Has Marriage Had Its Day?

By Neel Burton | August 24, 2026

A Philosophical and Feminist Critique

Standing before the altar — Something borrowed, something blue.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why an ancient institution may be outdated.

Human societies tend to various degrees of patriarchy, in which men hold primary power. Most anthropologists agree that, on the evidence, there have been no known unambiguously matriarchal societies. In the state of nature, man subjugated woman by being stronger, while woman was habitually handicapped by childbearing and childrearing.

With technological advances such as mechanisation, birth control, and long-range warfare, the male advantage has, like the peacock’s tail, become largely redundant. But still the patriarchy perdures, upheld by hoary ideology and vested interests. This ideology is manifest, among others, in the socialisation of children, which emphasises man as breadwinner and decision-taker, and woman as mother and homemaker. Boys are encouraged to be brave and strong, while girls are expected to be passive and pretty, through, among others, fairy tales, dolls, pastimes such as dressing up and baking, and, above all, the examples and attitudes of role models, including historical ones.

Marriage did not create patriarchy, but has long been one of its central instruments, regulating sex and reproduction, transmitting property and legitimacy, and reconfirming the respective roles of men and women.

The Marriage Market

From a young age, girls in particular are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage, which itself contributes to maintaining and perpetuating traditional gender roles. Beyond a certain age, a man who remains unmarried is thought of as independent or intelligent, whereas a woman who remains unmarried is assumed to be desperate, at once a figure of pity and scorn. An unmarried man is called a bachelor, and you might even find him on a list of eligible bachelors, but aside from the vetust ‘maiden’ or ‘spinster’, there is, despite the renowned richness of the English language, no polite term for an unmarried woman.

A woman who is strong-minded enough to forgo marriage and live out her own life is constantly made to doubt her resolve:

Never say never…
You just need to find the right man…
There’s this great guy I’d like you to meet…
Maybe you ought to lower your standards…
Have you tried one of those dating apps?

On the marriage market, women are made to feel like low-value, perishable goods. To find a taker, whether for marriage or just for sex, they need, much more than men, to conform to sexist, ageist, and racist stereotypes, and do constraining things such as wear makeup and high heels, which become the visible symbols of their oppression—like the burqa made sexy. As they are encouraged to marry a man who is older, more educated, and better connected than they are, they often begin married life in a doubly subordinate position—which, of course, suits the man just fine.

Pop Culture

These double standards are all too evident in popular culture. Even seemingly innocuous pop songs, which on the surface are all about romantic love, are in fact inherently sexist, revealing love as little more than a tool of patriarchal oppression.

Here, picked almost at random, are the opening lyrics of You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes:

I need love, love to ease my mind/ I need to find, find someone to call mine/ But mama said you can’t hurry love/ No you just have to wait.

It would be hard to imagine these lines in the mouth of a man.

And here are the opening lyrics of Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler:

Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit lonely/ And you’re never coming round/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit tired/ Of listening to the sound of my tears…

Now consider these lyrics from Chris Brown’s Fine China:

It’s alright/ I’m not dangerous/ When you’re mine/ I’ll be generous/ You’re irreplaceable, a collectible/ Just like fine china.

‘Her Day’

The marriage ceremony itself is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy dress that symbolises her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks after she has spent three months starving herself. Her father walks her down the aisle to ‘give her away’, and she passes, like property, from one man to another. The minister, who is traditionally and still usually a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that is in the minister’s authority and the woman has none of her own. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains silent and seated, fluttering her eyelids and holding back the tears that threaten to ruin her makeup. Henceforth, the woman will adopt the man’s name, as will their eventual offspring.

Despite all this, the wedding day is said to belong to the woman. This, would you believe, is ‘her day’.

By now, you’ve probably crossed me off the guest list and saved me a lot of trouble.

In Bed with the Church and State

Why should two people who want to celebrate their love and live together put themselves through a wedding, or even get married at all? Or to turn the question round, what is the state, arm in arm with the Church, doing by sanctioning the private relationships of citizens?

By legitimising a particular kind of relationship and denying others, the state is entrenching monogamy and patriarchy while devaluing and disenfranchising other forms of life and the people who choose or are forced into them, including single people, people in open or polyamorous relationships, and groups such as African Americans and the poor who, for various reasons, are less likely to marry.

Two people may love one another, sleep together, live together, raise children together, and grow old together without the state taking much interest. But the moment they marry, their private relationship becomes a public and legal institution.

Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalised inter-racial marriages, and sometimes even inter-racial sex, remained in force in many US states until as late as 1967. Is this not the state telling us who is and isn’t fit to raise a family, and what that family ought to look like? Marital status is not merely a matter of social prestige, but is attached to myriad benefits in areas as diverse as immigration, healthcare, banking, taxation, and inheritance.

In addition, marriage benefits the economy by producing new workers and consumers, largely through the unpaid work of women, and by making it difficult for workers with families to support to withdraw their labour. A wedding generates spending equivalent to an annual income, and probably that again on the gift list and the travel and other expenses of the guests. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the cost of raising a child, let alone two or three. When people point out how much I spend on fine wine, I point out that it’s still much cheaper than having children. Plus I can sleep at night.

The laws that govern marriage are drafted by the state rather than the couple that has to abide by them, and while marriage is deceptively simple and straightforward to enter, it is, like the Hotel California, much more difficult to leave—and in two-thirds of cases, it is the woman who files for divorce. Divorce is a personal tragedy unnecessarily inflicted by the state on almost half of the marriages it sanctions. When a couple divorces, people ask what went wrong with their marriage, without ever questioning whether there is anything wrong with marriage itself.

Collusion

To partake in the institution of marriage today is also to condone the historical abuses perpetrated in its name.

Until recently, women faced a ‘choice’ between marriage and a life of poverty and stigma. In many parts of the world, they still do. In Marriage and Morals (1929), the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.’ Once married, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed under those of her husband, and the so-called marriage bar restricted her ability to work outside the home. Her husband could rape her with impunity, yet contraception, abortion, and divorce were all denied to her.

The rape of an unmarried woman was construed as a property crime against her father, robbing him of his daughter’s precious virginity—with, in some cases, the woman forced to marry her rapist. Rape of a married woman by a man other than her husband was construed as a crime against the husband, with little concern or regard for the woman herself. Only from the middle of the twentieth century did evolving social norms lead to the criminalisation of marital rape, but there are still many jurisdictions in which it remains a private matter, or in which the law is not enforced.

Forced marriage is still practised all over the world, including, albeit illegally, in the UK and US; and if marriage does not require consent, then, following that logic, neither does any subsequent sexual intercourse. Many married women cannot even leave the home without their husband’s permission. Women who protest or try to escape, or so much as talk to another man, risk being beaten or murdered in an ‘honour killing’. In 2010, a twelve-year-old Yemeni girl, Elham al-Assi, died from internal bleeding three days after being made to marry a man twice her age; according to her mother, her husband had tied her up and raped her.

Marriage Today

When I was a child, it was customary for a woman to sit in the passenger seat when there was a man in the car, or in a back seat if there were two men, because everyone assumed that men ought to be in charge, do most of the talking, and enjoy the better view. Things have improved since then: women have much more economic and political clout than they did just thirty or forty years ago, and men are much more egalitarian in their approach to matrimony.

But women still shoulder the bulk of the housekeeping and childrearing, even when working full-time. A married man is likely to pursue his career as though he were still single, while a married woman is expected to forfeit her public life to follow her husband and care for the young, the old, and the infirm of the family.

In the workplace, employers look favourably upon married men, who are deemed to be more mature and responsible, while married women may be passed over for fear that they will go off to have babies or, worse, refuse to collude with the patriarchy. A vicious circle sets in. Because the man brings in more money, his time is prized and prioritised, while the woman’s unpaid contributions, which she fits around the man, remain largely invisible. The more the man earns, the more the woman can afford to slip into subordination, with the middle classes leveraging their privilege to entrench the old gender stereotypes.

Marriage has undoubtedly changed for the better. But this raises an awkward question. If marriage has been stripped of so many of its traditional assumptions—female obedience and dependence, division of labour, indissolubility, compulsory heterosexuality—what is it that we are still clinging on to?

Is It Really Love?

The hard truth is that a lot of people tie the knot because they are terrified of loneliness, or buckle under the social and psychological pressure that bears upon the unmarried state. But in the longer term, marriage might be even lonelier than its alternatives, and that’s before it breaks up. ‘The trouble,’ mused the writer Charlotte Brontë (d. 1855), ‘is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’

There is also an argument that marriage is detrimental to community, undermining ties with neighbours, friends, and relatives. ‘Families, I hate you!’ wrote André Gide in Fruits of the Earth (1897), ‘bolted homes, shut doors, jealous repositories of happiness.’ There is of course the intimate relationship with the spouse, but, like eating the same meal every day, sex can quickly lose its appeal when it becomes a habit, or when it is taken for granted, or when the man, being married, lets himself go—wherefore the proliferation of sex manuals aimed at married women.

In the spring of its rapture, romantic love seems to enclose the germs of freedom and fulfilment, but, with the turning of the seasons, yields nothing but failure and frustration—and it is worth remembering that man had no time for romantic love back in the day when woman was his possession. Romance took the form of ‘What’s for dinner?’ followed by a grump and a stiff drink.

Equality Is Not Liberation

The gay rights movement fought long and hard for gay marriage, and still carries on the fight. But ironically, this obscured the feminist message by making marriage seem like the crowning glory of love and a fundamental human right. David Cameron as Pater Patriae (a Roman honorific meaning ‘Father of the Fatherland’) declared that he supported gay marriage because he was a conservative, not in spite of it: and marriage, even gay marriage, or especially gay marriage, is a profoundly conservative institution.

Equality in marriage as in everything is of course to be welcome, but equality in this case should not be confused with liberation. To have the right to do something because others have it is one thing, to exercise that right is quite another.

In The Second Sex (1949), the feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘marriage is obscene in principle insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be founded on a spontaneous urge’.

At a time of such unparalleled social freedom, why, say many feminists, should we limit ourselves to an inauthentic, monotonous, and potentially calamitous life of state-enforced monogamy?

Are we really so brainwashed, and so cowered, that we cannot rise up to a freer way of living? And could the state please stop penalising those who do?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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The Psychology of Sadomasochism

By Neel Burton | August 17, 2024

A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Attempts to Explain Sadomasochism

Saint Sebastian: martyrdom or ecstasy? Guido Reni, c. 1615. — Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by Guido Reni (c. 1615).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 29 August 2026.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
I am human, and consider nothing human to be alien to me.
—Terence

Many people think of sadism and masochism merely as perversions. In fact, these tendencies exist on a continuum, and are present, to some degree, in all of us.

Sadomasochism can be defined as the taking of pleasure, often sexual in nature, from the inflicting or suffering of pain, hardship, or humiliation. It can feature as an enhancement to sexual intercourse, or, less commonly, as a substitute or sine qua non.

The infliction of pain or hardship incites pleasure, while the simulation of violence can serve to express and deepen attachment. Indeed, sadomasochistic activities are often instigated at the behest, and for the benefit, of the masochist, who orchestrates the activities through subtle cues.

Consensual sadomasochism should not be confused with simple acts of aggression. While sadomasochists seek out pain in the context of love and sex, they do not do so in other situations, and abhor uninvited aggression or abuse as much as the next person.

Sadomasochistic practices are very diverse, although one study identified four distinct patterns or clusters: hypermasculinity, infliction and reception of pain, physical restriction, and psychological humiliation. Interestingly, the study found that homosexual males tended more to hypermasculinity, whereas heterosexual males tended more to humiliation.

A Brief History of Sadomasochism

‘Sadomasochism’ is a portmanteau of ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’. In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a compendium of sexual case histories and sex-crimes, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who coined the terms, spoke of basic tendencies to sadism in men, and to masochism in women. Modern surveys indicate that sadistic and masochistic desires are common in both men and women, with, however, sadism being commoner in men and masochism commoner in women.

Krafft-Ebing named ‘sadism’ after the Marquis de Sade, author of Justine, or The Misfortune of Virtue (1791); ‘masochism’ he named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs (1870):

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Through man’s passions, nature has given man into woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

The terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ may be of the nineteenth century, but the activities they denote are as old as the rocks. In his Confessions (1782), the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau admits to the pleasure that he derived from childhood beatings, adding that ‘after having ventured to say so much, I can shrink from nothing’. And shrink he did not: ‘To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments…’

In Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the only Roman novel to survive complete, Fotis slips into her lover’s bedchamber, produces a whip from beneath her clothes, and invites him to punish her.

The Kama Sutra, which probably dates back to the second century, contains an entire chapter devoted to ‘blows and cries’. ‘Sexual relations,’ according to this Hindu sacred text, ‘can be conceived as a kind of combat… For successful intercourse, a show of cruelty is essential.’

The physician JH Meibom formulated the first theory of masochism in his Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery (1639). According to Meibom, flogging a man’s back warms the semen in the kidneys, which then flows down into the testicles, leading to sexual arousal. Other early theories of masochism centred upon the warming of the blood, or the benefits of sexual arousal in mitigating physical pain.

Krafft-Ebing never connected sadism and masochism, because he understood them as stemming from different sexual and erotic logics. But in Three Papers on Sexual Theory (1905), Freud observed that sadism and masochism often come together (no pun intended). Finally, in 1913, the psychoanalyst Isidor Sadger married the terms.

Freud understood sadism as a distortion of the aggressive component of the male sexual instinct, and masochism as a form of sadism directed against the self—and a graver ‘aberration’ than simple sadism. He remarked that the tendency to inflict and receive pain during intercourse is ‘the most common and important of all perversions’ and ascribed it (as much else) to arrested or disordered psychosexual development. He paid scant attention to sadomasochism in women, either because he thought of sadism as a problem of men, or because he thought of masochism as the natural inclination of women.

In Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the physician Henry Havelock Ellis argued along similar lines that there is no neat divide between sadism and masochism. By restricting sadism and masochism to the sphere of eroticism, he severed their historical link with abuse and cruelty.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze pushed back against Freud and Havelock Ellis. In his essay Coldness and Cruelty (1967), he contended that sadomasochism is an artificial term, and that sadism and masochism are in fact separate and distinct phenomena. Deleuze provided fresh accounts of sadism and masochism, which, despite being fluent in French, I struggled to comprehend. His point, I think, is that the sadist seeks a victim, whereas the masochist seeks—and in an important sense creates—a despot. For the sadist, a masochist is not a genuine victim.

Sadomasochism Explained

If the experts agree on anything, it is that sadomasochism is one of the great mysteries of the human condition. Here, I propose a number of explanations, none of which are mutually incompatible.

Most obviously, the sadist may derive pleasure from feelings of power, authority, and control, and from the ‘suffering’ of the masochist.

The sadist may also harbour a conscious or unconscious desire to punish or desecrate the object of sexual attraction (or a stand-in for the object of sexual attraction, or for an original object of sexual attraction) for having aroused his desire and thereby subjugated him, or for having frustrated his desire or aroused his jealousy.

Sadism can also serve as a defence. By objectifying a partner, the sadist does not need to handle his or the partner’s emotional baggage, and is able to discount the sex as next to meaningless: a mere act of lust rather than an intimate, vulnerable, and pregnant act of love. The partner becomes a trophy, a mere plaything, and while one can own a toy and knock it about, one cannot fall in love with it or be hurt or betrayed by it.

In some cases, sadism might also represent a species of displacement, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, shame, and guilt are discharged onto a third party, who serves as a scapegoat.

For the masochist, taking on a role of subjugation and helplessness can offer a release from stress or the burden of responsibility or guilt. It can also evoke infantile feelings of vulnerability and dependency, which can serve as a proxy for trust and intimacy. Moreover, the masochist may derive gratification from earning the approval of the sadist, fulfilling his fantasies, commanding his undivided attention, and, in that sense, controlling him.

For both the sadist and the masochist, sadistic or masochistic desires may arise through conditioning, if domination or submission becomes associated with sexual arousal.

For the couple as a unit, sadomasochism can be seen as a means of intensifying normal sexual relations (pain releases endorphins and other hormones), leaving a mark or memory, testing boundaries, rebelling against social norms and expectations, giving form and expression to psychological realities, building trust and intimacy, or simply playing.

Sadomasochism in Ordinary Life

And what about you, dear reader? It’s easy to think that this sort of stuff only applies to a handful of ‘deviants’, but the truth is that we all harbour sadomasochistic tendencies. Just think, for example, of casual, ‘normal’ behaviours such as love-biting, tickling, or teasing.

Sadomasochism can also play out on a psychological level. In every relationship or almost, one partner is more attached or dependent than the other. Characteristically, the more attached partner is ‘the one who waits’.

Thus, the philosopher Roland Barthes (d. 1980):

Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. (L’identité fatale de l’amoureux n’est rien d’autre que: je suis celui qui attend.)

The likely outcome of this asymmetry of desire is that the less attached partner (A) becomes dominant, while the more attached partner (B) becomes submissive in a bid to please and seduce. Sooner or later, A feels stifled and takes distance, but if he or she ventures too far, B may threaten to go cold or give up. This in turn prompts A to flip and, for a time, to become the more enthusiastic of the pair. But the original dynamic soon re-establishes itself, until it is once again upset, and so on ad vitam æternam.

Domination and submission are elements of every relationship or almost, but that does not mean that they are not tedious, sterile, and, to echo Freud, immature. Instead of playing at cat and mouse, lovers need to be able to rise above that game, and not just by getting married. By learning to trust each other, they can dare to see each other as the fully-fledged human beings that they truly are, ends-in-themselves rather than mere means-to-an-end.

True love is about respecting, nurturing, and enabling—whatever else may happen on a Sunday—but how many people have the capacity and maturity for this kind of love?

And, of course, it takes two not to tango.

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The First Gays in Recorded History

By Neel Burton | July 15, 2017

Three Tales of Same-Sex Love in Ancient Egypt

Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep touching noses, a gesture suggestive of kissing, in their shared tomb at Saqqara, c. 2400 BCE. — Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep touching noses in their shared tomb at Saqqara, c. 2400 BCE.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.

Ancient Egyptian sources are largely silent on the subject of same-sex love. Our insights into the matter come from just three areas:

A myth about the gods Horus and Seth
A historical tale about Pharaoh Neferkare and his general Sasenet, and
The tomb of court officials Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep.

Horus and Seth

In the Contendings of Horus and Seth, a myth with several versions, Seth and his nephew Horus vie for the throne of Egypt. Seth keeps on trying to get the better of Horus. At last, uncle decides to subjugate nephew by inebriating, seducing, and inseminating him.

‘How beautiful are your buttocks, how vital!’ This line, used by Seth on his nephew, is without a doubt the oldest chat-up, gay or straight, in all of recorded history.

In the event, Horus is not all that drunk, and succeeds in catching Seth’s semen in his hand. The next day, he shows his manky hand to his mother Isis, before washing it in the Nile. Together, Horus and Isis plot their revenge over Seth…

Horus finds Seth’s lunch and masturbates into his lettuce. After enjoying his dressed salad, Seth puts his domination case before the tribunal of the gods—but, of course, Horus disputes his claim. When Thoth calls forth their semen, that of Seth rises from the Nile, while that of Horus pours out of Seth’s mouth.

The myth suggests that, in Ancient Egypt as in Ancient Rome, the sticking point, if you’ll forgive the pun, was not so much with same-sex love per se, as with a male playing a passive or receptive role.

In 46 BCE, Julius Cæsar was rumoured to have submitted to Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, and mocked as ‘Queen of Bithynia’. A popular quip ran: Gallias Cæsar subegit, Cæsarem Nicomedes (Cæsar subjugated Gaul, and Nicomedes Cæsar).

It is notable that Horus had no qualms about being seduced by Seth, or even with bedding him, but only with being penetrated or inseminated by him.

Pharaoh Neferkare and General Sasenet

From three extent fragments, it is possible to reconstruct the twenty-third century BCE story of Pharaoh Neferkare (the long-reigning Pepi II) and his secret nightly visits to General Sasenet.

One night, a spy observed Neferkare going, on his own, from the royal palace to Sasenet’s house. Having arrived at the house, Neferkare ‘threw a brick after stamping with his foot. Then a ladder was lowered to him (and) he climbed up.’ Neferkare spent four hours in the house with Sasenet, leaving only ‘after his majesty had done that which he had wanted to do with him’. One fragment specifies that there was no woman, or wife, in Sasenet’s house, and the same incomplete sentence also contains the word ‘love’. The story ends with the spy confirming to himself that ‘the rumours about [Neferkare] going out at night are true’.

Although the tale is censorious of Neferkare’s conduct, this is more because it does not befit a king and god than because it involves same-sex love.

Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep

In the twenty-fifth century BCE, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep shared the title of ‘Overseer of the Manicurists’ at the court of Pharaoh Nyuserre Ini. As with the Gentleman of the Bedchamber at the royal court of England, the title was much more prestigious than it sounds, since the pair would have been granted the rare privilege of touching the person of the pharaoh and would have had unrivalled access to him.

When they died, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were buried together in a mastaba tomb. In this tomb, they are severally depicted embracing and, in one instance, even touching noses, which in Egyptian culture generally signified kissing.

That their wives and children also feature in the tomb has led some to conclude that they were brothers rather than lovers—but having a family of their own need not have precluded them from being lovers, and in the tomb they are represented in the same mode as husband and wife.

So far as the written record goes, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep are, I think, the oldest gays in history.

Like other ancient peoples, the Egyptians valued fertility and dominance, and disapproved of men who played a passive role. But they did not have a rigid convention of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, and, at least in certain periods, and in certain strata, may have tolerated and even celebrated same-sex love.

I was interviewed on ‘the oldest gays in history’ by PRIDE:

Meet the Gays of Ancient Egypt

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Why So Many Gods Are Trans

By Neel Burton | July 9, 2017

Gender Fluidity in Gods and Heroes

Ardhanārīśvara, the divine union of Śiva and Pārvatī.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 25 August 2026.

Many cultures feature gods, demigods, heroes, and other mythological beings with both male and female attributes, and it is worth asking why that might be.

In Hinduism, Vishnu’s female avatar, Mohini, seduced Shiva, later giving birth to the god Shasta. Shiva himself is often represented as Ardhanarishvara, an androgynous composite of Shiva and Parvati with a body that is male on the right-hand side and female on the left.

This recalls the Greek Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who became fused with the nymph Salmacis—giving us the word ‘hermaphrodite’.

The great warrior of the Mahabharata epic, Arjuna—a kind of Hindu Achilles, but more thoughtful—spent a year as a woman, during which he took the name of Brihannala, and taught song and dance to the princess Uttara.

Speaking of Achilles, to prevent him from dying at Troy, as had been foretold, his mother Thetis sent him to live at the court of the king of Skyros disguised as another daughter of the king, under the name of Pyrrha (‘the red-haired’), Issa, or Kerkysera. The great killing machine of Homer’s Iliad was for a time a shy princess.

Hapi, the god of the annual flooding of the Nile, brought such fertility to the land of Egypt as to be regarded by some as the father or most important of the gods. He is usually portrayed as intersex, with a ceremonial false beard and pendulous breasts.

Hapi might be compared to Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of fertility and sexuality, who was associated with the moon and, like the moon in Aztec culture, had both male and female attributes. Tlazolteotl inspired vice, but as Tlaelcuani the ‘Eater of Filth’ she was also able—not unlike Jesus—to purify sinners by absorbing their sins.

The Mesopotamian Ishtar, the beautiful goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex, was sometimes represented with a beard to emphasise her more bellicose side. Ishtar could change a man into a woman, and the assinnu, kurgarru, and kuku’u who tended to her cult had both male and female features.

After the hero Gilgamesh rejected her offer of marriage, Ishtar unleashed the Bull of Heaven, leading to the death of Enkidu, whom Gilgamesh loved more than anyone: ‘Hear me, great ones of Uruk/ I weep for Enkidu, my friend/ Bitterly mourning like a woman mourning.’

Gilgamesh bears more than a passing resemblance to the Greek Herakles (Hercules), who spent a year enslaved to Omphale, Queen of Lydia. Omphale made Herakles wear her clothes and sit at the spinning wheel, while she herself wore the skin of the Nemean Lion and brandished his olive-wood club.

To seduce the nymph Callisto, Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, took the form of the goddess Artemis. Zeus took many lovers, but, according to the historian Xenophon (d. 354 BCE), granted immortality to but one, the Trojan prince Ganymede, whom he abducted and appointed his cupbearer.

Other instances of same-sex (typically male) love in Greek myth include: Apollo and Hyacinthus, Hermes and Krokus, Dionysus and Ampelos, Poseidon and Pelops, Orpheus and Kalais, and Herakles and Abderus, Hylas, and Iolaus. In these pairings, the eromenoi (younger men) usually got killed, with the first three, Hyacinthus, Krokus, and Ampelos, each finishing up as a flower or flowering plant, the hyacinth, the crocus, and the vine. If you love a god, you will probably die, but you will also flourish.

Also in Greek myth, the prophet Teiresias spent seven years as a woman, even giving birth to children in that time. One day, Zeus and his wife Hera dragged Teiresias into an argument about who has the greater pleasure in sex: woman, as Zeus claimed, or man, as Hera countered. Teiresias averred that, ‘Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.’ For this, Hera struck him blind, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of foresight and a lifespan of seven generations.

Even the hyper-masculine Thor, the Germanic god of thunder, had to travel to the land of the giants dressed as a bride to retrieve his hammer, Mjölnir, without which he and the other Asgardian gods would have fallen to the giants.

But Thor had nothing on Loki, who turned himself into a mare, mated with the stallion Svaðilfari, and gave birth to Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin.

What It All Means

How might all this gender bending be read?

The union of masculine and feminine elements shows them to be complementary, inseparable, or one and the same, while also emphasising divine attributes such as power, fertility or creativity, and boundlessness. In its completeness, the union of the sexes also represents perfection and self-sufficiency, and, by extension, serenity or even ecstasy.

Spiritual schools tend to look favourably upon sexlessness, especially in the priestly caste, since the attraction between man and woman—or indeed between man and man, or woman and woman—gives rise to worldly concerns and attachments, such as children and a home, and jealousy and heartbreak, which can detract from spiritual work and the wisdom and liberation at which it aims.

In heroes, gender fluidity may mark out the hero as something more than a mere mortal. It may also, like the katabasis (descent into hell) undertaken by Gilgamesh, Herakles, Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas, and other mythical heroes, represent the search for knowledge, especially self-knowledge, which is the hallmark of the heroic quest.

As well as the search for knowledge, the katabasis represents death and rebirth. Wisdom is perspective, that is, objectivity rather than subjectivity—and the pretender has to die to himself, to die as a subject, to be reborn as a hero. The time that he spends as a woman, or in the guise of a woman, is another way of making the same point. To become more than himself, the hero must first cease to be merely himself.

But there is also an uglier, misogynistic aspect to all this gender shifting. Especially in Western myths, there is often the suggestion, as with Herakles and Teiresias, that having to spend time as a woman is a kind of humiliating punishment—made all the worse, in their particular cases, for being meted out by a woman.