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Rather, I would like to examine how, in such a fraught and complicated topic as male prostitution, the narratives around these lenses are not simple. My project here is not to dismantle the field - or, not to dismantle it out of spite, or a kind of skepticism which refuses the value of this type of work. As I will outline throughout this paper, while a certain artifact or structure may physically exist, the ways material culture is used to enforce an argument or prove a point are very often tenuous at best, and outright misleading at worst. Pointing out these lenses and their interactions with each other is by no means novel, but what I would like to emphasize here is that, despite the veneer of objectivity, all three of these lenses are subject to bias and misinterpretation. Arguing that a piece of art should be interpreted a certain way because other scholars have interpreted other works similarly, or that a certain modern identity did or did not exist in antiquity: these kinds of claims, in my model, would fall under theory. The final lens, “theory,” is how I label any argument which uses the field itself as evidence. Through translating and analyzing poetry, laws, and other documents from the past, we may find some insight into how they functioned. The second lens, language, is particularly common when studying cultures like Greece and Rome which left behind an extensive written record.
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Most prevalent in the study of archaeology, this kind of work - studying material remains, artifacts, and ancient art and architecture - gives us access to tangible pieces of the past. As such, classicists have, in my view, three options for collecting data and making their arguments. Unlike cultural anthropology and sociology, which (despite their own biases) have the luxury of dealing with extant cultures and conducting field research with living people, classics and archaeology are by nature limited in the information they have access to.
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In the long term, this research will tease apart three distinct lenses through which male prostitution is analyzed and interpreted: material culture, language, and “theory.” While this paper deals primarily with the first of these, all three lenses are important in capturing a full picture of the current state of the field.įirst, I will provide some context on the nature of these three “lenses,” and my rationale behind dividing them as I have here. The project of this paper is, among other things, to map and attempt to untangle these webs of discourse and ideas. Whatever the impetus behind its study, prostitution, and specifically male prostitution, exists at a complex and interesting crux of scholarly and personal biases. Researchers in classics and other fields may approach the topic for a variety of reasons - queer and women’s studies scholars may examine prostitution as a lens for Roman sexuality or gender inequality, while the more normative and prevalent cisgender heterosexual males in the field may study the topic for (supposedly) purely economic or historical reasons.
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This project deals with the topic of male prostitution in ancient Rome, and the tangled narratives, biases, and scholarly practices which surround its study.
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43 Male Prostitution in Ancient Rome: The Tangled Narratives of Material Culture by Greyson Gove I.