latining:

eastiseverywhere:

Queer Week!

Terracotta lamp with a scene of a woman performing cunnilingus on another woman
Turkey (00s CE)
British Museum
[Source]

It’s really hard to find stories and images of queer women in pre-modern Asia. This is an interesting exception!

The British Museum says:

Scenes showing two women together are rare, but this first century oil lamp from Roman Turkey shows two women having oral sex together on a couch. While sex was frequently shown on everyday domestic items, it is uncertain who would have used or seen this lamp. It may have been made to titillate male viewers, rather than to appeal to women.

This is Roman!

It was Roman custom to greet companions with a kiss on the cheek or mouth, as a result, oral sex was the most taboo sexual act, because nobody wants to go in for a polite greeting and get a face full of dick breath.

I disagree that this was intended to titillate men for a few reasons:

1. These lamps are small, portable, and relatively replaceable/disposable. They cover scenes from daily life with no exceptions.
2. There was a HUGE slave trade in the Roman empire. Selecting slaves for domestic and sexual labour was completely normalised and there is no reason or evidence that women didn’t participate.
3. Classics over-relies on Martial’s nutty MRA epigrams because they’re the only references to lesbians we have. Counterpoint: they’re the only references to wlw that we have because bisexuality (as the modern world would define it) was the norm for Ancient Rome, and nobody else thought women having sex with other women (instead of them) was a problem.
4. The Romans considered women the seat of sexual desire. It was impossible for a woman to control her raging lust, and a man’s noble duty to resist spilling his manly essence unnecessarily, lest he end up a ridiculous, emasculated brute like Hercules.
5. My, times have changed.

Recommended reading: Bisexuality in the Ancient World, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Ideologies of Desire), Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook, A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities