Gender Fluidity

      There’s an old chestnut, famously reported in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Jupiter and Juno are having a men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus argument. This is something of a noteworthy setup in itself, since Jupiter and Juno always have a contentious relationship, and it’s unusual for them to be having any sort of casual conversation, but set that aside for now. The topic of the discussion is orgasms, and who has better orgasms, men or women. One might note at this point that Greek and Roman gods are never imagined as omniscient, so this isn’t a question that Jupiter can simply answer by virtue of being the all-knowing creator god. Moreover, as king and queen of the universe, Jupiter and Juno probably have the most inflexible sexual identities in the cosmos: they embody the experience of their respective sexes, and they do not experiment with gender fluidity, period. (It is true that just a little bit earlier in the Metamorphoses Jupiter raped the nymph Callisto by disguising himself as the goddess Diana, but I tend to think of him as wearing a feminine disguise over a male body--the gendered language makes clear that Jupiter’s masculine identity remained intact throughout the rape, and the references to masculine equipment lurking under “Diana’s” dress are fairly blatant as well.) So neither Jupiter nor Juno has anything approaching empirical knowledge of what the opposite sex’s orgasms are like. With this established, they decide that the argument is too subjective to be settled through discussion; they need an objective judge who knows what it’s like to be both female and male. Hence they summon Tiresias.

      (I should note that, in their argument, Jupiter and Juno are both asserting that the sex OPPOSITE their own enjoys better orgasms. As in the case of many notions from classical myth, this is rooted in attitudes toward sexual humiliation and dominance. The idea is that if one sex enjoys more intense orgasms, that sex will be more eager to have sexual experiences, and therefore will be more easily manipulated with promises of sex or the withholding of sex. As mentioned above, Jupiter and Juno have a contentious relationship and are always looking for each other’s weaknesses--it’s never wise for one of them to admit that they particularly enjoy something that the other is in a position to withhold (see Iliad 14, the ‘Deception of Zeus;’ see also Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which men and women alike are represented as desperately horny and unable to refrain from sex for even a few days). This argument between Jupiter and Juno is meant to be extrapolated out among husbands and wives in general and their attempts to manipulate each other via sexual enticement, so it’s advantageous for the purposes of this argument to have less exciting orgasms, to not be the one who can be easily manipulated by sexual means.)

      Tiresias appears! He has a lot of backstory. You probably met him in high school by reading Oedipus Rex, in which he is the famous Blind Seer of Thebes, whose lack of ordinary sight is an ironic inversion of the fact that he is the only character who sees events clearly, blah blah blah, we all wrote the same boring high school essay on the subject, let’s move on. But plenty of interesting things happened in Tiresias’ life, long before Oedipus even got to first base with his mother. Tiresias’ mother was a close companion of Athena (one of Callimachus’ hymns, the ‘Bath of Pallas,’ seems to describe them as lesbian lovers, although I may be reading too much into it). There are varying accounts of how Tiresias became blind; sometimes it’s because he saw Athena bathing, and other times it was Juno/Hera who took his eyesight away--in any case, his blindness always has a supernatural explanation, and his ability to see the future is given in compensation for that lack of ordinary sight. But he also has other supernatural experiences in his past, the relevant material that prompts Juno and Jupiter to summon him to settle their argument: one day walking in the woods, he came across a pair of copulating snakes. When he hit them with a stick (I don’t know WHY he chose to do this), he miraculously was transformed into a woman. He lived as a woman for several years, until he came across the same snakes copulating, hit them again with a stick, and was transformed back into a man.

      Jupiter and Juno therefore call on his expertise, since he has lived as both a man and a woman; if anyone can resolve this question objectively, Tiresias can. And that’s a fairly loaded statement, since it implies that Tiresias had sex while in the form of a woman (in the Metamorphoses, Ovid specifies that ‘Venus of both kinds was known to him’). It’s well known that, with few exceptions, Greek and Roman society were rigidly patriarchal. The average woman did not have authority over her own sex life; it would have been controlled by her husband, father, or guardian. As a man, Tiresias would have been recognized as having autonomy over his sex life, but that privilege goes away once he goes home and announces his sex change. It’s clearly problematic to take someone who is inherently recognized as a part of a privileged class and, in response to something analogous to a lightning strike, demote them into an underprivileged class, assign them a guardian, and all the rest. Once she returned to her family, it seems unlikely that she would be having a lot of casual sex.

      On the other hand, maybe the female Tiresias never went home and attempted to fit herself into the conventional structure of her patriarchal family. Maybe she refused to give up her autonomy and instead set off for an independent life. This seems to fit perfectly well into Ovid’s world; the Metamorphoses certainly has enough random idiots bumbling around in the woods, seemingly cut off from any societal structure. The trouble is, the young idiots bumbling around in the woods inevitably run into trouble, whether they’re raped or turned into trees or attacked by dragons or forced to eat themselves. This isn’t the place to have a nice casual romantic encounter and write up some notes on the relative intensity of orgasms. If the possibility of a sexual encounter arises here, Tiresias would be lucky to still be human at the end of it.

      It seems as though Ovid didn’t want to put a lot of thought into how Tiresias lived her life when she was a woman. For his purposes, he only wanted to establish that Tiresias was an objective judge and move on with the argument between Jupiter and Juno (in case you were wondering, he quickly takes Jupiter’s side and says that women have better orgasms--possibly because Jupiter is more powerful that Juno and in a better position to reward him for his help). But it strikes me as unfortunate, because his sex change would be such a vexed situation, with a lot of potential to explore questions of gender roles in society, starting with what happens when a young man goes out for a walk and comes back saying that he’s misplaced his penis. Carol Ann Duffy took a shot at addressing this with her poem “Mrs. Tiresias” in The World’s Wife, which shows short vignettes of Tiresias’ new life as a supposedly objective authority on gender and sex differences. I still think there’s a lot left to be said.