Wit & Attitude Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Bradley’s line tries to smuggle a modern argument through an “ancient Greece” costume: same-sex intimacy is framed less as desire than as a rational workaround for women’s alleged lack of access to “civilization.” The move is rhetorically convenient. If male-male bonds can be explained as the inevitable result of male education and female exclusion, the messy reality of erotic attraction gets tidied into sociology. That tidiness is the tell.

The intent reads as explanatory, even corrective: to situate Greek male relationships inside a story about class, literacy, and power rather than treat them as scandal or anomaly. But the subtext is sharply hierarchical. Calling young Greek men “idiots and uneducated” is a sweeping insult that clears the stage for a preferred thesis: cultured adult men seek “emotional and friendly relationships” with their equals, and women are implicitly not eligible as equals. It’s an argument that pretends to dignify same-sex bonds while actually narrowing them to a kind of elite mentorship, stripping out sex and flattening a wide spectrum of practices, identities, and coercions.

Context matters because Bradley wrote in a period when popular historical fiction often justified non-normative sexuality by making it safe: situational, temporary, intellectualized. That framing reassures a mainstream readership by implying that what’s “real” is emotional camaraderie, not queer desire. Ironically, it also reproduces the ancient misogyny it’s attempting to diagnose, turning women into the absence that explains everything and turning queerness into an explanatory footnote rather than a lived center.