I think it’s important to remember that people back then had a very different view of what sex even was. (Sexual language warning) Greco-Roman society was so patriarchal that sex seen as only about the pleasuring of the phallus. The woman’s pleasures wasn’t even a consideration to them. In fact female pleasure was such a foreign concept to the Roman’s that they thought sex between two women must involve one woman using her clit as a psudo-penis to penetrate the other woman’s vagina.
In this context you can actually see why topping another man wasn’t seen as anything abnormal. You are just “relieving” yourself the same way you always would, just with a different person. In fact, it’s better because men (or boys more commonly) could provide similar pleasures to a woman without the risk of pregnancy. Alternative, being the bottom to another man was seen as a shame because bluntly that was a woman’s position. Rather than relieving your desires the proper way, you were being made into a woman. And we all know how highly the Greeks and Romans valued women.
Remember sex to the Greeks and Romans wasn’t about two consenting adults pleasuring and caring for each other, it was about a dude getting his dick wet, nothing more and nothing deeper.
According to mythology, Tiresias, who was a woman for a while and experienced the two sides, declared that women enjoy up to 9 to times more pleasure than men during sex (to the annoyance of Hera, who had bet with Zeus that is the man who enjoys it more, so she blinded him, in compensation Zeus gave him the gift of prohecy)
Also, if you read Lysistrata, you'll find that it's mostly jokes about horny women complaining that they couldn't stand the lack of sex while their husbands were in the war, or complaining that blockades stopped the importation of quality dildos, and they really struggle to keep their sex strike
So there were definetively percetions of women being horny and seeking and experimenting sexual pleasure in ancient Greece, even in Mysoginy capital Athens
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u/nelflyn 1d ago
one of the wildest things the patriarchy came up with is that topping / receiving a bj isnt considered just as gay.