How to Write Scholarship About a Sex Position While Sounding Sexy and Scholarly

Hint: can't be done

Etruscan cheese grater with wooden lion handle, 6th c. BCE

As a scholar of comedy who sometimes likes to pompously-yet-self-deprecatingly start sentences by saying “As a scholar of comedy…”, I understand how difficult it is to analyze what makes something funny without being boring.

E. B. White famously once wrote, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” Although, as I write that, I find myself hoping that any frogs E. B. White dissected were dead before the dissection process and didn’t die in the process. My father likes to tell a story that is about half as funny as it is disturbing about how he and his high school classmates had to personally kill their dissection frogs. I’m grateful that by the time I was a 9th grade biology student it was no longer the done thing to watch the life leave your frog’s eyes before you then cut them open to try to find the tiny frog eye lens.

But, as a scholar of comedy, sometimes dissecting humor is kind of your job. Especially when the joke needs to be explained because it’s 2500 years old and translated from ancient Greek and its meaning isn’t obvious anymore.

The joke I want to explore is from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, which I wrote about a few months ago:

Early in the play, when the women of Greece are planning their sex strike, they all swear a very formal oath. In the play, Lysistrata does the oath as a call-and-response with one of the other women, over her protests. Here’s the condensed version, in Sarah Ruden’s 2003 translation:

Neither my boyfriend nor my wedded spouse
Shall touch me when inflated.
I shall stay home unhumped both night and day,
While wearing makeup and a flashy dress,
That I may give my man the scorching hots,
But I will not consent to what he wants,
And if he forces me, against my will,
Then I will sulk, I will not hump along;
I will not point my slippers at the roof;
Nor, like a lion knickknack, ass in air—
Abiding by these vows, may I drink wine;
If I transgress, let water fill the bowl.

As I type this, it occurs to me that we really, really need a new translation of Lysistrata, because this is the best one I can find and it’s doing nothing for me. It’s both dated and tonally weird (“inflated”? Really? And was “hump along” ever a commonly used phrase??). I much prefer the still-surprisingly-faithful abridged version of the oath in Spike Lee’s Chi-raq, which goes, “I will deny all rights of access or entrance from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection. If he should force me to lay on that conjugal couch, I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy!”

Noticeably missing from the Spike Lee version: lion knickknacks. A smart cut, because what the hell does that even mean? Spoiler: nobody knows for sure, although some people sure do have opinions. Just a few hundred years after Aristophanes, Hellenistic scholars were already writing scholarship demystifying exactly which sex position he’s referring to here. A 2018 article in The Cut — yes, that The Cut, the one that just recently published that deeply cringe personal essay where a woman brags about how her “flush ponytail” bagged her a sweet gig as the trophy wife of a man 10 years older than her — calls the lioness on the cheese grater “History’s* Most Mysterious Sex Position”.

*(Rant time!): LITERATURE, NOT HISTORY. I will be more-than-usually pedantic on this point because we’re talking about Lysistrata, and there’s a long, long history of people getting just an eensy weensy bit confused and claiming that a sex strike “actually” happened in ancient Greece and that the play is “proof” that sex strikes “work”, and I hate it. Rant over.

Before we go any further, let’s address the painful lion in the room: most people probably wince at the idea of associating cheese graters with sex. Very fair, and I hear you. Although I will note that even in English there’s a lot of slang associating sex with sharp metal things (screwing, nailing, scissoring), so let he whose language doesn’t use pointy implements as euphemisms for sex cast the first stone.

Unfortunately, I’m now going to recap the two different sides of this debate for you. I’m sorry. On the one hand, you have the scholars like the two white male professors on the cusp of emeritus status who I read this play with in college — picture Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets and you’re not far off — who asked the students what we thought this line meant and then loudly chortled, “They’re doing it doggie-style!” while I hoped my 17-year-old cheeks weren’t as magenta as they felt. This camp tends to see their interpretation of the line as so obvious (what else COULD it mean??) that it barely needs justifying.

Ruden is clearly on this side of the debate and includes a footnote after “ass in air” (pictured below) that reads, “Literally, ‘I will not assume the position of a lioness on a cheese grater.’ Ornamental lions were typically depicted set to pounce, crouching in front but with their hindquarters raised.” Note the tonal difference between this footnote and the text of the translation itself.

as a scholar of comedy, I think the juxtaposition is even funnier on paper

Because this is a sexy newsletter about sexy sex positions, I’m going to go in the sexiest possible direction here and do some old-fashioned German-style source criticism (Quellenforschung). Try to keep your pants on.

Ruden mentions in her Acknowledgments section that she mainly used Henderson’s 1987 text for her translation, and I’m certain she’s drawing on his commentary on this line, which reads, “Like a lioness ready to pounce, with her head and forepaws down, hindquarters aloft. For this sexual posture cf. Pax 849-9 and numerous paintings. Household items were often adorned with such animal motifs, and a crouched posture would perhaps lessen the chance of breakage…”

Henderson, meanwhile, seems to be relying on the early 20th century German scholar Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, who wrote, “the animal described would be in a position ready to pounce, the hind legs high and the front legs low to the ground” (die Tiere werden in der Stellung vor dem Losspringen dargestellt, also die Hinterbeine hoch, die Vorderbeine auf den Boden gedrückt). Both are probably drawing on the ancient scholion on this text that reads:

The posture is licentious and meretricious. A cheese-grater is a big knife. Upon the handles of the knives are carved ivory lions crouching down; if they were carved standing upright, their feet might break off. Therefore it is said that not upon the man will I stand, behaving like a prostitute, like a lioness upon a cheese-grater.

“Licentious and meretricious” feels like it would make a great social media bio, right?

I have to assume that all of these people have:
a) had sex
b) some vague idea of what a lion looks like
c) seen a cheese grater ever
…but honestly, it’s not entirely clear that assumption is earned based on literally anything I’ve quoted up to this point.

The second camp argues that, actually, we’re probably talking about some version of woman-on-top here. A more than 20-page article from 2009 dedicated solely to this joke and titled “The Lioness & The Cheese-Grater (Ar. Lys. 231-2)” makes this claim, arguing that there’s no textual reason to assume that the Lysistrata’s lioness on the cheese grater is the same position as the all-fours position in the Peace and that, based on the ascending tricolon of sexual positions in the oath, the vibe of the line suggests a position in which the woman is dominant.

However, part of Prince’s argument in the article is that there never existed actual cheese graters with lionesses on them, and we should be looking at the general set of cultural associations around lionesses and cheese-graters rather than seeing this line as a reference to a specific object. Up until recently, no such object had been found. However, as every scholar of antiquity knows, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: see the hero image of this newsletter for a very real pre-Lysistrata lion on a cheese-grater handle. Oops! Although that doesn’t mean Prince is wrong about the position, and his overall approach of teasing out the meaning of the terms is a fruitful one. Also, he included in his article the line, “We now possess a corpus of several dozen ancient cheese-graters in a variety of materials,” and I have to give props for that.

Prince is, interestingly, the scholar who the writer for The Cut reached out to. Although almost a decade had passed since the publication of the original article (publication is time travel), Prince stood by his analysis: “‘I still hold by what I wrote: woman on top, with extra back-and-forth motion,’ he affirms.” Interestingly, he also told the writer, “basically everyone agrees it is a position with a woman on top” before qualifying, “Even if not everyone agrees with me, at least they don’t think I am out in left field!” Hmmm. Seems like there’s a lot of daylight between those two claims, maybe.

(I quite like the hard-to-substantiate argument in this piece in Working Classicists comparing Lysistrata to How I Met Your Mother and arguing that the “lioness on the cheese grater” should be understood not as a staple in every Athenian prostitute’s repertoire, but as a fanciful, made-up sex act such as one might find in Urban Dictionary. This is such a fun interpretation, and it’s sort of similar to Prince’s, even though they reach different conclusions: Prince argues that each line of the oath escalates in the amount of sexual power and dominance held by the woman, while Sills argues that the escalation is in absurdity. Both seem to agree that the oath is building toward a bit of a climax with this line, if you know what I mean.)

Incredibly, building on the piece in The Cut, Elite Daily then ran an article with the title “A Sexpert Explains Ancient Greece's Hottest Sex Move, ‘The Lioness On The Cheese Grater’”. The article has to be the only one in existence that cites eminent classicist Alan Sommerstein alongside “Dr. Stefani Threadgill, a sex therapist and sexologist.” The writer spends an honestly surprising amount of time recounting the debate in detail before, finally, quoting a sexpert: “Don’t get too caught up in the ‘right’ way to do the move; the original interpretation of the position has probably been lost to history. Instead, ‘embrace your inner lioness,’ as one sexpert suggests.”

This is excellent advice, although I find it absolutely hilarious that she implies that people are looking at commentaries on Lysistrata like they’re articles in Cosmo: “These ten sex positions from ancient Greece will drive your man wild!!!” When in reality, most classical scholars write about this sort of like Stroup 2004, a useful piece of scholarship that I cite often that sounds like this: “As others have noted, the ‘lioness on the cheesegrater’ position must refer to dorsal sex. But the lioness was also one of the animals popularly associated with Attic hetairai… a survey of representations of intercourse on vases of the fifth century suggests that the posture required by dorsal sex seems among the most identifiably hetairic.” If you want to drive your man wild, read him that article out loud, including the footnote on “others have noted,” which includes the parenthetical “(cf. the coarse sexual idiom, “doggy style”)”.

Honestly, it’s probably better for scholars of Aristophanes to stick to their lane and write impenetrable (HELLO) prose rather than reframing their scholarship as Cosmo listicles. The occasional double entendre wouldn’t kill anyone, but it does risk making you seem creepy, like a 70+ year-old professor chortling to a classroom of undergraduates. The safest move would be for Aristophanic scholars to rigidly compartmentalize our real-life sense of humor from our dissection of frogs and Frogs. But I can’t help feeling like, if you’re working on Aristophanes and not having fun, what are you even doing?