Masculinity: A Theoretical Analysis

Foucault argues that though young boys are seen as objects of pleasure, they are considered as males as long as they participate in homoerotic acts for social status rather than personal pleasure. Greek society considered the penetrated and the penetrator to be in roles similar to the binaries of active and passive participants rather than the male or female genders.

In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Leviticus assumes that the male gender is defined by biological sex, not the role which he plays in the sexual act. Specifically, Leviticus addresses male homoerotic acts with specific instructions for males not to penetrate other males: “Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence… If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death- their

9:14 argues that the penetrated male in a homoerotic act should be treated as the passive partner, a role traditionally held by a female, and thus be held liable for participating in a homoerotic act. In this text, Rabbi Aliba instructs the others to read: Leviticus 18:22 with different verbiage in order to derive the prohibition of a male allowing another male to penetrate him. Traditionally, males were referred to with active verbs and females were referred to with passive verbs. Therefore, Rabbi Aliba suggests reading Leviticus 18:22 as “Do not be laid” rather than “Do not lie” (Satlow 1994, p. 10). The concept of isomorphism suggests that all categories or binaries are related, and this analysis clearly demonstrates that point. By using a passive verb, which is usually used to describe a female, to describe the penetrated male, Rabbi Aliba puts penetrated, passive, and female in the same category. Therefore, though the rabbis seem to focus on the penetrator and penetrated specifically when writing about situations involving male homoerotic practices, they conceptualized the situations in terms of the male/female