Gender and sexuality

Work in Progress -- The Dragon Demands (talk) 17:33, July 10, 2015 (UTC)

Like the Heraldry page, this article is written from an out-of-universe perspective, first providing context for what the topic was like in the real-life Middle Ages, and then explaining how Game of Thrones handles it.

Gender and Sexuality in the real-life Middle-Ages

Overview

"Sexuality" is a social construct, variable across time and space. While animals engage in sex acts, they attribute no meaning to their behaviors, as they are not capable of intelligent thought - only humans are. "Sexuality" is therefore not the sex act but the meaning and mental framework through which it and and patterns of gender behavior are contextualized and understood. In Victorian England, it would be scandalous for a woman to show her ankles; in the 21st century, women in bikinis appear on the covers of major fashion magazines. In 1950's Hollywood it would be scandalous for a male actor to reveal that he had sex with another man, while in Ancient Greece, sex between men was considered not only acceptable but normal. In the United States or England in the 21st century, polygamy is scandalous - yet in many other contemporary parts of the world it is not, and in the past, many Judeo-Christian biblical figures had polygamous marriages. In certain cultures at different times and places, it was seen as shockingly effeminate for a man to wear his hair long down to his shoulders, while in others, long hair was seen as a sign of virility and masculinity.

In short, patterns of sexuality are not universal and objective constants, but changed over time, and varied from one location and culture to another. Michel Foucault famously argued about the subjective, not objective, nature of social conventions, particularly with regard to sexuality. As Prof. Ruth Mazo Karras, one of the major contemporary scholars on sexuality in the Middle Ages, said:

"To suggest that sexual identities, attitudes, and practices in the culture that gave us our legal systems and religious traditions were different teaches us that the way things are, or the way we imagine them to be, is not the 'natural' way but historically contingent."

Medieval people did not conceptualize the world the way that contemporary people do. They did not have an abstract concept of "the nation-state" or of a divide between "Public" and "Private" cultural spheres. This does not mean that modern society is some sort of culmination that previous social models were evolving towards. Modern social values and behavior patterns are not more "advanced", but simply different. Fundamentally, it is wrong to assume that medieval concepts of gender and sexuality were exactly the same as contemporary models.

Thus while there were certainly "men who had sex with men" in the Middle Ages, it would be inaccurate to even call them "homosexual", because "homosexuality" is a specific and subjective social concept. For that matter, "men who had sex with women" in the Middle Ages cannot accurately be called "heterosexual". The homosexual/heterosexual categorization scheme of contemporary cultures did not exist in their culture. They did have categorization schemes, but they had a different basis. Men who had sex with other men in the Middle Ages did not conceptualize what they were doing the same way that contemporary men who have sex with other men do.

"...'Homosexuality' [as a concept] is not a thing that one can find in all cultures...to label anyone in the past who had sex with someone of the same sex as 'a homosexual' would be to impose a modern category. The same argument also applies to other categories of sexual behavior: heterosexuality, bisexuality, prostitution, or any other; the acts may be the same, but each society will determine what the meaning of those acts is and whether they create identities."

Patterns of Sexuality in Medieval Western Europe

It is difficult to talk about "Sexuality in the Middle Ages", because Sexuality is a subjective social construct variable across time and space: concepts of Sexuality in the thirteenth century were different in northern France compared to southern Italy, and concepts of Sexuality in England alone changed between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Several generalizations, however, can be made about broad sub-regions of Medieval Europe:

Factors contributing to patterns of sexuality in Medieval Western Europe:

• 1 - Religion was a very important social force and institution, and the Catholic Church in Western Europe had a celibate clergy, of male monks and female nuns.
• 2 - The medieval Catholic Church was dominated by an all-male priesthood.

Resulting major patterns of sexual behavior and conceptualization:

• 1 - Sex behavior and identity was not seen as divided between heterosexuality and homosexuality, but between celibacy and non-celibacy. In turn, because celibacy was the ideal, the non-celibate were only supposed to have sex purely to produce children, not for pleasure. Thus for the non-celibate as a whole sexuality was instead centered on a dichotomy between procreative versus non-procreative sex.
• 2 - "Sex" was strictly conceived of as something a man did to someone else, by penetrating them with a penis. Men and women were not thought of as performing the same act when they had sex with each other.
• 3 - Therefore, "sexual orientation" was not based on object choice - being attracted to a man or woman - but on the role a person preferred to play in the sex act. Instead of a man thinking "I prefer having sex with women", he thought "I prefer being the penetrator in the sex act", and did not make a distinction between whether he was penetrating a woman or another man.
• 4 - Because women could join the celibate clergy and become nuns (though not priests), women tended to marry at relatively late ages in Medieval Europe, which in turn fostered a larger degree of social independence and personhood for women than in neighboring societies in which women married at young ages.

1 - Sex as a dichotomy between procreative versus non-procreative sex

Due to having a celibate clergy (unlike neighboring Muslim or Jewish communities), medieval Western Europe did not conceptualize sexuality as a dichotomy between "heterosexual" and "homosexual", but between "celibate" and "non-celibate". Homosexuality or heterosexuality did not conceptually exist as a "sexual identity" - they did have two categories of "sexual identity", but it was based on a divide between celibate and non-celibate. Choosing to join the celibate clergy was a lifestyle choice, and seen as a "sexual identity" in itself.

This is not to say that "Christianity" inherently had a celibate priesthood. Rather, about a thousand years after Jesus's crucifixion, "marriage" was redefined to be something that priests could not do - and then five hundred years after that, the Protestant Reformation redefined "marriage" yet again to be something priests could do. After the year 1000, in the eleventh century, the Gregorian Reform movement gradually spread within the Catholic Church, seeking to remove the corruption caused by secular powers dominating Church affairs. One major principle embraced at this time was that priests had to be celibate, to remove themselves from corruptible worldly attachments (i.e. so a bishop couldn't try to pass down his title to his son). The Gregorian Reform movement embraced celibacy, it let to a major shift in attitudes towards sexuality among the non-clergy as well.

Because society was dominated by this celibate clergy, their writings praised celibacy, and proliferated the view that the only time people were supposed to have sex was specifically to produce children within marriage, as a necessary evil. Therefore, for the non-celibate in Medieval Europe, sex was not defined as a dichotomy between "heterosexual" and "homosexual", but as a dichotomy between "procreative" and "non-procreative" sex. A wife performing oral sex on her husband, or a man performing oral sex on another man, were both seen as more or less equally bad, because to the celibate clergy, neither act would result in children, which was the only permissible form of sex.

The real "sexual identity" dichotomy was between the celibate clergy and non-celibate lay people, and in turn, for the non-celibate the only "acceptable" sex was vaginal penetration explicitly for procreation. Indeed, even woman on top sex positions were also described as "sodomy" and condemned as abnormal: it was widely believed that due to gravity, it was more difficult for a man to impregnate a woman in woman-on-top position, so it was common for couples who wanted to have vaginal sex purely for pleasure to have woman-on-top sex (cowgirl position). Rear-entry (doggy-style) positions between a man and woman were also thought to be less conducive to conception, and were similarly viewed as abnormal. This was condemned by the church, because they ruled that sex was purely for procreation.

2 - Sex as dichotomy between penetrator versus penetrated

Due to being dominated by an all-male priesthood, all social writing and circulated knowledge about sexuality was written from a male perspective (as it had largely been extending back into Greco-Roman times). As a result, "sex" was strictly conceptualized as "a man penetrating someone else with a penis". Men and women were not thought of as performing the same act when they had sex with each other. Men "screwed", women "got screwed", but to say "a woman screwed a man" would seem a contradiction in terms to them. Sex wasn't something two people do together but something one person does to another.

That is not to say that women were thought of as not enjoying sex, they were simply not seen as performing the same action. Because writings on sex were dominated by a celibate all-male priesthood worried about women "tempting" them with lustful thoughts, women were actually broadly depicted as desiring sex more than men did, in keeping with the view that women had little control over their emotions and urges. Even so, it was believed that women had an uncontrollable desire to be penetrated by a penis, not other sex acts.

In this medieval conceptualization, if a man penetrated a woman vaginally, they were having sex. If a man penetrated another man anally, they were having sex. If a man performed cunnilingus on a woman, however, because no penis was directly involved they were not conceptualized as having "sex". It was universally believed in all medieval medical writing (all written by men, many of them celibate priests) that the sole source of female sexual pleasure was penetration of the vagina by a penis (and that ejaculation of semen into a vagina was the sole cause of female orgasm, due to a physical/chemical reaction). Therefore, they thought women solely craved penetration and ejaculation. Their entire conception of sex was male-dominated and thus very phallo-centric.

In turn, because sex was conceptualized of as "a man penetrating someone else with a penis", they actually had little conception of homosexual relationships between women. It was not condoned but it was not stigmatized either - celibate male priests who did all of the writing about sexual morals couldn't really understand how two women could physically have sex with each other without a penis ("I don't even understand how two women can make love - unless they just kind of scissor, or something." -- South Park). While on some vague level there were general prohibitions against "a woman laying with a woman as with a man", there are only a handful of court records that show women prosecuted for same-sex relationships: there are only surviving court records for twelve women convicted of same-sex behavior in the entire one thousand year long medieval period, compared to hundreds of court records for same-sex male behavior.

3 - Sexual orientation defined not by object choice but on role in the sex act

Medieval people did not define their sexual "orientation" based on object choice the way modern Western society does, i.e. with a man being a "heterosexual" if he is attracted to women. Medieval sexual "orientation" (for lack of a better word), was based on the role you play in the sex act. Men who preferred to be the penetrator were seen as "normal", women who enjoyed being penetrated were "normal". The practical difference is that if a man penetrated another man anally, it wasn't seen as that much more out of the ordinary than if he chose to penetrate a woman anally - what mattered was that he was the one doing the penetrating. In contrast, a man who enjoyed and preferred to play the passive role in sex, and to be anally penetrated by another man's penis, was seen as abnormal.

This links back to the first point: sex was conceptually divided between procreative and non-procreative sex, not heterosexual/homosexual. A man penetrating a woman anally or penetrating another man anally were both equally "non-procreative", neither particularly better or worse morally/socially for the penetrator. In turn this object choice/role played distinction also stems from the second point: the person doing the penetrating in the sex act and the person being penetrated were conceptualized as performing two entirely separate actions, not just "sex" as a mutualistic experience. Because the roles that men and women performed in the sex act were already seen as two distinct and separate actions, it therefore followed that their definition of "having sex" was based on which of these two different actions they liked to perform, with less emphasis on the biological sex of who they were doing it with.

4 - Women and the European Marriage Pattern

While having an all-male priesthood like Islam or Judaism, Christianity was unlike these neighboring religions in that it had a celibate clergy - not the priesthood, but male monks and female nuns. Judaism and Islam had no equivalent to nuns. The existence of a celibate female clergy encouraged families to wait for better prospective suitors for one of their daughters, because if they ended up waiting too long and she became too old to bear children, they could send their daughter to a convent to become a nun. In contrast, the neighboring Islamic world did not have celibate clergy, and thus once a woman became too old to bear children, and was unable to marry, there were no viable social options for her. Therefore, families in the Islamic world had greater motivation to marry off their daughters sooner instead of later.

This actually had far-reaching effects on the entire social model, because it meant Christian women tended to marry much later in life, to husbands who were closer to their own age. This phenomenon is known as the "European Marriage Pattern": unlike any other region in the world, in medieval Western Europe women tended to marry (on average) at between 20 and 30 years of age, while in most other parts of the world a girl over 20 years of age was often considered to be past marriageable age.

Women who married as soon as they could reproduce (when they first began menstruating, or "Flowering") moved immediately from being a child living under their father as head of the household, to living under their husband as head of the household, socially dominated like a child. If women were married off in their mid-teens, the best suitors were often more financially stable men a decade or more older than them, reinforcing this age and power dichotomy. In contrast, women who married in their late 20's spent far more years living independently, and gaining their own sense of personhood distinct from their husbands. This also meant that they were closer to the same age as economically established men who made good marriage prospects (it was not even uncommon for a woman in her late 20's to marry a man a year or two younger than her). Thus while sex was still seen as something a man did to a woman, the pattern of sexual relationships was actually much more mutualistic.

Gender binary and patterns of gender behavior

"Sexuality": Biological Sex, Gender, and Orientation

In the context of academic Gender Studies, the term "Sexuality" encompasses "Sexual Identity" but is an even broader term, referring to the entire realm of human erotic experience and behaviors. This can be further subdivided into three aspects: Sex, Gender, and Orientation:

• Sex - means physical/biological sex at birth, male or female.
• Gender - refers to patterns of behavior or identity, such as "masculine" or "feminine" (not necessarily involved with the sex act at all, but day-to-day personality and identity).
• Orientation - refers to what type of people a person is attracted to sexually: male bodies, female bodies, both, etc.

If a physically male person prefers to have sex with other physically male persons, this is not his "Sexuality" (or "Sexual Identity") - this is his "Orientation", one specific aspect of Sexual Identity. His "Sexuality" encompasses all three aspects, the third one being gender behavior, i.e. masculine or feminine. In early 21st century parlance, one might be a "cis-gendered homosexual male" – meaning biological male who is only sexually attracted to male bodies, yet whose gender behavior pattern is masculine, not effeminate ("Cis" means exhibiting gender behavior typically associated with your biological sex – masculine males, feminine females – while "Trans" means gender behavior commonly associated with the opposite sex, i.e. a male who behaves effeminately). Moreover, the exact definition of what constitutes "masculine" or "feminine" gender behavior is highly subjective and culture-specific. While in the mid-20th century United States it would be seen as effeminate for a male to wear a skirt, a medieval Scottish Highlands warrior would not consider wearing a "skirt" (kilt) to be effeminate.

In contemporary usage, these three aspects are variable, and can mix and match in a dozen combinations. In recent decades there have also been broad social movements away from a strict gender binary to treat sexual identity and gender behavior as fluid, on a sliding scale.

In contrast, in the Middle Ages, because the very definition of sex was so inherently linked to biology - who had the penis and did the penetrating did one action, the one being penetrated did another - sexuality was conceptualized of as a very strict gender binary, with "sex, gender, and orientation" not variable but inherently linked. A person of biologically male sex was believed to automatically express active masculine gender behavior - not just in the sex act but in all aspects of their everyday life - and to have an innate orientation/attraction to women. A person of biologically female sex was believed to automatically express passive female gender behavior in everyday life, and to have an innate desire to be penetrated by a man.

As a result, they had no concept of a "cis-gendered homosexual male", a homosexual male who behaved very masculinely. This is not to say that they would be "offended" by such a man, but rather that they would find it conceptually difficult to understand. If a knight was highly skilled at masculine behavior such as warfare and martial prowess (i.e. Loras Tyrell), many would dismiss the suggestion that he privately enjoyed having sex with men – following the familiar stereotype that "he is too butch to be interested in other men", etc. Indeed, research by medieval historians has generally agreed that King Richard the Lionheart of England (1157-1199) was quite probably a homosexual - or rather, that he had sex with both men and women at different points in his life. Richard I was one of the greatest military leaders and warriors of his age, commanding forces in the Third Crusade, and in many ways was seen as a paragon of "active" masculine behavior - so few in his lifetime seem to have suspected that he would enjoy "passive" sexual behavior with other men in private (however, the point from the famous play The Lion in Winter which alleges that Richard was in fact a lover of King Philip II of France himself is almost certainly apocryphal).

Not every real-life society has a conceptual model of only two genders: some have more than two, and particularly in the developed world in the early 21st century, many now espouse that gender behavior is a fluid spectrum, not rigid categories. Some societies recognize a third gender of biological males whose gender behavior is commonly associated with females. Some societies have not only a third but also a fourth gender, recognizing biological females whose behavior is commonly associated with males (not every society that recognizes a third gender also recognizes a fourth gender). These societies "recognize" more than two genders, in that they consider them to be co-legitimate with the more common "masculine biological male" and "feminine biological female" (though what constitutes "masculine" or "feminine" behavior is culture-specific). Contemporary examples would be the Hijra third gender in the Indian sub-continent, or the "Two-Spirit" individuals in Native North American culture.

In contrast, Medieval Europe did not recognize more than two genders: a biological male who behaved femininely was not seen as a legitimate, separate category of gender - he was simply seen as a defective kind of "male". Similarly, a female who behaved in traditionally "masculine" ways such as participating in warfare (even if she was not sexually interested in other women and exclusively had sex with men) was not seen as a distinct fourth gender - rather she would be seen as a defective kind of "female", a bizarre aberration from the traditional passive gender behavior expected of women.

Eunuchs

The strong belief in the Middle Ages about a direct link between physical sexual characteristics and gender behavior is exemplified by attitudes about eunuchs.

Their definition of the sex act was so phallo-centric that they thought that the possession or lack of a penis directly defined whether someone was "active" and masculine (actively trying to penetrate someone) or "passive" and feminine (passively allowing someone else to penetrate them). Because they saw Biological Sex, Gender, and Orientation as inherently linked, a biological male had a penis and therefore would behave "actively"/aggressively/masculinely - and because their concept of "Orientation" was based on "the role you play in the sex act" instead of object choice, males therefore had an innate drive to be the penetrator. Conversely, biological females didn't have a penis, therefore had an innate drive to be the penetrated one in the sex act, and their gender behavior in everyday life would be passive and effeminate.

According to widespread belief, if a male had his penis removed and was turned into a eunuch (or even if just his testicles were removed), he would therefore automatically exhibit effeminate gender behavior as a result. It was impossible to be "masculine", in their view, without a penis. They also believed that eunuchs would then inherently want to be the one penetrated (anally) in the sex act. Thus there was a widespread stereotype across Medieval Europe of effeminate eunuchs. In truth, if an adult male has his testicles cut off he can still achieve an erection with his penis, but if his testicles are cut off before puberty he cannot achieve an erection as an adult, due to the absence of several hormones supplied to the body by the testicles during maturation. Even so, this stereotype of effeminate eunuchs persisted, even for those who lost their testicles but retained the penis shaft.

These stereotypes about linked gender traits, exemplified by eunuchs, were seen in the neighboring Islamic world as well. A prominent example is in the writings of the ninth century Arabic author Al-Jahiz, observing the Islamic court in Baghdad. The court eunuchs did enjoy passive anal sex (as one of the only remaining sexual parts they could receive sexual stimulation from), but al-Jahiz was astonished at how masculinely they behaved and their martial prowess:

"What is astonishing is that, despite their transferral from the realm of male characteristics to that of females, they are not susceptible to effeminacy...and what is yet more astonishing about them in this connection is how common passive homosexuality is among them, despite the rarity of effeminacy."

Al-Jahiz had assumed that lack of male genitals, effeminacy, and sexual passivity were all linked (though he was open-minded enough to observe that in this case he encountered they clearly were not linked).

Similar stereotypes seem to exist in the world of Westeros and Essos: there is a widespread assumption that eunuchs behave effeminately. Varys self-consciously plays into this stereotype to lull others into thinking he is non-threatening: an effeminate, foppish eunuch used to the soft pleasures of court life. Yet this is all just an act Varys puts on to play into other people's stereotypes.

In the narrative (and the TV adaptation to a somewhat more frequent extent), several characters frequently mock eunuchs for their lack of male genitals. While this may sound very phallo-centric...the society Martin chose to depict is itself very phallo-centric, and such mocking comments were actually quite common in the medieval period (i.e. the go-to insult people repeatedly make to Varys is to point out that he is a eunuch, a point which never seems to get old to them). As a reaction against the idealized and "polite" societies depicted in High Fantasy literature, Martin's more gritty and realistic Low Fantasy setting does have husbands who beat their wives, women forced into prostitution, etc., so it is actually fitting that they would also exhibit stereotypes about eunuchs that contemporary culture would find "politically incorrect".

People from Westeros, with these biases about eunuchs and a phallo-centric definition of gender behavior, would have difficulty comprehending how the Unsullied such as Grey Worm can be elite warriors. "Warrior-eunuch" itself would seem a contradiction in terms to them. They also seem confused that the Unsullied can experience intimate emotions despite having their penises and testicles removed (though another factor making people assume this specifically about the Unsullied - not just eunuchs in general - is that their brutal training is supposed to strip them of all emotion, so they will robotically follow orders). When an Unsullied named Stalwart Shield (called "White Rat" in the TV version) is ambushed and killed while cuddling with a prostitute, Daenerys is confused, and Grey Worm explains that "Even those who lack a man's parts may still have a man's heart".

Patterns of "masculine" and "feminine" behavior

The actual definitions of what constitutes "masculinity" or "femininity" have varied across time and different places.

Things men were expected to do.

Things women were expected to do.

While medieval people did have a concept of a gender binary, confusingly, certain behaviors were seen as masculine virtues and others feminine virtues, but both men and women could exhibit them. This makes more sense in languages which have gendered nouns: "courage" is a masculine-gendered concept, but both men and women can exhibit courage; "mercy" is a feminine-gendered concept, but both men and women can exhibit mercy. They thought that men and women had different mixtures of these virtues and qualities to different degrees, but both men and women still contained a mixture of both. Thus it was possible for a female monarch to be "manful" in her tenacious leadership during war, even if she didn't take to the battlefield. Empress Matilda annoyed people because she wasn't demure about it, she acted like a man, openly yelling at people.

Page 70 – girl education --Sew, dance, sing, write poetry, how to dress (fashion), musical instruments (harp, bells), and also basic horseriding. They are also taught practical mathematics, because a female noblewomen is expected to be the head of managing the household, working closely with the castle’s steward.

Marriage and inheritance

Page 156 – “Marriage” defined as “monogamous, indissoluble…a relationship in which sexual intercourse could give rise to children who could inherit property” was hammered out in a long, drawn out process over the course of the Middle Ages.

Page 60 – Marriage – transfer of property, ensuring that any children of this union will lawfully inherit from their parents. A way of linking families and acquiring lawful children. Many of the Merovingian kings of France in the 500s to 900s were engaged in polygamous marriages; many nobles also married close-degree cousins to consolidate family wealth. The Church saw it as a spiritual union and by the twelfth century, succeeded in redefining marriage. The Gregorian Reforms of the tenth century not only resulted in a celibate priesthood, but succeeded in making a politically stronger clergy not dominated by the nobility, who could in time pressure the aristocracy to accept their moral dictates.

Didn't really have anything to do with "rearing of children".

Thus, in the eighth century, marriage was largely seen as a transfer of property, ensuring the production of legitimate children (of confirmed parentage) who would inherit that property, and thus linking two families politically. By the twelfth century, the new push for a celibate clergy had resulted in reforms which redefined marriage, infusing it with a spiritual-religious element.

Page 62 – Divorce did not exist for Christianity, only annulment. Divorce was easier for both men and women to achieve in medieval Jewish or Muslim communities. Polygamy was practiced in the Islamic world at the same time as in Merovingian France but it was already in decline and becoming fairly rare (only the very rich could afford it).

“Marriage in the Middle Ages was not an affirmation and official recognition of love between two people as much as it was the establishment of a legal unit which legitimized children and facilitated the transfer of property from one family to another and one generation to another.”(Karras 147)

Inheritance laws varied widely across Medieval Europe. In some regions and times women could not inherit at all, in others women inherited after brothers, in others the inheritance was gender-blind. Moreover, many major regions actually did not practice primogeniture at all, even between two sons: instead of the elder son getting all of the family lands in a winner-take-all system, the land would be divided evenly between two sons. Female landholding affected how many women would therefore wield political power, and many actually did.

Page 100 – Legitimization of bastards Page 125 – Bastardy wasn’t a problem yet for Norman kings in the 1100s. Bastards often weren’t *quite* as looked down upon…early on, at least…Henry I of England had 6 known concubines and over 20 illegitimate children. Page 81 – medieval people knew what sex was – they all shared one bedroom! Page 154 – beddings actually occurred, though they were less titillating and more matter-of-fact. The aristocracy married young, around 12-14. Page 124 – “plucking a rose” was a common sex euphemism.

Different culture zones of Medieval Europe

Given that patterns of sexuality vary across time and space, it is difficult to talk about "sexuality" across Medieval Europe as a whole, much less sub-regions. Still there are a few very broad culture zones that may be talked about, largely defined by the affect that religious differences had on separate regions. These are only vague generalizations and the borders are ill-defined.

There were three major religions in contact with each other in Medieval Europe and immediately neighboring lands: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. All three were Abrahamic religions in origin, and actually, all three had quite similar models of gender and sexuality. The defining feature that set Christianity apart from these other two religions is that it had a celibate clergy, which Islam and Judaism did not have. This in turn strongly influenced cultural attitudes about sexuality.

Attitudes towards gender and sexuality in Islamic regions (from Spain to Baghdad) and in Jewish communities were not that different from Christian regions in many respects, as they also possessed a gender binary, and frowned upon sex outside of marriage - attitudes about homosexuality were generally similar to Christian attitudes. What can be misleading is that a very common rhetorical insult was to claim that enemies enjoyed playing the passive role in anal sex with men (seen as a sign of decadence) or that the enemy sodomized male captives. Christian sources accuse Islamic enemies of this, and Islamic sources accused Christian enemies of this: these were just common stock insults with no basis in reality. There were several small but crucial differences, such that girls tended to marry earlier in the Islamic world because they had no celibate orders of nuns that older women could join. Because Muslims and Jews did not have a celibate priesthood, they did not define proper sex as something done only for procreation the way that the Christian church did. Therefore, sex-for-pleasure within marriage was not frowned upon in Islamic and Jewish communities, the attitude being that this helped to strengthen the marriage bond.

There were also major divisions between Christian regions: the Byzantine Empire centered at Constantinople was the most powerful and advanced Christian political entity for much of the Middle Ages, yet Greek Orthodox Christianity did not practice exclusive clerical celibacy. In Orthodox Christianity, lay priests could marry, and only the higher-ranking officials such as bishops had to be celibate. Through missionaries, Orthodox Christianity was spread to the Eastern Europe and Russia, influencing their views on sexuality as well, which generally matched Byzantine patterns. Orthodox Christianity formed a sort of intermediate cultural zone between Islam and Catholic Christianity in Western Europe: it was more tolerant of non-procreative sex (i.e. within marriage) than Western Europe, though not quite as much as Islam or Judaism.

Even within Western Europe, however, in which in theory everyone was under the same religious influence from the Catholic Church, there was a major division between the north and the south. It is known from observational/demographic records that in southern Europe, older men tended to marry younger women. The "West European Marriage Pattern" is more accurate called a "Northwest European Marriage Pattern".

Northern/Scandinavian Europe also possessed different attitudes towards sexuality, in regions that in many cases only recently converted to Christianity.

"Homosexuality" in the Middle Ages

"Homosexuals" were not conceived of as a distinct category of person

While medieval people did conceptualize of sex by the role played instead of object choice, they really did not conceptualize that there was a distinct category of male that preferred having sex with other men, either to penetrate them or to be penetrated by them. There were men who at times enjoyed having sex with other men, but they did not conceptualize of "homosexuals" as a distinct category of person. Homosexuality was not an identity, but a sex act.

"To the extent that sodomy was an act, or a set of acts, which a man could commit, rather than an orientation, it was not seem as limited to a minority group but was a more generalized threat. Manuals for confessors for confessors envisioned it as a sin that anyone could commit."

On the other hand, unlike in the Greco-Roman era, while medieval people did not really conceive of "homosexuals" as a distinct category of person that enjoyed having same-sex relationships exclusively...they were starting to develop some vague sense of this. Major church writings and other official documents never treated "sodomites" as a specific kind of person, just as an action that people could commit - yet in medical writings and even the "popular culture" of courtly love poetry, some people at times speculate that certain people exclusively preferred same-sex activity. This emphasizes a broader point: the "Middle Ages" were not simply an unchanging "Dark Ages" in which all social development ceased and society simply hibernated from the fall of Rome until the Renaissance. Rather, the Medieval period was a time of dynamic social change across many centuries: social ideas and conceptions were in flux.

For example, in the Arthurian romantic poems of Marie de France, in her Lanval story, Marie has Queen Guinevere complain to a man who rejects her advances (not realizing it is because he is already in love with another woman):

"Asiz le m'ad hum dit sovent / Que des femmez n'avez talent. /

Vallez avez bien afeitiez, / Ensemble od eus vus deduiez."

"People have often told me / that you have no interest in women. /

You have fine-looking boys / with whom you enjoy yourself."

So Marie de France, a French noblewoman composing her own narrative poetry in the late 1100's, seems to have had some notion that there were certain men who exclusively preferred to have sex with other men (and apparently thought it was amusing to imply that men she was writing stories about were homosexuals).

Still, a division between "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals" would have made about as much sense to most people in Medieval Europe as making a differentiation just as strict between "men who enjoy getting fellatio from a woman, and men who prefer vaginal penetration". The real "sexual identity" dichotomy was between the celibate clergy and non-celibate lay people, and in turn, for the non-celibate the only "acceptable" sex was vaginal penetration explicitly for procreation.

A few medical writers in the medieval universities (which were staffed by clergymen) did on occasion postulate that some men had an exclusive preference for having sex with other men, perhaps stemming from differences in their biological makeup - and thus in a sense this was "natural" for them, as in it was according to the nature of their bodies (though this view held that while it was "in their nature", this was a deformation from standard human nature, comparable to blindness - in the sense that people didn't choose to be blind, they were just born that way). The highly influential thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas, however, propagated the view that men having sex with other men could not possibly be said to be "natural" in any frame of reference (not even that the man was acting in accordance with his personal "nature"), and that homosexual behavior was fundamentally "unnatural". However, Aquinas was not - as his wording might imply - making a recourse to "Nature" as distinct from "God". Medieval people lived close by the livestock they raised and they were well aware that animals often engage in homosexual behavior. For that matter, they were aware that animals have no concept of Incest, so if brother and sister dogs weren't separated they would end up breeding with each other (thus leading to discussion on why they also used the word "unnatural" to describe incest). Rather, Aquinas's full line of mental reasoning (as laid out in his Summa Theologica) was that "human Nature" had been designed by God, and thus men who engaged in homosexual behavior were "unnatural" in that they were going against the "Nature" that God had intended for human beings. Aquinas said that sex acts were "unnatural" - not intended by God - if they were "not for the benefit of the species", which he stated meant strictly for procreation. By this definition even oral sex between men and women was "unnatural", as were woman-on-top sexual positions, because they were believed to be non-conducive to conception. Engaging in non-procreative sex, particularly homosexual sex acts, was therefore an extreme sin of Pride, because it was a person believing they knew how to use their own body better than God did (Aquinas believed that Pride was the worst sin of all).

There is a widespread misconception that homosexuals were harshly persecuted in the Middle Ages, which is far from the truth. One of the first major figures in modern academic research about medieval sexuality was John Boswell, a Harvard-graduate and history professor at Yale, whose publications began in 1980 and continued until his death in 1994. Himself a homosexual, Boswell made a complete reevaluation of medieval attitudes towards sexuality, which had previously been based to a large degree on assumptions and modern biases, that the Middle Ages were a time of persecution of homosexuals. Boswell instead concluded that the Middle Ages were actually a time of great tolerance of homosexual behavior, not unlike the earlier Greco-Roman period. Boswell suddenly died from AIDS in 1994, but he spurred an entire generation of medieval scholars who carried on research in this new field. Boswell had made a pendulum-swing reaction against the view that Medieval Europe was completely intolerant of homosexual behavior by strongly arguing that it was greatly tolerated. In the twenty years since his death, however, continuing research in the burgeoning field of medieval gender studies refined its views and has developed a more complex and nuanced model of social attitudes towards homosexuality in Medieval Europe, falling between the two extremes of Boswell and his opponents: there weren't actual laws punishing homosexuality in the Middle Ages, but it still wasn't socially "tolerated" the way that Boswell thought.

The significance of Boswell's developments for the A Song of Ice and Fire novels is that George R.R. Martin conceived of much of the world of Westeros in the early 1990's, when he was working on the first novel and draft out much of the rest of the series. Even in the 1980s Boswell's school of research was still very new and it isn't clear how familiar Martin could have been with it. Moreover, gender studies about the actual status of homosexuality in Medieval Europe have significantly advanced since Martin first planned out the world of Westeros in the first novel.

Two main points that have emerged about homosexuality in the Middle Ages in the past twenty years of academic discourse:

First, "homosexuals" were not conceived of as a distinct kind of person in the Middle Ages, but an act that someone could commit. Therefore, clerical writings that denounce sins of the flesh actually assume that all men might be tempted to engage in homosexual sex, just as much as they might be tempted to engage in adultery with a woman outside of marriage.

Second, that act was not punished particularly severely - it was a venal sin of the flesh, loosely on par with adultery, fathering bastard children, etc. (and a man having anal sex with a woman was equally chastised). Just like adultery, being caught performing a homosexual sex act was not punishable by death, prison sentence, or even fines. There were not outright "laws" against it, as in secular laws - but at the same time, it was not something casually accepted either. It was seen as socially disgraceful, like adultery, and people did still try to hide it (a loose comparison would be to an actor being outed as a homosexual in 1950's Hollywood: no "laws" were being broken but it would disgrace and effectively end his career).

"Men who had sex with other men" were not really thought of as a distinct category or kind of person - and "women who had sex with other women" even less so. As explained above, their definition of "sex" was so phallo-centric that they had difficulty conceptually understanding that two women even could have "sex" with each other, when no penis was involved, so "women who had sex with women" were even further from being treated as a distinct category of person.

In real life, homosexual relationships were only particularly singled out and villified after the Reformation and Enlightenment, when the priesthood in Protestant parts of Europe was no longer celibate, while the Catholic Church responded by extolling sex within marriage. The divide between procreative and non-procreative sex had weakened and was no longer the defining aspect of "proper" sexual activity. This is similar to another common stereotype, to say that "witchhunts" and witch burnings were "medieval" - in fact, the era of the great mass witch-hunts in Europe also only really began after 1500, due to heightened religious hysteria caused by the wars of the Protestan Reformation. "Witch-hunts" and "executions of homosexuals" are not really a "medieval" activity at all, but a phenomenon of the Early Modern era.

Patterns of homosexual relationships

It is very difficult for historians to determine if there indeed was a homosexual subculture in Medieval Europe, because they left no written records behind. No one openly circulated books of homoerotic love poetry, etc. There were probably brothels or other social clubs in some of the major cities that catered to homosexual men, but there are no surviving records attesting to their existence. One of the largest sources of records is in ecclesiastical court records - while not a secular law punishable by death, in the later Middle Ages certain major cities such as Venice or Florence started exacting morality fines on homosexuals or adulterers (it was a good source of tax revenue).

While there were men who felt an innate physical attraction to other men in the Middle Ages, how they themselves conceptualized these urges was quite different. Because "homosexuals" were not thought of as a category, and there were no examples in romantic songs and epics about love between two men, they had no models to follow. Even in contemporary society, there have been numerous accounts from young homosexuals who grew up in an isolated farming community, etc. who had no idea that such a thing as same-sex relationships even existed, and thus had difficulty mentally processing feelings they did not understand.

A principle which generally seems to hold true throughout history is that patterns of homosexual relationships tended to mirror the model set by heterosexual relationships in their society. In southwestern Europe, it was common for older men to marry younger women, and thus heterosexual relationships were very hierarchical between a dominant male and a passive female.

"In a culture in which sex is hierarchical - a dominant partner doing something to a subordinate partner - it makes sense that the subordinate partner would typically be younger."

Surviving records from Venice, Florence, and other parts of southwestern Europe generally indicate that homosexual relationships in the region imitated the same pattern: powerful older men would enter into relationships with younger men - not "pedophilia" anymore than the heterosexual relationships in the same region, but for both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, there would be a 15-20 year age gap between the older partner and the younger partner.

In contrast, northwestern Europe had its unique marriage pattern of women waiting until relatively late ages to marry, often in their late 20's (and not infrequently to men who were the same age or even a year or two younger than they were). Heterosexuals in northwestern Europe therefore did not have the same extreme hierarchical relationship stemming from a large age difference, and their relationships were more mutualistic (though this is relative; men were still seen as the "active" partner, women the "passive" partner). Accordingly, surviving evidence indicates that homosexuals in northwestern Europe also tended to be in relationships with people closer to their own age, and similarly this meant that their relationships were less hierarchical and more mutualistic.

Indeed, this phenomenon of homosexual patterns mirroring heterosexual patterns can be observed into the 20th century itself. Even through the mid-20th century, the conceptual model persisted that in terms of gender behavior, men were "active" and women were "passive". It was seen as unusual for women to be involved in "masculine" fields such as in the workplace. Sex was therefore conceived of as a dominant "top" man and submissive "bottom" woman. Surviving sources about homosexuals in the early 20th century indicate that prior to World War II, most homosexual subcultures similarly self-categorized between dominant "top" partners and submissive "bottom" partners. Following the societal changes brought by World War II and ultimately the resulting Sexual Revolution of the 1960's, however, there was a great drive for women to break away from being confined to submissive social roles. In effect, to stop treating the three main aspects of Sexuality - Biological Sex, Gender behavior, and Orientation - as inherently linked. With Second Wave feminism came a new model that heterosexual women could nonetheless be "active" in previously male spheres. Patterns of homosexual behavior, based on models in ubiquitous heterosexual culture, were in turn affected by this push to stop seeing romantic couplings as a union between one "dominant" and one "submissive" partner, and categorizations about "tops" versus "bottoms" in homosexual relationships began to diminish. Then in Third-wave feminism from the 1990's onwards there came a drive to see gender and sexuality as more of a spectrum of behaviors than rigid categories.

There was another key difference between Medieval Europe and contemporary society: while "homosexuality" was not widely accepted, "homosociality" was by far the norm. Deeply passionate yet platonic relationships were celebrated among men, such as a "band of brothers" who formed deep bonds from their shared experiences in war. The male and female spheres of activity were so segregated that men did not form deep personal friendships with women - and it was not expected for a man to have a deep personal connection or even friendship with his wife. "Marriage" was just a breeding arrangement, a method for ensuring political alliances between families and ensuring that the children produced from that union were legitimate (that they were the children of these two people and not someone else). In the narrative, for example, Robert Baratheon doesn't even like his wife Cersei Lannister - almost all marriages among the nobility are arranged, not made for love but to secure political alliances. King Robert's deepest personal relationship was the platonic friendship he had with Eddard Stark, forged when they were both wards of Jon Arryn and then fought in war against the Targaryens together. At the same time, the Middle Ages produced a large among of torrid courtly love romantic epics between men and women - often between a poor male knight trying to woo a rich married noblewoman above his social station, not celebrating love within marriage. Marriages were rarely conducted for love, and thus even for heterosexuals, their most passionate personal relationships were platonic ones with members of the same sex. Thus deeply passionate and also sexual relationships between two men were not as big of a step away from societal norms as it would be in contemporary society (i.e unaware of Renly's homosexuality, many people wouldn't think it that unusual that his deepest personal relationship seems to be with Loras and not his wife Margaery).

Prostitution, contraception, and abortion

Page 107-108 – female prostitutes were seen as an outlet, prostitutes were the only ones who knew anything about contraception Page 73 – Contraceptives/Abortion Page 74 – both the rich and poor wanted many children, and thus probably didn’t practice contraception. Only prostitutes regularly practiced contraception, so any history of “reproductive rights and practices” must examine court records about prostitutes.

Male privilege

Page 50 – Rape and the Two Seeds theory Page 86 – “First Night” did not exist! Page 113 – Rape – women’s “consent” irrelevant Page 114 – Women did not tend to choose their husbands, their parents did. Other than overt, physically violent cohersion, they didn’t have a concept of emotional/economic cohersion, threats, etc. Page 121-123 – boys will be boys double standard, male privilege Page 126-128 – “Rape”, as they understood it, you didn’t really need a woman’s consent. They were passive.

The mysterious status of oral sex in the Middle Ages

Page 84 and 140 – Oral sex rarely even mentioned in the middle ages’ texts, even to be condemned

A curious aspect of medieval sexuality is that while there are hundreds of religious or court records describing "sodomy", there are hardly any at all which mention fellatio, perhaps only a dozen or so. Again, this "oral sex" refers specifically to fellatio (stimulation of a man's penis with a mouth), not cunnilingus (stimulation of a woman's genitals with a mouth), because they did not conceptualize "sex" as being able to occur without a penis. There are two theories to explain this mysterious absence of oral sex in the records: the first is that celibate priests with no sexual experience were not imaginative enough to understand fellatio (which doesn't make much sense because they did understand anal sex), while the second (more probable) explanation is that "sodomy" had come to be used as a broad umbrella term for any non-vaginal sexual contact. From what can be gleaned from the few records that seem to refer to oral sex specifically, oral sex seemed to confuse their strict dichotomy of "active penetrator" and "passive one who gets penetrated". The physical mechanics of two men having anal sex were similar enough to the mechanics of vaginal sex not to confuse this dichotomy.

The ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have considered the man whose penis was inserted into a mouth as the active partner, given that he was "penetrating". In the Middle Ages, however, in some circles at least, there seems to have been some debate in the other direction: in this view, the person performing the fellatio with their mouth is the "active" partner because "they're doing all the work", while the man's penis passively receives the fellatio. In effect, if a wife was performing fellatio on her husband, the entire active/passive roleset was suddenly reversed. This was not, however, a stable definition: the few records that discuss fellatio in the Middle Ages seem deeply confused about who was the active partner and who was the passive one, perhaps explaining why they rarely wrote about it at all. The definition of roles in fellatio remained largely a mystery. For example, in Season 1 of the Game of Thrones TV series, when Loras performs fellatio on Renly, who can be said to be the "active" partner, and which of them the "passive" partner? Loras because his mouth is being penetrated by Renly, or Loras because this is something he is actively performing and that Renly is passively allowing? ("A question for the philosophers" - Olenna Tyrell).

Gender and Sexuality in A Song of Ice and Fire

As with the real-life Middle Ages, social constructs of gender and sexuality vary extensively across Westeros, Essos, and the rest of the known world in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels written by George R.R. Martin. They may have also changed over the centuries within the narrative. It is extremely difficult to examine such values beyond Westeros itself, because so much of the narrative is focused on Westeros. So what follows is an examination of the evidence in the novels about gender and sexuality in Westeros, and a few notes about what has been briefly described in the rest of the world.

Overview of Westeros

The Faith of the Seven is the dominant religion in most of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, having been introduced to the continent 6,000 years ago during the Andal Invasion. Only the North managed to halt the advance of the Andals, and thus continued to worship the Old Gods of the Forest. A few Andals also invaded the Iron Islands, but the Faith found little purchase there, and instead the invaders converted to the local Drowned God religion. The Rhoynar migrated to Westeros about 1,000 years ago and settled in Dorne. They did convert to the Faith of the Seven - but ignored many of its prohibitions on sexual behaviors, making the culture of the modern Dornishmen quite distinct.

The core regions of Westeros, the populous and wealthy kingdoms south of the Neck, follow the Faith of the Seven and broadly fall into the same cultural sphere. The Iron Islands and Dorne are actually stated to have the smallest populations of any of the Seven Kingdoms, while the North is not one of the more populous ones, and due to its vast size, it has a very low population density. Thus by far the majority of Westeros's population and land area falls into the cultural sphere of the Faith of the Seven. Of the five settlements large enough to be called "cities" in Westeros, four of them are located in this central region (King's Landing, Oldtown, Lannisport, and Gulltown). The fifth and smallest city is White Harbor, located on the southeastern coast of the North - but it is ruled by House Manderly, a family from the Reach that fled to the North and continues to follow the Faith of the Seven, actually making it a small enclave of southern culture in the North (indeed, it was the Manderlys who built up White Harbor into a southern-style city; it wasn't a pre-established large Northern city that happened to accept the Manderlys).

Gender and Sexuality under the Faith of the Seven, in most of Westeros

The key factors that shaped conceptualizations of sexuality in real-life Medieval Europe are that it had celibate clergy of both genders (monks and nuns), but an all-male priesthood. This led to a dichotomy not between homosexual and heterosexual, but between celibate and non-celibate, and in turn, a dichotomy between procreative and non-procreative sex. Non-clergy were only supposed to have sex for the explicit purpose of producing children. Meanwhile, because there were no female priests writing about sexual morality, sex was strictly defined as penetrating someone else with a penis. This led to a pattern of conception about sexuality based on role in the sex act instead of object choice.

In contrast, the Faith of the Seven does have a gender-blind priesthood, accepting both men and women without distinction. Men become septons and women become septas, but these ranks are apparently the same (it's just a gendered word, like how a man is an "alumnus" from a university but a woman is an "alumna"). Women can also join the all-female monastic order of the Silent Sisters, though there are many other orders not described in the novels, some male, some female, some maybe both. Women are even explicitly described as becoming members of the Most Devout - the ruling council of the Faith of the Seven, which is basically analogous to the College of Cardinals in Catholic Christianity. Septa Unella - the septa who leads Cersei's naked walk of atonement - is a member of the Most Devout, and thus basically a cardinal. While Martin has never explicitly mentioned it, there may well have been a "High Septa" in the past, a female High Septon (their analogue of the papacy).

Therefore, unlike in the real-life Middle Ages, in Westeros:

• 1 - Because there are female priests in the Faith of the Seven, they probably don't strictly define sex as "penetrating someone with a penis", but a wider range of behaviors.
  • Someone in the real-life Middle Ages would not describe Jon Snow as having "sex" with Ygritte when he performs cunnilingus on her - yet people in Westeros probably do consider cunnilingus to be "sex".
  • Correspondingly, sexual relationships in general are less hierarchical, because sex isn't thought of as a thing a man does to a woman but a mutualistic experience they do together. Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell are presented as seemingly having a fairly mutualistic relationship, instead of a hierarchical relationship such as the senpai and kōhai (or seme and uke) homosexual relationships among medieval Japanese samurai (Loras served as Renly's squire and as the king's brother Renly technically outranked him, but Loras was considered the more active and martial of the two, one of the best knights in Westeros, while Renly was more of a statesman).
• 2 - Sexual relationships between homosexual women were barely understood in the real-life Middle Ages, even to criticize them. In contrast, homosexuality between women is probably criticized in Westeros as much as homosexuality between men - because the female priests understand that women can give sexual pleasure to each other without a penis.
  • Indeed, the World of Ice and Fire sourcebook (2014) mentions that septons have tried to admonish the Dornishmen because they feel it is no great concern if a man lays with a man, or a woman with a woman - real-life medieval people would probably not even have mentioned women laying with women, finding it conceptually impossible. It isn't clear if the authors intended this when they wrote this detail, but by coincidence it matches up with the social effects logically resulting from having female priests.

On the other hand, the Faith of the Seven still has a celibate clergy overall, so they would still have a basic dichotomy between celibate and non-celibate, and thus procreative and non-procreative sex (at one point in the novels a member of the Most Devout tells Cersei that the gods made men and women's private parts purely for the begetting of children).

Therefore:

• 1 - Men who have sex with other men probably are not thought of as a distinct category of person, because all non-procreative sex is considered bad.
• 2 - Homosexual sex is probably not viewed as particularly worse than other venal sins such as adultery - i.e. Loras Tyrell isn't seen as particularly worse than King Robert Baratheon's frequent whoremongering. At the same time, also like a major lord committing adultery, Loras doesn't just casually acknowledge in public that he engages in homosexual behaviors.

This is the pattern that would be expected of having both a gender-blind priesthood of both men and women and a celibate clergy overall. The question is, do the novels match it?

The A Song of Ice and Fire novels do have characters in them who have same-sex intimate encounters - but realistically, they have never gone into a lengthy speech clearly defining their mental framework about sexual behavior. The novels never say that men who have sex with men are thought of as a distinct category of person: this might be a simple omission and Martin assumed that they actually think of it as a category, however, same-sex relationships have been mentioned in such vague terms that they could easily match the expected model, that they don't think of it as a distinct category.

On a more general level, it does appear that same-sex relationships in the novels are not seen as any sort of heavily vilified taboo, but as expected, a venal sin roughly on par with adultery. No actual "laws" against homosexuality have ever been mentioned in the novels. It is simply seen as socially disgraceful.

Therefore, in general, views on sexuality and gender in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels (in the core regions of Westeros that follow the Faith of the Seven) are somewhat closer to modern patterns than to the medieval model - but, the presence of female priests is a drastic change from how real medieval society operated. The differences observed compared to the real-life Middle Ages - sex is not hierarchical but mutualistic, not strictly defined as something a man does to someone else using a penis, greater insight into female sexuality, etc. - are all things that would logically result from having female priests.

Whether Martin consciously intended these differences is unknown, i.e. as an invented fictional world not connected to real life he was free to make this change, and perhaps preferred writing about people whose mental frameworks are closer to modern ones, both for himself as an author and to readers.

The fringes of Westeros, with unique religions and cultures

Westeros has more than one major religion in it, and they generally co-exist. Medieval Europe had Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. They didn’t get along that much, but all were basically Abrahamic religions and their views on sexuality were not radically different. In contrast, the Old Gods of the Forest and the Drowned God are completely unrelated to the Faith of the Seven and have (or can have) very different value sets.

The fact that three major religions coexist more or less peacefully in Westeros is a marked difference from Medieval Europe, in which the sense of community, of "us" versus "the Other" was often defined as "Christendom" versus those of other religions. In both Christianity and Islam, slavery was actually allowed - the only stipulation was that it was immoral to enslave persons belonging to the same religion as you. Thus Christians had no problem with enslaving pagans in northern Europe and Muslims in southern Europe. In contrast, the Faith of the Seven in Westeros explicitly forbids slavery as a heinous crime - as do the religions of the Old Gods and Drowned God. This is simply a narrative conceit which makes Westeros different from the real-life Middle Ages. In-universe this level of tacit toleration for other religions (and lack of slavery) might be due to the fact that their historical record is over twice as long: the Faith of the Seven was introduced to Westeros six thousand years ago, and there actually was quite a lot of religious strife in the early centuries when it pushed the other religions out to the fringes of the continent. After so many millennia, however, the fighting has long since stalemated, so that all three religions settled into a grudging co-existence.

Northmen and wildlings: followers of the Old Gods

The views of the worshipers of the Old Gods of the Forest towards sexuality are not very clear. In-universe, it is said that the religion of the Old Gods is less formal than the Faith of the Seven, and doesn't have as many "rules" as such. It doesn't even have a priesthood of any kind, male or female, but is based on quite contemplation before Weirwood heart trees in Godswoods. The Old Gods do seem to have several basic social rules, including the sacred bond of Guest right, prohibitions against Incest, Bastardy, Kinslaying, etc. Otherwise, there has never been any mention that the religion of the Old Gods has a specific view against homosexual behaviors - though their exact views are simply unclear.

The only prominent clue has been that Greatjon Umber's uncle Hother "Whoresbane" Umber is apparently a homosexual: he is called "Whoresbane" because in his youth he was sent to Oldtown to train as a maester, but a whore he was with tried to rob him, so he disemboweled the whore (then left Oldtown in disgrace). It is described that the story is only told in whispers, because no one wants to publicly say that it was actually a male whore that Hother was with. Therefore, it would seem that homosexuality is also seen as a social embarrassment in the North.

The Northmen who live north of the Neck but south of the Wall were never conquered by the Andals but in many ways acculturated to the behaviors of their neighbors, such as switching to speak the Common Tongue of the Andals instead of the Old Tongue of the First Men, and adopting a societal model more based on a system of Lordship than clans, etc. This is similar to the North's real-life analogue, Scotland, which in the Middle Ages quickly built itself up into a strong kingdom generally capable of resisting invasion from England to the south by adopting many English cultural and social models.

In contrast, it is said that the wildlings (or "Free Folk" as they call themselves) have very few "rules" beyond what they can keep with their own strength (though they also value Guest right, and have prohibitions against incest and kinslaying). Unlike the Northmen and the rest of Westeros, the wildlings also don't recognize a class of hereditary nobility in their society. Given that a core value of the wildlings is that they don't like other people telling them how to live, it is quite possible that they actually place no social stigma on homosexuality.

Similarly, the wildlings apparently don't have a strict gender binary of social roles, in that they have Warrior women in their culture, that they call Spearwives (though a spearwife can marry and have children while still being a warrior). For most of the Northmen, meanwhile, it is seen as unusual for a female to want to adopt the traditionally masculine role of a warrior (such as Arya Stark). At the same time, in some of the fringes of the North, there are some female warriors: Bear Island is under constant threat by sea from both ironborn raiders to the south and wildling raiders passing around the Wall by ship from the north. Because the men are out all day in their fishing boats they can't respond to quick raids against their homes, so the women of Bear Island - particularly their rulers, House Mormont - have had to develop a strong tradition of having warrior women as a practical necessity.

Therefore, what apparently seems to have happened, is that the original First Men might not have had many social gender restrictions on warrior women or on homosexuality, but over the centuries the Northmen gradually adopted many of the social customs and mores of the neighboring powerful Andal kingdoms to the south. The wildlings that live beyond the Wall, however, apparently have far fewer of such social restrictions. Little more can be postulated due to lack of evidence.

The ironborn, followers of the Drowned God

In the Iron Islands, the distinctive Ironborn culture values raiding, and follows the local Drowned God religion. It is praise-worthy for men to take as many concubines, called "salt wives", as he can, though the children of salt wives are not considered bastards. They do also have rules against bastardy and incest, etc., and marriage is a rite of the Drowned God performed by a priest. For that matter, the Drowned God religion does have an all-male priesthood, the Drowned Men.

Not much is known about the views of the Drowned God religion on gender and sexuality. In general, ironborn culture seems to be very misogynistic. It is considered very controversial that Balon Greyjoy raised his daughter Asha (renamed "Yara Greyjoy" in the TV show) as a surrogate son, and many reject her leadership out of hand just for being a woman. Asha/Yara is very abnormal under the ironborn social model of expected female gender behavior. Then again, there is mention in the fifth novel that some of Victarion's men raped a maester they took prisoner from the Shield Islands. So it is quite possible that the Drowned God religion is actually closest to what happened in Medieval Europe: so long as you are the one penetrating someone else specifically with a penis, it's not a problem, and they don’t really conceive of women as "enjoying" sex or performing the same action that they do, they don't care. This is due to the effect that having an all-male priesthood had on Medieval Europe's views on sexuality, and the Drowned God is the only religion in Westeros with an exclusively male priesthood. The Drowned Men are apparently celibate, though this is unclear. For that matter, unlike Medieval Europe, the ironborn don't have a celibate clergy of nuns that women can join - in which case they would probably marry off their daughters as soon as they were old enough to have children; as a result, ironborn girls probably would not have as much of a sense of personhood and social independence, which does seem to match how little power ironborn women seem to wield compared to the rest of Westeros.

Asha is sexually active and no one blames her for it, however this is possibly due to her overall tomboyish attitudes - she is very abnormal under the ironborn social model of expected female gender behavior, and not remotely representative of what is considered "standard" female behavior in their society.

Dorne, descendants of the Rhoynar

Then of course we come to Dorne. The Rhoynar ancestors of the Dornish came from city-states along the Rhoyne River in the Free Cities. They converted to the Faith of the Seven when they migrated to Westeros, but they just ignored the rules they didn’t like, so 1 – they see men and women as equal, both in inheritance and sex, 2 – they keep formal mistresses called paramours, and 3 – they don’t consider it a big concern “if a man lies with a man, or a woman lies with a woman”. Thus a Dornish noblewoman can inherit rule in her own right, and while technically married to a man to produce children, also openly keep a female paramour in an a deep, loving relationship. The Dornish, however, do not see this as a matter of the object choice dichotomy, given that even women do it. They just have a very fluid and non-binary attitude towards sex.

The Valyrians, the Targaryens, and definitions of incest

The Valyrians practiced heavy incest between brother and sister, to "keep the bloodlines pure". The Valyrians also practiced polygamy - it was not universal and frequent, but it was not uncommon either.

House Targaryen was a surviving Valyrian noble family that settled on the islands off the east coast of Westeros, and later conquered and united the Seven Kingdoms. As a political expedient they converted to the Faith of the Seven, and abandoned polygamy, but they continued to practice incestuous marriages. This led to conflict with the Faith of the Seven which was only decided through civil war.

This may have affected how incest was defined in Westeros. In the real-life Middle Ages, the Catholic Church defined incest as any marriage between relatives who were third cousins or closer, i.e. marrying a fourth cousin or a third cousin once removed was not incest. In Westeros, however, it is apparently not uncommon for members of major noble Houses to marry their own first cousins. Tywin Lannister himself married his first cousin: her full maiden name was already "Joanna Lannister" before she married.

The incestuous marriages of the Targaryens were still seen as very unusual, but they felt that their royal status set them above the rules of normal men. Apparently this aspect of Valyrian/Targaryen culture was loosely inspired by the incestuous brother-sister marriages among many of the real-life pharaohs of Ancient Egypt.

The definition of what marriages were considered incestuous in real life actually changed over time. During the early Middle Ages it fluctuated considerably, with instances of first degree cousins marrying, but other instances in which seventh degree cousins were forbidden to marry. The Catholic Church only officially set the definition of incest as marriage within third degree cousins or closer at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The reason that study of the definition of what constituted "incest" in the Middle Ages is important is that it is further evidence that there was never a single "traditional" definition of marriage, but rather, that the definition of marriage changed considerably over the centuries.

Beyond Westeros

• The Free Cities
• Slaver's Bay
• Qarth
• The Dothraki
• The Summer Islands and Sothoryos
• The Farther East
  • Yi Ti
  • Hyrkoon
  • The Jogos Nhai
  • Asshai

Outside of Westeros, we know little and less. The Free Cities have many different religions so their cultural values about sex can vary considerably. Courtesans are held in high cultural esteem in Braavos, and throughout the Free Cities formal concubines are not uncommon. Norvos was founded by religious extremists who are a very conservative all-male priesthood and who believe that sex is strictly for the creation of children.

The religion of the Lord of Light *apparently* is a bit more sexually tolerant; in their dualist view, the Lord of Light made humankind male and female, and the Lord of Life is in a struggle of the power of life versus the power of death against the Great Other. Therefore, when male and female are joined together it is a life-affirming, powerful act. This might indicate that they don’t view non-procreative sex as positive, but it is unclear. Either way there are so many other religions worshipped in the Free Cities, even in a single city, that there are multiple homosexual characters from there.

The Valyrians were obsessed with “keeping the bloodline pure” and practiced heavy brother-sister incest whenever possible (though apparently, not parent-child). Polygamy was also fairly common. We know little about how the Valyrian Freehold functioned at its height. We can only see them through the window of how the early Targaryens functioned in Westeros: apparently marriage and bastardy were rules they had, and there were female dragonlords, but Aegon I became lord ahead of Visenya? Was this due to Westerosi influence? Uncertain. Several historical Targaryens were homosexual, but they always stood apart from the peoples they ruled. This may have influenced the incest laws of Westeros, given that first cousins marry often in the Seven Kingdoms.

The Summer Islands are very “sex positive” and view it as a holy, life-affirming act, even when non-procreative, that the gods gave it to humans to enjoy themselves, and apparently they don’t make a distinction against homosexual sex either. The sex values of other religions such as the Lord of Harmony on Naath are less clear, so Missandei’s views are not certain.

In Slaver’s Bay, worship often involves temple prostitutes.

Asshai actually can’t reproduce because living there makes you sterile, they “reproduce” by adopting slave children. Therefore, if Melisandre is any indication (she is much more explicit about this with Gendry in the TV series) they don’t have particular rules against any sex acts.

We don’t know much about the Dothraki. On the one hand, male warriors are dominant, and they can have more than one wife. On the other hand, the only “priesthood” they have are the crones of dead khals, the dosh khaleen…how would this affect their attitudes towards sex? For all we know, the Dothraki have a “two spirits” conception of sex, like certain nomadic Native American tribes (i.e. some Dothraki warriors might have sex with other men, but still behave masculinely, and no one would think that was unusual). Little has been said about this.

Yi Ti’s emperors have been said to have concubines but how common this is, it’s unknown, The Hyrkoonian city-states of the central mountains are organized like mole rats, like a hive. They’re ruled by female warriors, all but the handsomest and healthiest males are castrated at a young age and treated as worker-drones. The few they don’t become breeding stock for all the women warriors.

Qarth…or, the dress the launched a thousand fanarts!....yeah…

The Jogos Nhai have very interesting attitudes towards sex and gender. They see social roles as very linked to gender behavior, but that these are independent of biological sex. Warriors are a masculine role, but the priesthood, healers, judges, and other domestic affairs (i.e. merchants?) are female roles. Thus if you’re born female but want to be a warrior you have to live as a man, and if you’re a man who wants to be a merchant you have to live as a woman. This is due to their religion of the Moonsingers. Notably, the Moonsingers are a major religion in Braavos, due to some Jogos Nhai slaves taking the lead among the diverse group of escaped slaves that fled there. So logically, it might not be unusual to run into an Iron Bank member who is actually a man living as a woman, because she follows the Moonsinger religion.

Gender and Sexuality as adapted and depicted in the Game of Thrones TV series

Depictions of gender and sexuality in the Game of Thrones TV series adaptation by HBO generally match how gender and sexuality are presented in the A Song of Ice and Fire novels.

For the most part the TV series has focused on sexuality in Westeros, because the novels simply don't describe different social structures in Essos in very great detail, i.e. the novels didn't go into much detail about the view of the Dothraki on gender and sexuality, so the TV series didn't invent what was already unclear from the source material. In Westeros, the views of worshipers of the Old Gods (the Northmen and wildlings) and the Drowned God (ironborn) are similarly vague in the novels, so the TV series did not invent any new details either.

The TV series does accurately include the details from the novels that conceptions about gender and sexuality are very different in Dorne compared to the rest of Westeros.

A point of minor confusion is that the words "homosexual" and "gay" did not exist in the Middle Ages ("gay" in particular is a very recent term), and they don't exist in the novels either. A commonly used term in the Middle Ages was "sodomy", but the novels have avoided using this term, probably because it stems very specifically from the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Book of Genesis does not exist in the world of Westeros, so that's not a term they would use either. The TV series kept this point and also avoids using the terms "homosexual", "gay", and "sodomy". The first two of these are more obviously used in modern settings, but without the word "sodomy", "sodomite", etc. the TV series has at times had to struggle with how to refer to homosexuals:

• When Renly and Loras's relationship was discussed by Cersei, Joffrey, and Margaery in Season 3's "Dark Wings, Dark Words", Cersei just called him a "deviant" (which Joffrey copied), or "perversion". Margaery delicately explained to Joffrey that Renly was a homosexual by using the more convoluted description that "I don't think he was interested in the company of women".
• Later in Season 3's "The Climb", Tywin Lannister and Olenna Tyrell discuss rival marriage-alliance plans (in a scene invented for the TV series). Tywin just refers to Loras's homosexuality as "unnatural behavior". Olenna calls it "buggery", though the script also introduces the description "sword swallower" (which is not from the novels).
• In the Season 4 premiere "Two Swords", Cersei referred to Loras as a "pillow-biter" - which is not a term from the novels, and probably not from the real Middle Ages. Apparently, "pillow-biter" is actually a very modern term originating in the 1970s: the euphemism refers to a man who enjoys being on the receiving end of anal sex from another man, and is thus face down in the bed's pillows and bites into them when he orgasms. Olenna herself also later refers to homosexuals as "pillow-biters" in Season 5's "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken".

Joffrey in the novels never threatened to declare homosexuality a "perversion punishable by death" (which he said to impress Margaery in "Dark Wings, Dark Words"). There has never been widespread persecution of homosexuals in Westeros, so in context this is sort of like Joffrey saying "adultery will be punishable by death". It is in keeping with his trend from the novels of making outrageous and psychopathically violent proclamations with little or no provocation (i.e. when starving war refugees come to the castle gates begging their king for food, he stands on the battlements and shoots several dead with his crossbow, insulted that they think him "a baker").