Women and Sexual Graffiti in Ancient Pompeii

This article considers the question of if and how Roman women used the writing and reading of sexual graffiti to claim sexual agency within a culture that officially denied them such agency. There are many complications to trying to assess this topic. There isn’t always direct evidence for the gender of the person who wrote a particular text, and never direct evidence for who was reading it. But Levin-Richardson sets up a plausible basis for making conjectures. The article works through three main topics: evidence for women’s literacy, an analysis of sexual graffiti plausibly written by women, and speculation (the author’s term) on how women might experience a type of sexual agency by reading sexual graffiti that defamed men.

Evidence for literate women among the elite is plentiful, whether taught by private tutors or sometimes schooled together with their brothers. Education for daughters could be seen as a status marker. Education was sometimes noted as an accomplishment on funerary inscriptions, not only for the elite but across social classes. Portraits of women sometimes depict them with writing implements. Business women required literacy for record keeping and correspondence, while women working as secretaries or bookkeepers necessarily were literate. Women are depicted as literate in fictional texts and even the depiction of sex workers as literate, e.g., in Lucian, does not appear to be intended as unbelievable. Not only do we have evidence of elite women composing poetry and writing letters, but artifacts such as the Vindolanda tablets show women of relatively low status writing their own correspondence, or in some cases adding a personal postscript to the work of a professional scribe.

Graffiti was unlikely to have been written by a professional, therefore texts that are written from a female perspective (identifying the author with a female name, or using grammatically feminine descriptions) can reasonably be assumed to have been written by a woman. (Note, of course, that a great deal of graffiti had no overt gender markers, but has traditionally been assumed to have been written by men unless there is irrefutable evidence to the contrary.)

Levin-Richardson uses the following criteria to evaluate probably female authorship of graffiti. A first-person statement combined with a feminine adjective or title. Given that graffiti often represents the author in the third person [note: think “Kilroy was here”] a third-person statement combined with a feminine subject strongly suggests a female author. Texts in groups where multiple texts address other women, but no texts address men, is strongly suggestive of women writing to each other (sometimes as simply as “Hi so-and-so”).

As the sexual graffiti under consideration is from Pompeii, it’s also worth noting that Pompeii had a strong culture of literacy among all classes, to varying degrees, therefore estimates of literacy rates elsewhere in the empire may underestimate the Pompeiian situation. All this taken together supports the conclusion that female authorship of graffiti is not simply plausible but probable.

This brings the article to specific examples of sexual graffiti. The article’s title is a clear example “fututa sum hic,” with its first-person statement “I was fucked here” and a grammatically feminine form of the participle. Not all of the examples have the same level of proof of authorship, but Levin-Richardson, having established that women of all classes could be literate, and that at least some sexual graffiti was written by a woman, looks for examples of sexual graffiti that provide a strong case for female authorship.

One type of evidence is the grammar of sexual acts, in which men normally appear as the agents of “insertive” verbs while women (and low-status men) appear as the recipients. [Note: Most identifiable sex acts in Latin vocabulary occur in matched pairs, one focusing on the insertive partner, one on the recipient. Thus, not only can the “active-passive” dichotomy in Roman sex be indicated by grammatically active versus passive verb forms, but also by word choice where the “recipient” of a hierarchical sex act can also be the agent of the active form of a verb for being the recipient of that act.] However being the subject/recipient of a penetrative sex act was treated as degrading even if it was part of normative sexual practice. I.e., women were degraded by being fucked even as they were expected to consider it the normal state of affairs.

This is all background to examining the grammar of sex in graffiti. Our first example is “Fortunata fellat” (Fortunata [a female name] sucks [dick]). [Note: Levin-Richardson makes creative use of sexual slang as well as of deliberate spelling “errors” to represent the emotional impact and literacy competence of individual inscriptions.] The graffiti examples for this article were identified by searching for forms of the verbs futuere (fuck), fellare (suck-dick), pedicare (ass-fuck), irrumare (mouth-fuck, i.e., the active mirror to fellare), and the most common nouns for the male and female genitals and the anus. A significant subset of the likely-female-authored graffiti involve forms of fellare, making the woman the grammatically active subject, despite being “sexually passive.” In contrast, there are no graffiti examples in the data assigning a woman the grammatically-passive and sexually-passive role of irrumare. Versions like Fortunata’s are common, either alone or sometimes including a price (thus likely being a form of business advertising). Other graffiti use a (feminine) agentive noun “fellatrix” again highlighting the agency of the female participants. Levin-Richardson suggests that this was a way of “fashioning identity” as a professional specialist.

A somewhat less logical use of an agentive noun is an inscription identifying a named woman as “fututrix.” This construction appears both in private houses and brothels. A straightforward literal reading would be “woman who is the active and insertive partner in penetrative sex” however the suggestion in this article is that it was claiming a role as a willing and eager participant in the act, rather than claiming a penetrative role. [Note: Levin-Richardson along with a co-author have a much more detailed discussion of this conundrum in Kamen & Levin-Richardson 2015.]

In the last (and most speculative) section of the article, the author discusses the motivations and experience of women reading aloud from graffiti that sexually denigrates men, identifying them as “fellator” (cock-sucker), or as performing cunnilingus. In cases where the inscription doesn’t contain a specific name, reading off the inscription could be experienced as accusing any random man in the vicinity of the act. In the case of the cunnilingus inscriptions, this experience could be compounded by the female reader positioning herself as the socially dominant recipient of pleasure. A handful of inscriptions parallel the fellatio + price format, stating that a named man performs cunnilingus for a stated price. As with the fututrix example, this offers a perplexing question of whether there were actual male sex workers selling their oral services to female clients, or whether the inscription is simply meant as the worst insult someone could think of.

Similarly, it is suggested that women could “try on” sexual agency vis-à-vis men by reading graffiti where the author is represented as the sexual agent of a socially degrading penetration of a man (in the mouth or anus).

Women’s interactions with sexual graffiti create a tension between claiming sexual agency and supporting a social system that considered normative female roles in sex to be inherently degrading.