Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man's noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman. Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.

p. 125 - Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)