Big Dyke Energy
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Big Dyke Energy
On The Patriarchy, Women's Sexuality, and the Invention of Heterosexuality
This is Life as a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. We’re generally working our way through Leviticus these days. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here.
Last week, we discussed one of the clobberiest clobber verses—the one that has been used to justify untold amounts of homophobia and harm over the centuries.
Notably, it focused primarily on what “men” should do with “males”—that is, it focused on male same-sex activity. (I’m rolling with the language in these traditional texts, while of course aware that there are genders outside any kind of cis binary—we’ll get to the ones articulated in Rabbinic texts at some point.)
Today, however, is for the ladies—the womyxn, the butches and the femmes, the sapphics, the demigirls, the pan nonbinary fems, the wlw (women loving women), the lesbians, bi chicks, queer babes and everyone else.
That is to say
, let’s talk about where women ((Don’t worry, straight friends, things will be less gay next week.) (Sorry, queer friends, things will be less gay next week.)
Before we get into things, I want to talk about “female same-sex activity” as differentiated from “homosexuality,” specifically because the social constructions known as “homosexuality/heterosexuality” simply didn’t exist until actually quite recently.
That is, as my friend
(writing under Hanne Blank) wrote in her fantastic Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, “Prior to 1868, there were no heterosexuals.” There also weren’t, like, homosexuals. For the whole of humanity, thousands of years, nobody was walking around with the belief that people should be “differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced.” There were just people, and the things they did, and the people they did them with. (And, of course, sometimes the judgements associated with some of those acts.)
Do you track? It’s not that there haven’t been sexual norms everywhere, and generally cultural biases towards some acts over others. But they weren’t born out of a belief that there was something deep, innate, singular about the self, some sort of existential truth about the individual and their desires—that they only ever desire one kind of sex/gendered person, and never any other kind of sex/gendered person.
The term “heterosexuality” was coined by Karl Maria Kertbeny, a Hungarian journalist who, we are led to understand, believed that it applied to him. In solidarity with a man fired because of a Prussian anti-sodomy law,
he published a couple of anonymous pamphlets arguing that this law was unjust, and coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in an attempt to create a sense of symmetry between those oppressed by this law and those who were not—that is, to suggest that these two populations were equal. Excellent branding and marketing strategy, really thoughtful, and A+ ally work.But friends, the word “heterosexual” is not immutable science or the truth handed down from the Heavens.
It’s a word made up around 150 years ago by a nice guy who was trying to overturn some garbage legislation.
This idea that you can look into your essence and find that your true soul only wants the opposite sex and if you ever had a thought, even, or a desire of another sort, you would be unalterably Different... was totally made up for PR purposes.
This fact, of course, does not fix homophobia and/or hate of those who engage in same-sex activity.
Both Jewish and Christian traditions have used those Leviticus verses from Torah to bolster shame and hate, which has caused generations of trauma and untold deaths. These are facts.
But thinking about “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” as recent inventions might take us some interesting places as we try to make sense of last week’s essay, and today’s.
Hopefully we have sufficiently clobbered the clobber texts in Leviticus. Homophobic Christian communities (which, of course, is not All The Christian Communities—if you’re queer and/or trans and Christian and looking to find your way home, there are so many places to go now) usually look to the Christian Bible—namely, Romans 1:26-27—to bring hate to this park. Again, not my lane.
Jews also didn’t learn out any prohibitions against female same-sex activity from the verses we looked at last week. And as much as I love to hold up the more optimistic texts in my corpus, it’s still a very patriarchal tradition and we have plenty with which to reckon.
Especially given what’s at stake today, we must unpack the intersection of homophobia and misogyny in Judaism’s approach to female same-sex activity—and the echoes we see of it in our culture today.
So. At the beginning of Lev. 18, we get:
You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws. (Leviticus 18:3)
I mean, it seems innocuous enough, if vague. No worshipping Anat or Moloch, no mummification, OK, fine. Right?
… That’s what it means.. right, guys? Guys?? Right?!?
Welp. Not according to this authoritative early midrash:
"As the deed of the land of Egypt and as the deed of the land of Canaan, you shall not do," … What did they do? A man would wed a man, and a woman, a woman. … (Sifra, Acharei Mot, Section 8 8)
Hmph.
So—what happens if you are a woman who weds a woman? Or even if you, erm, don’t put a ring on it?
Well. We get this, randomly just floating in the Talmud, apropos of very little—a second ago we were talking about ear piercings
and suddenly we're.. here.. (as always, bold is the original text and non-bold is added for clarity):Rav Huna said: Women who rub against one another [sexually] are disqualified from marrying into the priesthood. [That is to say, it renders her a zona—a woman who has had sexual relations forbidden by Torah—and thus unfit to marry one tasked with guarding the holiness of our most sacred space.] No. (Shabbat 65a)
That is, the anonymous voice of the Talmud records Rav Huna’s position—that whatever happened at Ancient Near Eastern Girl Scout camp Softball practice is considered weighty enough to disqualify one from a sacred role—and then just rejects it outright. How interesting.
Even according to the opinion of Rabbi Elazar, who said that an unmarried man who has intercourse with an unmarried woman not for the sake of marriage renders her a zona, a woman who has had sexual relations forbidden by the Torah, this applies only to sex with a man, but sexual behavior with another woman is mere licentiousness that does not render her a zona, and therefore she is still permitted to marry into the priesthood. (Talmud Yevamot 76a)
“Mere licentiousness.” Pritzuta b’alma. A lil’ slutty behavior. Nothing serious.
We’ll come back to that.
As Jewish law trundles on, here’s Maimonides in the 12th c.:
Women are forbidden to be mesolelot
with one another. This is the practice of the Land of Egypt, against which we have been warned... Although this practice is forbidden, no flogging is imposed, since there is no specific negative commandment against it, nor is there any intercourse at all. Consequently, [such women] are not forbidden to the priesthood on account of znut [being a zonah, having crossed that sexual line], nor is a woman prohibited to her husband [as she is in cases of heterosexual acts of adultery] on account of it, since there is no znut [being a zonah] in it. However, a flogging for rebellion should be given, since they have performed a forbidden act. A man should be strict with his wife in this matter, and should prevent women who are known to engage in this practice from visiting her, and prevent her from going to them. (Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Intercourse 21:8)
OK OK OK OK WHOAH there’s a lot going on here. Can we unpack?
We start with the Egypt thing, the prooftext, fine.
Then Maimonides says VERY CLEARLY that lesbian sex is not technically forbidden in Jewish law—”no negative commandment” means that there are zero “Thou Shalt Nots” in the Torah and/or the expanded Rabbinic corpus on this subject, if you will. It’s not prohibited! Not really!
and not just that…
nor is there any intercourse at all —
“It’s not really sex.”
Which is why the Talmud says that a woman can marry into the priesthood—and as such, Maimonides concludes, she isn’t regarded as having committed adultery, not really.
Peninei Halakhah is a contemporary book on practical Jewish law by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed that’s wildly popular in many parts of the religious world in Israel, and internationally—even used widely as a textbook in religious schools.
And here, what’s implied elsewhere is spelled out as explicitly as possible:
While lesbian sex is considered promiscuous… a married woman who engages in it is not [regarded as adulterous], since this activity involves no penetration in the way that a man penetrates a woman (Peninei Halakha, Ch 4, Laws of Maintaining the Covenant 12)
Why is it not really sex? No penis. The presence of a penis is what turns the Velveteen Fooling Around
into something real.This idea is still prevalent now! SO prevalent!
One of the questions that Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico included in their 2013 book on “Myths about LGBT Life and People,” was, “Is Lesbian Sex ‘Real Sex’?”
They write,
Many men (straight and gay) simply cannot imagine that real sex takes place without a penis. For this reason, lesbian sex has become a cultural marker, a stand-in, for the question “What actually counts as sex?”—for anyone.
According to contemporary stereotypes, queer women’s/femme’s sexuality either doesn’t exist—believed to die as soon as it’s born, faded into a U-Haul-assisted “lesbian bed death” haze of cats, tea, and emotional companionship [1, 2, 3] —or it’s just pritzuta b’alma—a little mere licentiousness with Katy Perry and cherry chapstick. [1, 2]
It has no substance, no heft. No weight. No penis.
Because patriarchy has decided for the last 2000+ years that that’s what defines sex.
Female sexuality, on its own, is regarded as not only fundamentally unserious (pritzuta!) but as something that doesn’t really even exist.
So Maimonides says that female same-sex sexual activity is not prohibited. But even so, if they get caught, they should be given “lashes for rebellion.” Yes, unfortunately this was a real thing. Mostly it’s meant for people who violate Rabbinic (rather than Torah-ordained) commandments, like lighting Shabbat candles or the laws of Purim, or people who were disrespectful to the Rabbinic court. So this not-forbidden thing starts to sound like it’s getting a pretty harsh punishment given that it… didn’t violate anything specifically and wasn’t bothering anyone? But that’s just me.
Male sexuality is a toeva—this? It’s not sex, but she must be whipped for “rebellion,” so she will know her place better.
You see how this is sexism and homophobia rolled up together? How the homophobia of lesbianism is rolled into the misogyny of women, the refusal to take them seriously yet to demand they stay in their place? (As opposed to male homophobia—misogynistic because it crosses boundaries of “appropriate” masculinity, constructions of power and domination in patriarchy, etc.)
I do not know how many women throughout history have been harmed by this choice of Maimonides’ to institute lashes—physically, emotionally, spiritually—but I imagine it was a lot. Just as the choice to use the most homophobic possible reading of Leviticus 18 and 20 has done profound violence to untold men throughout history. Let us honor all of them.
Am I allowed to find the last line bitterly hilarious?
A man should be strict with his wife in this matter, and should prevent women who are known to engage in this practice from visiting her, and prevent her from going to them.
No telling what Wilma and Betty are up to when Fred and Barney are at the beit midrash quarry.
If you don’t know this song, below, it (released 1995) preceded the Katy Perry one and is entirely different, and far superior, with only the title in common.
But, like, notice how even the lyrics of the song echo exactly the trope to which Maimonides alludes in 12th c. Egypt. That, my friends, is a very strong trope. Also, yes, likely a long-standing historical reality—but also really, really, really a strong trope.
I want to talk about the word “dyke” for a moment.
Back in the Late Pleistocene era when I was coming out (early 90s), both “dyke” and “queer” were understood to be reclaimed former slurs. Queer Nation intentionally chose in-your-face language for organizing. And, like, we had the Dyke March, dyke bars, Dykes on Bikes opening Pride, Allison Bechdel’s legendary (still holds up) comic in the free weeklies- “Dykes to Watch Out For.”
Just as “queer” was used to denote a certain sensibility that was a little more punk, explicitly concerned with larger unjust systems and unseating heteronormative assumptions about how things could or should be done —”Not gay as in happy, queer as in f-k you,” went the old slogan—so, too, was “dyke.” The former could apply to anyone of any gender, the latter tended to belong to those who were closer to the “women lovin’ women” category (including trans women and transfemme folks). But, at least in my circles, it didn’t imply exclusive homo attraction the way “lesbian” did—one could be a dyke and also be interested in whatever other genders. But it was also a feisty word, reclaimed, glory atop a motorcycle.
There are old jokes: What’s the difference between a dyke and a lesbian? A lesbian plays softball. A dyke plays hardball.
Anyway. One of those words grew in its acceptance in the mainstream. And one did not—to the point where it’s still regarded as a slur. For example, I just did a quick search on Amazon (horrible sweatshop, useful for data like this) and “queer” pulled up over 20,000 results. “Queer: A Graphic History.” “Queer as Folk” “Queer Data History.” A mug with Oh Deer I’m Queer. Queer fridge poetry magnets. Etc. Dyke? 1,000 results, the majority of which seem to be side cutters (also called dykes!) or related to Dick Van Dyke. I counted six things that seemed to relate to lesbians—all t-shirts, most of which said “big dyke energy.”
So why didn’t “dyke” take off the way “queer” did?
Someone I chatted with online (hi Tilly! Thank you!) noted that “queer” “applies to everyone who isn’t cishet, so there are a lot more people reclaiming it,” whereas “dyke” is specific to just one group.
Yep, possibly. But I have another theory.
I asked a bunch of nice strangers on the internet what their connotations were to the word “dyke,” and they came up with things like: Strong, butch, fight back, middle finger, radically queer, community active, cool lesbians, diesel dykes, independent of men, brave, fearless. Which tracks with my connotations—it’s a word with strong energy.
And I wonder if the reason that the word never took off is this—I mean—
Which narrative of female same-sex desire better serves patriarchy?
The one with an inoffensive, sexless cat lady and a sexy Katy Perry song one, or DYKE and all that it holds?
DYKE is a word about female power.
The realness of the sexuality feels more implied. Harder to brush off someone defined as “strong, brave, fearless, playing hardball” as engaging in “pritzuta”, just something meaningless, sneaking in and out of the back door before your husband gets home.
Even now, even when on the one hand, it feels like our lines around gender and sexuality are blurrier than ever.
Because the other, we are dealing with a country that issues bans on abortion and gender affirming care, and on even teaching or talking about LGBTQ issues in schools. There is a strong likelihood that the paternalistic patriarchy is coming for more and more of us. They want to keep us in our places, to push back the clock.
If we allow “dyke” to become more real in our culture, we open up a whole other world for talking about women and gender and power.
OK, so, the Ruth and Naomi thing, if you’re one of the people wondering. Here’s the case for them being lovers:
You’ve got the narrator commenting on Adam and Eve at the beginning of Torah:
Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings/dvk to his wife, so that they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)
Then, we get to the Book of Ruth. Naomi the Judean’s two sons have died, she’s sick of living in Moab and is gonna go home, says goodbye to the nice Moabite women her sons have widowed:
They broke into weeping again, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law farewell. But Ruth clung/dvka to her. So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has returned to her people and her gods. Go follow your sister-in-law.”
But Ruth replied, “Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may God do to me if anything but death parts me from you.” (Ruth 1:14-17)
The use of the word specified as “becoming one flesh” here is where things start to get interesting. What’s going on there? Have they done what a man usually does to a woman? And if you assume that means something sexual, it certainly puts the rest of the declarations in a very different light. This is open, frankly, to interpretation, which is what we do in Torah. I maintain that the case of David and Jonathan is more clear, but there’s a case to be made.
Mona West, in The Queer Bible Commentary, writes that “Ruth is our Queer ancestress,” but less based on whether or not she and Naomi ever had a sexual relationship, and more because she resists heterosexist, patriarchal family structures and builds family in ways that work best for her, including, after her marraige, explicitly co-raising her child with Naomi (and her husband, who is Naomi’s kin.)
Whatever the case, Jewish dykehood has always been a thing.
I messaged a friend when I was putting together the third paragraph in this piece—someone 10 years younger than me. I was told it felt “old school in a good way.” Cool, I’ll take it. So I wrote back,
Me: I don't even know what words the kids use tho now. is there updated verbiage I should know about?
R: Just that folks are moving away from gender all together i feel like
Me: well, right, there is that
(Time passes) Me: OK now with your blessing can I quote you? I can say "my friend who identifies as (I'd want to know what word would make sense for you--dyke, lesbian, queer, etc, maybe I misunderstood and actually you're straight, hope your wife takes the news ok) said,…
R: Lol yes that works. And any of those besides straight is fine with me 😂
Me: What do you prefer and please confirm pronouns?
R: “any pronouns”. You can say queer. I’m actually not totally on board with like post-gender thought but for me it doesn’t matter, lol. Like i don’t really think about it. Yes like - i identify as a woman, and i think that means literally nothing in terms of preferred anything - i prefer “mens” clothes, I’ve only dated women, but like do i care if someone calls me “he” - not at all, and i also don’t think i should do or be interested in things typically attributed to women, like my identity as a woman doesn’t influence really any part of my life - but i know it does for some and that’s cool too.
Our understandings and experiences of gender and sexuality are changing rapidly, even among those who consider themselves cisgender. What that means, will mean in a generation or so for the binaries of “homosexuality,” and “heterosexuality,” (and, yes, the sometimes vowel “bisexuality,”) may be profound and far-reaching.
In fact, the tectonic plates are already shifting—a staggering one-fifth of GenZ women identify as bi. Given the ways in which women’s queer sexuality is dismissed—pritzuta!—it may be easier for women to, well, find that they’ve kissed a girl and they liked it.
For men, same-sex attraction or activity is still fraught with stigma— because patriarchy, because the presence of a penis means it it is regarded as “real sex,” because those verses in Leviticus are so loud, because bisexual men are so often presumed to be gay, because the idea that some attractions that don’t cancel out other attractions is still a lot for a society attached to the binary concept of heterosexuality/homosexuality to grasp. So it’s unsurprising that those numbers are lower for men—whether that’s about men choosing to identify as bi, choosing to take action on same-sex desires, or both.
My money is on things changing even further away from the old model in the next generation. I mean, my kids’ K-5 (public!) elementary school has a Rainbow Club, and anyone can go Monday at lunch if they want. They talk about stuff, learn about stuff, and make drawings. It doesn’t have to mean anything. What will things look like when they’re adults?
Blank Boyd wrote, in 2012,
“Heterosexuality seems to be bigger than we are, independent, more powerful. It is not. In reality, we are the ones whose imaginations created the heterosexual/homosexual scheme, and we are also the ones whose multitudes that scheme ultimately cannot contain. Eventually as a culture we will imagine our way into some different grand explanation, some other scheme for explaining our emotions and our desires and our passionate entanglements. For now, we believe in heterosexual. And this, too, shall pass.”
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Aaagh yes you can be butch and bi, you can be femme and pan, you can be bi and furious that I used the word “chick,” don’t I know it. (Also “bi and furious” is its own identity, I think.) But there was never gonna be a single elegant way to do this, so I went for the fun, if incomplete way instead. My friend Rachel said it sounded “old school in a good way” and she’s not as ancient as I am so that’s what I’m holding on to.
Of course, there were things that we might now call queer culture—”Mollie” culture in 18th c. England, eg. But, as Blank Boyd puts it, “Western culture acquired sexual self-consciousness on a grand scale because self-assessment offered ways to defend against being marked as a degenerate or deviant. Heterosexuals learned to experience heterosexuality — to think about themselves as ‘being’ and ‘feeling’ heterosexual, to believe that there’s a difference between ‘being heterosexual’ and ‘being homosexual’ — because they needed, in newly official ways, to know what they weren’t… It doesn’t stem from relatively small numbers of people wanting to signal to others like them the ways in which they were sexually outside the mainstream. It stems from enormous numbers of people being very anxious about the possibility of seeing a degenerate in the mirror.” And, I’d add, a shoving away of thoughts, feelings or even behaviors that, in other times and places, might have been framed in a completely different way.
Unfortunately, he failed. And as it happens, this very law became the basis of Nazi persecution of LGBTQ folks in the Holocaust.
There are too many examples, too many tragedies to list. But I’m particularly holding in my heart right now a recent, particularly painful and stark example of what this hate does. [tw: suicide] May Hershel Siegel’s memory be a revolution; and may his alma mater, Yeshiva University—which spent the years Siegel was on campus legislating all the way to SCOTUS in the attempt to avoid having Pride Alliance on campus—spend the remainder of its institutional existence and financial capacity doing the labor of amends, repair and tshuvah. All of those responsible can never undo what they have done, but they have an obligation to spend their lives trying. And the institution as a whole has that same obligation. So too for every religious institution that has been spewing homophobia and/or transphobia at the very real cost to very real people.
Again, check QueerTheology & QueerGrace (and NB QG’s great book list).
Actually, though. And it’s in the context of a girl too young to wear jewelry, so the options for starter studs are things like “wood chip” and “string.” Makes me even grateful for these newfangled screw-on starter studs that are impossible to get off [… devolves into incoherent aging Xer ranting]
Technically the “rubbing against each other” thing, but has become an all-encompassing term for lesbian sex by this point.
Big Dyke Energy
Great post! I like your interpretation on the whole saga of Ruth and Naomi. Ruth's declaration, platonic or not, always read to me like something so rich in its love that anyone could use it regardless of gender for committing to their partner.
I just signed off on the proofs for an Acrylic Pin version of our Big Dyke Energy design for NerdyKeppie* to debut for Pride this year. :D
* dyke hidden in the middle always included >.>