cities, and partly to the peculiar notions which they entertained regarding the seclusion of free women in the home, all the higher elements of spiritual and mental activity, and the conditions under which a generous passion was conceivable, had become the exclusive privileges of men. It was not that women occupied a semi-servile station, as some students have imagined, or that within the sphere of the household they were not the respected and trusted helpmates of men. But circumstances rendered it impossible for them to excite romantic and enthusiastic passion. The exaltation of the emotions was reserved for the male sex.” (70) I’m gonna have to disagree here. Women did occupy a ‘semi-servile station’ —well, maybe not semi-servile, but wholly servile. Sometimes, as here, Symonds seems to idolize Ancient Greece too much to even slightly criticize it, even when it eminently deserves it.

“The peculiar status of Greek women is a subject surrounded with difficulty; yet no one can help feeling that the idealisation of masculine love, which formed so prominent a feature of Greek life in the historic period, was intimately connected with the failure of the race to give their proper sphere in society to women. [Yes! Exactly. But weren’t you just denying that?!] The Greeks themselves were not directly conscious of this fact; nor can I remember any passage in which a Greek has suggested that boy-love flourished precisely upon the special ground which had been wrested from the right domain of the other sex. Far in advance of the barbarian tribes around them, they could not well discern the defects of their own civilisation; nor was it to be expected that they should have anticipated that exaltation of the love of women into a semi-religious cult which was the later product of chivalrous Christianity. We, from the standpoint of a more fully organised society, detect their errors and pronounce that paiderastia was a necessary consequence of their unusual social culture; nor do we fail to notice that just as paiderastia was a post-Homeric intrusion into Greek life, so women, after the age of the Homeric poems, suffered a corresponding depression in the social scale. . . .
It was at Athens that the social disadvantages of women told with greatest force; and this perhaps may help to explain the philosophic idealisation of boy-love among the Athenians. To talk familiarily with free women on the deepest subjects, to treat them as intellectual companions, or to choose them as associates in undertakings of political moment, seems never to have entered the mind of the Athenian. Women were conspicuous by their absence from all places of resort . . .
It does not follow from the facts which I have just discussed, that, either at Athens or at Sparta, women were excluded from an important position in the home, or that the family in Greece was not the sphere of female influence more active than the extant fragments of Greek literature reveal to us.” (84-6) So he admits that women were totally excluded from public life, but refuses to admit that this is was a servile and oppressive condition for them?!! 😮‍💨

“Sexual inversion among Greek women offers more difficulties than we met with in the study of paiderastia. This is due, not to the absence of the phenomenon, but to the fact that feminine homosexual passions were never worked into the social system, never became educational and military agents. The Greeks accepted the fact that certain females are congenitally indifferent to the male sex, and appetitive of their own sex. This appears from the myth of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, which expresses in comic form their theory of sexual differentiation. There were originally human beings of three sexes: men, the offspring of the sun; women, the offspring of the earth; hermaphrodites, the offspring of the moon. They were round with two faces, four hands, four feet, and two sets of reproductive organs apiece. In the case of the third (hermaphrodite or lunar) sex, one set of reproductive organs was male, the other female. Zeus, on account of the insolence and vigour of these primitive human creatures, sliced them into halves. Since that time the halves of each sort have always striven to unite with their corresponding halves, and have found some satisfaction in carnal congress—males with males, females with females, and (in the case of the lunar or hermaphroditic creatures) males and females with one another. Philosophically, then, the homosexual passion of female for female, and of male for male, was placed upon exactly the same footing as the heterosexual passion of each sex for its opposite. Greek logic admitted the homosexual female to equal rights with the homosexual male, and both to the same natural freedom as heterosexual individuals of either species.
Although this was the position assumed by philosophers, Lesbian passion, as the Greeks called it, never obtained the same social sanction as boy-love. It is significant that Greek mythology offers no legends of the goddesses parallel to those which consecrated paiderastia among the male deities. Again, we have no recorded example, so far as I can remember, of noble friendships between women rising into political and historical prominence. [Besides Ruth and Naomi in the Bible! Not Greek though.] There are no female analogies to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Cratinus and Aristodemus. It is true that Sappho and the Lesbian poetess gave this female passion an eminent place in Greek literature. BUt the Aeolian women did not found a glorious tradition corresponding to that of the Dorian men. [She would be hard-pressed to do so, considering how oppressed and how lacking in political and social rights her entire sex was during this whole time period!] If homosexual love between females assumed the form of an institution at one moment in Aeolia, this failed to strike roots deep into the subsoil of the nation. Later Greeks, while tolerating, regarded it rather as an eccentricity of nature, or a vice, than as an honourable and socially useful emotion. The condition of women in ancient Hellas sufficiently accounts for the result. [Italics mine.] There was no opportunity in the harem or the zenana of raising homosexual passion to the same moral and spiritual efficiency as it obtained in the camp, the palaestra, and the schools of the philosophers. Consequently, while the Greeks utilised and ennobled boy-love, they left Lesbian love to follow the same course of degeneracy as it pursues in modern times.” (93-4)