Sexual Ambivalence

"Sexual ambivalence in antiquity was both deeply threatening to the social order and profoundly attractive. Especially in a culture in which gender roles seemed so fundamental, hermaphroditism was monstrous, a portent of disorder. But in the myths and the philosophy of that world it also represented the promise of fusion, the hoped-for reward of love and the ground from which civilization sprang. Everyone who studies sexuality, whether in the ancient world or in the present, owes Brisson a great debt for bringing together such a wide range of texts on so important and moving an issue."--Thomas W. Laqueur, author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud