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c h a p t e r e i g h t Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe When Girls Won’t Be Girls Diane T. Pintabone Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe in the Metamorphoses has always raised more questions than it has answered about ancient concepts of female homoeroticism. The myth itself concerns Iphis, a girl raised as a boy, who ultimately is changed into a boy so that she can marry Ianthe. By placing the tale in the contexts of feminist theory and classical scholarship, we can at least identify the questions. By additionally looking at this story within the framework of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a whole, we can approach some answers. In this essay, I hope to add to the current body of scholarship a sense of Ovid’s unique approach to female same-sex desire. The Masculine Woman Scholarship examining the works of Roman authors suggests that those authors conceptualized as masculine a woman who sexually desired women. The insightful work of Judith P. Hallett, “Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature,” locates the story of Iphis and Ianthe within the (relatively small) body of ancient Roman sources that refer to female same-sex desire; these sources tend to, as she puts it, masculinize , hellenize, and anachronize female homoeroticism,1 removing it from the realm of Roman contemporary reality. Hallett notes that Roman authors most often depict a tribas (tribad most often refers to the2 “active” female partner in female-female sex) as masculine and aggressive and as the one who wishes to penetrate, while her lover’s gender role is left ambiguous.3 In her work Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, Bernadette Brooten finds that the precise meaning of tribas is difficult to define: Since the ancient sources do not clearly define the sexual position and sexual acts of a tribas, some sources designate both partners as tribades, whereas others call only the “active” partner a tribas. And while most sources seem to assume that a tribas has sex only with women, according to one source she just prefers 256 women to men. Whereas the ancient authors are rather vague about the sexual acts of a tribas, they vividly depict her as one who takes on a male role and male desires. (24) The word tribas is a Greek word (borrowed by Romans), probably derived from a verb “to rub,” itself implying an “active” sexual partner but often further suggesting penetration.4 Some women (Iphis among them) are so masculinized in these sources, Hallett observes, that they are said to become men.5 She cites telling words used by various authors to describe the “manly” practices of tribadic women, indicating a negative judgment. She cites, for example, Seneca the Younger (Moral Epistles 95.20.2) who claims that such women, their lust equal to that of men, “having devised so perverted a type of shamelessness, enter men” (adeo perversum commentae genus impudicitiae viros ineunt) (“Female Homoeroticism” 214 –215). As Hallett’s work suggests, same-sex desire among women was condemned as socially unacceptable,6 and the females said to experience such desire were chastised primarily on the grounds that they were manly.7 Brooten adds to this image and finds that the masculinization of such women extends to thoughts of females genitally penetrating females; this masculinization depends on a concept of an “overly large clitoris,” which provided a possibility for a sort of female erection (Love between Women 50). She further locates this idea of female homoeroticism within a broader spectrum of responses present in the ancient Mediterranean, finding that there is some evidence for female-female marriages associated with Canaanites and Egyptians (50, 332–336). In a recent study of Sappho in Ovid’s Heroides 15, a work by Ovid consisting of a fictional letter written “by Sappho” to her (male) beloved Phaon, Pamela Gordon8 finds that Ovid has his Sappho exhibit what Ovid elsewhere associates with masculine sexual desire. The characteristics that Gordon notes in “The Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15: Or, Why Is Sappho a Man?” can be summarized briefly: Ovid’s Sappho expresses her sexual passion (rather than simply bewailing her predicament); she plays the active role (Ovid presents her gaze to readers) while her male beloved is seen as passive ; she describes herself as sexually experienced; and she notes her own faithlessness to her former female lovers (280–284). Such “masculine” women are described as...

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